Performing Captivity, Performing Escape

Cabarets and Plays from the Terezin/Theresienstadt Ghetto

Out of Print

 

6 x 7.5 inches, 390pp, 50 colour illustrations. April 2014

ISBN : 9780857420008

Rs  750.00 (PB)
$25.00 (PB)
£16.00 (PB)

The concentration camp and Jewish ghetto at Terezín, or Theresienstadt, in what is now the Czech Republic, was a site of enormous suffering, fear and death; but in the midst of this was a thriving and desperately vibrant cultural life. While the children’s drawings and musical pieces created in the ghetto have become justly famous, the prisoners’ theatrical works, though a lesser-known aspect of their artistic endeavours, deserve serious attention as well.

 

Performing Captivity collects eleven theatrical texts—cabaret songs and sketches, historical and verse dramas, puppet plays and a Purim play—written by Czech and Austrian Jews. Together, these works reveal the wide range of ways in which the prisoners engaged with and escaped from life in the ghetto through performance. The anthology opens with an insightful preface by novelist Ivan Klíma, who was interned in the ghetto as a child, and contains a detailed introduction by editor Lisa Peschel about the pre-war theatrical influences and wartime conditions that inspired the theatre of the ghetto.

 

The array of theatrical forms collected in Performing Captivity speaks of the prisoners’ persistence of hope in a harrowing time and will be moving reading for students of the Holocaust.

 

Lisa Peschel has been researching theatrical performance in Terezín since 1998. She is the recipient of a Fulbright grant, a Charles H. Revson fellowship at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and an Alan M. Stroock fellowship at the Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University.

 

Theatre And Performance Studies
Playscript
In Performance