Dr. Habil. Szilvia Peremiczky, Phd Leah Goldberg: a Kastély Úrnője

Dr. habil. Szilvia Peremiczky, PhD

ABSZTRAKT

A Kastély úrnője egyszerre két olvasattal is szolgál. A cionista olvasat középpontjában a diaszpóra- zsidó identitástól való hangsúlyozott eltávolodást hirdető Soá utáni izraeli zsidó identitás áll. Ezzel ellentétben az európai olvasat az európai identitás és kultúra Soá utáni válságára fókuszál. Zsidó szempontból azonban Európa nemcsak az üldöztetéseket és a Soát jelenti, hanem az európai zsidó identitás kialakulásában meghatározó szerepű európai kultúra értékeit és vonzóerejét is. Goldberg mindezt egy gótikus drámába ágyazva mutatja be, amelyben megkísérli a két olvasat egyeztetését.

ABSTRACT

The Lady of the Castle offers two parallel readings. The focus of the Zionist reading is the post- Shoah Israeli Jewish identity, which emphatically proclaims the imperative of rejecting the diaspora Jewish identity. In contrast, the focus of the European reading is the post-Shoah crisis of European identity and culture. From a Jewish perspective, however, Europe does not only signify persecutions and the Shoah, but also the values and attractions of European culture that had a defining role in the formation of European Jewish identity. Goldberg embeds all of these parallel and contrasting threads in a Gothic drama, in which she attempts a certain measure of conciliation between them.

Dr. habil. Peremiczky Szilvia, PhD irodalomtörténész, hebraista, 2018 óta az OR-ZSE habilitált egyetemi oktatója. Az ELTE-n végzett magyar-hebraisztika szakon, és 2008-ban szerzett PhD- fokozatot összehasonlító irodalomtörténetből. 2010 óta az OR-ZSE adjunktusa, 2014 óta a MAZSIHISZ tudományos igazgatója, 2004 óta óraadó az ELTE-n. Magyar és idegen nyelvű publikációi között 2012-ben jelent meg Jeruzsálem a zsidó irodalomban című monográfiája. Fő kutatási területei a középkori ibériai és itáliai zsidó költészet, a judeoespañol nyelvű szefárd kultúra, a modern héber irodalom, a 19. századi magyarországi zsidó irodalom, a zsidó dráma és színház, a középkori és a 19-20. századi olasz, angol, spanyol, francia nyelvű költészet és ezek határmezsgyéi. Jelenlegi kutatásai témái: a zsidó dráma, színház és identitás összefüggései; a magyarországi zsidó irodalom és az identitás kölcsönhatásai, a héber és a nyugati líra kapcsolata, valamint a költészet, a költői szerep és egyéniség kérdései.

Dr. Szilvia Peremiczky, PhD is a historian of literature, a Hebraist and from 2018 a habilitated lecturer at the Jewish Theologial Seminary – University of Jewish Studies. She majored in both Hungarian and Hebrew language and literature at ELTE University of Budapest, where in 2008 she gained a PhD in Comparative Literature. A part-time instructor at ELTE University of Budapest since 2004, Szilvia Peremiczky has been lecturing at the JTS-UJS since 2010 as a senior lecturer. She has been also the Academic Director of MAZSIHISZ since 2014. Her numerous Hungarian and foreign language publications include Jerusalem in Jewish Literature (Hungarian), a monograph published in 2012. Her principal research areas include Medieval Hebrew Poetry in Iberia and Italy, Judeoespañol Sephardi culture, Modern Hebrew Literature, Jewish drama and theater, and Medieval and 19-20th century Italian, English, Spanish and French Poetry. Her particular interest are multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary boundary issues. Current research projects include the historical and current interrelationships between Jewish drama, theatre and identity, the nature of the relationship between Hungarian Jewish literature and Hungarian Jewish identity, the linkages between Modern Hebrew Poetry and the poetry of Europe and America, and issues in Poetics, with focus on the role and personality of the poet.

Dr. habil. Szilvia Peremiczky, PhD

The purpose of this study is to present a short overview of the respective European and Jewish interpretations of Lady of the Castle, a play by Leah Goldberg, the renowned Israeli playwright, poet and novelist. To begin with let us first have a quick look at the history of the development of Modern Hebrew drama and theatre, which subsequently became Israeli upon the establishment of the Jewish state, as Leah Goldberg’s play cannot really be understood and interpreted in isolation from the historical context within which it arose. At the time of its beginnings, Modern Hebrew drama and theatre faced a severe shortage of original dramas in Modern Hebrew, which became particularly burdensome when the centre of gravity of Modern Hebrew theatre had shifted to the Holy Land from the mid-nineteen-twenties on. That in turn had made it an urgent national mission to create an indigenous Hebrew drama and theatre as part of a Jewish national culture that would be imbued with the Zionist ideal and would in turn be driving the newly forming Israeli-Jewish identity of the waves of incoming Jewish immigrants to the then British Mandatory Palestine.

Following the birth of the State of Israel, when hundreds of thousands of immigrants arrived in the young state with an enormous diversity of linguistic and cultural backgrounds, it became particularly important not just to conjure up a new Israeli identity, but also to effectively communicate the character and essence of that identity to Israel’s highly diverse publics. And indeed, the principal concern of the drama and theatre in the newly arisen State of Israel was the creation, presentation and inculcation of an indigenous Israeli Jewish identity and its values, whilst also playing an essential role in facilitating the acquisition of a rapidly evolving Modern Hebrew literary language by its public. Accordingly, Israeli drama in the fifties and sixties was primarily about myth building and about embedding and anchoring those myths in the evolving indigenous culture of Israeli society. In referring to ‘myth building’ here, I am not using the term in any kind of a pejorative sense, but with the intention of designating a perfectly legitimate and positive, or at least value-neutral process for the creation and

Dr. habil. Szilvia Peremiczky, PhD

Leah Goldberg: A Kastély úrnője – Ellentétes interpretációk: a színdarab izraeli és európai olvasatai Leah Goldberg: Lady of the Castle - Contrasting Interpretations: Israeli and European Readings of the Play consolidation of a common value system, a historic-cultural awareness and a communal memory, within the context of which individuals may also find their own respective points of affinity. By the same token, a subsequent process of deconstructing and reinterpreting those myths may similarly be recognised as a just as perfectly legitimate.1

The majority of the first Israeli plays were about life in the kibbutz, about the War of Independence – which was the first Arab-Israeli war – and in general about the heroism involved in building the new country, and even though some sporadic questioning of the myths began to also occur, the style and vision of the overwhelming majority of the plays were conceived partly in the spirit of socialist realism, but even more so in that of European national romanticism. The Lady of the Castle by Leah Goldberg2 is in many respects a typical product of the dramatic literature of the era, but in just as many respects it is also very different from it. In addition to a striking articulation of the new Israeli identity and identification with it, there is also an explicit commitment in the play to the values of European culture and to preserving and integrating the Jewish culture of the Galut – that of the exile or diaspora of Jews living outside of the Land of Israel, which the Zionism of those days aspired to just forget about – and the subject of the Shoah, that of the Holocaust, is also given a central, if indirect role in the play.

In still another reading the play is seen to carry not just Jewish and Israeli levels of interpretation, but a European one as well, and whilst Goldberg conveys both her love and critique of European culture, her horizons are not just those of a Jewish author. The drama presents the interplay of four characters somewhere in East-Central Europe in nineteen-forty-seven, in the immediate post-war era: two Zionist emissaries from the emerging State of Israel in the persons of Zand, a man, and Dora, a woman, and two locals, Lena a very young Jewish woman who is a Holocaust survivor, and Count

1 cf. Abramson 1979; Abramson 1998; Rozik 2013; Urian 2000.

2 cf. Goldberg 2011 (Hebrew). 3

Dr. habil. Szilvia Peremiczky, PhD

Zabrodsky, an aristocrat and hereditary owner of the castle in which the action of the play takes place, where he gave shelter to Lena and protected her throughout the Holocaust. By virtue of the fact that many thoughts of the gravest import and seriousness are actually articulated by this non-Jewish aristocrat, the play steps out of both the Israeli and Jewish contexts, and gives acute expression to the agonizing questions of the post-Shoah crisis in European culture, and therefore to questions about the very nature of being a European. Leah Goldberg had a profound knowledge and very great love of European literature and culture, but just as profound a knowledge and love of Jewish history and Zionism, and she intensely cared about the fate and future of her people. Her play explores the respective natures of Zionist and European identities and the relationship between them in an immediate post-Holocaust context, feeling her way toward finding some sensible balance, some ‘sweet spot’ between the two.

Leah Goldberg was born in nineteen-eleven to a Lithuanian Jewish family in Königsberg, the erstwhile capital of East Prussia, now a part of Russia known as Kaliningrad. She learned Hebrew at a very young age and over time she became fluent and literate in various European languages; eventually she received a PhD from the Universities of Berlin and Bonn, where she studied German and Semitic languages. She made aliya in 1935 – moved to what was known at the time as British Mandatory Palestine – and settled in Tel Aviv. She is renowned primarily for her Hebrew-language poetry, but she also wrote plays, novels and works for children, translated literature into Hebrew from six European languages – she had exemplary knowledge of Russian, Lithuanian, German, Italian, French and English – and engaged in extensive scholarly research in comparative literature. In the early 1950s Leah Goldberg moved to Jerusalem, where she served as lecturer, then senior lecturer and finally as a professor in the Department of General and Comparative Literature at Hebrew University, ultimately becoming its chair. Apart from her magnum opus of translation, Tolstoy’s epic novel War and Peace, she translated into Hebrew, among others, the works of Rilke, Thomas Mann, Chekhov, Akhmatova,

Dr. habil. Szilvia Peremiczky, PhD

Shakespeare and Petrarch – with the sonnets of the latter having significantly influenced the numerous sonnets that she herself had written – plus many other works, including reference books and works for children. Her lyric poetry is generally recognised as having been significantly influenced, in addition to Petrarch, by French symbolism, Russian acmeism and Anglo-American imagism, as well as German and Russian lyricism, and in addition, as we shall see, she was also thoroughly familiar with the literature of nineteenth century gothic drama.

Lady of the Castle is widely recognised as the earliest Israeli play to deal head on with the issue of the Holocaust. The play was first performed in 1955 by the Kameri, one of Israel’s most important theatrical companies. Whilst the primary concern of the play is with the consequences of the Shoah, it also offers a synthesis of the questions around Israeli Jewish identity and of the problematic nature of the relationship of that identity with the worldwide Jewish diaspora and with European culture, whilst also presenting a sensitive overview of the agonizing questions that haunt the post-war and post-Shoah European identity. In light of all this, the position taken by Glenda Abramson in her history of the Modern Hebrew drama (Abramson 1979), is all the more peculiar for perceiving the play as a universalised drama concerned with the nature of love and power, the collision of reality and imagination, and the collision of the new and the old, as a result of which, according to Abramson, it cannot by definition be regarded as particularised to the Israeli context. Abramson asserts that

(…) the land of Israel and Jewish life were not a solitary and exotic island isolated within the problem of man’s existence in the world at the time. Their particular problems could not be solved without association with the general fate of the period. (Abramson 1979, 117).

Whilst this may well be true, and Leah Goldberg herself would no doubt readily assent to it, there is no getting away from the fact that in the end the issues that she presents in

Dr. habil. Szilvia Peremiczky, PhD

Leah Goldberg: A Kastély úrnője – Ellentétes interpretációk: a színdarab izraeli és európai olvasatai Leah Goldberg: Lady of the Castle - Contrasting Interpretations: Israeli and European Readings of the Play her play are particular and specific to questions of Israeli and Jewish identity. Of the three Jewish characters of the play, the two Israeli emissaries Dora and Zand manifest, from the first moment that they appear, two wholly different approaches to Israeli identity in terms of both form and strategy, whilst Lena – the very young local Jewish woman who became the Lady of Count Zabrodsky’s Castle in the course of the Holocaust – projects a figure of the Holocaust survivor who is to start a new life in Israel. Thus, however valid the general point made by Abramson may be, it does not detract in the least from the fact that the Lady of the Castle is also quintessentially Israeli, and that Abramson’s views are therefore ironically at once way too simplistic and a case of untenable over-interpretation.

With only four characters, the play is designed for a small and intimate stage. The action takes place somewhere in East-Central Europe in the immediate aftermath of the war. The two Israeli emissaries Dora and Zand find shelter against a storm in a castle. Dora’s task is to organise the aliya, the emigration of orphaned Jewish children to what was shortly to become the State of Israel, and Zand’s task is to salvage and retrieve looted Jewish cultural assets, in particular books. At first, it is only the custodian of the castle that seems to be its sole inhabitant; he turns out to be Count Zabrodsky, the one-time seignior of the castle. Soon however it becomes clear that behind a secret door there is someone else who is also living in the castle. She turns out to be the very young Jewish woman Lena, whose life was saved by Count Zabrodsky, who however fell in love with her, and therefore did not let her know that the war was over. The young woman is frightened of the two Israeli emissaries, who find it difficult to make her understand that they were not Nazis and that the war was over. In the end, they succeed in persuading her to go with them to what was shortly to become the State of Israel, and by that time the Count is also encouraging her to do so, even though he would remain alone in the castle once she was gone.

Dr. habil. Szilvia Peremiczky, PhD

The storyline is very much based on concrete historical evidence. There were in fact many Jewish children who survived the Shoah thanks to having been taken in by Christian families, many of whom also arranged to have these children baptised. Most of these children were successfully retrieved after the war by Zionist organisations, which arranged for them to make aliya to what was shortly to become the State of Israel, where they were placed in Jewish communal settlements and agricultural schools. In Hungary, pioneering research into these stories is currently being conducted by Viktória Bányai (Biro et al 2016 (eds.), 111-25). It is one of these typical stories that Leah Goldberg then fictionalises in Lady of the Castle within the romantic conventions of a gothic drama. The contents of the drama evoke a favourite theme of the romantic tradition, that of a maiden who is being held captive by the lord of the castle, but finally set free by the hero. Aside however from reminders of the tales of Hernani or Rinaldo Rinaldini, there are also obvious allusions to the fairy tales of a royal princess held captive by a dragon. The dragon in this case is a disillusioned and embittered elderly Count, who prefers to live in the past, whilst the dimensions of the hero are represented by the figures of the two Israeli emissaries.

The gothic back-drop in Goldberg’s drama does not of course serve merely the purpose of setting the mood and atmospherics of the piece, but is at once symbolic and a homage to European culture. It is a homage to European culture in so far as Goldberg utilises the themes and formulae of the romantic vision, the conventions of the romantic drama and the centuries old traditions of the fairy tale to arrive at a cultural synthesis of the European and the Modern Hebrew; but it is also symbolic, in so far as saving the life of Lena whilst also holding her captive, the castle symbolises the exile of the diaspora or Galut, which to Zionists merely signifies a wretched Jewish past, a past that might have been life-giving once, but also suffocating, and one from which the Jewish people is seeking release and to escape from. Thus, the principal motifs in terms of which the

Dr. habil. Szilvia Peremiczky, PhD

Jewish identities emerge and unfold in the play are visions of the past versus future; that of Galut or exile versus Erec, the Land of Israel; and that of captivity versus freedom.

The two opposing poles in the play are represented by the Count and Dora. The Count is one of the last representatives of a decadent European culture and of a declining feudal aristocracy that is in effect surviving in a kind of zombie existence literally despite of itself; a feudal aristocracy, which, moreover, was itself guilty of grave historical transgressions in the past. In protecting, but also holding Lena captive, like a feudal seigneur, the conduct of the Count is of course perfectly emblematic of those historical transgressions. At the same time however the play also presents the positive aspects of his world, in that the Count is a protector of the weak and the defenceless, abhors the barbarity of Nazism, and is an embodiment of European refinement, erudition and style. His antithesis is Dora, the down-to-earth emissary from Erec, who had radically broken with not just the old world represented by the Count, but also with the Jewish diaspora living outside of the Land of Israel, and fixes her vision exclusively on the new, the future, whilst harbouring a profound hatred of the past, both as a Zionist and as a socialist.

Dora might not have been born in Eretz, but her attitudes are most definitely typical of the native-born sabras, named for the cactus fruit, which is prickly outside, but sweet inside. The Count indulges in reveries about the past; inactive and melancholic, he turns away from the realities around him. Dora on the other hand looks confidently to the future; active and tough as nails, she squarely faces whatever realities she might be up against. She is salvaging and saving human lives, the lives of children, whose lives are the best guarantee that there would be a Jewish future, and at the same time she associates the past only with Jewish suffering. In her own words (Goldberg 2011, 24):

Dr. habil. Szilvia Peremiczky, PhD

ארמונות וחורבות תמיד שוכנים זה בצד זה! אולי אני חסרה כל חוש אסתיטי. אולי ראיתי יותר מדי צער ומצוקה ועוני בשנים אלו, בעבודתי, בלכתי אחרי ילדים בני בלי בית, עזובים, חולי-שחפת, מוכי כנמת, אבל אני שונאת את כל הנושנת הללו, את כל האפר הזה ללא תועלת! )...( אני אוהבת שמש, ונקיון ואפשרות פשותה ביותר של חיים בריאים ופשוטים לבני אדם. כן! לבני אדם! וכל השאר לא איכפת לי )...(.

Castles and ruins always lie side by side! Perhaps I lack all aesthetic sense. Perhaps I saw too much sorrow and distress and poverty in these years, in my work, tracking down homeless children, abandoned, sick with tuberculosis, lice infested, but [and] I hate all this archaic baggage, all this useless ash! I love sunshine and cleanliness, and I want people to be able to live a healthy, simple life. Yes! For people! As for the rest, I don’t care!

Dora herself was born and brought up in the country in which the action takes place, and at a subsequent point in the drama she actually mentions that while her father no longer read Jewish religious literature, her grandfather did; in fact he had a very large library of such books. Given that her father had evidently drifted away from religion, Dora would have grown up immersed in a spiritual and intellectual environment favouring assimilation, but she broke with the idea of assimilation just as she broke with the religious past. For her, the great difference between a shtetl or assimilationist Jewish identity on the one hand, and a Zionist or Israeli identity on the other, is the presence or absence of fear, and it is the absence of fear that differentiates between freedom and servitude, and makes possible for the sense of identity to be free of any and all oppressive encumbrances. As Dora says, facing Lena (Goldberg 2011, 59):

שני יהודים. הלא רואה את: אנחנו חופשים ואינינו מפחדים?

[We are] two Jews: don’t [can’t] you see that we are free and not afraid?

The character of Count Zabrodsky would remind the Hungarian reader of Count Pongrácz of the Siege of Beszterce by Kálmán Mikszáth. With an attitude recalling that of Don Quixote, the hero of the Siege of Beszterce is trying to live the life of a medieval or renaissance nobleman, but centuries too late, in the era of the Dual Monarchy. His character is comic and can often become a mix of the creepy and scary, but at certain

Dr. habil. Szilvia Peremiczky, PhD

Leah Goldberg: A Kastély úrnője – Ellentétes interpretációk: a színdarab izraeli és európai olvasatai Leah Goldberg: Lady of the Castle - Contrasting Interpretations: Israeli and European Readings of the Play moments it can nonetheless sublimate itself to reach tragic heights. Count Pongrácz is elevated above his social environment by the ideals he holds, in sharp contast to the lack of ideals in the petty world of the milieu depicted in the novel.

The same can be said of Count Zabrodsky too, excluding of course the comic elements in the portrayal of Count Pongrácz by Mikszáth. The way Zabrodsky keeps the nineteen- year-old Lena captive is of course ethically indefensible, even though he saved her life by risking his own. At the same time, his commitment to the one-time high cultural ideals of Europe and to the vanished quality of life of a bygone era do elevate him above a culturally despicable milieu that repudiated its own former cultural ideals and thereby enabled the devastation of Nazism to befall on Europe. Count Zabrodsky was utterly disgusted by the Nazis whom he saw as defiling the European past, and he preferred to shut himself away in his castle, in a past in which the castle itself seemed to assume an agency for bequeathing to each generation the cultural and intellectual inheritance of their forebears. As Count Zabrodsky tells it (Goldberg 2011, 41-42):

אני מכיר אותו ]את הארמון הזה[ מיום בו ראיתי את אור העולם. אני מכירו מאז היתי ברחם אמי. הארמון הזה, אדוני, היה שייך לי, לאבות אבותי ואבותיהם. זה היה הארמון שלי. בשנה שמונה עשרה, נסתם הגולל על החיים שאהבתי. הקיסרות לא היתה עוד. אני הוספתי לאכול, לשתות, לישון, להתנועע, אך לעצם מת הייתי, קבור בארמון הזה. אבל כאשר ראיתי כאן על אדמת ארץ-אבותי את הקצינים הללו, מגולחי-העורף, גסי-הרוח, והנבערים מדעת, היהירים, המתנבאים על חיים חדשים, העושים להם דת חדש –דת חדשה של קאניבאלים . . . .

I have known it [this castle] from the day I came into this world. I have known it ever since I had been in my mother’s womb. This castle, sir, was mine, as it had been of my father’s fathers and their forebears. It was my castle. In nineteen- eighteen, the life I loved had come to an end. The empire was gone. I continued to eat, drink, sleep and move around, but in reality I was dead and buried in this castle. But when I saw those officers here, upon the land of my forefathers, with their close-cropped hair and their vulgar, ignorant and arrogant ways, prophesying a new way of life, setting up a new religion – a new religion of cannibals . . . .

Dr. habil. Szilvia Peremiczky, PhD

Count Zabrodsky regards the Jews as among the last that are willing and able to preserve their traditions in the modern world, and he admires them for their steadfastness in doing so. Again, in Zabrodsky’s words (Goldberg 2011, 35-36):

אותו סבא שלך, גבירתי, שאת כל כך היטבת לתארו, ידע שמה פירושו של ספר כזה. אלו היה הוא בא הנה, היה הוא אולי מבין יותר מאשר כל הפרופסורים להסטוריה ולתולדות אמנות. חושבני, שהיום היהודים הם היחידים בעולם, המסוגלים להבין עדיין מה זאת מסורת. אני תמיד מעריץ הייתי את העם היהודי על שלא הלך אחרי חבל-החבלים של העולם הזה ולא סטה אחרי תהפוכותיו, אלא בדרכו שלו חלך.

This grandfather of yours, madam, whom you described so very well, knew the significance of a book like this. Had he come here, he would have perhaps understood more than all the professors of history and the history of art. I think that these days the Jews are the only people in the world who are still capable of understanding the meaning of tradition. I have always admired the Jewish people for neither following in the vanities of this world nor deviating to follow in its upheavals, but persisting in its own chosen way.

The reclusive nobleman retreating as much behind the protective walls of his castle, as behind the just as protective walls of the past, could equally be a Hernani or a Rinaldo Rinaldini, or in another reading, even a Dora or a Zand, romantic heroes all. In robustly choosing the identity of an outsider opposed to social injustice and oppression, and in general to the petty value system of the social milieu in which he finds himself, the reclusive and alienated Count Zabrodsky himself clearly embodies the romantic figure of the “noble brigand.”

In her 1990 volume Geschichte des Dramas, the German theatrologist Erika Fischer- Lichte mounts a strong case for interpreting the history of European drama in terms of a history of European identity. The Hungarian translation of the book was published in 2001 as A dráma története, and it is from this edition that I would like to quote now, in English (translation mine), a passage dealing with the romantic outsider, which appears particularly pertinent to understanding the character of Count Zabrodsky:

Dr. habil. Szilvia Peremiczky, PhD

The heroes of Kleist, Byron and Shelley are all outsiders in the society in which they find themselves. Their sole concern is with their own Self; they yearn for self-fulfilment, experience the ordeal of sudden alienation of self, and insist on freedom of self-definition for themselves. Meanwhile they discern society around them only to the extent of its immediate relevance to themselves and their problems, in the sense of either validating or challenging their right to self- fulfilment. Such persons or literary characters are always enigmatic for others around them. Although Shelley does make a connection between the problem of identity and social conditions, his interest is focussed on the traumatic ordeal of the alienation of Self the moment it gets ‘infected’ by an utterly alien world, and more broadly, on the consequences of this for the Self subjected to that infection. (Fischer-Lichte 2001, 446).

In his own way, Count Zabrodsky is also a defiant romantic outsider who insists on defining his own identity and on determining the nature of his relationship with the world, in particular during the war – notwithstanding the Nazi totalitarianism that was completely engulfing him with its total subjection of individual selfhood – as his value system does not allow him to identify himself with the spirit of Nazism.

From time to time the Count would tutor the young woman on a variety of subjects, would waltz with her or play Chopin for her, and talk to her about a happy afterlife in the spirit of a sort of Christian mysticism. Of course, what this kind of mysticism reflects is the profound disillusionment of the Count with life, giving expression, as it does, to his yearning for an escape and also perhaps to his longing for death.

The conflict between Dora and the Count is also a mirror image of the internal conflict of culturally sophisticated Jewish refugees from Europe to the then British Mandatory Palestine, which was in effect a struggle between thesis and antithesis. Europe signified for them high culture, though also the tribulations of the diaspora; Israel on the other

Dr. habil. Szilvia Peremiczky, PhD

Leah Goldberg: A Kastély úrnője – Ellentétes interpretációk: a színdarab izraeli és európai olvasatai Leah Goldberg: Lady of the Castle - Contrasting Interpretations: Israeli and European Readings of the Play hand signified feelings of hope, the security of having their own country, and a future to look forward to, but also a total absence of their accustomed cultural milieu. Lena and Zand occupy intermediate positions on these issues of contention between Dora and Count Zabrodsky. With her youth, insecurity and traumas Lena emerges as the very personification of a future that needs to be protected at all cost; a future for the sake of which Zabrodsky rescued her, but a future that can only be secured for her by Dora and Zand jointly; her physical future by Dora, her spiritual and intellectual future by Zand.

It is important to emphasise that as far as the Count is concerned, there is no difference between Jew and Christian; he is free of any and all anti-Semitic prejudice. On the other hand, however, under Zabrodsky’s influence Lena suffers a complete loss of her Jewish identity and it is up to Dora and Zand to rebuild it within her. But the prospects of this do fill Lena with a trepidation that in terms of the Zionist ideal is unequivocally symbolic of the apprehensions of the Galut, the jettisoning of which is without doubt the key to acquiring an Israeli identity. Lena in fact holds onto a kind of badly distorted sense of liberty that only enables choosing between captivity and death (Goldberg 2011, 76):

אתם באים ולוקחים את הכל. את חיי אתם לוקחים, את הרוזן, את כל מה שהיה לי, ... אתם לוקחים ממני את חחופש, אם אני רוצה לחיות או למות...

You come and take everything [from me]. You take my life, the Count, everything I had, … you take away my freedom, [the freedom to decide] whether I want to live or to die…

Zand is working to rescue books, as well as other forms of Jewish cultural heritage, inclusive of the best traditions of both Jewish and European culture. Thus, while Zand is committed to the future, he is also striving to preserve cultural traditions of value. However, in contrast to Dora he is not just capable of recognising value in the past, but actively works at maintaining a continuity from past into the future through the preservation of the cultural values of that past, and thereby to facilitate the transition from old to new. For this reason, he understands the Count’s point of view very well, and

Dr. habil. Szilvia Peremiczky, PhD

Leah Goldberg: A Kastély úrnője – Ellentétes interpretációk: a színdarab izraeli és európai olvasatai Leah Goldberg: Lady of the Castle - Contrasting Interpretations: Israeli and European Readings of the Play has feelings of sympathy towards him. Whilst Zand comes from a poverty-stricken family, he does mention that they had books inherited from their forefathers. What he is alluding to with this is not just the Jewish tradition of utter immersion in their books, but also to the culture of study and the desire to understand and preserve the past being the very foundation of Jewish identity. It is thus highly symbolic that his father was a watchmaker, because that puts Zand into a kind of mystical and intimate relationship with the continuity and continuous flow of time. This is how he puts it (Goldberg 2011, 48):

סבי היה יהודי עני. שען, כמו אבי. אבל, גם לו היו ספרים, שירש מאבותיו. בעבר, הביבתי, יש הרבה דברים, אשר גם בני-השענים צריכים לדעתם, ואפילו לאהוב אותם. גם בעברו של זאברודסקי.

My grandfather was a poor Jew. A watchmaker, like my father. But he too had books, which he inherited from his forefathers. In the past, my lovely, there are many things that even watchmakers’ sons must [learn to] understand, and even love. Even in Zabrodsky’s past.

Leah Goldberg’s nostalgia for European culture shows forth very evidently in her empathetic depiction of the Count’s solitude, and while Zand is clearly her raisoneur, she also identifies herself with Lena, who looks back with nostalgia on her lost castle as Goldberg does on her lost Europe. In summarising the linkages between Goldberg’s own identity and the identities represented in the play, Michael Taub, who is one of the translators of the play into English, takes a position similar to that of Abramson in the preface to his Modern Israeli Drama, a 1966 anthology of plays by Israeli dramatists:

[Goldberg’s] background and dedication to teaching the masterpieces of European literature could explain the positive, even perhaps tragic portrayal of the Count, whose intellectualism, conservatism, nobility, and high aesthetic sense, are what after all produced the Goethes and Schillers of European culture. Between Dora’s extreme views and the Count we find Michael [Zand], a practicing Zionist committed to building a Jewish

Dr. habil. Szilvia Peremiczky, PhD

homeland in the Asian desert, who seems to be [nonetheless] capable of integrating his European past, both good and bad, into his new life. He is perhaps [an] example of the hard-working farmer, who after [ploughing] his fields somewhere in the Galilean hills relaxes to Beethoven and Tolstoy. (Taub 1966, 17).

In the last sentence of this quote Taub points to a supremely significant element in the ideal of the Zionist pioneer or chalutz in Hebrew. It is a Zionist identity that rather than discarding its bonds with European culture, retains cultural sophistication as just as integral a part of its make-up as physical fitness, heroism, idealised collectivism or its rootedness in biblical heritage.

In her Geschichte des Dramas, Erika Fischer-Lichte identifies alienation, transformation and reintegration as the three phases in the rite of transition from one identity to another. In the play, it is Zand’s integration of a European past with an Israeli future that realises this rite of transition in its purest form. When Lena – whose tragic life experiences had led her to becoming completely alienated and isolated from everyday life – becomes acquainted with the Israeli emissaries who then draw her into the transformation phase of a rite of transition to an Israeli Jewish identity, it becomes possible to expect even her at first very alienated Jewish identity to ultimately achieve a healthy reintegration within a Zionist framework. She is helped along in her journey on the one hand by Dora’s brutally confronting stance on the life and death issues that she must face and resolve, and on the other hand by Zand, who builds a bridge for her from the past to the present, and then onwards to the future. And not least, in the identity- forming phase of Israeli theatre, the characters of Dora and Zand could also make it possible for the “Lenas” in the audience to likewise experience this rite of transition and the catharsis associated with it.

Dr. habil. Szilvia Peremiczky, PhD

At the same time, the play does not confine itself to presenting possible ways and means, and prospects and perspectives for post-war European Jewry, the diaspora in general, and for a newly emerging Israeli Jewish identity, but also addresses many of the dilemmas of what it means to be European in the post-war world, thereby offering the possibility of a non-Jewish reading too. The character of Count Zabrodsky in effect synthetises the European past; its dark side, as well as its brilliance, its transgressions as well as its morality. On the one hand, a Europe that could not, and often enough would not arrest the emergence, rise to power and the rampages of a Nazism made possible by the failures, negligence, prejudices and delusions of Europe and European culture; but on the other hand a humanist Europe creating enormous and ever increasing cultural, social and scientific value throughout its long history. The Europe of glory and of magnificent cultural achievements had however suffered a horrific defeat during the Shoah, and on this point the pessimism of Count Zabrodsky and Dora is at one with the profound distress of a Leah Goldberg enraptured by European culture, for all three of them clearly sense that Europe could never again find its culturally brilliant self after having suffered such a massive crisis and defeat.

A European reading of the play, in contrast to the optimistic Israeli one, will leave its European reader or audience with the sense of a crisis of identity. Of course, Dora and Zand had already passed through their own respective rites of transition to the point of reaching the last phase in terms of a successful reintegration of their Jewish identity into an Israeli Jewish one, and Lena has every prospect of being able to follow in their footsteps. But Goldberg does not abandon her beloved Europe either, and in conclusion let me requote here, albeit with the addition of a most significant last sentence, the subtle and gentle words with which she addresses, through Zand’s agency, not just Dora or the Israel-born sabras, but Europeans too (Goldberg 2011, 48):

Dr. habil. Szilvia Peremiczky, PhD

בעבר, הביבתי, יש הרבה דברים, אשר גם בני-השענים צריכים לדעתם, ואפילו לאהוב אותם. גם בעברו של זאברודסקי. מה עלינו לקחת מן העבר הזה, נחליט אנחנו.

In the past, my lovely, there are many things that even watchmakers’ sons must [learn to] understand, and even love. Even in Zabrodsky’s past. What we are to retain from this past, we shall decide that ourselves.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abramson, Glenda. 1979. Modern Hebrew Drama. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

Abramson, Glenda. 1998. Drama and Ideology in Modern Israel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Biró, Tamás et al (eds.). 2016. Schweitzer József emlékkötet. Budapest: MAZSIHISZ.

Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2001. A dráma története. Pécs: Jelenkor.

Goldberg, Leah. 2011. Lady of the Castle. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad the original Hebrew edition) ( גולדברג, לאה. בעלת הארמון. תל אביב: הקיבוץ המאוחד. 2011

Rozik, Eli. 2013. Jewish Drama & Theatre: From Rabbinical Intolerance to Secular Liberalism. Sussex: Sussex Academic Press.

Urian, Dan. 2000. The Judaic Nature of Israeli Theatre: A Search for Identity. London: Harwood Academic Publishers.

Taub, Michael. 1996. Israeli Holocaust Drama. Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press.