SOBOL, Joshua

Nationality: Israeli. Born: Yehoshua Sobol, Tel Mond, Palestine, 1939. Education: Studied philosophy at the Sorbonne University of Paris. Career: Playwright-in-residence and artistic director, Haifa Municipal Theatre, Israel, 1984-88; has taught drama and playwriting workshops at Tel-Aviv University, Seminar Hakibbutzim, Beit Tzvi Drama School, and the Ben-Gurion University of Beersheva; playwright-in-residence, Wesleyan University, Connecticut, Fall 2000. Awards: Davidis Harp award for best play of the year (Israel), 1984, Evening Standard (London) best play of the year, and London's Critics' Circle best play of the year, 1989, all for Ghetto; has received the Davidis Harp award for four other plays. Address: c/o Or-Am Publishing House, P.O. Box 22096, Tel-Aviv 61220, Israel.

Publications

Plays (all originally produced in Hebrew)

The Days to Come (produced Haifa, Israel, 1971).

Status Quo Vadis (produced Haifa, 1973).

Sylvester 1972 (also known as New Year's Eve 1972; produced Haifa, 1974).

The Joke (produced Haifa, 1975).

Nerves (produced Haifa, 1976).

Leyl ha'esrim (produced Haifa, 1976). 1976; as The Night of the Twentieth (produced London, 1978).

Gog and Magog Show (produced Haifa, 1977).

Repentance (produced Haifa, 1977).

The Tenants (produced Haifa, 1978).

Beyt Kaplan [The House of Kaplan] (produced Israel,1978-79; trilogy).

The Wars of the Jews (produced 1981).

Nefesh yehudi (produced Haifa, 1982). Published as Halaylah ha'acharon shel Oto Vaininger [The Last Night of Otto Weininger], 1982; as The Soul of a Jew (produced London, 1983), published as Jewish Soul, in Modern Israeli Drama in Translation, edited by Michael Taub, 1993.

Geto (produced Haifa, 1983). 1983; translated as Ghetto (produced London and New York, 1989), in Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology, edited by Lawrence L. Langer, 1995.

Hapalestina'it [The Palestinian Woman] (produced Haifa, 1985). 1985.

Sindrom Yerushalayim [Jerusalem Syndrome] (produced Haifa, 1987). 1987.

Shooting Magda (produced 1987).

Adam (produced Tel-Aviv, 1989). 1989; translated as Adam, in Israeli Holocaust Drama, edited by Michael Taub, 1996.

Bamartef [In the Cellar]. 1990.

Underground (produced 1991).

Solo (produced Tel-Aviv, 1991). 1991.

Girls of Toledo (produced Jerusalem, Israel, 1992).

Kefar: Mahazeh bi-shete ma'arakhot [Village]. 1996.

Other

Almah: Mahazeh [Alma]. 1999.

Shetikah: Roman [Silence]. 2000.

Translator, Draifus, by Jean-Claude Grumnerg. 1980.

Translator, Milhemet Troyah lo tihyeh, by Jean Giraudoux. 1984.

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Critical Studies:

"Zionism: Neurosis or Cure? The 'Historical' Drama of Yehoshua Sobol" by Yael S. Feldman, in Prooftexts, 7(2), May 1987, pp. 145-62; "In Search of Sobol" by Rachel Shteir, in Theater, 21(3), Summer/Fall 1990, pp. 39-42; "When Choosing Good Is Not an Option: An Interview with Joshua Sobol" by Douglas Langworthy, in Theater, 22(3), Summer/Fall 1991, pp. 10-17; Joshua Sobol/Larry Kramer section of Text and Performance Quarterly, 12(4), October 1992; "Memory and History: The Soul of a Jew by Jehoshua Sobol" by Freddie Rokem, in Jews & Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger, edited by Nancy A. Harrowitz and Barbara Hyams, 1995; "Meeting Joshua Sobol" by Marion Baraitser, in The Jewish Quarterly, 46(1), Spring 1999, p. 68.

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Playwright Joshua Sobol is the author of three of the best dramas concerning the Holocaust: Geto (1983), Adam (1989), and Underground (1991). Sobol, one of Israel's finest playwrights, is with good reason considered one of the finest dramatists—if not the greatest—regarding the Holocaust. Of his three plays concerning the Shoah, Ghetto is unquestionably the most popular. All three plays are testaments to the vitality of life in the ghetto. The characters are always busy and acting as if this day might be their last. Sobol claims that when he directs Ghetto, he instructs his actors and actresses to comport themselves as if the action in which they are currently engaged might be their last, that at any moment the Nazis might come and liquidate the ghetto. Similarly in Adam a life-or-death crisis presents itself, and the ghetto inhabitants must decide if they will follow Jacob Gens's orders to find and turn over Yitzhak Wittenberg to the Nazis or side with the United Partisan Organization; they have only a few hours to find Wittenberg or the ghetto might be liquidated on the orders of Kittel. In Underground the doctors must contain the typhus outbreak and hide it from the Nazis, which becomes a serious problem when Kittel and SS Doctor Jaegger come to visit the hospital. Again a life-or-death situation occurs, because the news of a typhus outbreak would result in the liquidation of the ghetto.

Unlike earlier dramatists, who sometimes created plays regarding the Holocaust in which the Jews were always innocent victims or survivors who continued to suffer psychologically years after the Shoah, Sobol wrote more complex and controversial plays. His Jewish characters are more three-dimensional and are capable of being selfish and sinful. In Ghetto Sobol portrays the tailor Weiskopf as an accomplice, a Jew willing to sacrifice other Jewish lives for the Nazi cause—and for his personal benefit. In Adam Sobol dramatizes Wittenberg Day—16 July 1943—the day that Vilna ghetto Judenrat leader Jacob Gens turned over to the Nazis Yitzhak Wittenberg, the leader of the partisan group that intended to lead an armed rebellion against the Germans and to save the lives of the Jews, including that of Gens himself. In Underground the dramatist portrays Doctor Lishafsky, a Jewish doctor who, despite the suffering that he witnesses in the hospital, sells medical drugs, intended for patients, for personal profit. Sobol, furthermore, dramatizes Jewish brutality onstage, such as the murder of the Hasid by Jewish smugglers in Ghetto as well as the brutality of the Jewish ghetto police in the same play. In his introduction to Israeli Holocaust Drama, Michael Taub attributes the shift in drama of the Shoah, embodied by Sobol's triptych, to the wars fought in the Middle East (the Six-Day War in 1967, Yom Kippur War in 1973, and Lebanon War in 1982), as well as the Jewish occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Taub argues that during these situations Jews came to be in control of another group of people: "Consciously or not, this unique situation has, to some extent, led to a reexamination of the Shoah where the victims were, of course, Jews." Freddie Rokem concurs, making a connection between drama of the Shoah and the fighting in the Middle East in his book Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre. Rokem claims that in Ghetto Sobol implies that to some extent Israeli society has assimilated the violence that Jews experienced at the hands of the Nazis and has employed it to victimize the Palestinians. Such a theory is, of course, controversial. Nonetheless people who disapprove of this implication still acknowledge Sobol's great talent as a playwright.

Joshua Sobol concedes that his plays are controversial, but he insists that he is passing on a legacy. Sobol has always been fascinated by documents and thus conducted much research and interviews in preparation for writing his plays. He realized one day that there was a theater in the Vilna ghetto and managed to locate and interview the director of the Ghetto Theatre, Israel Segal, which led him to further research, in particular the diary of ghetto librarian Herman Kruk, which the playwright read in Yiddish. In an interview Sobol claims that "during the events of the Holocaust, people used to write to express themselves, to look for any form of expression that was available to put their experience into form, which is art. If they did it, we probably should not play the nice souls who are shying away from doing it … They are trying to pass a legacy, and if we deny ourselves the freedom to make the legacy ours, we are in a way interrupting that legacy." In the Ghetto Theatre in Vilna, actors, actresses, and playwrights attempted to preserve their culture, which they saw being annihilated by the Nazis; they consequently performed plays for the ghetto inhabitants. Decades later, when Sobol's play opened in Tel Aviv, Israeli actors performed the drama, indicating that the legacy has continued.

—Eric Sterling

See the essays on Adam, Ghetto, and Underground.