Andre Aciman's new novel got such good reviews that I decided to read his memoir, Out of Egypt, published to great fanfare, reviews, awards in 1994. A thoroughly enjoyable family story full of "characters" and bygone customs and competing narratives and a sense of oncoming not-exactly doom. I was in college with an Alexandrian Jew named Andre Bernard, his father an Egyptian Sephardi, his mother French (fled to Egypt when the Vichy regime took over in France), who had themselves fled Egypt when King Farouk was overthrown by the nationalist regime eventually headed by Nasser. (1953) Aciman's family stayed on a few more precarious years, as one by one their property was sequestered (British and French nationals in 1956, others later - Aciman's father claimed Turkish nationality, and held out till 1965). The Jews who had lived in Egypt since at least the fourth century B.C.E. were finally expelled from the land, as they were from all the Arab lands (where, as in Egypt, they had often lived for longer than the Arabs had) in the wake of the independence of Israel, too bitter a pill for any Arab regime to swallow. The Christian communities are not doing so well in these lands either - they are also more ancient than the Muslims in such nations as Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Yemen, but it isn't helping them. The Christian Palestinians are in no higher favor with the Israeli authorities than the Muslim Palestinians - a difference is that the Christians are more likely to have relatives to take them in abroad.
It is all part of the sad rise of nationalism around the Mediterranean that has been a tragic part of the history of the 20th century. The Med used to be surrounded by transnational cities like Alexandria - Constantinople, Barcelona, Algiers, Beirut, Smyrna, Thessalonika, Trieste, Split, Durazzo, Venice. Now only Marseilles (and perhaps Napoli, with its African and Chinese immigrants) remains a great cosmopolitan metropolis. The others are monuments to one nation each. (Splendid article on this by Jerry Miller in the current Foreign Affairs, by the way.)
One thing surprised me in Out of Egypt was the author's careless reference to the Muslim holiday of Ramadan - Ramadan, he tells us, was a spring holiday, always a sign that the summers at the beach were about to begin. And I can easily believe this was true in the last year or even two of his life in Alexandria, years that would imprint himself on his careless memory in all the years that followed, but Ramadan is not a fixed holiday on the solar calendar - the Muslim calendar is lunar, and its holidays move steadily backwards year by year, falling ten days short of our calendar. This year Ramadan was in October; next year it will be in September. It seems surprising that someone who grew up in a Muslim country did not remember this. But then, as he subtly points out (he never states it), Alexandria was not a Muslim city, it was a polyglot city, a polynational city, a polyreligious city - until Nasser gradually cleansed it, of Brits and French (after their failed war for the Suez in 1956), of other Europeans later on, of Jews steadily, and ultimately even of Copts, the aboriginal inhabitants of Egypt (insofar as anyone is). Andre's family spoke Ladino among themselves, French as a common tongue, English or German or Italian in separate family groupings, Hebrew only when it had to be remembered for prayers, a sort of pidgin to the servants (Arabs all) - but Arabic never. At his great-grandmother's hundredth birthday party, she fondly says she's lived in Alexandria fifty years, half her life, and doesn't know more than fifty words of Arabic. Andre is ordered to study Arabic by his father (who fears government spies), but he flunks the class steadily, unable to take any of it seriously, even to learn the letters. He recites suras from the Koran, but cannot translate them or understand them. Conversational Arabic is out - his friends are all Jews or Christians anyway.
More controversial, I gather, is the question of how much of this story Aciman remembered and how much he invented, or varied. Some writers insist the star figure of the first chapter, his scoundrel greatuncle Vili, confidence man, auctioneer, secret agent, womanizer, demagogue, professor is not in fact a real relative but a notable Alexandrian distantly related (most of his scenes in the book take place before Andre is born, and are so presented) but not quite the man Aciman writes of. Some writers express outrage that the book won a non-fiction prize.
But ... it's a memoir. Memory is a tricky thing. Memoirists make things up, add details, subtract others, enhance the portrait (it's a portrait, not a photograph), omit a color or a defect, or underline one to get a heartier laugh. Vili is a great character. No writer could resist inventing him, enhancing him, building him up. I'm on the side of the writer in this one.
Too, as Aciman admits (and we know his academic credentials), his favorite novel is Proust's, and Proust's novel is pieced together from many an unforgettable character devised from enlarging upon the characteristics of real people Proust knew. He never said his novel was anything other than fiction, but the boundaries where Marcel leaves off and "Marcel" begins are seldom clear-cut. This is how writers work. We may read a novel and wish we knew what genuine experiences produced it ... but if it is a real work of imagination, then the experience was only the nugget of what appeared on the page ... and in any case, even in the factiest non-fiction, the writer's viewpoint is never objective ... it is not what another person would have seen or said ... it is not what god (whichever) would have noticed.
I was thinking of that, unoriginally enough, when I wrote a poem last weekend (which appears in a post on my other blog, urbanepagan) and sent it to several friends, and a few of them asked who the love affair remembered romantically in it had concerned. The answer surprised them: I made it all up. Or no, that's not true or fair, I took bits of this event and that affair and this imaginary moment and put them together with sentiments long saved to produce the poem. It is what writers do. They don't just list the facts. How dull that would be.
Showing posts with label Jews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jews. Show all posts
Friday, April 18, 2008
Saturday, February 2, 2008
English Jewish joke - p.s. to Mike Leigh
1946. An Englishman – from an entirely assimilated family - is horrified to learn that one of his distant cousins has turned up in one of the camps where Jews who survived the concentration camps were interned. He investigates - it's true. The poor man has survived his entire family, and now, broken in spirit, is one of the last persons in the camps who has not been repatriated somewhere. The Englishman consults with his family - of course there's only one thing to do - I mean, the guy can't be expected to go back and live in Poland, now, can he? After all he's been through. And there's no one there to receive him in any case. He's probably in terrible health. He deserves a family - and fortunately, they're still Jewish enough to remember family. The paperwork is submitted and after endless delays, more than a year having passed, the man is located, is permitted to enter England as the refugee relative of an English family through whom he can build himself a new life.
The big day comes. The plane lands at whatever airport they were using in 1947. The Englishman, a fixed smile on his stiff upper lip, waits at the terminal. A vagabond, bent and prematurely aged, thin and sickly, emerges from the plane. He smiles with his few remaining yellow teeth. The Englishman smiles back (thinking, Oh my God), and embraces him. The refugee bursts into tears. The Englishman is terribly embarrassed. "None of that, now," he mutters. "There's no point to it. You're safe now. You're in England. ENGLAND." The cousin stops sniveling and begins to think about this.
The Englishman takes his cousin at once to Bond Street, goes to his personal tailor (to whom he had explained matters in advance), and orders him shirts, shoes, ties, suits, hats - so they can take him around and not be ashamed of him. The refugee has forgotten about such treatment. He is overwhelmed. He cannot grasp things, but he tries. He lets the tailor pick everything out that might be suitable. He stands before the triple mirror being fitted. Cuffs? Does he like cuffs? How long should they be? Lapels? How wide?
It is all too much. He bursts into tears again. The English cousin is even more mortified - in front of his tailor! Egad. How will I ever face the fellow again?
"Oh, don't go on like that, Cousin Osip. I've explained it to you. We're English now!"
"Yes!" sobs Cousin Osip. "English! And we've lost Ind'ya!"
(My mother told me that joke. I should send it to Mike Leigh. The father in Two Thousand Years tells bad jokes. A lot.)
The big day comes. The plane lands at whatever airport they were using in 1947. The Englishman, a fixed smile on his stiff upper lip, waits at the terminal. A vagabond, bent and prematurely aged, thin and sickly, emerges from the plane. He smiles with his few remaining yellow teeth. The Englishman smiles back (thinking, Oh my God), and embraces him. The refugee bursts into tears. The Englishman is terribly embarrassed. "None of that, now," he mutters. "There's no point to it. You're safe now. You're in England. ENGLAND." The cousin stops sniveling and begins to think about this.
The Englishman takes his cousin at once to Bond Street, goes to his personal tailor (to whom he had explained matters in advance), and orders him shirts, shoes, ties, suits, hats - so they can take him around and not be ashamed of him. The refugee has forgotten about such treatment. He is overwhelmed. He cannot grasp things, but he tries. He lets the tailor pick everything out that might be suitable. He stands before the triple mirror being fitted. Cuffs? Does he like cuffs? How long should they be? Lapels? How wide?
It is all too much. He bursts into tears again. The English cousin is even more mortified - in front of his tailor! Egad. How will I ever face the fellow again?
"Oh, don't go on like that, Cousin Osip. I've explained it to you. We're English now!"
"Yes!" sobs Cousin Osip. "English! And we've lost Ind'ya!"
(My mother told me that joke. I should send it to Mike Leigh. The father in Two Thousand Years tells bad jokes. A lot.)
Friday, February 1, 2008
So I did some research on Mike Leigh actually
From an interview in The Guardian on the occasion of the move of Two Thousand Years from the Royal National to the West End (U.S. equivalent: Off-Broadway to On), which may be found href="http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1755767,00.html:"> here.
'Leigh's parents met in 1936 at Habonim, the Jewish socialist Zionist youth group in Manchester. Both his mother's sisters made aliyah (emigrated to Israel), one in 1934, another in 1949. His parents had also considered making aliyah themselves but married at the beginning of the war and by the time it ended, his father had a doctor's practice in Salford. "There were always people in and out of our house who were off on aliyah," Leigh says. It was a kosher home, though they only went to synagogue now and again and they drove on the sabbath. "But it was very, very Jewish. My grandparents were immigrants - they talked in Yiddish - and there were some outreaches of the family where there were genuine frummers [Orthodox]." In 1960, like many Jewish teenagers, he went with Habonim to Israel for the summer, and hitchhiked there on his own the following year. Nevertheless, when he became a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, he consciously escaped his Jewish identity because, as he writes in an introduction to the play, he was escaping being stereotyped; having so many other possibilities closed down. This seems to be a peculiarly British dilemma that does not afflict American Jews; in the US almost everyone comes from somewhere else. To be British is to have to suppress where you came from, to pretend you always came from here.'
Yes, pat on my back, I seem to have spotted the difference between an English Jewish family (with a kibbutznik Socialist background) and my American Jewish family (with its hoity-toity Norman Thomas Socialist background). In the play, when Josh demands of his grandfather, "What does being Jewish mean to you? Are you ashamed of it?" the old man grumbles, "You're born Jewish, and that's the end of it. Ashamed of it? Proud of it? You just are." He certainly doesn't believe it calls for any religious observance, and by the end of the play, Josh has accepted this family attitude as well: He was acting "Jewish" to attract God's love because his family was treating him as an embarrassment or refusing to notice him at all. Now that they do notice him, now that he feels loved again, and part of the conversation, he can forget about God.
Perhaps this is Leigh's sly – and devastating – sendup of religion, and what gets people involved in it. It certainly helps to explain my delight in polytheism and a multiplicity of deity, and personality – my cordial dislike of One Omnipotent Father before whom to cringe, desperate for notice and some sign, any sign, of affection. Better to interpret every thunderclap as that. At least the folks are talking to me.
'"There is no doubt whatever that there is a context in which there is a confusion between Jews and Israel," Leigh says. "That Israelis, for better or worse, bring it on themselves, is all I'll say. The play is a reflection, rather than a conclusive didact because that's what I do." In the play, the daughter, with her Israeli boyfriend, reflects how Zionism has changed from being "something positive and hopeful" to a dirty word. For the family, Zionism has been a disappointment because it has not lived up to its own founding values. To others, I point out to Leigh, it had only ever been a colonial movement bent on ethnic cleansing. "Given the events of even the 19th century, Zionism was inevitable," he replies. "Given the events of the 20th century, Israel was inevitable." The play is about disappointment, he says, twice during the interview. Political disappointment and, perhaps, disappointment at how one child, of whom you had high hopes, has turned out.'
A universal theme, seen, however, through a uniquely English-Jewish lens. (All great art reveals a particular lens on a universal question. "Man is the noblest study of all - says Man," as James Thurber put it. An American-Jewish lens would show a different play, a different way of exploring the questions; so would a French-Jewish lens, or a Russian-Jewish lens, or a South African-Jewish lens. And within the nationalities, the attitudes would certainly vary. I have friends who see everything through a self-consciously Jewish lens and (rather closer) friends who find their Jewishness irrelevant. This is a luxury they might not be allowed in other societies, but it is allowed in this one, and they revel in it, and American society permits them to. (Does it permit this to Muslims these days? But Muslim plays and novels have not been produced much in this society – yet. I'm looking forward to it. Can't read the Jews, mostly, but I love the Catholics.)
By the way, on Leigh's working methods, another Guardian article provides this:
"Leigh's idiosyncratic preparation for both his plays and films is well documented. The director shuns scripts in favour of improvisation and likes to spend time talking his actors through the people they are going to play.
It was reported that, with the exception of Imelda Staunton, who played the eponymous abortionist, the cast of Vera Drake was not told that the film was about abortion until their characters discovered for themselves what Vera did."
'Leigh's parents met in 1936 at Habonim, the Jewish socialist Zionist youth group in Manchester. Both his mother's sisters made aliyah (emigrated to Israel), one in 1934, another in 1949. His parents had also considered making aliyah themselves but married at the beginning of the war and by the time it ended, his father had a doctor's practice in Salford. "There were always people in and out of our house who were off on aliyah," Leigh says. It was a kosher home, though they only went to synagogue now and again and they drove on the sabbath. "But it was very, very Jewish. My grandparents were immigrants - they talked in Yiddish - and there were some outreaches of the family where there were genuine frummers [Orthodox]." In 1960, like many Jewish teenagers, he went with Habonim to Israel for the summer, and hitchhiked there on his own the following year. Nevertheless, when he became a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, he consciously escaped his Jewish identity because, as he writes in an introduction to the play, he was escaping being stereotyped; having so many other possibilities closed down. This seems to be a peculiarly British dilemma that does not afflict American Jews; in the US almost everyone comes from somewhere else. To be British is to have to suppress where you came from, to pretend you always came from here.'
Yes, pat on my back, I seem to have spotted the difference between an English Jewish family (with a kibbutznik Socialist background) and my American Jewish family (with its hoity-toity Norman Thomas Socialist background). In the play, when Josh demands of his grandfather, "What does being Jewish mean to you? Are you ashamed of it?" the old man grumbles, "You're born Jewish, and that's the end of it. Ashamed of it? Proud of it? You just are." He certainly doesn't believe it calls for any religious observance, and by the end of the play, Josh has accepted this family attitude as well: He was acting "Jewish" to attract God's love because his family was treating him as an embarrassment or refusing to notice him at all. Now that they do notice him, now that he feels loved again, and part of the conversation, he can forget about God.
Perhaps this is Leigh's sly – and devastating – sendup of religion, and what gets people involved in it. It certainly helps to explain my delight in polytheism and a multiplicity of deity, and personality – my cordial dislike of One Omnipotent Father before whom to cringe, desperate for notice and some sign, any sign, of affection. Better to interpret every thunderclap as that. At least the folks are talking to me.
'"There is no doubt whatever that there is a context in which there is a confusion between Jews and Israel," Leigh says. "That Israelis, for better or worse, bring it on themselves, is all I'll say. The play is a reflection, rather than a conclusive didact because that's what I do." In the play, the daughter, with her Israeli boyfriend, reflects how Zionism has changed from being "something positive and hopeful" to a dirty word. For the family, Zionism has been a disappointment because it has not lived up to its own founding values. To others, I point out to Leigh, it had only ever been a colonial movement bent on ethnic cleansing. "Given the events of even the 19th century, Zionism was inevitable," he replies. "Given the events of the 20th century, Israel was inevitable." The play is about disappointment, he says, twice during the interview. Political disappointment and, perhaps, disappointment at how one child, of whom you had high hopes, has turned out.'
A universal theme, seen, however, through a uniquely English-Jewish lens. (All great art reveals a particular lens on a universal question. "Man is the noblest study of all - says Man," as James Thurber put it. An American-Jewish lens would show a different play, a different way of exploring the questions; so would a French-Jewish lens, or a Russian-Jewish lens, or a South African-Jewish lens. And within the nationalities, the attitudes would certainly vary. I have friends who see everything through a self-consciously Jewish lens and (rather closer) friends who find their Jewishness irrelevant. This is a luxury they might not be allowed in other societies, but it is allowed in this one, and they revel in it, and American society permits them to. (Does it permit this to Muslims these days? But Muslim plays and novels have not been produced much in this society – yet. I'm looking forward to it. Can't read the Jews, mostly, but I love the Catholics.)
By the way, on Leigh's working methods, another Guardian article provides this:
"Leigh's idiosyncratic preparation for both his plays and films is well documented. The director shuns scripts in favour of improvisation and likes to spend time talking his actors through the people they are going to play.
It was reported that, with the exception of Imelda Staunton, who played the eponymous abortionist, the cast of Vera Drake was not told that the film was about abortion until their characters discovered for themselves what Vera did."
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Mike Leigh in Yiddish
Just back from Mike Leigh's Two Thousand Years, which is in previews at the Acorn on 42nd Street. I was rather eager to see the play, first because Mike Leigh is horribly amusing (or amusingly horrible), second because he has never dealt with the subject of Jewishness, though he is the son of a Jewish doctor (the name must have been Levy... or something) – it would seem that he scrupulously omits autobiography from his plays, which often developed (so goes the scuttlebutt) from actors' improvisations. My third reason to go is that I am an assimilated Jew, and have always been rather puzzled what this meant, how much it should impact on my existence.
First of all, I should say that there has been no scuttlebutt (so far as I am aware, but I'm 3000 miles away) as to how close or distant anything in Two Thousand Years is to Leigh's own family. It can't be autobiographical, because the play is set roughly in the present day (2004-5), and Leigh would be a bit older than most of his characters. It isn't very close to my experience, either, because though they are an assimilated Jewish family, they are a great deal closer to the Zionist experience than mine has been: some of them were born in Israeli kibbutzes, and all of them toss Yiddish phrases into conversation, whereas when I was growing up, it was very rare to hear a single word of it. (I learned Yiddish phrases from friends at Columbia and tried them out on my grandparents – to their great amusement, as they knew perfectly well I could not have acquired such things in their highly Anglophone homes, where the "mama loshin" was Gilbert & Sullivan, Shakespeare and Mark Twain.)
Second, though the play's title seems to imply that Jewishness is the subject, and perhaps we are intended to keep it in mind during the 21st-century goings-on of half a dozen damaged, dysfunctional and variously hysterical self-absorbed English Jews plus a single well-mannered and considerate Israeli (joke! but he means it) outsider. (There is also an English outsider, painfully present only to provide backstory, if we need it.)
The subject of the play is how disastrously self-absorbed members of the middle classes interact, restrained by civility in the presence of strangers (but unrestrained with relatives). In other words, it's a Mike Leigh play. I've seen Goosepimples and Abigail's Party, and the films Topsy-Turvy and Naked, in which Jews were as conspicuous for their absence as rational behavior. Two Thousand Years is about Jews, on the surface, but underneath it's just another Mike Leigh play where you start giggling and end up cringing, grateful that you're not related to, or sexually involved with, anyone this ghastly. This makes me wonder if the other plays (he's written two dozen or so, most of them too Brit to jump the pond, plus a lot of films, most notably Vera Drake) were not in fact about his family circumstances and not (as they seemed to be) about the contempt of Britain's professional class for the pathetic aspirations of the lower middle classes. (In Britain, everything boils down to class – or does it?)
To an American Jew, it is puzzling that Mike Leigh has never written a play dealing in any perceivable way with his Jewishness – except that Britain's other two most distinguished playwrights, Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, have never overtly dealt with their Jewishness in their plays either (so far as I know). It is, in other words, a British trait, not a Jewish one, to exercise such restraint. In this country, all our playwrights are autobiographical to one degree or another: Tennessee Williams's plays are about having a romantic and female sensibility in a body that is not going to be able to inhabit such a life; Edward Albee's plays are about the evil of mothers; Cliff Odets's plays are about rising from the (Jewish) underclass successfully enough to sell out; Lillian Hellman's plays are about families keeping evil secrets from one another, right out in the open (she never dealt with her Jewishness onstage either, however); Eugene O'Neill's plays are about Irish myth-making and its poisonous operations in daily life; David Mamet's plays are about the delights and perils of a life of macho bullshit. But British playwrights don't live their mishigoss out in public so overtly. (Another reason it is inane to say Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare because his plays are about royalty and not about being arrested for poaching while courting a pregnant older woman.)
Some years ago I knew a delightful English lady (really, a lady; her husband is a knight), who told me the English are brought up to be so English that all ethnicity fades, or is expected to fade, to become something to put behind one, or under the rug. This is obviously not going to wash with people who look unBrit (skin color, etc.), so it is a doomed aspect of Englishness, but her generation had grown up uncertain whether they were Jewish or not (even if they were observant) or English or not, because they were educated, unconsciously, to regard every otherness as threatening to Englishness, as shameful somehow, as less than proper, as alien ethnic survival. Stop going to a church (or temple) where people believe; go to a nice good Church of England church where it's all about the singing and the decor and how the vicar's wife dresses. Her ladyship told me proudly how pleased she was when her husband got a contract to write a history of Israel: "It meant we had to live there for several years, while our boys were growing up, so they had the experience of being Jews in a place where being Jewish wasn't questioned. And by the time we got home, they both knew they were Jews, whatever else they were, so they've not gone on being slightly ashamed of it. As I suspect many English Jews are."
Well, now to the play (spoilers ahead! don't read this if you haven't seen the play and intend to go):
Dave is a dentist, married to Rachel. Her parents are in the 70s and slowing down, but her father is still irascible as hell. Rachel has a sister, a successful investment banker who hasn't communicated with the family for years. One child, Tammy, is a successful translator for the U.N., idealistic and vital. The other, Josh, is 27, a brainy, jobless college grad, fat and lonely, who hides in his room and reads a lot and is jealous of his sister. They are the sort of Jews who love going to Rome on vacation, though they think the Vatican tasteless. (All that gold, and then all those beggars on the steps.) Act I sets up all this. A shock in scene 2: Josh, alone in the house, comes into the room, and hides in a sofa behind the front sofa. We see him winding something tightly around his arm. We suspect what he's getting into. But he's not: it's tefilin. He's trying to become Orthodox. This is as shocking to his parents (when they find out, which is soon) as if he were on drugs, or (I couldn't help but think) gay. His mother catches him dovening. His grandfather is revolted at seeing him in a kipa.
But the exploration of Jewish identity which this seems likely to lead to never does begin, at least not overtly, and indeed Josh is in no hurry to urge it on them. (He never suggests his parents keep a kosher kitchen. They wouldn't if he did.) The conversation (and much of the play is rather static conversation) is more often about current politics, Israel's betrayal of its socialist ideals, England's &c., the plight of the Palestinians. In Act II, Rachel's unseen mother has been dead three months, the widower is more irascible than ever, Josh's oddness is more or less accepted with a general shrug, and Tammy comes home with an Israeli boyfriend (decidedly hot, but also sweet). He is not the catalyst, though: he is the witness and outsider (like the hapless Turk in Goosepimples). The catalyst for action is the last character to arrive, the long-lost banker sister, who has just found out her mother is dead and has come wailing to the house seeking – who knows what? She is so self-involved, and the others are so unyieldingly angry with her, that we never do know (does she? It's a bravura part, and a bravura performance), but at the climax of the play, all four adults are on their feet screaming at each other (a familiar situation in Leigh) and peace is only brought upon the house when the Israeli breaks it up, shakes hands all around (irony: his good manners are stronger than those of anyone English), takes his girl and departs. (We in the audience are all wondering: why does he still want to be with her when he knows what her family is like?) His determined acknowledgment of everyone else on stage has calmed things down – for one thing, Josh is stunned by it, and then acknowledges his grandfather. Everyone lets their grudges go just a bit. (Except the mad sister, who steals a hefty slug of scotch and departs unregretted.) In the brief final scene, father and son – whom we have not seen relate before – are playing chess, the kipa forgotten along with the rest of the furshluginer business of acting, you know, like Yids, and mom is tsk-ing about accounts of New Orleans in the hurricane in the paper.
So is this about Jews who will fight about any subject but really mean: I'm in this family, and they should notice me! Or is it about getting along with your pretenses, in a Mike Leigh sort of way? I shall be very curious when the reviews and discussions come out. (If anyone bothers to say.) As my Gram used to say after just about any play (and she adored plays): I didn't really understand it, but the acting was terrific.
P.S. The pace is slow-ish, but the one thing that really disturbed me was the woman behind me who insisted on laughing enthusiastically at everything that entertained her, as if she were a TV laughtrack. No one else did this; she wouldn't stop. And it was the same laugh, the same number of beats, the same peeing on the carpet: "I'm here, don't you DARE pay attention to this play and leave me out!" She later got a grin and a nod from the actress playing Michelle, the mad sister – evidently she was a pal come to give support to the troops. She overplayed that hand. Everyone around me was irritated as hell, but none of us had the guts to confront her. What would we say? How does one handle this situation in a polite and well-bred fashion? "You're not funny; let them be funny." Doesn't wash. She's entitled to be amused by things that aren't funny if she wants to. The polite thing to do is keep your mouth shut and endure. Which we all of us did. She ran out of steam eventually – but only when her friend came on (middle of Act II), when she finally wanted to pay attention to the play I'd guess.
First of all, I should say that there has been no scuttlebutt (so far as I am aware, but I'm 3000 miles away) as to how close or distant anything in Two Thousand Years is to Leigh's own family. It can't be autobiographical, because the play is set roughly in the present day (2004-5), and Leigh would be a bit older than most of his characters. It isn't very close to my experience, either, because though they are an assimilated Jewish family, they are a great deal closer to the Zionist experience than mine has been: some of them were born in Israeli kibbutzes, and all of them toss Yiddish phrases into conversation, whereas when I was growing up, it was very rare to hear a single word of it. (I learned Yiddish phrases from friends at Columbia and tried them out on my grandparents – to their great amusement, as they knew perfectly well I could not have acquired such things in their highly Anglophone homes, where the "mama loshin" was Gilbert & Sullivan, Shakespeare and Mark Twain.)
Second, though the play's title seems to imply that Jewishness is the subject, and perhaps we are intended to keep it in mind during the 21st-century goings-on of half a dozen damaged, dysfunctional and variously hysterical self-absorbed English Jews plus a single well-mannered and considerate Israeli (joke! but he means it) outsider. (There is also an English outsider, painfully present only to provide backstory, if we need it.)
The subject of the play is how disastrously self-absorbed members of the middle classes interact, restrained by civility in the presence of strangers (but unrestrained with relatives). In other words, it's a Mike Leigh play. I've seen Goosepimples and Abigail's Party, and the films Topsy-Turvy and Naked, in which Jews were as conspicuous for their absence as rational behavior. Two Thousand Years is about Jews, on the surface, but underneath it's just another Mike Leigh play where you start giggling and end up cringing, grateful that you're not related to, or sexually involved with, anyone this ghastly. This makes me wonder if the other plays (he's written two dozen or so, most of them too Brit to jump the pond, plus a lot of films, most notably Vera Drake) were not in fact about his family circumstances and not (as they seemed to be) about the contempt of Britain's professional class for the pathetic aspirations of the lower middle classes. (In Britain, everything boils down to class – or does it?)
To an American Jew, it is puzzling that Mike Leigh has never written a play dealing in any perceivable way with his Jewishness – except that Britain's other two most distinguished playwrights, Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, have never overtly dealt with their Jewishness in their plays either (so far as I know). It is, in other words, a British trait, not a Jewish one, to exercise such restraint. In this country, all our playwrights are autobiographical to one degree or another: Tennessee Williams's plays are about having a romantic and female sensibility in a body that is not going to be able to inhabit such a life; Edward Albee's plays are about the evil of mothers; Cliff Odets's plays are about rising from the (Jewish) underclass successfully enough to sell out; Lillian Hellman's plays are about families keeping evil secrets from one another, right out in the open (she never dealt with her Jewishness onstage either, however); Eugene O'Neill's plays are about Irish myth-making and its poisonous operations in daily life; David Mamet's plays are about the delights and perils of a life of macho bullshit. But British playwrights don't live their mishigoss out in public so overtly. (Another reason it is inane to say Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare because his plays are about royalty and not about being arrested for poaching while courting a pregnant older woman.)
Some years ago I knew a delightful English lady (really, a lady; her husband is a knight), who told me the English are brought up to be so English that all ethnicity fades, or is expected to fade, to become something to put behind one, or under the rug. This is obviously not going to wash with people who look unBrit (skin color, etc.), so it is a doomed aspect of Englishness, but her generation had grown up uncertain whether they were Jewish or not (even if they were observant) or English or not, because they were educated, unconsciously, to regard every otherness as threatening to Englishness, as shameful somehow, as less than proper, as alien ethnic survival. Stop going to a church (or temple) where people believe; go to a nice good Church of England church where it's all about the singing and the decor and how the vicar's wife dresses. Her ladyship told me proudly how pleased she was when her husband got a contract to write a history of Israel: "It meant we had to live there for several years, while our boys were growing up, so they had the experience of being Jews in a place where being Jewish wasn't questioned. And by the time we got home, they both knew they were Jews, whatever else they were, so they've not gone on being slightly ashamed of it. As I suspect many English Jews are."
Well, now to the play (spoilers ahead! don't read this if you haven't seen the play and intend to go):
Dave is a dentist, married to Rachel. Her parents are in the 70s and slowing down, but her father is still irascible as hell. Rachel has a sister, a successful investment banker who hasn't communicated with the family for years. One child, Tammy, is a successful translator for the U.N., idealistic and vital. The other, Josh, is 27, a brainy, jobless college grad, fat and lonely, who hides in his room and reads a lot and is jealous of his sister. They are the sort of Jews who love going to Rome on vacation, though they think the Vatican tasteless. (All that gold, and then all those beggars on the steps.) Act I sets up all this. A shock in scene 2: Josh, alone in the house, comes into the room, and hides in a sofa behind the front sofa. We see him winding something tightly around his arm. We suspect what he's getting into. But he's not: it's tefilin. He's trying to become Orthodox. This is as shocking to his parents (when they find out, which is soon) as if he were on drugs, or (I couldn't help but think) gay. His mother catches him dovening. His grandfather is revolted at seeing him in a kipa.
But the exploration of Jewish identity which this seems likely to lead to never does begin, at least not overtly, and indeed Josh is in no hurry to urge it on them. (He never suggests his parents keep a kosher kitchen. They wouldn't if he did.) The conversation (and much of the play is rather static conversation) is more often about current politics, Israel's betrayal of its socialist ideals, England's &c., the plight of the Palestinians. In Act II, Rachel's unseen mother has been dead three months, the widower is more irascible than ever, Josh's oddness is more or less accepted with a general shrug, and Tammy comes home with an Israeli boyfriend (decidedly hot, but also sweet). He is not the catalyst, though: he is the witness and outsider (like the hapless Turk in Goosepimples). The catalyst for action is the last character to arrive, the long-lost banker sister, who has just found out her mother is dead and has come wailing to the house seeking – who knows what? She is so self-involved, and the others are so unyieldingly angry with her, that we never do know (does she? It's a bravura part, and a bravura performance), but at the climax of the play, all four adults are on their feet screaming at each other (a familiar situation in Leigh) and peace is only brought upon the house when the Israeli breaks it up, shakes hands all around (irony: his good manners are stronger than those of anyone English), takes his girl and departs. (We in the audience are all wondering: why does he still want to be with her when he knows what her family is like?) His determined acknowledgment of everyone else on stage has calmed things down – for one thing, Josh is stunned by it, and then acknowledges his grandfather. Everyone lets their grudges go just a bit. (Except the mad sister, who steals a hefty slug of scotch and departs unregretted.) In the brief final scene, father and son – whom we have not seen relate before – are playing chess, the kipa forgotten along with the rest of the furshluginer business of acting, you know, like Yids, and mom is tsk-ing about accounts of New Orleans in the hurricane in the paper.
So is this about Jews who will fight about any subject but really mean: I'm in this family, and they should notice me! Or is it about getting along with your pretenses, in a Mike Leigh sort of way? I shall be very curious when the reviews and discussions come out. (If anyone bothers to say.) As my Gram used to say after just about any play (and she adored plays): I didn't really understand it, but the acting was terrific.
P.S. The pace is slow-ish, but the one thing that really disturbed me was the woman behind me who insisted on laughing enthusiastically at everything that entertained her, as if she were a TV laughtrack. No one else did this; she wouldn't stop. And it was the same laugh, the same number of beats, the same peeing on the carpet: "I'm here, don't you DARE pay attention to this play and leave me out!" She later got a grin and a nod from the actress playing Michelle, the mad sister – evidently she was a pal come to give support to the troops. She overplayed that hand. Everyone around me was irritated as hell, but none of us had the guts to confront her. What would we say? How does one handle this situation in a polite and well-bred fashion? "You're not funny; let them be funny." Doesn't wash. She's entitled to be amused by things that aren't funny if she wants to. The polite thing to do is keep your mouth shut and endure. Which we all of us did. She ran out of steam eventually – but only when her friend came on (middle of Act II), when she finally wanted to pay attention to the play I'd guess.
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