Challah, humour, the Holocaust and me

During the ten years of its development, the show has become about “the quest of this young woman who is trying to leave her family behind, which is so hard as the child of a survivor who can never complain to her father.”

Sol (born Schaja in Poland) felt unable to support Filler in her quest to be a performer. For him showbiz lacked the security of an essential trade like his. This opinion hardened like the crust on a loaf on the very day he was liberated after surviving the Krakow ghetto, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, plus the torment of being a slave labourer.

He weighed no more than 70lbs when he encountered his Russian liberators. At first he had assumed the tanks approaching what was left of the 30,000 Auschwitz inmates who had been forced on a death march were German and sent to finish them off. But no. After realising the identity of the army in front of him he asked in his best Russian for help. The commander upbraided Sol for not not using his own language. “I’m a Jew”, said the Russian officer. “Speak Yiddish to me.”

Going to Auschwitz with him and then the small Polish town he came from is what changed my life, more than anything else

The Russians had no bread to give Sol and his fellow survivors. But they had flour. Sol offered to bake bread if they could spare some soldiers to help him. The officer refused because there was still fighting to be done. But the Russian agreed to Sol’s suggestion that the Jewish baker conscript two helpers from the column of German POWs under Russian guard.

“The major looks at my father and says, ‘You would bake bread with the guards who’ve done this to you?’ And my father says, ‘Listen, I’m hungry. You’re hungry. They’re hungry.’ So on the day of liberation my father goes into the kitchens and bakes bread with German POWs who, he said, were only too happy to bake bread.” The image of an emaciated Jewish baker, making and then breaking bread with his German persecutors is, says Filler, a Jewish lesson for us all. “We must move ahead, look for hope and choose life over revenge,” says the artist.

It is easy to imagine a theatre audience’s appetite for powerful storytelling being fully sated by the story of Sol’s liberation. But there are other incredible events too such as the story about the concert where Sol watched Leonard Bernstein perform. According to Filler the New York maestro had been asked perform with an orchestra in Munich soon after the war. “Bernstein said, ‘This orchestra is full of antisemites. Is there a Jewish orchestra?’ And there was at a DP [displaced persons) camp.”

They were all survivors and many were musicians. So Bernstein went there and played Rhapsody in Blue with them. The concert later reverberated through the life of Sol’s daughter in an astounding way.

Not to give too much away, Filler’s show reveals how it came to pass that Bernstein sat at a piano and played the same piece of Gershwin music to her, and only her, in an otherwise empty Auckland concert hall when she was a teenage student. The production, directed by Mitchell Cushman, connects these stories to her life in New York during the 1980s when one of her ad-hoc income streams was driving a “1984 poop-brown V8 Chevrolet Caprice Classic” for an upmarket cab firm.

The small talk led to the OMG realisation she had Leonard Cohen in the back of her car

On one occasion Filler had been sent to Columbia Records to pick up a fare whose name was Mr Cohen. The small talk led to the OMG realisation that she had Leonard Cohen in the back of her car. When Cohen returned the question “What do you do?”, Filler mentioned the regular spot she had as a stand-up in a comedy club where she told “dirty Jewish jokes”.

They made Cohen laugh so much he offered to reciprocate by playing his only copy of the number that was to be his first release in eight years. It was called Hallelujah. He handed the cassette to his driver who placed it in the car’s deck. You will have to buy a ticket to Filler’s show to discover what calamitous thing happened next. Suffice to say that it is a moment that seared itself onto the memories of both the cab driver and her customer.

After taking her audience through the 42 jobs she had in New York “each one worse than the other”, Act Three of Filler’s show, which requires its performer to segue through no less than 33 characters, brings the narrative full circle with an account of Filler accompanying her father on a trip to Poland during which they visited Auschwitz.

“This was in 1990,” says Filler. “It was just after Perestroika and the [Berlin] Wall coming down. “Going to Poland with my father, and then Auschwitz and then to the small town that he came from is probably the thing that more than anything else has changed my life.”

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Cohen, Bernstein, Joni and Me is Upstairs at The Gatehouse from January 21 until February 2

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