Dr. Habil. Szilvia Peremiczky, Phd Leah Goldberg: a Kastély Úrnője
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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 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. 1 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 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 2 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 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 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.