By Agata Peleszuk | 12/08/2010
Between 28 August and 5 September the Polish capital will set off on a time travel during the Singer's Warsaw Festival. The 7th edition will focus mostly on the theater, but the streets of the former Jewish quarter will also fill up with the traditional and modern Jewish music. Long list of plays, cabarets and music
performances will present a variety of aspects of the Polish Jewry's culture mirrored in the literature of Isaac Bashevis Singer
photo: GPO
It is not a coincidence that the Singer's Warsaw Festival opens with a play “Half jokingly”. The performance at the Jewish Theater is based on prewar works of an ace authors – Julian Tuwim, Marian Hemar or Jerzy Jurandot. Texts of those vivid and witty cabaret masters are combined with an old favorites and revue melodies from 1920's and 30's. Right at the same day the Warsaw public will be able to see the “Song of Songs” by Sholem Aleichem – a less known monodrama played by the respected actor Jerzy Walczak from the Warsaw Jewish Theater. At the festival there will not be missing the Israeli accents either. The Israel's Yiddishe Theatre will present a play “Maybe she was never here at all” directed by Dan Wolman. One of the interesting underground projects will be “Ala of the Rudiments” which tell the story of Alina Margolis-Edelman (wife of a famous Warsaw Ghetto Uprising's fighter Marek Edelman). Naturally the Festival would not be able to take place without the Jewish music. This year the Warsaw stages will be taken by Nigel Kennedy, Kroke, Giora Feidman, Gershwin Quartet, Raphael Goldwaser and others. The final concert of this year edition will be devoted to the theme of Kadish. The Warsaw Symphonic Orchestra will perform two pieces titled “Kadish” by Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki and Leonard Bernstein.
These and many other performances are a perfect tribute to the prewar Warsaw – the city colorfully captured on the pages of Bashevis Singer's novels. Seven years ago the Nobel prize laureate inspired the festival's organizers for the first time. On the 100th anniversary of the writer's birthday they created around 40 cultural events that brought the Jewish atmosphere back to streets of the old Warshe. The tribute to Yiddish culture and great efforts to somehow reintroduce the Jewish narrative to Polish landscape had an amazing effect. The dominant intellectual purpose of the festival works successfully already for seven years. Each time the artistic and academic events gather thousands of people from various backgrounds.
Thanks to the Festival the lost atmosphere built for hundreds of years by Warsaw Jews is visible again. At least for a moment the fragments of Singer's texts acquire a naturalistic significance again. A dynamic revival of the prewar literature and theater plays contribute to a collective awareness of the incredible value of the real world that was brutally destroyed during the Holocaust. Crowds that attend various performances and workshops during the festival show that this intellectual and sentimental encounter with Yiddish culture positively influences the public attitude to the important part of Warsaw's spirit. Suddenly Bashevis Singer's words are not only a literary work, but most of all a realistic reportage…
Warsaw Jews divided a capital to “the” and “those” streets. (…) As good streets were considered those located in the southern part of the Jewish Warsaw: Śliska, Pańska, Grzybowska, Twarda, Grzybowski Square, Twarda, Gnojna, Krochmalna, Mariańska. (…) There lived the most devout and conservative part of the Warsaw Jews. (…) Most of inhabitants lived in poverty, but if somebody was a wealthy man, he was a solid one, without bankruptcies, debts, mortgage. On “the” streets almost on every courtyard there was a Chassidic szitbl, and one mikve to couple of houses. Boys and young men that studied Torah rarely hid their sidelocks wrapping them behind the ears – there was no need for that here. (…) On Friday afternoon, before the Sabbath came, a guard walked around the area so that all the shops would be closed earlier than during the week. It did not happen that any shop or storehouse was opened on the Sabbath. On Saturday morning streets filled up with a flavor of cholent or kugel. Sound of Sabbath songs came from all the windows. Here was the land of Israel. (…) It is hard to imagine that all this pulsing and full of splendor life was extinguished, that this huge set of human peculiarities was wiped off the surface of the earth.
Fortunately, already for the 7th time, Warsaw brings back some sparkles of the vanished culture. Through the imperishable verses and sounds Singer and others take routes to their old places.
*More information about the Singer's Warsaw Festival can be found on the official website http://www.festiwalsingera.pl/
