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News Release
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No More Raisins, No More Almonds
Agitate For Tolerance - Jean St-Hilaire, LE SOLEIL
March 31, 2004
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A place of life relived, can the theatre also campaign for tolerance and, while
it is on the subject, for intercultural understanding?
Bryna Wasserman thinks the answer is yes. Not only can it, but the theatre
has a duty to become the leader in the field, she asserts. Artistic Director
of the Theatre Yiddish Dora-Wasserman, named for her mother, founder of the
institution who died last December, Bryna Wasserman in parallel gives life to
YAYA, an acronym for Young Actors for Young Audiences. With 36 pupils from Secondary
V of the Bialik School of Montreal, she mounted, not a musical comedy, but an
epic musical that moved its young performers down the dark paths of memory.
Subtitled Children Ghetto Songs, the play No More Raisins, No
More Almonds relives the tragic episode of the Holocaust.
Yesterday’s presentations were performed in front of secondary students
of Quebec City. In the discussions, which followed that morning, some voices
confessed to complete ignorance about the Holocaust. But everyone understood
the deep emotion that some of these young actors had just relived in front of
them and the terror and despair of their grandparents in the overcrowded ghettoes
of Central and Eastern Europe. Everyone grasped that these young figures, who
confronted the untenable with songs of such harrowing nostalgia, but also with
surprisingly cheerful tunes sometimes, that these youth scorned and starving,
waiting to be exterminated, were reduced to this indignity for what they were,
and not for what they did.
They recognized the face of racism at its extreme. In the discussion that followed,
the voices on stage and in the hall taught some and reminded others that the
Gypsies, disabled persons and homosexuals also paid the absolute price of Nazi
rage, and that the "never again” of the days following the Second
World War did not prevent the demons of ethnic cleansing to reappear in Bosnia
and Rwanda. They recognized the monster. And undoubtedly they cherish a little
more today the chance they have to be judged for what they do, and not for what
they are.
Top image: LE SOLEIL, Steve Deschênes |
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