Parisian theater stages Isaac Bashevis Singer’s ‘Golem’ in Yiddish and French
A diverse group of French, Israeli and Palestinian actors perform in Yiddish in Amos Gitai’s contemporary staging
A scene in Golem, currently playing at La Colline in Paris. Photo by Simon Gosselin
This article previously appeared in Yiddish.
Right now at the Théâtre de la Colline in Paris, France, Yiddish is taking center stage.
Amos Gitai’s Golem, running until April 3, is adapted from a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Intended for young readers, the tale was published in Yiddish in the Forward in 1969. Singer himself translated it into English in 1982. It recounts the legend of the Golem of Prague — a creature made of clay and brought to life by Rabbi Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el to protect the Jews from persecution.
More than a third of the play is in Yiddish with supertitles in French and English. The rest of the dialogue is mainly in French. Live instrumental and vocal music is woven into the show, helping to set the mood in different scenes. The instrumental music — played on violin, synthesizer, santur (a Persian string instrument), harp and piano — was composed especially for the play. Professional opera singers perform contemporary arrangements of traditional Yiddish songs. The musicians appear on the stage among the actors, creating an intimate bond between music and spoken words.
The seven actors in the theater company hail from diverse backgrounds, including French, Israeli and Palestinian. They practice different religions and speak different native languages. None of them had ever spoken any Yiddish before this play. (More about this later.)
Gitai, who both conceived and directed the play, is an eminent Israeli filmmaker. Born in Haifa, he now splits his time between Israel and Paris. He’s recognized around the world for his documentaries and feature films on a wide range of subjects, often related to the Arab-Israeli conflict. He’s won numerous awards from prestigious film festivals and film academies in Europe, Israel and the United States. Much of his life has been dedicated to promoting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
Gitai’s films — including three from the 1990s that explore the contemporary relevance of Golem symbolism — are often multilingual, featuring a mix of Hebrew, French, English and Arabic. Since the story of the Prague Golem was the framework for his stage play, Yiddish was not only the ideal language thematically, but felt like the best fit in today’s political context.
“Yiddish, as a language that never had its own land, can transcend boundaries and bring people together in a unique way, regardless of who they are and where they come from,” Gitai said in a telephone interview.
It’s actually quite uncommon for an Israeli of Gitai’s generation (born 1950) to feel so comfortable with Yiddish. Although more Israelis are expressing interest in the language today, it was often disparaged in Gitai’s youth as a symbol of Jewish exile. But his parents saw things differently. His mother, Efratia Margalit Gitai, was a psychologist, scholar and teacher, while his father, Munio Weinraub Gitai, was a renowned architect.
“My mother was a Sabra, but she loved Yiddish her entire life, and my German-Jewish father did too. So I’ve always had warm feelings for the language,” he said.
Although there’s a compelling logic in staging parts of the play in Yiddish, Gitai couldn’t be sure how it would work out, since the actors didn’t speak the language. Some had never even heard of Yiddish.
That’s where Shahar Fineberg, a Yiddishist based in Paris, came in as the production’s Yiddish adviser and dialogue coach. Fineberg is a writer, translator, actor, radio-host, and current director of the Troïm Theater in Paris, which performs plays in Yiddish. He worked intensively with the “Golem” actors and singers to help them understand and correctly pronounce the Yiddish words.
“I was impressed by their hard work and dedication,” he said. “In only a few months, the actors learned to pronounce Yiddish beautifully and clearly, and I think audiences really enjoy listening to them. Hearing Yiddish on such a renowned stage in Paris isn’t something that happens every day. And besides its ‘exotic’ appeal, Yiddish has that knack of undermining preconceptions and starting unexpected conversations.”
It’s perhaps a little surprising that Gitai chose Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yiddish version of the Golem tale for his play. Despite Singer’s fame as the only Yiddish writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature, his Golem story is less well-known than H. Leivick’s 1922 dramatic poem about the Golem of Prague. In fact, the only time Singer’s Yiddish-language “Golem” appeared in print was when it was serialized here in the Forward some 56 years ago.
But the simplicity of Singer’s tale, written for children and adolescents, was exactly what Gitai was looking for. “I wanted almost a ‘fairy-tale’ Golem for the play, a Golem that speaks directly to the heart,” he said. “Singer’s version was perfect. He tells the story so directly and movingly. ”
Singer underscores the Golem’s humanity, and his vulnerability as he tries to become a true individual. Unlike many other versions of the legend, this Golem can speak — though his language is crude and child-like. He feels and expresses deep emotions like love, fear, envy and longing. He struggles with questions about who he is, why he was created, how to treat the people around him and how to respond to shocking cruelty and violence.
“It’s this humanity which made such an impression on me, and on all of us involved in the play,” Gitai said. “Everyone can relate to Singer’s Golem.”
The play also draws on other literary sources, including quotations from historians such as Joseph Roth and Léon Poliakov, who address both the particular plight of Jews as well as the universal lessons to be learned from Jewish history.
In the scene where a pogrom takes place, the actors speak words by the Yiddish writer Lamed Shapiro, known for his horrifically graphic descriptions of pogroms in stories like “The Cross” of 1909. Although Shapiro wrote in Yiddish, the actors movingly quote his words about murder, rape and terror in their own native languages — including French, Hebrew, Russian and Arabic. This jumble of tongues evokes the chaos of a pogrom. And stripping Shapiro of his own language suggests the violation and alienation experienced by victims of extreme brutality. The scene’s multilingualism is also a reminder that every group can become enmeshed in violence.
“In Singer’s Nobel Prize speech in 1978, he described Yiddish as a language of exile, without a land, without boundaries…a language of peace instead of conflict, and we quote these words in the play,” Gitai said. “They epitomize the message of our project.”
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