A Problematic ‘Soul of a Jew’

Being Jewish has never been simple. But, until recently, the room for self-hatred has never been large. Just as a self-hating anyone reflects some measure of psychological disturbance, so does the Jew who can’t abide being Jewish.

In “The Soul of a Jew,” offered in Hebrew by the Haifa Municipal Theatre Company as an 8-performance event at the Mark Taper Forum, playwright Joshua Sobol (“Ghetto”) has attempted to lend a universality to an individual case study--a Jewish universality, insofar as he links it to the political development of Zionism and, in a much broader sense, to life in Israel today. But the effort is riddled with problems: presentational, psychological, dramaturgical.

Sobol’s anti-hero is Otto Weininger, a short-lived turn-of-the-century Viennese-Jewish philosopher who, at 23, wrote a controversial anti-Semitic and misogynous book called “Sex and Character.” He converted to Christianity shortly after its publication and killed himself six months later. He did not make enough of a ripple to be noted in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but his book was widely read, it seems, and later used as a source for Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda.

As the playwright acknowledges, the disturbed Weininger’s self-hatred had more to do with a blurred sexual identity than with the pros and cons of being Jewish. To listen to the Weininger character in Sobol’s play is to witness a self-loathing homosexual ranting against unadmitted sexual impulses. Linking them to the philosophies behind an ongoing (and, at the time, idealized and highly popular) Zionist movement of which Weininger disapproved, was and is a classic misplacement of personal difficulties onto the larger schema of racial or religious identity.

It’s the sort of thing that sounds irresistibly theatrical but, unless magnificently distilled, can turn to dross as theater. Sobol’s attempt to extrapolate a larger message from this short and deeply troubled life remains confusing and confused.

He sets the play in the room on Vienna’s Schwarzpanierstrasse where Weininger shot himself (chosen by Weininger, we’re told, because Beethoven died there 76 years earlier), then attempts to enlarge its scope by the use of flashbacks, calculated effects and other less-than-novel time-benders. This is done in such a dense and literal manner that the heavy-handed, anti-heroic drama becomes tedious and mannered, both physically and psychologically.

A scene of sexual confrontation between Weininger (Doron Tavori) and the young woman who tries to love him (Noa Goldberg) hardly requires the semi-choreographed blocking (reminiscent of the sex scene in “Equus”) or the nudity in which it indulges. Both feel deliberately superimposed and picked from a book of theatrical “don’ts” that are perfect examples of theatricality as misplaced as the source of Weininger’s problems.

The acting on the whole is difficult to assess, largely because a stilted and verbose simultaneous translation (over earphones) seriously gets in the way of hearing the spoken Hebrew. Removing the earphones to hear the actors speak revealed an almost idiosyncratic naturalness in the Hebrew, in direct contrast to the baroque, overblown syntax of the English text. Stylistically, which is one to believe? This is not a satisfying way to solve a language barrier.

Simultaneous translations should be laconic, not much more than a guide through a text, allowing time between words to hear the actors. (A recent Lithuanian production of “Uncle Vanya” in Houston did this to perfection.) It should not be, as it is here, a word-for-word representation performed by three translators short on acting skills. This merely interferes and, combined with the other structural problems of this glum, one-set production, only adds to the difficulties.

Beyond all that remains the larger issue of how much this play speaks to us. What is the message of a piece that has “message” written all over it? That the 11th Commandment should be “Do not hate thyself or thine”?

It’s not clear. “Soul of a Jew” focuses on the soul of one Jew and the incompatibilities within the Judeo-German identity that, as the play suggests, were frequently more German than Jewish in the early part of this century. It illustrates, but in oh-so-circumvoluted a fashion, the reasons why the Jew who was more German than the Germans was doomed to destruction when Hitler came along.

Perhaps, to hear Sobol state it in a program note (and one wants to believe him), it speaks to some Central European Jews who carry a complex burden of guilt and shame and self-hatred as a result of the Holocaust. But only perhaps.

Self-hatred is not a condition widespread among Jews who owe their extraordinary survival as a people through 20 centuries of anti-Semitism to an unmatched belief in themselves, in the correctness of their principles (religious and otherwise) and to the support they have historically and generously extended to one another.

If you strip this “Soul of a Jew” of its wider aspirations, it is unfortunately not exciting symbolism, or impressionism, but rather a bleak, unpalatable, self-involved odyssey that ironically owes more to another German often accused of anti-Semitic feelings--Rainer Werner Fassbinder--than to any Jew.

At the Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., nightly at 8 p.m., through Sunday only, with 2:30 p.m. matinees Saturday and Sunday. Tickets: $23; (213) 972-7231.