DRAMATIST PURSUES HOLOCAUST’S MEANING

Playwright Joshua Sobol’s introduction to the Holocaust was from a distance. When he was 3 years old, his family owned the only radio in Tel Mond, a small town in Israel outside Tel Aviv; he eavesdropped on the ominous reports from Europe.

“I have memories of people listening and discussing,” he recalled during a recent visit to Los Angeles prior to the West Coast premiere of his play “Ghetto” at the Mark Taper Forum Oct. 30. “After the war, when I was 6, people started to arrive from Europe. I have the memory of a pale young man coming to the door, speaking Yiddish, describing terrible things, the gas chamber. People lined up before our open door, vomiting their entrails. I didn’t know what to make of those images.”

Sobol’s contention is that the Western world has never been able to assimilate the meaning of the Holocaust. It was virtually inconceivable in terms of European culture before it happened; it wasn’t believed by most of the world when early reports came out of Germany while it was happening, and its aftermath has proven too awesome for any European rite of purgation and too volatile for any Arab-Israeli peace settlement.

In time, what cannot be assimilated becomes phantasmal.

“What made me want to write this play when I grew older is that the Holocaust was something I couldn’t approach,” he continued. “It was a fiction, a mirage. It was described to me in unrealistic colors, black-and-white demonization of the Nazis and idealization of the victims--which gave it an unreality. It was like an invention.”

Sobol is a soft-spoken, scholarly looking man with a trim salt-and-pepper beard and kindly eyes that appear to have absorbed a great deal of sorrow. His father was an agronomist from Russia who had so many fond and frequent memories of his student days in France that Sobol, who had spent part of his youth in the Israeli army and on a kibbutz in Galilee, took his Ph.D. in philosophy at the Sorbonne.

“I was influenced by Sartre and his examinations of the antagonism between freedom and love, freedom and truth,” Sobol recalled. “Is one free when confronted with truth?”

If the enormity of the Holocaust gave it a fictional cast in Sobol’s mind, it still didn’t relieve him from what he terms “my obsession over the question of suffering’s meaning as opposed to its value.

“I started going from book to book on the Holocaust. I started concentrating on the Vilna ghetto, which had to do with my grandmother, I think, who came from a small town outside of Vilna, the cultural capital of Lithuania. Eventually, I found a book called ‘Diary of a Ghetto’ by Hermann Kruk. He had lived in the Vilna ghetto and was murdered in 1943. The book was a detailed diary which marked down everything without self-censorship or selection.

“It was the first time I realized what life in the ghetto was like. Before that, to me, it had just been propaganda. This book was the best journalism one could imagine. He even noted things against his own convictions. For me, it humanized the ghetto, made it accessible as a human experience. What I try to retain in the play is the freshness I got from Kruk and his diary--not all those abstract attitudes.”

“Ghetto” was preceded by another work, “Soul of a Jew” (both played the Berlin festival in 1983), and other works more familiar to American audiences, including “Status Quo Vadis” and “Gog and Magog Show.” He has written 17 plays and last year became artistic director of the Haifa Municipal Theatre.

Sobol had written short stories and had thought of writing for movies and television, but shortly after he returned to Israel, theater became his considered choice. In his analytical way of approaching things, he said, “What appeals to me about theater is that it’s a living encounter between an audience and actors. Also, you’re forced to use the language of imagination. Movies and TV block out the imagination. In theater, you can’t show everything; what becomes the most important part of a show is the mind of the spectator.

“There were 75,000 Jews living in Vilna when the war broke out. It was one of the first places where the Final Solution was applied. Fifty thousand were killed in a very short time.

“Ghetto” is the story of what they did to survive, and how they failed. It deals with the options they faced in reacting to the Nazis. Their leader, for example, tries to understand the Germans’ logic in order to save as many lives as he can, and concludes that the best way is for the Jews to be productive in the war effort.

“In the end, all the Jewish reactions were doomed to fail. They were helpless. ‘Ghetto’ is an attempt to show that moral and spiritual resistance is no less important than armed resistance.”

It takes a scholarly, or at least fine-tuned mind to be able to sort between value and meaning, but Sobol isn’t a man locked into dry cerebration. By the time he had worked from abstraction to concrete realization, the theme of genocide began boiling in him.

“I wrote ‘Ghetto’ in a state of terrible rage,” he said. “I had to do what Kruk did in his diary. I had to reveal everything, not only the Germans, but the disintegration of the Jewish society and its values.”

Sobol’s scholarliness is expansive enough to include a close historical knowledge of the development of Judaism--he’ll converse on its origins that precede the Exodus from Egypt in the 12th Century B.C., and its waves of assault from the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Pharisees and the subterfuges of, as he puts it, “the Hellenistic world and its intrigues.”

But it doesn’t bury him in the past. He’s a keen observer of current Middle Eastern conditions who’s wary of “the mixture of God and nationalism. They can be innocent in themselves, but together they can be explosive. Once nationalism gets religious legitimization, it becomes terribly dangerous.”

He worries about the extremist elements that, in his opinion, hold dangerous sway in contemporary Israel and the conditions that have made the Palestinians, as he puts it, “the Jews of the Middle East.” As Sobol sees it, Judaism has experienced 32 centuries of hardship, in the face of which the Holocaust is still beyond comparison. Sobol studied science, mathematics and philosophy; but when he applies everything he knows to this subject, he confesses that “to try and understand this is an act of assuming.”