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"Enough shouting, let the dead live": Meir Shalev's latest work is revealed - voila! culture

2023-05-11T14:57:28.883Z

Highlights: On the 30th anniversary of the writer's death, Walla is revealed! Culture for the first time. Excerpts from "The Fathers and Mothers" - his first and last play, which he worked on in the last months of his life. As part of the plot, the three fathers and three mothers are resurrected 3,500 years after they were buried in the Cave of the Patriarchs. In the video above, you can watch the director of the play, Amit Epstein, read excerpts from the play.


On the 30th anniversary of the writer's death, Walla is revealed! Culture for the first time Excerpts from "The Fathers and Mothers" - his first and last play, which he worked on in the last months of his life and will be staged at the Gesher Theater


First publication of excerpts from "The Fathers and Mothers", the first and last play written by the late Meir Shalev and will be performed at the Gesher Theater. Narrator: Director Amit Epstein (Sagi Ben Nun)

On the thirtieth anniversary of the death of writer and journalist Meir Shalev, who passed away at the age of 74, excerpts from his first play – and sadly his last – are revealed for the first time in Walla! Culture. The intriguing play Shalev worked on in the last months of his life, called "The Fathers and Mothers," is defined as an "original biblical satire" and will be performed this month, May 24, at the Gesher Theater. In the video above, you can watch the director of the play, Amit Epstein, read excerpts from the play.

The passages indicate that the play combines sharp criticism with humor. As part of the plot, the three fathers and three mothers are resurrected 3,500 years after they were buried in the Cave of the Patriarchs, calculating with each other about parenthood and relationships, aqada and circumcision, faith and history, without knowing what is happening above them in the present - until they encounter reality. In the play, Doron Tabori will play Avraham, Natasha Manor will play Sarah, Gilad Kletter will play Yitzhak, Michal Weinberg will play Rivka, Alon Friedman will play Yaakov and Tali Osedchi will play Leah.

Over the years, several of Shalev's books have been adapted for the theater, including the children's book "Grandpa Aharon's Rain" which won first place in the Haifa Festival of Children's Plays, the novel "Jonah and a Boy" which was adapted for a play at the Bridge and the novel "Some Days" adapted by the Cameri, among others. However, this is the first time that an original play by him has been performed in the theater. Gesher's playwright-in-residence, Roi Chen, who accompanied Shalev in writing the play and signed it as a dramaturg, recently told Haaretz: "His biblical satire combines his love for biblical heroes with the sarcastic wit that characterized his weekly column."

"The play depicts one day in the Cave of the Patriarchs, in our own day, in which our ancestors and mothers are revived. They wake up because the youngest son, Yaakov – who wanted to be buried with Rachel but was eventually buried with Leah – wants to leave the cave and return to his beloved," the show's director, Amit Epstein, tells Walla! Culture. "This saga wakes up the whole family - his parents Isaac and Rebecca, and later also his grandparents Avraham and Sarah. We experience all of Yaakov's struggles with family friends, who really don't want him to come out of nowhere, but he wants a different future. He does not want to stay with this family but to leave, to relocate to Rachel's Tomb, which brings a great storm into the family. I won't reveal what happens in the end, but I will say that through this story, many questions are resurrected that have to do with relationships in the family and with us as a people, supposedly all descendants of the same first family, full of questions about morality and politics."

He accompanied the play until the last weeks of his life. Meir Shalev (Photo: Miriam Elster, Flash 90)

In one of those moments concerning the Israeli people and politics of today, Epstein reveals, "Meir wrote a very funny moment, in which Avraham tells of a covenant between the Batarim that he made. He tells how God told him to take a triple cart and a triple goat and so on, divide them in two and sit between them. And he says to them: Right there he promised me this land. Then Jacob asks him: Where to where? Avraham says to him: M'ztomrat? Jacob asks: Where to where did he promise you this land? So what are the limits? Maybe you know. Avraham tries to remember, saying: I remember that there was darkness, there was blood. Jacob says to him: Didn't you see anything? Avraham answers: I didn't see anything. There is satire here and a wonderful point of view by Meir Shalev, who manages to take a mythical biblical event and find in it a concrete relevance to our lives here today."

Despite his battle with cancer, Meir Shalev accompanied the creation of the play sharply and was also involved to some extent in several decisions beyond writing the play. About a month and a half before his death, already very ill and with an IV, he came with his wife Rina for the first reading of the play. At the same meeting, a footage of which was presented in Studio Friday, Shalev told the cast that "writing was a very interesting experience, it's a different genre of writing. The play still needs some corrections. I think there will also be natural changes during your rehearsals, which will come out of the director and the actors. And that's it, I'm ready to work as long as time gives me."

Epstein is emotional in his voice when he talks about working together. "Listen, it was so fast. I first met Meir in January at a café in Tel Aviv. I saw a strong person in front of me. Sharp. Shannon. Celebrity, people stopped him on the street and asked to be photographed. And within three or four months there was such a rapid deterioration that I had never experienced before. But he was with us right up until the last moment. My last meeting with him was on Purim. I got to his apartment in Tel Aviv, he was already very, very sick. The meeting was short, only twenty minutes, because he was already tired and lay down. He was tired but he was still sharp, still listening to my ideas, backing them up or adding more thoughts to them. I involved him in sketches for costumes and sketches of the stage. Until it was really a little too much and we realized it was nearing the end so of course we took a step back. But up until that moment, he was part of the team that worked on this show, unequivocally."

More in Walla!

"They are gone, absolutely no more": the last poems Meir Wieseltier wrote before his death

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"The loss is huge." Director Amit Epstein (Photo: Walla!, Sagi Ben Nun)

What did you learn from working with Meir?

"He came to one of the readings and brought with him the Bible that his father had bequeathed to him. His quietness, his wisdom, the way he reads something. He reads a verse, delves into it, lets it resonate, and then he searches for the resonance of this or the answer of it in our days. What I took away most from Malignant was the conduct of this man, who loved the Bible, loved our stories, loved our heritage and managed to infuse these mythological figures with so much humanity. His observation of things, his quietness, gave me a lot of inspiration."

The play deals with the resurrection of the dead and includes quite a few references to death, for example when Leah says, "Death is so similar to life," and in another passage the play says, "Shout, Jacob. Let the dead live." Were there morbid references in the play that took on a different meaning after the great loss with Shalev's death?

"The loss is a huge loss. A loss that cannot even be quantified in words. He is a cultural legend. The books he wrote, his opinion columns, his presence as an active and clear cultural figure. It's very strange and very hard to lose a playwright halfway. It's an original play, his first and unfortunately his last. We were in a great process of working together because between prose and drama a whole ocean passes, we started with Roi Chen, the playwright in residence of the Gesher Theater, to work together on the material and adapt it to the stage at certain moments, and he suddenly went and left us speechless. But nevertheless we are moving forward and putting out this show as we thought it was and as we thought it was right for it to come out."

"And the context of death within the play is actually in a comic context for me. It's not a dramatic context," Epstein adds, smiling wistfully, "because when you die you're allowed everything. You are allowed to say what you think, you are allowed to do what you feel, death suddenly does not become a factor - then the fear disappears. It allows all kinds of hidden secrets or hidden desires to rise above the surface and come out bluntly like you've never dared to do it in life. After all, none of us have been given the opportunity to go back or experience the resurrection, and this mechanism produces a very funny dramatic action. It's a satire, a comedy, about people who come out of the grave after so many years and can finally tell their family what they didn't dare say until now. I think it's a nice trick."

More in Walla!

The One Who Is Gone Anymore: Farewell to His Writer Meir

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"How much time has passed? 3647 years": from "The Fathers and Mothers" by Meir Shalev

So there you go, in the first publication in Walla! Culture, excerpts from "The Fathers and Mothers" from the beginning of the play, which take place in the Cave of the Patriarchs, when Yaakov wakes up and wants to go out to his wife Rachel - read below and watch director Epstein's reading above.

Jacob: Rachel... Rachel!
Leah: Is your voice, Jacob?
Jacob: Rachel?
Lea: The voice of my uncle, my love, my heart.
Jacob: Are you here?
Lea: Come to me
Jacob: And here she is, Leah!!
Lea: Did you read to me?
Jacob: Did you hear me call Leah...? What did you wake up for? I read Rachel... Rachel, as I have done in our lives. Rachel and not you.
Lea: Death is so similar to life. Nothing has changed. And he will love Rachel Mela too. I was and still am the hated woman.
Jacob: Hated for a good reason.
Lea: For a moment I hoped—maybe he cut your spears? Perhaps death has softened your heart's armor? Did the dirt numb the of your tongue?
Jacob: Death didn't change anything. Not in me and not in you. There is nothing new. I am all Rachel, and who do I see? You! Like that morning, they will take opal. And here she is.
Lea: How much time has passed?
Jacob:3647 year.
Lea: So long?
Jacob:3647 A year of longing, of longing, of longing and longing.
Lea: How do you know? Maybe only 3646?
Jacob: I have a calendar in my heart. It runs on the seven years I worked for her. Seven years and seven years and seven years, and so five hundred and twenty-one times. Simple arithmetic.
Lea: Doesn't sound the most accurate to me.
Jacob: I worked in it for seven years, seven years I waited for it. Day after day, week after week, year after year, the moon went back and forth, back and forth, in my heart, and back and forth. I woke up because I was getting out of here and walking to her.
Leah: Jacob, we've been here for thousands of years. Dead. Buried side by side, and you - you will not forgive and will not forget. You will not forgive me or forget her. (get up, stop him) Look at me. Not as beautiful as her, not as beloved as her, hated - that's what everyone called me - but I beat her. I, not her, the mother of most of your children, (sitting Yaakov) I gave birth to you Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Yehuda, Issachar, Zevulun... Neither she nor I are buried here, in the Cave of the Patriarchs, next to your grandparents, your father and mother, by your side and she... (Taking the urn from his hands) Burial Burial of a donkey on the side of the road, alone. I beat her.
Here I am. Your first wife.

"A great process of working together." Meir Shalev with the cast of the play "The Fathers and Mothers" (Photo: PR)

Jacob: There you are, like that morning of horrors. Light entered the tent, banishing the darkness. I wanted to see Rachel, and there she was. Cheater daughter of a cheater. Leah is the daughter of Laban, the largest fraudster in the largest family of fraudsters in history. Cheater and liar, but miser he was not. He arranged our false wedding as it were. All the dignitaries of Pedan and all the shepherds gathered and came, like furnished sheep, to Baren... Everyone devoured and sucked, and I starved only for her. My lips and tongue asked only for her. I looked at her features. My body is her body. Bring my wife because my days are over, so I told your father, and I will come to her. And he, the cheater, brought you to the tent. As thieves in the night. Under cover of darkness. You knew, Rachel knew. Your parents knew, the shepherds in Sukkot knew, the sheep knew, stifled laughter in the enclosure. Only I didn't know. I was, for example, and to wit. I was caught between your thighs like a bird in a fortress. Seven years of dream and longing, ending with one night of darkness and deceit.

Lea: Do you think it was pleasant for me? Enter the dark tent instead? I remember too. Your lips on mine came Rachel. Your tongue on mine Rachel said, your heart on my heart pounded Rachel. Your hands on my body caressed Rachel. In your flesh once Rachel. You kissed, and caressed, plucked your eyelashes at my neck, but it was me, and you were you... You knew, you felt, Eli lusted, it wasn't the darkness that blinded you, but the passion.

  • culture
  • stage
  • Theatre

Tags

  • Meir Shalev
  • Gesher Theatre

Source: walla

All tech articles on 2023-05-11

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