French Actor Sami Frey: or ‘Beckett Judaizing Beckett’
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By Benjamin Ivry April 12, 2010
The other evening, a solo performance of Samuel Beckett’s “First Love” (Premier Amour) at New York’s French Institute Alliance Française had an unexpected Jewish aura to it.
The French Jewish actor Sami Frey, born Samuel Frei in 1937 to Polish Jewish parents deported from Paris and killed during World War II, will also perform it April 14 to 16 at La Maison Française, Washington, D. C., interpreting a different text by Beckett, “Worstward Ho” (“Cap au Pire”) on April 17.
Frey has investigated heritage and history in plays like “I Remember” (“Je Me Souviens”), a 1989 staging of a text by French Jewish author Georges Perec, whose parents were murdered at Auschwitz. In 2009, Frey portrayed the patriarch of a Montmartre Jewish family in the French crime film “Mensch.”
Beckett’s text itself has an aura of recent Jewish history. “Premier Amour” was written in 1946, just after the war in which Beckett was active in the French Resistance. As he told a biographer: “I was so outraged by the Nazis, particularly by their treatment of the Jews, that I could not remain inactive.”
Beckett’s close Jewish friends included his assistant Abraham Jacob Leventhal and Barbara Bray (born Jacobs), daughter of Jewish immigrants from Holland and Belgium.
The Forward’s Philologos has written about metaphorical references to Judaism in Beckett’s later work, but his 1947 play “Eleutheria” already has a line in which his name, pronounced French style as “Samuel Béké” is described as a “cross between a Jew from Greenland and a peasant from the Auvergne.”
An academic article, “Beckett Judaizing Beckett: ‘a Jew from Greenland’ in Paris” by Jackie Blackman, investigates Beckett’s attachment to other Jews like his former professor Alfred Péron and like Paul Léon, a Polish-born friend and assistant of James Joyce who was deported to his death. These and other alliances are detailed in the fascinating “Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. I, 1929–1940” (Cambridge University Press).
Postwar Beckett characters like the narrator in “Premier Amour,” homeless after his father’s death, wandering through cemeteries, confront annihilation and find a measure of laughter, as Sami Frey told one interviewer. Beckett’s subtext of bemused, and sometimes even amused, survival in the post-Holocaust world has duly inspired Jewish creators like sculptor Eva Hesse and choreographer Anna Sokolow.
Watch below as Sami Frey gravely dances the Madison in the 1964 film “Band of Outsiders.”
Watch a promo below for a 2004 short film, “Waiting for Woody Allen,” a parodic appropriation of Beckett “about two quarrelsome Hasidic men.”
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
