Packing Hana’s bags
08/18/2011 23:57 By BARRY DAVIS
Howard Rypp’s emotive and acclaimed Israeli production about the efforts of a Japanese instructor to teach the Holocaust, and what they led to, is in the running for a prestigious national award next week in Givatayim.
Photo
by: Courtesy
Howard
Rypp set out his stall as an exponent of Jewish tradition and
social-minded theater back in his native Toronto. In 1978, along
with Gabriel Emanuel, he founded Nephesh Theater which, says Rypp,
“was the only professional Jewish theater operating in Canada at
that time.” On Monday, Rypp’s acclaimed Israeli production of Hana’s Suitcase is in the running for the Children and
Young People Interdisciplinary Award for 2010-11. The event will
take place at Givatayim Theater (starting 8:30 p.m.) in the
presence of Minister of Culture and Sport Limor Livnat.
The
competition encompasses 22 shows from 14 theater companies and
independent producers across the country. Awards in several
categories are in the offing, including writing, acting,
directing, design and best show. The awards are the brainchild of
the Ministry of Culture and Sport, and the Israeli branch of
ASSITEJ – the International Association of Theater for Children
and Young People, which has 83 centers around the globe.
Rypp
calls Hana’s Suitcase one of the most emotive shows he
has worked on in his three-and-a-half-decade career, during which
he has directed and acted in such productions as Children of
Night, about renowned Jewish educator Jansuz Korczak; Einstein,
Nephesh’s first Hebrew production, co-produced with the Habimah
National Theater; and his one-man show Gimpel the Fool, with which Rypp periodically tours abroad.
“We were just
in Prague with Hana’s Suitcase. It’s a very inspiring
story,” says the 56-year-old director-actor. “It has been very
gratifying to work on it because I was able to meet all the people
that are still living.
Obviously, a lot of the characters
perished in the Holocaust, but I have met Fumiko [Ishioka], the
Japanese teacher who started the whole thing.” Ishioka attended
the premiere of Hana’s Suitcase, which took place in
April 2010.
Indeed Ishioka, the 40-year-old director of the
Tokyo Holocaust Education Center, is “guilty as charged.”
Around 10 years ago, she was working with a bunch of Japanese
youngsters who were looking into the Holocaust and, as a means of
conveying some of the impact of the time to her young wards, she
decided to try and track down various personal items that had
belonged to children who had been in the Holocaust. After
investing quite a lot of effort in the venture, she eventually
received a number of artifacts from the Auschwitz Museum in
Poland. Among them was an empty suitcase bearing the name “Hanna
Brady,” her date of birth – May 16, 1931 – and the word
“waisenkind” (orphan). The original owner’s given
name was misspelled. “That set Fumiko on a hunt to find out who
Hana Brady was,” Rypp continues, adding that he has a more
direct connection with the heroine of the play. “I also met
Hana’s [older] brother, George Brady, who survived and lives in
Canada – and, it turns out, was a good friend of my late aunt.”
Hana Brady was born in Nové Mesto, Czechoslovakia.
She and
George watched their parents being arrested and taken away by the
Nazis. The children were sent to the concentration camp and, in
1944, Hana was deported to Auschwitz. George survived by working
as a laborer, but Hana was sent to the gas chambers a few hours
after her arrival at Auschwitz, on October 23, 1944.
Rypp
says that George’s part in the play, both as a character in the
storyline and as a real-life contributor to the story, is
something of a miraculous turnabout, in several senses. “For a
start, his survival of the Holocaust is amazing..
“About
10 years ago, George gets this letter from Fumiko Ishioka, saying
that she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings, but she’d like him
to write to her students about Hana, [about] who she was,”
continues Rypp,” and George did write back to Fumiko with Hana’s
story.” Word got out, and the amazing story subsequently spawned
a book by Ottawa-based author Karen Levine, called Hana’s
Suitcase: A True Story, which won the 2002 Sydney Taylor Award
for Older Readers. The book has obviously hit a universal nerve
and has been translated into 40 languages. The play, written by
Emil Sher, has been performed all over North America, in Europe
and also in Japan.
Rypp says that among all the
globe-trotting he has done with the play, last month’s
performance in Prague was very moving. “We were chosen to do the
Czech premiere of the play, in Hebrew, with Czech subtitles. I was
very proud to do that.”
Mind you, Rypp confesses it took
him a while to get up and running with Hana’s Suitcase.
“The idea was thrown at me a few times, and I kept saying it
won’t go well in Israel. I read the book and I was very moved by
it – but I thought that Israelis were so saturated with the
Holocaust, what would we care about some Japanese woman doing
something with her school in Tokyo? I didn’t think it suited the
Israeli mentality.” Rypp had a change of heart three years ago,
when he went to visit his aunt in Canada.
“The
playwright, Emil Sher, is a good friend of a good friend of mine,
and he heard I was in Canada and came to meet me. I told him I
really liked the story, but that I didn’t think it would go down
well in Israel, in Hebrew.
He said I should read his
adaptation, and then decide.” That did the trick. “I was blown
away by the drama-turgy. The play was developed in such a way that
Hana and all her family appear at the beginning as ghosts and, as
the Japanese learn more and more about Hana, and get closer and
closer to her, it becomes less stylized and more natural and real.
That’s really excited me theatrically.” The roles gradually
interchange as the play progresses, with the Brady family members
becoming corporeal characters, while the Japanese turn into
ethereal spectators.
“That was what prompted me to do the
play, and I had so many wonderful experiences during the process,
and meeting all these incredible people.” Besides providing
gripping entertainment and, hopefully, winning an award here and
there, Rypp is also very keen to convey important messages through
his work. “When I first moved here, I started doing theater in
English but, after a while, I realized that I didn’t come to
Israel to do plays for tourists, I came here to make an impact on
society. That’s when I started working on doing plays in Hebrew,
and that’s what I’ve been doing – directing – for the last
30 or so years. “It is only recently that I started acting in
Hebrew, with Gimpel the Fool, which I have done in Romania,
Russia and Prague – at the Nine Gates Festival, at which Hana’s
Suitcase was also presented.
The Nephesh Theater
website credo states that the theater’s productions “reflect a
plurality of beliefs, depicting different communities within
Israeli society that must develop a common language and achieve
mutual respect.” The plays also aim to emphasize common bonds
rather than dwelling on differences.
Rypp’s eventual
enthusiasm for producing a Hebrew rendition of Hana’s
Suitcase has evidently been conveyed to the theatrical powers
that be, and the play is a strong contender for this year’s
Children and Young People Interdisciplinary Award. Judging by the
kudos the play has garnered across the world, the universality of
the Nephesh Theater message is hitting home.