"GIMPEL TAM"
The National Yiddish Theatre - Folksbiene U.S. Premiere
Q & A WITH DIRECTOR AND ADAPTOR
MOSHE YASSUR
September 2008
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
Q. Folksbiene's production of the new musical "Gimpel Tam," an adaptation of the famous Isaac Bashevis Singer short story, is the U.S. premiere of a production you first staged at the Jewish State Theatre in Bucharest Roumania in 2007. It is in Yiddish, and it is a musical. How true to Singer's original have you been with your adaptation?
A. The adaptation comprises the original Singer story almost in its entirety, plus some scenes showing the characters in action in their environment. I have also written the lyrics to 16 songs that comment on the action. Reminiscent somewhat of Brecht's epic style.
Q. When you set out to adapt the work, did you always intend for it to have a musical score?
A. I felt from the very beginning that music could add a lighter counterpoint to an otherwise dark and sad story, thus underscoring, I hope, the ironies so subtly woven by Singer into the story.
Q. What is it about the story and its setting in a mythical Eastern European shtetl, Frampol, that lends itself to theatricalization or more precisely to musicalization?
A. The conflict of any character with the society in which he lives and his struggle to keep his individuality against unequal odds, is always a tempting subject to bring from the realm of prose to the language of drama. The stage gives this tension the feeling of here and now. The story of Gimpel is an excellent example and several attempts have been made to dramatize this story.
ABOUT THE TITLE
Q. Singer published "Gimpel Tam" as a short story in the Yiddish Forward in 1945, which means that you are restoring this piece, which much of your audience in New York knows only from the famous Saul Bellow English translation (first published in the Partisan Review in 1953), to its original language. Do you think that the word Fool is an accurate reflection of Singer's intention, or does the word Fool fool around with the meaning?
A. Bellow's translation into English (the only one) is quite faithful to Singer's original. Except that in describing the material of Elke's dress, Bellow uses the word "plush" instead of Singer's "barhat" which means flannel which gives a more accurate feeling as to Elke's poverty. Also puzzling is Bellow's choice of the title of the story "Gimpel, The Fool." Singer calls him "Tam." Tam in Hebrew and in Yiddish is not a fool. Tam means innocent, simple, naive and sometimes even perfect, whole. In the Passover Haggadah the fourth son, the one who is so innocent that he does not even know how to ask questions, is also called "Tam," not fool, but this is not a put-down.
ABOUT GIMPEL
Q. Gimpel is often referred to as the quintessential schlemiel - an unlucky man who is beset by one misfortune after another. But he is also extremely gullible, believing everything he hears. Is his life a matter of bad luck, or does his gullibility put him at an unusually high risk of being exploited?
A. Gimpel is not a shlemiel. Since when is an unlucky man a shlemiel? Besides we don't know for sure who is more unlucky, Gimpel or his tormentors? Is it Gimpel, who refuses to exact revenge and who undergoes many changes throughout his life becoming a wiser man at its conclusion, or his tormentors, who undergo no change and learn nothing from their life's experience? And as far as gullibility is concerned, we are all Gimpels. Consider the extraordinary success of the advertising industry to sell us any crap as long as we see it long enough on the TV screen, or bombarding us every hour on the hour on our home telephone. After all, the adage "there is sucker born every minute" has not been coined in Frampol. And if this is not enough, have a good look at the Wall Street shenanigans that thrive on the gullibility of millions of investors.
Q. Whether he is a victim or he brings disaster upon himself, Gimpel is constantly mistreated by his fellow townsmen. He suffers one injustice and humiliation after another. And yet he never seems to mind. Is Gimpel unaware that he is being mistreated?
A. I do not believe that Gimpel sees himself as victim anymore than Hamlet sees himself as a tragic hero. However, he is well aware that his fellow townsmen mistreat him and at one point he even thinks of getting out of town.
Q. When given a chance to exact revenge on those who have harmed and exploited him, Gimpel says no. In a sense he accepts that he is a victim and he accepts the status quo of his victimhood. Why does his faith instruct him to accept things as they are?
A. Gimpel opposes the Devil's attempt to corrupt him and poison the bread he feeds his fellow townsmen out of fear of God. He in no way accepts his victimhood. At the climax of his life's crises, he leaves everything and goes wandering into the world. Jewish faith never advocates accepting things as they are. Job does not accept the arrows of bad fortune. Job will fight and try to bring God Himself to justice in accordance with God's laws. But he will not lose his faith nor his love of God. God, in Jewish tradition, created man to make him a partner in the creation of a better and more perfect world.
ABOUT THE STORY
Q. Singer loved to write his folktales as if they were parables filled with meanings relevant to modern readers and modern times. How does this story relate to a world devastated by world war on the one hand, and to the geopolitics of more recent times on the other?
A. How and if the story of Gimpel relates to the world after WWII is an open question that each person, especially the one who lived through the cataclysm, might feel the need to answer first hand. As a survivor myself, I feel that every Jew in every generation should consider himself a survivor of the Holocaust, just as every Jew in every generation should consider himself as coming out of Egypt. Again according to the Passover Haggadah.
Q. To the extent that Gimpel believes everything he hears, and his gullibility makes him vulnerable to great suffering, does this character and this story teach us to aspire to be more accepting or is it warning us to be more skeptical of others?
A. The greatness of classic writing is that it doesn't teach or preach. Each person is free to draw the lesson suitable to his or her needs. What do we learn from the tragedy of tragedies, "Oedipus?" Is it really a terrible tragedy? Or is it less a tragedy than, say, Moliere's comedy "The Miser"? One can argue that Moliere's comedy is more tragic than Sophocles' tragedy. Oedipus gouges out his eyes but he has learned something from his experience. There is a note of optimism here. Harpagon learns nothing. Life passes him by, and he perishes holding on to his strong box.
ABOUT THE MORAL OF THE STORY
Q. Gimpel says at one point, "it is better to be a fool all your days than for one hour to be evil." Is Gimpel's rejection of the Spirit of Evil's offer of revenge a sign of weakness or of strength?
A. It is the Rabbi who tells Gimpel that it is better to be a fool all the time than evil one hour. According to Jewish tradition one can evaluate a man's character on three occasions: "Bekiso, Bekoso and Bekaaso." (Hebrew in transliteration) Which means, the way he handles money, drink and rage. If we apply this criterion to the way Gimpel handles his rage, it is quite clear what kind of person he is.
Q. His abiding faith instructs him to accept things as they are. Is he accepting the badness in others by not demanding better treatment, or is there some bigger irony here?
A. The irony, as I understand it, is that Gimpel believes that there must be some truth in what people say. After all "an entire village cannot go crazy" which is quite logical. As logical as believing that a civilized people as the Germans would not perpetrate the most barbaric acts against their neighbors.
Q. Is faith a question of total acceptance? The rationalism that underlies most social movements, including the socialism that many of Singer's contemporaries in the intelligentsia believed so passionately in, suggests that change is necessary and attainable. Was Singer totally skeptical of change, and, as a result, deeply pessimistic?
A. In writing Gimpel, Singer seems to be rather the ultimate Cartesian doubter. At the end of his life Gimpel tells that he has heard many stories and many lies. However, who knows if these were lies. Perhaps they were truths. This oscillation between what is truth and what is a lie is the leitmotiv of I.B. Singer's oeuvre.
ABOUT THE CAST AND YOU COLLABORATORS
Q. You have a totally new cast and a new physical production? How are you feeling about the type of actors you have at your disposal in New York and how will this create new challenges and opportunities for you as a director?
A. The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, as is its tradition, has put together a first class cast. The best New York has to offer. I feel confident that with their full collaboration we are on the way to have a performance that our audience and I.B. Singer would be proud of.
Q. The score is by Radu Captari. Did you choose him to work on this project and what has his score contributed to the production?
A. This is my second collaboration with the young Romanian composer, Radu Captari. The first was working on "The Wise Men Of Helem," M. Gershenson's comedy presented by The Jewish State Theatre in Bucharest in 2001 that ran successfully for a few years.
ABOUT YOU
Q. You are based in New York and Bucharest. How does that work and are you doing the same things in both places?
A. It is a privilege and a great pleasure to have the opportunity to work in New York as well as in Romania and to enjoy a wide range of theatrical experiences. Romania, with an old and venerable tradition of real repertory theatre, where actors are life members of a large number of theatres, some municipal, some national, all fully subsidized by the government. A fact that has great influence on the quality and on the durability of the created product. Some of my productions run in Bucharest in repertory for years. For example, Joe Orton's play, "What The Butlers Saw," runs in Romanian for the sixth season at the Teatrul Mic, one of the best theatres in Bucharest. At the Jewish State Theatre, Jacob Gordin's "The Kreutzer Sonate" and Mario Diament's "The Book of Ruth," which opened in 2001 and 2002 respectively, are still in the repertory.
Q. You were an assistant to the director Jean-Marie Serreau on two Eugene Ionesco premieres in Paris. Have you any thoughts about the correspondences between this work and the wonderfully nihilistic world view of Ionesco?
A. As a young theatre student in Paris in the Sixties, I studied with, among others, Jean-Marie Serreau who at that time was one of the prominent directors and one of the promoters of the plays by Eugene Ionesco, Beckett and Genet. I was lucky enough to become his assistant and to work with him on Ionesco's "Hunger and Thirst" as well as Brecht's "Man Is Man." This gave me the opportunity to meet Ionesco and, as a fellow Romanian, I had long discussions with him about the Romanian surrealist writers, such as Urmuz and Tristan Tzara, and the degree to which these writers influenced his own writing. Ionesco was not a nihilist. He was not even happy with the label Martin Eslin attached to his writing calling it absurd. All his life Ionesco fought against that, claiming that life is absurd not his theatre. Ionesco's world, as I understand it, is not nihilistic. It is crazy and fun.
Q. You were born in Jassy Romania, which is the acknowledged birthplace of Yiddish theatre, since it is here that Abraham Goldfadden produced the first of his operettas in Yiddish at the Pomul Verde Wine Garden in the 1870's. What is Jassy like today and do you maintain artistic and personal connections to this city?
A. Jassy has not changed much since my childhood. There are new buildings and some of the places where I lived no longer exist, but 50 years of Communism and faulty economy have stomped the natural dynamic development of this vibrant city, the second largest in Romania with a large and flourishing Jewish community before WWII.
I still maintain artistic and personal connections to the city and especially to the Jassy National Theatre where, as a young boy, I started my first endeavors. In 2003 I returned to Jassy to direct Ionesco's "Jack or The Submission" and "The Future Is In The Eggs" as well as Howard Barker's Judith which opened at the National Theatre to a warm reception, both by the press and the audience.
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