Arts features

Pulitzer play turns spotlight on relations with Muslims

John Nathan — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:40:10 +0100

T he latest play to win a Pulitzer Prize for drama will be remembered for a long time by those who see it at west London’s Bush Theatre, where performances begin today. And Jewish or Muslim audience members are unlikely to forget it. Disgraced is written by Ayad Akhtar, a 42-year-old American actor, screenwriter, novelist and now dramatist. Previously performed at New York’s Lincoln Centre last year, the play is set in a fancy apartment in the city’s Upper East Side.

Its hero is corporate lawyer Amir, who has forsaken his Pakistani Muslim heritage and assimilated himself into American society as a member of its professional classes. His artist wife Emily is not Muslim, the law firm where he is a rising star is largely Jewish, as is the curator of the gallery who wants to exhibit the paintings created by his wife. Amir’s is an idyllic life of urbane sophistication — until, that is, his rejected Islamic past begins to catch up with him, forcing him to confront issues of identity.

The play climaxes in an explosive scene in which Amir and his Jewish dinner guest Isaac square up over the kind of issues that have caused friction between the Muslim and wider world in general — and, it could be said, Muslims and Jews in particular.

“I’ve been thinking about that a lot,” says Akhtar when I ask if Disgraced suggests that those points of friction between Muslims and others are at their most incendiary when the non-Muslims are Jews. Without quite answering the question head on, he lays out the context pretty succinctly.

“The question is the beginning of a whole series of things,” he replies. “Amir’s relationship to Jews, to Jewish immigrant experience, to making one’s way as an immigrant in American society by looking up to or being mentored by Jews — this is the politics but also the landscape of the play.” It was those questions of second generation immigrant experience and the dual identity of being a Muslim in a largely non-Muslim world that provided Akhtar with the themes for his acclaimed debut novel American Dervish, described by the New York Times as a “modern Muslim spin on earlier stories of Jewish assimilation”. Akhtar’s 2005 film The War Within took a different tack, exploring how a Muslim student in Paris becomes a radicalised terrorist in New York.

There are similarities between Akhtar and Amir, the fictional hero of his play. Both are sons of Pakistani parents and each has decided to live a largely secular life away from traditional Islam. Akhtar’s parents, both doctors, arrived in the US in the 1960s, settling in Milwaukee. They had a secular outlook, so their son’s interest in Islam was largely self-generated as a child.

“I had an amazing teacher in high school who sort of bombarded me with all the great existentialist literature — Sartre, Camus, Dostoevsky and Kafka. I was 16 and that was a shift. There was a different way to ask questions that encompassed this larger picture but that was not about blind belief. Which is why I [now] call myself a cultural Muslim, which is to follow so many of my Jewish friends who call themselves cultural Jews.”

In the play however, Amir’s relationship with his parents is very different. We hear how, when Amir was a boy, his mother dissuaded him from having anything to do with Rivkah, the Jewish girl in his school Amir fell for.

His mother does this by spitting in his face. And it’s partly this willingness to grapple with the attitudes of some Muslims to not only the non-Muslim world but to Jews too that gives Akhtar’s writing much of its power. This is balanced by his willingness to also grapple with the way Muslims are treated unfairly in the non-Muslim world, and by some Jews also. It’s explosive stuff.

“American Dervish is actually much more directly about Muslims and Jews,” says Akhtar of his novel as we chat in the Bush Theatre’s kitchen. Downstairs, rehearsals for Nadia Fall’s production of Disgraced, which has just won the Pulitzer, are well advanced. The venue is abuzz with anticipation.

“I get asked a lot ‘what is it about Muslims and Jews that’s so interesting to you’? And to me there are a couple of different levels. The first is that you can say that Islam is many things, but one of the things it certainly is is a meditation on Judaism. And the Koran, of course, quotes so much of the Old Testament, as if the original audience for the Koran was familiar with those stories. This is to say is that the Koran emanates from a landscape that is in part Jewish and there are continuities of ideology, mythology and of sensibility and practice between Jewish and Muslim cultures. When I was 13 I was assigned My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok when I was in middle school. I loved the book so much that I read all of Potok’s books. And I had this odd feeling that he was writing about people I knew, my people, even though he was writing about Chasids in Brooklyn.”

It’s probably worth pointing out that the main dramatic relationship in Akhtar’s play is not between Amir and Isaac, the Jewish curator, but between Amir and his wife, whose art, just to load the dramatic dice further, incorporates traditional Islamic design and imagery. Amir remains a rare Muslim version of something that has existed in Jewish literature for a long time — the self-hating Jew. In fact it’s thanks to the work of two artists with Muslim backgrounds that this hitherto largely Jewish trope has found its way to the stage recently. The production of Arthur Miller’s Breaking Glass, starring Antony Sher as the self-hating Gellburg, was directed with great sensitivity by Iqbal Khan. Now comes Amir, a very different kind of self-hater, of course. But it is still no coincidence that his creator understands the Jewish diaspora experience as well as that of Muslims.

“When I was in college and discovered Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and especially Woody Allen, there was a feeling of familiarity,” Akhtar recalls. “But also a liberating sense that I could tell stories in ways that were familiar and which were my experience. There was this bridge that was showing me how to go about the process of authoring the Muslim American experience.”

Review: Travels With My Aunt

John Nathan — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:28:38 +0100

In Giles Havergal’s amusing adaptation of the Graham Greene novel, four actors in dull suits interchange the role of Greene’s narrator — retired bank manager Henry Pulling — and all the other male and female characters in the gently subversive story.

After his mother’s funeral, Pulling is swept into his Aunt Augusta’s law-breaking, convention-busting world of long-distance travel. Christopher Luscombe’s shadowy production is set among the architecture of Pulling’s local suburban train station, suggesting his escape from a life of conformity. The evening is high on charm and Jonathan Hyde, who takes the bulk of the Aunt Augusta role, and the oddly mesmerising David Bamber — whose stares have a strangely manic quality about them — are outstanding.

But Greene is diminished in a show whose acting overshadows rather than enhances the story.

Review: The Hothouse

John Nathan — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:50:36 +0100

Harold Pinter’s vision has come true. Up and down the land, institutions set up to care for the vulnerable have become callous places of torment. As a series of disturbing reports have shown, in a number of places, residents are at best routinely treated without respect and, at worst, abused. In that sense, real life has overtaken this prescient play. At least here, Roote (Simon Russell Beale), chief executive of the hospital in Pinter’s nightmare, has enough humanity to be appalled by the death of patient 6457. And at least he has the decency to show a little shame when it’s revealed that the baby born to patient 6459 is his.

He also appears to fear he might be called to account for the abuse under his watch, which is rarely the case in real life. So nobody can doubt the searing relevance of The Hothouse. But, as Pinter apparently acknowledged, the satire here comes across as pretty laboured at times.

Jamie Lloyd’s production, the latest in his muscular Trafalgar Transformed season, evokes both physical and moral decay. Soutra Gilmour’s design lines the Trafalgar’s cavernous stage with shabby interior walls.

Neglect here is engrained. The pointy bust, tight pencil skirt and high heels worn by the sexually insecure and predatory Miss Cutts (Indira Varma) locates the play somewhere around the year Pinter wrote it, 1958. And so does the humour. The exchanges between Roote and his sinister subordinates Gibbs (John Simm) and Lush (John Heffernan) have a kind of Beyond The Fringe absurdity about them. What makes them funny is Russell Beale, whose Roote is a brilliant portrait of insecure authority. Every piece of bad news delivered by Gibbs is received with gasping, gobsmacked incredulity.

But terrifying though the scenes in which the willing Lamb (Harry Melling) is experimented on with electrodes are, the evening fails to generate the fear that Pinter a little too obviously intended. And although, yes, we are made to think not of just failing hospitals but also of totalitarian regimes, the evening amounts to little more than vague political posturing. I was left feeling an absence of hard facts about real events that, for instance, Howard Brenton’s new play about Ai Weiwei delivered at the Hampstead Theatre — although that also failed on the fear factor. This is political theatre with a blunt edge.

My pilgimage in Poland

Simon Rocker — Thu, 02 May 2013 13:09:58 +0100

It had been a while since I had last tasted a slice of boiled gefilte fish. So where better to renew acquaintance with the Shabbat delicacy than one of its lands of origin, Poland? But I was not eating a Shabbat meal. I was one of a ravenous group of pilgrims who had arrived late on a midweek night in the small south-eastern town of Lezajsk (Lizhensk in Yiddish) and were enjoying the hospitality of some Israeli Chasidim in a marquee.

Like many Jews, my only experience of Poland, my father’s birthplace, had been a fly-in, fly-out day visit to Auschwitz. One can hardly apply the word pilgrimage to a place of such desecration. But it is appropriate for Lezajsk.

Across the road from us was the old Jewish cemetery and within it the tomb of Rabbi Elimelech (Weis-blum), one of the revered pioneers of Polish Chasidism who died in 1787. “If Auschwitz is the number one destination for visiting Jews, Lizhensk is the second,” said Simcha Krakowsky, a Lelov Chasid from Israel who organises free kosher meals for wayfarers.

There was an air of anticipation that night. The Belzer Rebbe from Israel was due to drop in sometime during the evening to visit the site, accompanied by several coachloads of his Chasidim. Large screens had been erected in the graveyard to broadcast his devotions inside the simple stone ohel (mausoleum) where Elimelech lies. His yahrzeit now attracts some 7,000 visitors each year and Rabbi Krakowsky has catered for as many as 1,000 over Shabbat.

When we returned in the morning, the marquee, portaloos and screens had gone. My companions went to recite Psalms and put their kvitlech — pieces of paper containing personal petitions — alongside the candles on the saintly tomb. “You can feel the kedushah [holiness] of the tzaddik,” said Simche Steinberger, a Conservative councillor from Hackney. “I feel that he is taking my prayers up.”

Pre-war, about a third of the 15,000 inhabitants were Jewish, the Mayor of Lezajsk, Piotr Urban, reminded us. “Jewish people fit into the landscape and local people treat it as natural and normal,” he said. “When they come, they don’t find any difficulties here.”

As we were leaving, another coach pulled up — this time containing a group of Polish teenagers from a nearby town. “It’s very important for the children to realise that Jews and Poles lived together in harmony from the time of Kazimierz the Great [14th century],” their teacher told me. “This is not only a holy site for Jewish people. Many Polish Catholics come here and ask for help,” she added.

The phenomenon of Jewish pilgrimage, which has been growing since the end of Communism in 1989, dovetails with increasing efforts by some Poles to commemorate the Jewish past in a country which was the graveyard of three million Jews during the war. Old synagogues are being restored as memorials in towns the Nazis emptied of their Jewish inhabitants.

Sponsored by the Polish embassy and the Foreign Ministry, our trip was arranged by Filip Slipaczek, a London-based businessman of Polish and Jewish extraction who has been instrumental in fostering ties. In a town hall chamber no bigger than a dining room, we were greeted as dignitaries by the Mayor of Bobowa, Waclaw Ligeza, who said: “Our community has always tried to express appreciation for the Jewish community that lived here.” Over the road, the decorative vines are fruitful once more on the fresco around the ark of a restored 18th century synagogue.

The most famous resident was the founder of one of the main Chasidic sects, the Bobover Rebbe, Rabbi Shlomo Halberstam, who died in 1905. In June the town will stage a festival of Jewish culture centred on the re-enactment of a 1930s Chasidic wedding. One of our group, Ami Weitz, a great-grandson of the Rebbe, told the mayor of “the importance we put on our Jewish roots. If we can come back to our origins and feel welcome, it makes a huge difference.”

The Bobover’s ohel lies at the top of a hill made more accessible by a new asphalt track. As we climbed, the smoke from chimney-tops drifted gently across the valley against the red and yellow streaks of the dying sun. The little, sloping Jewish cemetery is the kind that inspires poets to write elegies. But then a grim reminder of the past jars with the bucolic peace — the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.
By moonlight, we visited the ohel of another tzaddik, Rabbi Shlomo’s grandfather, Rabbi Chaim Halberstam, founder of the Sanz dynasty, in the town of Nowy Sacz. In the field of tombstones, there are patches where a stone stands alone like a solitary tooth in an old man’s mouth ‑— the Nazis ripped out tombstones to use for construction.

“It can be hard walking here,” said Rabbi Osher Schapiro, a big-hearted Bobover Chasid from Stamford Hill, who recalled a visit to Poland by his father, a New York rabbi, in the 1980s. “There was a Holocaust survivor in his shul who cried: ‘How can you walk on the soil that is soaking in the Jewish blood of our brothers and sisters?’ He was trembling for days.”

There is no more striking example of restoration than in the city of Lublin. In 1930 Rabbi Meir Shapiro — founder of the Daf Yomi Talmud study programme — opened the largest yeshivah in the world. Used by the Communists as a medical school, the building has been returned to the Jewish community. Its magnificent façade
is as imposing as that of an imperial hotel.

But the old Jewish quarter dating back to the 15th century was levelled by the Nazis and most of the 42,000 Jewish inhabitants taken and murdered in camps such as Majdanek, which is situated in a suburb of the city. At the far end of the camp looms what looks like some kind of giant well. As you approach, its contents become shockingly clear - a huge mound of human ash, milled bone and soil – a mixture the Nazis used as fertiliser – which have been gathered as a monument to their victims beneath the inscription: “Let our fate be a warning”. Nearby stretch some of the trenches where 18,000 Jewish prisoners were shot in a single day as part of the Germans’ “Operation Harvest Festival”.

However, the old gatehouse which separated the Jewish and Christian quarters of the city remains, transformed into an exhibition and cultural centre dedicated to preserving the memory of Lublin’s Jewish past. Entitled Theatre NN (No Name) it educates around 10,000, mostly young, visitors a year, using creatively staged exhibits and performance.

“In our centre we collect all traces of Jews who lived in Lublin,” said its energetic director Witek Dabrowski. “In the last few years Polish neighbours forgot about their Jewish neighbours. We want to commemorate them. We have collected thousands of photographs, some unique, and we have testimonies of people who remembered Lublin before the war. Every single testimony is a treasure.”
As he led us up the narrow stone steps from the entrance to the gatehouse, he remarked; “This is the passage between life and death, between light and darkness. The Christian part of Lublin still exists. The Jewish part does not. Every day we come to the centre, we feel the emptiness.”

Still, a pocket of 30 or so Jews remain in Lublin. Against the odds elsewhere, new shoots of Jewish life are appearing. No more so than in the old Jewish quarter of Krakow, whose summer festival of Jewish culture, launched in the 1980s, has become an international event and a byword for Jewish revivalism.

The district shouts its Jewish legacy from the rooftops. Israeli or Yiddish music pours out of cafes called Cheder or Babelstein. Outside the 17th century Isaac Synagogue, a young woman handed us leaflets for a klezmer concert there that night. Our guide, Dorota Kluska, reckoned there are about 350 Jews affiliated to the community. “It’s a trend to trace your Jewish heritage from the past and convert,” she reported.

At the new Jewish Community Centre, little painted ceramic butterflies were being affixed to the front wall as part of an international project to mount 1.5 million butterflies in memory of the Jewish children murdered during the war. But for the centre’s forward-thinking director Jonathan Ornstein, they also represent the children and grandchildren of survivors. “Here we are focused on life,” he said. “In this place where there was so much tragedy in the last century, Jewish life is able to re-emerge and be reborn. We have people who are finding out about their Jewish roots and getting in contact all the time.

“I feel in most places in Europe it is getting more difficult and less safe to be Jewish, but every day in Poland, it is easier, safer and better to be Jewish. And that’s a remarkable story the Jewish world needs to know about. Not only to see Poland as a place of tragedy and loss but as a place with an incredible thousand-year Jewish history, a fantastic present and a very bright future.”

Camels? Israeli art is about far more

Jennifer Lipman — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 09:55:44 +0100

At first glance, Gil Shani’s 2006 painting Untitled appears completely abstract, a black expanse with white shapes scattered across it in a seemingly random fashion. But, after a while, your eyes begin to identify the shapes — camels passing through a rocky, desert landscape.

“Many people think Israeli art is about camels and olive trees,” says Yigal Zalmona, a leading authority on the Israeli art scene after 40 years as a curator, critic and historian. “I would like them to understand that it is different. This painting is a critique of the idea.”

Mr Zalmona’s new book does plenty to disabuse the myth that Israeli art has not progressed from patriotic
posters depicting early Zionist settlers. Titled A Century of Israeli Art, the mammoth volume features images and analysis of the depiction of the Zionist journey in painting and sculpture — and how over recent decades Israeli art has become sought after by international collectors and exhibited in prestigious galleries the world over.

An array of artistic genres is discussed, from graphic art to futurism, sculpture and installation work. But there is less in the way of traditional portraiture. Impressionism, for example, barely gets a look in. “It’s all very modern,” Mr Zalmona adds, explaining that this is in large part because of the natural symbiosis between the ideas of Zionism and modernism.

“The early modernists wanted to forge a new experience. In a way, that’s the idea of Israel — to go to a new place, to live there and start a new society. It’s a social laboratory. Think of the idea of the kibbutz, it’s something that was unknown before.”

In true Israeli style, the story does not even start in the Jewish state, but with Eastern European-born artists like Boris Schatz — founder of the Bezalel School in Jerusalem — and E M Lilien, at a time when Jews were first discussing ideas of nationhood.

From the beginning, Israeli art was politically linked and even today replicates the political debate, with “post-Zionist” artists like Yael Bartana focusing their attention on identity in the diaspora.

In Mr Zalmona’s opinion, the art scene has now well and truly arrived, with artists like Michal Na’aman redefining how the world views Israeli culture — a far cry from the olive trees and camels. The book has been a labour of love, four decades in the making. But, in 2113, will another curator be reflecting on a further century of Israeli art? Perhaps not. For Mr Zalmona says that, although Israeli art is excellent, there is “not really an ‘Israeli art’ that can be specified any more”.

This one will run and run — Paul, 88, completes 22nd marathon

Sandy Rashty — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:37:23 +0100

Completing the 26.2-mile marathon distance is a gruelling task for any participant. To prepare properly requires a lifestyle overhaul, particularly with regard to diet and exercise. But the London Marathon’s oldest competitor, 88-year-old Paul Freedman, takes it all in his accomplished stride. Last Sunday’s marathon was his 22nd and Mr Freedman is a man for sticking to a schedule — which makes him difficult to track down.

On the Thursday and Friday prior to the race, he was busy collecting sponsorship for his chosen charity, St Francis Hospice, which cared for his late wife Teeny, who died from lung cancer in 2007. Obviously, he was otherwise engaged on Sunday and, on Monday morning, I learn via his son Martin that he is at his aerobics class. So, Monday afternoon it is.

“I always like to keep fit, exercise and keep my body in shape,” the Essex grandfather says. “I get my energy from being on the go all the time. I do aerobics, body step and body attack classes every week. I like classes where there are more girls than men.”

Mr Freedman served with the RAF at home and in India during the Second World War, went on to work in retail and only took up jogging at the age of 61. Now quite media savvy, a favourite quote is that his motivation to keep on running during a marathon is “being behind a nice bottom because it makes all the aches and pains go away”.
Sixteen of his marathons have been in aid of the hospice he holds in huge esteem. “Teeny didn’t stay there but they sent her a bed, came over to visit and talked to her,” he recalls. “They were absolutely marvellous. I’ll always be grateful to them.” Following Teeny’s death, he has settled down with “a nice partner, Ellen. We share everything together.”

After a heart attack in 2003, he missed out on the 2004 marathon and had been advised not to take part on Sunday. “I was under orders not to run by my surgeon because of my heart. But I told him that I had to run because I’m committed to the hospice.”

This year he has already brought in more than £5,000 in sponsorship with more to come in. “I want to raise at least £6,000,” he says. “I’ve got to start collecting now. One bloke promised me £150. All I have to do is make the phone call and the money will start coming in. But I need to rest now. I do tend to get the donations six weeks after the event.” Down the years, he has raised in excess of £80,000 for the hospice.

But fundraising aside, this has not been a vintage marathon year for him and he is unhappy with his seven-and-a-half-hour time. He reluctantly reveals that his “knees were playing up” and that the prolonged winter weather had affected his training. He further makes the point that, in his third marathon, he finished in three hours 56 minutes. But his 2013 time is hardly an embarrassment for a late octogenarian.

“I am officially the oldest runner in 2013,” he says, perking up. “I was also the oldest runner in 2011. They said another guy was the oldest in 2012 but they never could prove it because they didn’t have his birth certificate. At the end of the marathon, three ladies who support the hospice decided to come and join me for the last three miles. I felt like the queen — although I should probably say king.”

With “so much to see” of the capital’s sights along the route, losing focus is not an issue. “You speak to other runners and get to know people. Sometimes I stop and say: ‘I’ve only come here to get the Sunday paper’ or ‘Am I going the right way?’ That gets them laughing.”

His marathon efforts have earned the Hornchurch resident and Romford Synagogue member an MBE for fundraising efforts. He has also run for Jewish Care and Jewish Blind & Disabled, completed some 170 half-marathons in aid of the Jewish blind and was an Olympic torch-bearer. “I fell in love with marathons and charity work. I have a very full schedule and love every day of my life.”

An unfulfilled ambition is to run a marathon with grandson Samuel. “He’s 15 now but when he turns 18 we’ll run it together. But he’s a better runner than me.”

He also plans to join the annual Moon Walk for cancer, in which around 14,000 women and 1,000 men participate wearing decorated bras. And the whole Freedman family is getting involved with grandfather, father and grandson participating. “We’re the first three men from different generations to take part. Generations of women have done it, but not the men. They’ve asked me for photos of all of us. But I’m waiting for the bras,” he says jokingly.

He is almost as passionate about West Ham United as he is about marathons and fundraising. “I’ve been supporting the club for over 50 years,” he says. “I’ve heard that [West Ham co-chair] David Gold wanted to meet me but then got busy. I’d like to meet him and see if he can sort us out a box at a special price when West Ham move to the Olympic Stadium.”

He is also part of a group known as The Entertainers which performs “light-hearted musicals at homes and other places. This week will be our 630th show,” he reveals, once again demonstrating an impressive capacity for figures. “I’m the compère and tell the jokes. I would tell them to you, but you sound a bit young,” he teases.

For the marathon, he sported a T-shirt bearing the slogan, “Officially the oldest runner 2013”. “People kept shouting out: ‘How old are you Paul?’ I would say 88 but they didn’t believe me. I do look younger — I look 87.”

It’s thanks for the memory as Lipman takes scientific journey

Sandy Rashty — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 21:18:34 +0100

For the last 15 years of his life, Maureen Lipman’s father Maurice struggled with short-term memory loss and the actress was “afraid it was going to happen to me”. It was the inspiration for If Memory Serves Me Right, a prime time BBC documentary broadcast on Thursday night in which she explored issues of memory and memory loss.

Having agreed to an interview “not early” on Sunday morning, Ms Lipman starts by explaining: “I’ve always been interested in memory and wanted to learn more about the brain. There was no script for the programme. I just did it. We had one director, one cameraman and one researcher who almost collapsed by the end.

“I’m an actress. So if I want to learn how to play golf, I play the part of a golfer. That’s just what we do.”

The programme follows the West End star on a personal and scientific journey. Personal because she shares her own memories with the viewer and scientific because she seeks out medical experts, looks on as a brain is dissected in a lab and has a virtual glance at her own brain following an MRI scan. But she has some serious qualms about the edited version of the documentary.

“I wanted the programme to be something other than soundbites and about my life. It might be interesting to other people, but it’s not interesting to me. I didn’t really want it to be personal.” She had been conscious of the problems inherent in “celebrity-led documentaries”, where “the celebrity often gets in the way of information. There are usually just shots of celebrities telling a story as they get in and out of taxis. It’s so infuriating.”

Indeed Ms Lipman is shown stepping in and out of black cabs at various points as she travels to interview memory experts and victims of memory loss.

A close-up catches her teary-eyed visiting her native Hull for a reunion at her old school. When I point this out, she snaps back: “That’s what I’m fighting. They focus on it when you get misty-eyed. I thought I was brighter than that. I guess it’s entertaining at the end of the day, but what happened to that stiff British upper-lip?”

She is far happier discussing the science behind the programme, particularly as the BBC editors “decided to cut most of it out. In the scene where I meet the hypnotist [Paul McKenna, who convinces Ms Lipman her dog has won an award], it looks like I’m acting but I’m not,” she insists. “He was using rapid eye movements that they couldn’t show because it would affect the viewers.” She does not know why other elements were left on the cutting room floor. “If it’s too technical it gets thrown out.

“Looking at the brain was remarkable, like a mysterious rolled-up tape of memories. To think about how that waxen cauliflower is controlling every movement I make and even how I’m talking to you now — it’s remarkable. I always read books about science.”

Throughout the documentary, Ms Lipman talks about her father, a tailor who had a shop in Hull, who had memory problems from the age of 68 until his death at 83. “One day he went into hospital for a minor operation and two days later he lost his short-term memory.

“In those days we didn’t ask questions. It could have been a stroke but we don’t know. After that, my father knew who we were but sometimes did not know where he was. We spoke lucidly about his condition. It made him very afraid because he was a proud man. On my wedding day he forgot to take me down the aisle. He kissed me at the West London shul and in through the doors he went. I had to nudge my beautifully dyed shoes through the door and say: ‘Come back.’ He didn’t come to my son’s barmitzvah because he was too afraid they would call him up to read and he would forget to go. He lost all of his confidence.”

Her father had lost brain cells, “but so much more than that, he lost his essence. With the loss of his memory, I lost the father I knew. I had never really questioned or thought about memory, what it is, what it does. From that moment I did think to myself: ‘I must look after my memory.’ It’s something that does concern people of my age, I really wanted to find out what the brain does,” Ms Lipman, 66, says.

“The left side of my brain doesn’t seem to function,” she adds, laughing. “When I learn a dance for a musical, I can only get the steps if I see someone doing them. I don’t count in numbers like everyone else. It must be a familial genetic part of the brain. I can’t understand a word my accountant says, it takes me a long time to work out percentages and I find languages very difficult. Jack [Rosenthal, her late husband] was pretty bad with numbers as well. Once my son left his keys about and I said: ‘What are you like?’ ‘You,’ he replied. I can’t argue with that.”

If her memory goes, “that’s the end of your career as an actor and you’ll have to go into radio. Your memory affects what you do. It’s not difficult as long as you have your memory. I don’t plan on retiring any day soon. They’ll have to put me down dead before I retire.”

Her favourite part of the show is a victorious memory battle with actor Larry Lamb. Applying memory techniques, the challenge was learning 25 new names, faces and birthdays. “That’s really what the programme was about.”
She has learned that memory resilience is connected to “exercise, eating blueberries and fresh garlic every day and learning something new every day to keep your mind active. It’s much better than Sudoku.”

And if she still forgets people’s names? “As I wrote in the JC the other week, I can’t possibly remember all the people I meet, but they remember me because I’m the speaker. They’ll say: ‘How can you not remember me, I gave you a lift home?’ But in the end you just have to bluff, use your charm and hope you get away with it.”

As the interview ends, I have an unforgettably cringeworthy moment, asking instinctively: “Would you say this programme was a trip down memory lane?” It sounds silly and we both know it. But Maureen Lipman is a professional. “You could say that but I’ll leave it to the sub-editors,” she replies.

Gatekeepers director Dror Moreh: Why I had to make this film

Anne Joseph — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 17:00:18 +0100

"I knew I had dynamite on my hands," says director Dror Moreh. He is talking about his Oscar-nominated documentary The Gatekeepers which has provoked wide international debate across the political spectrum since its release. Even Israeli embassies have had to grapple with how to respond to its frank revelations, admissions and insights. The Gatekeepers, wrote Israeli journalist Chemi Shalev, 'is like a waterboarding of the soul'.

The film comprises a series of extraordinary in-depth interviews with six former heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence and security service, also known as the Shabak. The six - who have never been interviewed about their work on camera before - speak with remarkable candour about their role as protectors of the Israeli State since 1967.

Supported by computed generated imagery (CGI) and archive footage, the film provides an overview of the country’s policies in the occupied territories, the agency’s counter-terrorism campaigns and the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

There is no spy glamour about their work. They speak about torture, targeted assassinations and personal and political moral dilemmas. But each comes to the same conclusion: the current status quo regarding the occupation cannot continue.

"You can’t make peace using military means. Peace must be built on a system of trust," says Avi Dichter, who headed the Shin Bet between 2000 and 2005.

"For Israel, it’s too much of a luxury not to speak with our enemies," asserts Avraham Shalom (1980-86). Indeed, when pushed by an off-screen Moreh, he emphasises that he means, "everyone, so it includes even Ahmadinejad, whoever… I’m always for it."

These security giants have served their country since their army service until their retirement from the Shin Bet, but "they feel that the security of Israel is deteriorating all the time and the cause that they spent their life trying to achieve is getting further and further away," explains Moreh, speaking in London ahead of the film's UK release on Friday (April 12).

He was inspired to make The Gatekeepers while he was filming Sharon (2008), a documentary about the politician Ariel Sharon. During the film Moreh had interviewed Dubi Weisglass, Sharon’s Chief of Staff and one of his closest advisers. Weisglass told him that Sharon had been deeply influenced by an interview with four heads of the Shin Bet that had appeared in Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s most popular newspaper in 2003.

They stated that if Sharon continued to run Israel as he was, it would lead the country into disaster. Weisglass said that these remarks had greatly influenced Sharon, precisely because they came from the heart of the defence establishment, from people who were dealing with the Palestinians all the time and knew them well.

Moreh says: "As a filmmaker in Israel I want to create films that will change reality." In Sharon he wanted to explore how and why the right-wing politician shifted his thinking. He recalls hoping that his Gatekeepers film idea might have a similar effect on others, "in a way like the interviews did on Sharon. And I was right," he laughs.

He initially approached former politician and Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon, who then helped him to recruit the other directors.

But will anyone listen to these six men? Morah recounts a tale that he confesses made him very happy. After Israel’s latest election - an election result that Moreh refers to as Netanyahu’s defeat (he lost 12 seats in the Knesset) - an IDF Spokesman was questioned about the causes for this result. One of the reasons given was The Gatekeepers.

Also cited was an interview Moreh did with Yuval Diskin, one of the Shin Bet heads (2005-2011) two weeks prior to the election, which was printed in Yedioth Ahronot. "So," Moreh says, "I think it does have an impact." But, not for the far right he claims. "They are lost. Nothing will persuade them. Nor the far left."

There were numerous occasions during filming when Moreh was shocked by what he heard but more profoundly he discovered that the Israeli narrative he had grown up with - that the Israelis always wanted peace and the other side always refused - was not quite so.

"The Israelis and the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity," he says, rephrasing Abba Eban’s famous quote. "This is the tragedy of the conflict because a lot of people who could be with us now are buried in Israeli and Palestinian cemeteries."

Conversation turns to discussing the chapter in the film that addresses the events surrounding Yitzhak Rabin’s death, and the visible distress that Carmi Gillon (1994-96) displays when talking about it.

Moreh’s voice drops:"It was the most devastating moment in my life." He explains that November 4, the date of Rabin’s assassination, is his birthday. "Every time I see that sequence - around 3000 times - I have tears in my eyes."

He and Gillon were recently in Los Angeles conducting a Q&A session together for the first time; someone posed a question about it and Moreh says that he almost started to cry and had to pass the microphone over to Gillon.

He says: "If there is someone who understands the consequences of that assassination, it’s Gillon. He was the one who was head of the organisation that was supposed to protect the Prime Minister, and he failed. He will always carry that."

Moreh is openly critical of Netanyahu and sees contradiction in his rhetoric. He is also unequivocal when it comes to the extreme right.

"They are the most danger to Israel. If they think that to maintain the occupation is pro-Israel, then they are gravely mistaken. If there is something damaging the state of Israel, it is the maintenance of that policy." His belief and that of the gatekeepers is that "it is enough. It is devastating us from within."

Moreh plans to have The Gatekeepers subtitled into Arabic and wants it shown in the West Bank. He hopes the film will also reach Gaza. A five-part series is being made for Israeli TV - Moreh has over 70 hours of material - as well as a book.

For Moreh, the political future is bleak. Israelis and Palestinians alone cannot resolve the conflict. Pressure, he says, must come from outside, from the EU and America. He has little faith in the current Israeli political climate.

"The task of leaders is to lead to a better solution. At least honestly strive for that."

Is Schindler’s List fatally flawed?

Nathan Abrams — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 20:30:50 +0000

Steven Spielberg’s landmark Holocaust film Schindler’s List celebrates the 20th anniversary of its release next month. An adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s historical 1982 novel, Schindler’s Ark, it recounts the story of Oskar Schindler, a businessman and Nazi Party member who, by the end of the war, had saved hundreds of Jews from extermination.

It was, and remains, a controversial film. Of course, many praised its educational merits and the insight it gave into the Holocaust for a mass audience who may well have been generally ignorant of its details. Shot in documentary-style black and white, going to extraordinary lengths to be factually accurate and historically authentic, and using a high profile cast (Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley and Ralph Fiennes), it was a powerful docudrama that brought the Nazi genocide into sharp focus.

In so doing, it took its place alongside Claude Lanzmann’s monumental documentary Shoah (1985) and the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in 1993, in the trend that helped to create what US historian Peter Novick called a “Holocaust consciousness”.

Arguably, the film was part of a wave that helped to inspire national educational curriculum changes, the growth of Holocaust degree programmes, the institution of an annual remembrance day in the United Kingdom and the setting up of museums and memorials across the globe. As a result, it is no longer respectable in Western countries, in public at least, to deny the Holocaust.

Yet Schindler’s List had, and still has, many detractors. It has been criticised for its sexualisation of female suffering. Jewish concentration camp inmate Helen Hirsch (played by Embeth Davidtz), for example, is filmed from the front, her breasts clearly visible through her negligible shirt.

Elsewhere, a group of women inmates are forced to strip and herded into a large chamber labelled “Bath and Inhalation Room”. Thinking they are about to be gassed they panic and shriek. Although they survive this ordeal, as water comes out of the shower heads, the sequence makes us very aware of their nudity, which many argued was superfluous.

Some feel the film, which won a best picture Oscar, serves to embed a narrative of Jewish weakness and passivity, in which Jews were nearly always portrayed as undeserving victims. By choosing to focus on Schindler (Neeson) and the commandant of the Płaszów concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, Amon Goeth (Fiennes), Spielberg marginalised the Jews to supporting roles (with the exception of Schindler’s accountant Itzhak Stern, played by Kingsley).

Spielberg portrayed them as cardboard cut-outs, a monolithic mass of feebleness, lacking in psychological depth, to be saved or murdered at the whim of the non-Jews. From this point of view, then, Schindler’s List is not about the Holocaust or the Jews at all, but a biopic of Schindler and his conversion from ambivalent antihero to righteous gentile.

The film was also criticised for over-focusing on those who survived. By shining the spotlight in such a powerful way on the peculiar experiences of a particular set of Jews, who were not representative of the murdered six million, it gave a distorted view of the Holocaust. As the famous Jewish-American director Stanley Kubrick is reputed to have said: “Think that was about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List was about six hundred people who don’t.”

Perhaps Kubrick was bitter. It is rumoured that he abandoned plans for his own Holocaust film to be called Aryan Papers, because Schindler’s List got there first.

Many thought that Spielberg’s ending in particular was inappropriately upbeat and sentimental. It showed Schindler’s Jews leaving the camp and walking over the hill in the direction of a nearby town. As they walk, the film changes from black and white to colour, and the actors dissolve into the surviving Schindler Jews in what looks like present-day Israel. Meanwhile, on the soundtrack plays Yerushalayim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold), a post Six-Day War song, written 22 years after the Holocaust, and describing the Jewish people’s 2000-year longing to return to Jerusalem. The song inscribed the film with an irrelevant Zionist, even religious narrative. It was replaced with Hannah Szenes’s less emotive song Eli, Eli for Israeli showings.

In these various ways, many argued that Schindler’s List trivialised the Holocaust.

However, a perhaps unforeseen consequence of Schindler’s List is that it has embedded the Holocaust genre firmly into filmmaking. Several hundred films, in which the Holocaust figured as either the main or secondary plotline, have been made since. And because films like Schindler’s List have established the facts, younger filmmakers have felt increasingly empowered to make bolder and more provocative films about the Shoah.

A new paradigm in Holocaust filmmaking has emerged in its refusal to present Jews only as saintly victims and Nazis as monstrous oppressors. Jews are not merely there to be rescued or killed anymore. Watch Defiance (2008), The Pianist (2002) and, in particular, Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone (2001) — all of which are based on true stories — and you will even see Jews killing other Jews.

Even more noticeable is that the Holocaust is now cropping up in films and TV programmes which are not about World War II or the genocide at all. The Holocaust is now used either as a plot device in such exorcism horror films as The Unborn (2009) and The Possession (2012), or as a throwaway line or joke. A memorable episode of the popular sitcom, Seinfeld, for example, mimics the plot of Schindler’s List in order to mine it for jokes. At one point, Jerry is seen heavily petting his girlfriend during a screening of the film.

In the film Funny People (2009) a woman explains the idea behind JDate. “So that way you can date whoever is listed,” she says. The character played by Adam Sandler replies: “That’s interesting, I never thought Jews would like to be listed at all”. She looks at him blankly before he adds, “because of the whole Holocaust thing”.

So the question still remains — can Schindler’s List’s faults be forgiven because it informed a mass audience about the Holocaust who would otherwise have remained ignorant? Or it gave that very audience a disastrously false view of the genocide of the Jews? It is an issue that film-lovers will still be debating for the next 20 years.

Nimrod Borenstein: With that name, he was born to be a composer

Jessica Duchen — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 10:47:24 +0000

When Nimrod Borenstein first came to the UK to study at the Royal College of Music, he couldn’t understand why his fellow students would start whistling a particular melody when they saw him.

"Nimrod", part of Elgar’s Enigma Variations, is well-known in the UK, but less so elsewhere, and Borenstein – born in Israel and raised in France – scarcely knew a thing about it. Still, his name seems to mark him out for a career as a composer.

His best-known work to date is the Shell Adagio for string orchestra, which has been performed more than 30 times – mostly in the United States, including at Carnegie Hall. But now, having lived in London for some 20 years, Borenstein has been given his big break on these shores.

Last month the Philharmonia and the conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy performed his recent work The Big Bang and the Creation of the Universe at De Montfort Hall, Leicester. The same orchestra has commissioned a further piece from him, with the world premiere scheduled for the Royal Festival Hall in June; it is called, perhaps appropriately, If you will it, it is no dream. It is among eight new works of his that are being aired for the first time this year.

Borenstein, telling me about his life and music over coffee, is a fount of energy and enthusiasm. He needs to be. He is tremendously prolific; and in style, his music has evolved from 20th-century techniques such as Serialism and “sound clusters” to a highly individual take on traditional systems of tonality.

He has been writing music since the age of six. What made him start?

“I wanted to be like Beethoven,” he declares. “I really loved music and I wanted to write something that was great.”

Thinking big, then? “When I was seven,” Borenstein recalls, “I started to write 12-tone music, but I’d never heard of Schoenberg. I developed my own system for how the 12 notes of the scale could be arranged. When I heard that it had been done before, I stopped!

“I think some people have a misconception that composing music can be a hobby,” he adds. “It isn’t – it’s a vocation, a calling. Sometimes it’s nice and sometimes it’s awful, but it’s something you can’t live without.”

Borenstein is in many ways a citizen of the world. His accent is a hybrid of French, Polish, Hebrew and West London, where he lives with his Italian wife and two children; and his music, he says, is played most often by Americans on the one hand and eastern Europeans on the other.

His background is riddled with Holocaust tragedy. His paternal grandmother was one of 11 siblings, from Lvov, of whom only two survived the war.

“My grandmother decided to flee to Russia when her husband said that even Stalin was better than Hitler.” The family eventually headed for Israel, where his father Alec, a child prodigy artist, studied before meeting Nimrod’s mother and moving to France.

As Borenstein was finding his compositional “voice”, his father proved a vital advisor. In his student days, he was distressed to find that something he had just composed reminded him inordinately of Mahler. That might not sound such a bad thing – but for a young man with his heart set on originality, it provoked a miniature crisis.

“I ran out to a red phone box,” he remembers, “and my father talked me down. He gave me some sensible advice about comparing my work to other composers as well and then seeing if it really did sound as much like Mahler as I’d thought. I tried: and it was definitely not like Mahler, it was more modern than Shostakovich and it wasn’t like anything I’d heard before. So I thought: 'OK, I can leave that in'. And gradually, from then on, I found my way to my new world.”

It was a vital lesson in positive thinking – something that extends well beyond the music. “As many of my family died in the Holocaust, it is tempting for me to define my Judiasm by this, because I’m not religious,” says Borenstein.

“But my father would say that’s a negative definition; instead we should find a positive one. As a people, we’ve been persecuted – but we’ve also created great things. I think it’s the same in art: saying that you can’t do something, you can’t use tonal music, is not healthy. It’s better to define yourself through the positive: what you are trying to do, rather than what you are not.”

The Big Bang and the Creation of the World was commissioned from Borenstein by a Jewish philanthropist, Zvi Meitar. “He is an extraordinary person, interested in everything and involved with scientific projects as well as artistic ones,” Borenstein enthuses.

The piece sprang from a discussion in which Meitar and Borenstein considered ways to bring together elements of science with elements of the Bible, “to show that these did not have to be opposite ideas”.

Scientific topics are a major preoccupation for Borenstein himself; he gave a lecture on 11 March at the Royal Institution in London, for the Brain Circle, entitled “How do composers write music? Music and the scientific method”.

Borenstein feels that his Jewish background has affected his music so deeply that it cannot be easily defined via surface elements.

“Some years ago I was commissioned to write a piece for a Jewish music festival,” he says, “and the director then asked me what was Jewish about the work. What’s Jewish about it is that I am Jewish! If you want great music from great composers like Beethoven and Mozart, then you have to let them write as the people they are.

"If they are Jewish, there will be something Jewish in their work, just as there is something German about Beeethoven and something French about Debussy. It’s part of you. It shouldn’t be that you use little themes from folklore; that’s not the real thing.”

And what’s next? Borenstein has just finished writing a large-scale concerto for the Russian violinist Dmitry Sitkovetsky, due for premiere next year. Borenstein’s first love, along with composition, was the violin; this was what first brought him to study in London. He cherished hopes of combining a performing career with composition, but there simply weren’t enough hours in the day.

“I feel a little like Sibelius in that, like him, I wanted to be a virtuoso myself, but am not,” he says, with a laugh. “And I wanted to write a big piece...”