 © Photo: antolo |
Il compagno Rabinovic - Rassegna stampa Le nostalgie del compagno Ovadia www.lospettatore.it 16 giugno 2007 (...) Il compagno Rabinovich – Lavoratori di tutto il mondo, ridete è lo spettacolo epico e umoristico del popolo
|
|
|
Il compagno Rabinovic - Press Le nostalgie del compagno Ovadia (Comrade Ovadia's nostagia)
(recensione tratta dal sito www.lospettatore.it) Sabato, 16 June, 2007 (...) "Il compagno Rabinovich – Lavoratori di tutto il mondo, ridete" (Comrade Rabinovich-workers of the world, laugh) is an epic and humoristic show of the Soviet people, achieved through jokes – some are real classics, like the one about Stalin's look-alike and his moustache – and episodes which revolve around the title character, a little Russian Jew, as astute as he he is naïve, as selfish and as he is sentimental, ready to enthuse about the horizons of Socialism and to flatten himself on the ground to avoid its mortal blows...
|
 © Photo: antolo |
Il compagno Rabinovic - Text fragments It's three o'clock in the morning and bitterly cold. A knock is heard at the door of the Jew Rabinovich.-Who's there? - The postman, a voice answers. Rabinovich opens the door a crack and sees a dozen sinister-looking KGB agents staring at him with severe eyes. - Rabinovich, pray tell, which is the most beautiful country in the world? Rabinovich answers without hesitation: - Our great Soviet fatherland. -Good. And which is the most progressive political system which makes humans live the best? Why, Socialism, of course, comrades. -And tell us, Rabinovich, which is the country in which men live in greatest freedom? -But of course, it's our wonderful Soviet Union- answers Rabinovich. -Right, Rabinovich- The KGB agents all say in unison -Then, please explain to us why you have sollicited an emigration visa to Israel. -Well, just for one very small reason. They tell me that over there, the postman never wakes up citizens at three o'clock in the morning... |
 © Photo: antolo |
Il compagno Rabinovic - Author's notes Who is Comrade Rabinovich?Let's hear it in one of his famous answers: - "Comrade Rabinovich, are you a member of the Party?" - "No! I am its brain!". Comrade (tovarisch) Rabinovich or Citizen (grajdanìn) Rabinovich is the best known character in Jewish-Soviet humorism. Thanks to his wit and adventures, we may travel through the iniquities and absurdities, but also through the paradoxes and many human contradictions of the Soviet system, and, "sympathetically", through the whole system of what is known as "Real Rocialism". This liberticide system was founded on police, bureaucracy, repression and a rhetorical propaganda which was incredibly pervasive. However, the Soviet era was not only a time peopled by automatons and robots, by cruel tyrants and obsequious police agents as a certain relentless and perverse counter-propaganda would have us believe. At that time and in that space, men, women, children and old folks, managed to live, love, laugh, rejoice and even to feel a part of a great dream of international brotherhood. During the revolutionary years in the Soviet Union, there existed an extraordinary culture, first of support and then of opposition to the regime. There were political Springs in which it seemed that the ice of the police state and of bureaucracy might melt; times of great technical and scientific conquests, and also social and political ones. It is this humanity, with its glories and pains, with its weaknesses and miseries, which we want to observe through the impertinent inventiveness of our Jewish Comrade Rabinovich and his humorous stories. We want to sing of the dramas, the horrors, but also of the joys and hopes of that time. We shall do this through songs, poems and anecdotes, so that this humanity may be salvaged from the plastic trash can of revisionistic TV garbage. And we will do this in order to render justice to the victims, who were used or ignored, and to the dreamers and the glorious defeated who sacrificed themselves so that we might live in a better world. |
