If you missed the documentary drama Here There Are Blueberries, devised by Moisés Kaufman, in its Stratford East run, then I am sorry for you because it is simply the best play about the Holocaust I have ever seen and probably the best ensemble acting and direction too. It will be filmed for educational showings in schools. Why the Hampstead Theatre is not doing this play, or even the National, is beyond me.
I am trying to steer clear of the latest Trump Voluntary because the paper will be on full kvell alert. Suffice to say that Matthew Syed’s article in the Sunday Times says everything I feel. I have friends and acquaintances who say “Mazel tov!” “Good yom tov!” or “Ding Dong the Glitch is dead”, but the feeling in my stomach pit is not celebratory, it’s gloomy and doomy, like knowing you have the dentist after school or a First Night.
Syed says, “I don’t believe a word he says.” He cites Trump on his website “TRUTH” (or its synonym “FALLACY”) saying Iran’s nuclear facilities have been “totally obliterated”.
“Today,” Syed continues, “he says the nuclear threat is imminent. Both statements can’t be true. The difficulty is in wholeheartedly supporting a military gambit when its principal exponent is so duplicitous.’’
Truth has always been relative but now it seems to be the relative you don’t invite to the wedding. I mean how do we know who actually killed Khamenei? Very elderly man, others jockeying for positions around him, how do we know he wasn’t moved or even done away with earlier? I know, I know…I would say that, wouldn’t I? But if Iran can slaughter 30,000 of their brightest young people in two days, it’s no hardship to knock out a girls’ school in one sitting – it worked on the Gazan hospital, didn’t it? Jeremy Bowen? And then you can just blame it all on Israel.
When we were last in Tel Aviv, we saw a photographic installation that was particularly disturbing. It showed an IDF soldier talking about how he dreamed of home and family the whole time he was on duty, but found that when he was at home with his family he could not relax and enjoy them. He missed his dormitory, the terrible old sink and rusty mugs, and he sat there, staring into space, worrying about his brothers in arms. He was a soldier without a true home.
The soldier’s face came back to me this week, when I heard a story from an Israeli veteran. It was told with levity, in spite of being a story of his own near-death experience, and like any stunning individual tale, it became instantly a universal one.
The soldier, a veteran intelligence leader, let us call him D, was in charge of a unit in Gaza. The day before he sent up a drone to locate the exact lay-out of the area and mapped it for his battalion. A junior soldier sent back a correction pointing out that house 2048 was, in fact, house number 2040. D argued he was right but when he was proved wrong, he made the correction.
At the same time, the medic who travelled with the unit had a dilemma.
He was due to leave the next day, after 99 days of duty, to return to his family for a weekend, but he was uncomfortable. He called his wife and said “I have a funny feeling – can’t explain – but I would never forgive myself if something happened to my unit.” His wife told him, “Only you can decide … do what you have to do.’’ So he made the difficult decision to stay.
Around the same time, he had chosen to do advanced training. He was studying using a tourniquet on a bleeding lower leg wound. He asked the question of his superior what do you do if the upper leg artery was severed, but was informed that would be the next lesson. Feeling troubled, he looked it up and studied it carefully for himself.
The following day, D, the leader of the unit, took his men into Gaza. They entered a house. It was booby trapped. D went into an upstairs room and a bomb was detonated. His artery was severed and began gushing blood. The call for aid went out. The medic was five metres away and, thanks to his own initiative, knew exactly what needed to be done.
Back-up arrived, including the junior soldier, and D was rushed by comrades to an ambulance, a helicopter. Several months of operations and rehab later, he was standing here, smiling and telling us this story.
He ended with the sentence whispered to him by the soldier who had corrected his house numbering; “You know which house this is? It’s number 2040.”
“Sometimes,” our soldier wryly remarked, “the solution comes to you before the problem.”
So, gentle reader, I come to the story of Purim, where Esther, the daughter of Mordechai the Jew, was already married to King Ahasuerus, when Haman (booo, grrr, noise, tumult!) took umbrage with Mordechai because he refused to bow before him. Miffed as only a would-be king would be, he sought permission from his ruler to slaughter every Jew in the land. Ahasuerus said, with diffidence: “Oh sure, why not?”
Then, Esther, as we know, pleaded with her husband the king, and, phew, we lived to fight another unjust war. After which came much hanging and killing of Haman and hundreds of his followers. So, you might say – Esther, the solution, was already there before the problem evolved. Job done.
Mind you, I can’t help wondering, would it have been such a terrible thing to have just pretended to bow? A little inclining of the head perhaps? A slight genuflect that maybe turned into the tying of a shoelace? Maybe a shifty hand gesture afterwards, to deal with his pride? Ah, well, stiff-necked was coined for us, wasn’t it?
PS: On the subject of things you may have have missed, the last night of Jewish Book Week, our celebration of 99 years of the great Mel Brooks, was a bit of a triumph for me and my pals, Toni Kanal, Allan Corduner, Rob Rinder and, at the piano, Geoff Morrow.
We did Mel proud and the audience loved it and him. Corduner transmogrified into Mel, Hitchcock and the 2,000 year-old-man as did Rinder into Carl Reiner, Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese before their very eyes.
As for Producers stars Andy Nyman and Marc Antolin, well, they not only sang We Can Do It on their one Producers-free night off, but they chatted to the house about background Mel stuff and gave the evening the showbiz vibe it deserved. It was a lot of work but it was kvell done.
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