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Performing Captivity, Performing Escape

Cabarets and Plays from the Terezín/Theresienstadt Ghetto

With an Introduction by Lisa Peschel
A meticulously researched book that collects twelve playscripts written by European Jews imprisoned in the Terezín ghetto during the Holocaust.
 
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 amid this horrific period, there was also 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 endeavors, deserves serious attention as well.
 
Performing Captivity, Performing Escape collects twelve 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 prologue 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 theater of the ghetto. The array of theatrical forms collected in this anthology speaks of the prisoners’ persistence of hope in a harrowing time and will be a moving read for students and scholars of the Holocaust.
 

444 pages | 58 color plates, 36 halftones | 6 x 7 1/2 | © 2014

In Performance

Jewish Studies

Literature and Literary Criticism: Dramatic Works


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Reviews

Performing Captivity, Performing Escape is a fascinating, heartbreaking, frequently witty collection that has been translated with love and care, and that brings to light art that has heretofore been hidden. When you add the essays, thorough biographical notes, and beautiful, evocative artwork, you end up with a powerful portrait of a tragic era in Central European history and of the power of art to ameliorate suffering.”

Austrian Studies Newsmagazine

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Pronunciation Guide
Edition Notes and Conventions
Introduction
Prologue:?Terezín Theater by Ivan Klima
Part 1:?Czech-Language Texts
1.Radio Show
2.Looking for a Specter
3.Songs from the Revue Prince Bettliegend
4.The Smoke of Home
5.Laugh with Us
6.The Second Czech Cabaret
Part 2:?German-Language Texts
1.From the Strauss Cabarets
2.The Treasure
3.A Puppet Play in Ten Acts
4.Purimspiel
5.The Death of Orpheus
6.The Insult—But Unintended;
7.or, The Man with the Defective Memory
8.A Theresienstadt Courtroom Scene
9.From the Hofer Cabarets
10.Epilogue: New Year’s Eve in the Oederan Slave-Labor Camp
Glossary
Bibliography

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