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Dybbuk - Author's notes A Dybbuk.Avadim ainu. We were slaves: every Jewish family has repeated these words during Pesach (Passover) every year, for thousands of years, so as to remember that they are descended from a people of slaves who was delivered in order to embody an immense project of liberation based on an uncontrovertible ethic of anti-idolatry, the private project of a people but intended for all humanity.With the same spirit, in centuries to come, will the words "We were in the Shoah" ring out. To remind us of the point of no return which man crossed. And to remember to remember. Because without memory, no culture is possible. And as far as I am concerned, I am "possessed" by a dybbuk, the spirit of one deceased who has no peace and never will. I don't really know who it belonged to, he asks only to not be forgotten and to find in each generation a host who will take care of him, so that, since he cannot die, at least he may continue to live. Even if his identity is unknown to me, I like to think that he was a common man and not even one of the best. Not a saint, not a heroe. For him and those like him, I sing these songs. High and low, beautiful and less beautiful. They are the songs of his life. For life. Memory and life. I've known for the longest time that, sooner or later, I would have to stage a Dybbuk. This theme of possession from the eastern European Jewish world is somehow unavoidable for anyone entering this world without reticence. The dybbuk (the soul of a person who died prematurely and violently and takes possession of a live person's body) appears to me somehow as the representation of the ghost-like being which the outside world has frequently made of the Jew, and which sometimes, paradoxically, perversely, a Jew may make of himself. As for me, I find myself in a dialectical quandary: am I possessed by a dybbuk, am I myself a dybbuk, or am I the dybbuk of myself?Personal and professional motivations in the works that I have authored and acted in, have always been united and separated by a purely virtual boundary. A tenuous yet obsessive idea invades me at a precise moment and progressively takes over my entire mental and emotional territory with growing urgency, it won't listen to reason. This time, it took the shape of a necessary equation: Dybbuk-Shoah. The Shoah concerns the whole of humanity, because the project of annihilation not only called for the extinction of two diasporic peoples, the Jewish and Romany people, but also of two transversal groups, as we might call them: homosexuals and the handicapped. It concerns everyone because it is the failure of the modern, the failure of the Western myth; this in spite of the pathetic theories regarding the anomaly of the phenomenon, or of the miserable reasons advanced by revisionism. But, as far as the specifically Jewish issue is concerned, annihilation has assumed the dismay of the tautological form: the Jews must be eliminated because they are Jews. The frenzied accumulation of reasons for reasons has failed, as well. Personally, I have the unmotivated sensation that the Jews were exterminated because of their "inexplicable" relationship with the Torah, the law, ethos and that complex group of spiritual relations which transcend the concept of religion and of the pompously "secular" concept of culture. For centuries, the Jew has swayed with those parchment rolls as one does with one's own freedom, with freedom period, with that which is most precious and intimate in the holiness of man, in oneself and in others, even though many Jews today seemed to have forgotten it. Only a few faint traces connect me and my life to the Shoah: the memory of my mother's refugee coat, on whose lapel the place where the star had been, had the appearance of a darker spot on the now worn and discolored cloth; a few yellow buttons in the shape of a star of David, which lay happily alongside other buttons in a tin box with Cyrillic writing on it. The years passed and the buttons disappeared, together with the box, though apparently their extinction was not caused by any deliberate gesture. However, the weight of those innocuous signs, with the years has grown in me. In the tiny space occupied by them lays all the energy of the untold, the unsaid, of my parents' reticence (persecuted but saved from the fury as residents of Bulgaria which, together with Denmark, was the only country not to hand over its Jews). Then, as I grew, the books and information arrived, the memorials and all those things that the Jewish world puts at the disposal of this energy of absence. But how to say the unsayable, represent the un-representable? I have tried to do so, together with Mara, my indispensable companion on this journey in the impossible, through the use of a "rite"which we have consciously kept away from realistic temptations. We have entrusted this process to echos of sound: music, language (once again we have used Yiddish, with its irresistible expressiveness, its fibres which, though mortally wounded, remain pulsating with a possible life). We have utilized images of estrangement and emblematic yet real characters. But the small orchestra was our starting point, from which everything took shape. I have always represented myself with an instrumental ensemble and, somehow, fate dictated that the concentration camp orchestra, at once witness and victim, should be the dybbuk which possesses me alive. The small orchestra in general, and even more so in this particular case, appears to me as a microcosm weighed down with a paradoxical priviledge: the ineffable gift of ubiquity. This small human society is physically hic et nunc, but its language flows simultaneously in the past, the present and the future. The music rises and provokes the cry, the word, the song and with them the absolute imperative of being with memory, so that life may still be possible. Moni Ovadia |
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