With a voice that combines an exotic hybrid of his French roots, a decade in Israel, and a nod to the Pacific Northwest incorporated from his current environs in Seattle, Bet Alef Meditative Synagogue’s Rabbi Olivier BenHaim’s new six-step meditation CDs feature his self-described straightforward technique that is geared to the novice practitioner. 
“Souls’ Journey: Meditation and Kabbalah,” his inaugural release out on April 21, is a two-CD set designed to orient the student into the Jewish mystical, Kabbalistic tree of life.
To train the aspiring listener, BenHaim begins and ends each session with a “three-fold” chant of the Hebrew word for peace and wholeness, “shalom.”
“This is Jewish,” BenHaim told JTNews. “This is from our own book. Meditation has always been part of our past and our texts.”
Once oriented to BenHaim’s chants and his use of the Hebrew names for the five levels of the soul — or as he prefers to call them, “levels of consciousness” — the student begins his or her approach toward the five levels that Kabbalists say are accessible to all of us.
“I believe you can move through the tree of life through meditation,” said BenHaim. “They were states that the Kabbalists themselves had access to. We can experience what the Kabbalists experienced themselves in their bones and in their personal experience.”
BenHaim explained that the second track is a relaxation, centering, breathing, and grounding meditation. Instructions, he said, are simple and clear.
“It’s not convoluted and we don’t use highfalutin words,” he added. “It’s a very down-to-earth practice that follows the Kabbalistic system, but most importantly, follows our day-to-day human experience.”
His advice to would-be practitioners is that they practice with one each week, master that level, and build up to the more advanced lessons.
“I wanted to make it very easy for people to find 15 minutes during the day, to plug it in, and just do it,” BenHaim said.
During the sessions, BenHaim addresses one of the central teachings in Judaism often tackled by rabbis and mystics alike: The duality of the yetzer ha’tov, the good inclination, and the yetzer ha’ra, commonly called the evil inclination. Judaism says the human personality has both; however, the good-evil dichotomy is a misunderstanding of our essential natures, they say. The yetzer ha’ra is really where we form our ideas and plans for our lives. Some benefit us and others don’t.
While meditating about this aspect, BenHaim asks the listener to become introspective and to pay attention to his or her own thoughts and reactions.
“A lot of the yetzer ha’ra is out of the emotional body,” said BenHaim. “How can we not be enslaved to our emotions — to not be under their dictate? We can be responding instead of reacting.”
The techniques in the lessons, according to BenHaim, are a compilation of approaches that have been used by mystics and Kabbalistic teachers he has studied over the years.
The five aspects of the Kabbalistic vision of “soul,” explained BenHaim, exist within us like concentric circles that lie at the core of who we are.
“Track four is a meditation that talks about the level of nefesh, which is entering into our body,” said BenHaim. “Where are the sensations? Where are they coming from? Really being aware of whatever is happening in our body.”
By using these methods, said BenHaim, meditators can access these aspects of their personality and transcend their attachment to them.
The goal, he said, “is dissolving our identification with these concentric circles starting with the outer layer and working our way in. Ultimately,” he writes on his website, “what one discovers at the center is one’s own True Identity, the Face of the One that is every one.”
BenHaim freely admits that his CDs are not meant to be a substitute for the experience of meditating in a group or a class, or with a personal guide, but he does make himself available to users for any questions or comments they may have through his site.
Mainly, he wants to get these typically esoteric mystical techniques into the hands of many more people who can’t or won’t study meditation in the other formats. Also, by having a CD, students can “plug-in” at their convenience, whenever they have the time.
In addition to dissolving the five states of the soul, BenHaim also wants to disabuse those who have the idea that meditation is “un-Jewish.”
“You’re not betraying the faith,” said BenHaim. “I will always be a student of Kabbalah.”

Who were the first Jews in Washington State? How were they able to assimilate into American and Washington culture? Why did they move here and what were their lives like day to day?
On June 2, the Washington State Jewish Historical Society (WSJHS) and Book-It Repertory Theatre will premiere “In the Land of Rain & Salmon: Jewish Voices of the Northwest, 1880-1920” at Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute.
“It’s a collaboration of everything we stand for — our whole mission is in this production,” said Lisa Kranseler, executive director of WSJHS. “It’s bringing awareness to Jewish history and that’s important.”
Kranseler anticipates the show will sell out.
“We expect it will be very popular,” she said.
That the performance will be at Lang-
ston Hughes is significant: In 1914, Chevra Bikur Cholim (now Bikur Cholim Machzikay Hadath) built the facility and used it as its synagogue until 1958.
“It’s a really big thing,” Kranseler said. “The Langston Hughes community welcomes our community.”
This original theater production is based on “Family of Strangers,” a 2003 book authored by Jacqueline Williams, Molly Cone and Howard Droker, which describes the history of Jews in Washington, and materials from the Jewish Archives at the University of Washington’s Special Collections library.
According to Annie Lareau, education director at Book-It, the staged reading combines several vignettes from historical moments in Washington State history that involve its various Jewish communities.
“We keep authors’ words intact,” she said. “They take place all over the state and include Sephardic and Ashkenazic stories, with violin music. Photos are also displayed during the performance.”
The theater contracts with organizations like the WSJHS frequently.
“WSJHS commissioned us to create a touring staged reading, where this can be done in big or small spaces,” Lareau said. “We’ve done this several times with different historical societies.”
Author Jacqueline Williams is pleased her book is being made into a performance.
“Book-It picked out six or eight people from the book and used the dialogues from the book and supplemented it with oral histories,” she said.
4Culture, an organization that advances cultural services in King County, partnered with WSJHS to make the performance happen.
“When I heard the WSJHS had the theme of ‘Jews in Arts’ this year, and we talked about different ways of approaching it, we realized that theater-style was the one format the WSJHS would be most interested in,” said Eric Taylor, a senior staffer at 4Culture.
4Culture has helped put on other similar events.
“We have done this type of program before, starting in 2009 with commemorating Seattle’s first World’s Fair in 1909,” he said. “After the success of that program, we wanted to do something like it in the following years. In 2010 we did a performance to commemorate women’s suffrage in Washington State, which was also based on a book.”
In 2012 the performance commemorated the 50th anniversary of the World’s Fair.
Funding for this performance came from 4Culture and a Small and Simple grant from the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, which will also allow the production to tour. The performance will hit the road early summer and tour until November or December, Laraeu said.
“I’m excited about this,” Williams said. “We [the authors] used to joke about it. Oh, this book would make a great movie — there’s drama and conflict.”

History

A Provocative People: A Secular History of the Jews by Sherwin T. Wine (IISHJ, paper, $24.95). The late author was a founder of the Humanistic Judaism movement, dubbed the “atheist rabbi” in a 1960s Time magazine article. In this overarching history, mixed, as the introduction explains, with some opinion, Wine draws on secular sources, emphasizing that humanism give no credit to any supernatural powers in the actions of people. Probably his most interesting assertion is that the roots of European anti-Semitism are not in religion, but in the strong Jewish role in commerce that dates back to ancient times.
Holy Wars: 3,000 Years of Battles in the Holy Land by Gary L. Rashba (Casemate, cloth, $32.95). The author is a career defense-industry writer with an expertise in the Middle East. He turns to a more general audience here with 17 readable chapters, each covering a significant battle in what is now Israel, from biblical times to the 1982 Lebanon war. Rashba, who has lived in Israel for 20 years, demonstrates that today’s conflicts are just part of a series of almost unending conflict in that region.

Torah Study

Text Messages: A Torah Commentary for Teens, edited by Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin (Jewish Lights, cloth, $24.99). A variety of rabbis, cantors, teachers and communal leaders have contributed these commentaries specifically for high school students. For Parashat Noah, Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin asks teens to be the “un-Noah” and speak up in the face of the world’s wrongs. In Shelach-Lecha, Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman uses the line “we looked like grasshoppers” to encourage readers not to shy away from a challenge. Clear, short and to the point, these writings are ideal for bringing Torah relevance to teens.

Holocaust

Two recent Holocaust-themed books focus on those who resisted and those who escaped. Doreen Rappaport’s Beyond Courage: The Untold Story of Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust (Candlewick, paper, $22.99) is written as a textbook for students ages 10 and up, but still makes for interesting — and chilling — reading. Tens of thousands of Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe resisted during World War II, demonstrated here by individual portraits of courage in the face of death. The award-winning author based her writing on personal interviews and extensive research for this book that took six years to complete.
Professor Steve Hochstadt of Illinois College brings us a collection of interviews with Jews who managed to get out of Europe in Exodus to Shanghai: Stories of Escape from the Third Reich (Palgrave, paper, $28). Sixteen thousand European Jews were able to get visas to enter the one place that permitted free entry, at least until 1939. While the stories Hochstadt has collected provide a fascinating look into this chapter of Jewish history, his initial discussion of how an interviewer melds the randomness of a conversation into a cohesive narrative was equally interesting. The book is part of the publisher’s “Studies in Oral History” series.
Trusting Calvin: How a Dog Helped Heal a Holocaust Survivor’s Heart by Sharon Peters (Lyons, cloth, $19.95). As a teenaged prisoner in a Nazi work camp, Max Edelman witnessed a horrific dog attack on a fellow prisoner. He then suffered a brutal beating by prison guards that left him blind. How he managed to survive the camp is an incredible story on its own. Then, at age 68, he was forced to overcome his terrible fear of dogs when his wife’s crippling arthritis made it clear he would need a guide dog to maintain his independence. Peters describes how Max and Calvin, a chocolate lab provided by Guiding Eyes for the Blind, work around their mutual difficulties in a touching and entertaining fashion.
Israel
Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner, by Lela Gilbert (Perseus, cloth, $25.99). The author came to Israel for a pilgrimage six years ago and is still there. She arrived at the height of a war, already fascinated by a land of international conflicts of epic proportions, and found a country of “warm-hearted, smart and lively people.” A writer and a poet, she turned to journalism, writing about visits to Mamilla Mall and bomb shelters, and her conversations with Israelis, Jewish and Arab. She hopes this collection of her writings will promote understanding and harmony particularly among Jews and Christians.
Gefilte Fish for Neshama by Anna Shvets (Neshama Books, paper, $15.99). Here’s my dirty secret: I like jarred gefilte fish and never even had homemade gefilte fish until well into adulthood. Shvets’s well-crafted short book — part memoir, part cookbook — is filled with color photos of Israel where the Russian émigré spent her formative years before she moved to Vancouver, BC and opened Neshama Books. Her grandmother’s detailed gefilte fish recipe is illustrated with step-by-step photos and tempted me to try it. But I was deterred. Not by the live carp to be gutted and scaled after swimming in the bathtub, or even the popping out of the eyeballs so the sockets can be a handhold to secure the head while pulling out the spine with a pliers. It’s the smell that will linger in the house for a week after two hours of simmering the fish on the stove. (After reading this, you should read or re-read the classic children’s book, “The Carp in the Bathtub.”)

Fiction

A Wedding in Great Neck by Yona Zeldis McDonough (New American, paper, $15). Relying on cultural stereotypes to propel its story forward, this light, but entertaining book errs more on the side of sitcom than literature. A wealthy Great Neck matron hosts a wedding at her mansion for her type-A, go-getter daughter while her type-B hippie daughter languishes in the background. Unruly teenagers, well-meaning grandmothers, and an impulsive act that threatens the entire wedding are some of what you’ll find here.
The Other Shore by Fred Skolnik (Aqueous, paper, $21). This saga-length novel follows a motley cast of Israeli types through the 1980s between the Lebanese War and the outbreak of the first intifada. Skolnik, editor of the award-winning second edition of the Encyclopedia Judaica, has lived in Israel since 1961 and is a skillful writer and entertaining observer of Israeli society. The story illustrates the decade that saw the final shift in Israel from a Zionist-Socialist society to a Western-style consumer culture.

What do you do when the person you love turns out to be vastly different than the person you thought he was? This is the question Northwest art lovers, Jewish and not, have been asking themselves in the months since ceramics artist Charles Krafft was exposed by The Stranger as a sympathizer of white nationalist and Holocaust denial ideologies.
Krafft creates ceramic plates, objects, and figurines in the Delft style, but with an edge: A flowery AK-47, a plate decorated with the crashed Pan-Am plane, and — perhaps most famous — the Hitler teapot. Until now, Krafft’s Nazi-related art had been interpreted as wonderfully ironic. Jewish collectors bought his work. 
Around the same time that story broke, Delilah Simon, executive director of the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center, stopped by JTNews with a recently acquired painting. The framed oil depicts a pawnbroker with a trimmed white beard and a conniving grin, tipping a scale away from a soldier. A donor, assuming it to be a work of European anti-Semitica, donated it to the Holocaust Center.
This is not the first piece of art the Holocaust Center has received. Paintings, posters, postcards and artifacts have for years appeared at the center’s doorstep. Recently, they received a briefcase full of Nazi propaganda a new homebuyer found in the house. At an estate sale, they picked up a box full of painstakingly preserved Nazi propaganda magazines saved by a German immigrant who turned out to be a pilot for the Luftwaffe.
Other items, like a postcard for Germany’s 1937 “The Eternal Jew” exhibit and a massive poster advertising a world Jewish conspiracy, are picked up by travelers who, for whatever reason, are interested in propaganda.
So what’s to be done with it? And should our local Jewish community be concerned with revelations of Nazi sympathies and Holocaust denial in our midst?
“I think the Charles Krafft incident heightens our awareness into the subject of anti-Semitism, and how we as a community need to be ever vigilant and never assume that something isn’t anti-Semitic because we don’t want it to be,” Simon told JTNews. “We see cases of anti-Semitism happening throughout our own region. And it makes our work that much more important.”
Simon cited a phone call from concerned parents in nearby Federal Way whose son was acting violently and had joined an Aryan group. In some parts of the state people don’t know what a Jew is.
“We use [the propaganda and art] as a case study to show future generations what it looks like when a country and its laws can marginalize its people, and how that manifests itself first as something as simple as paintings, to eventually the ultimate extermination of a people, and how a society as a whole tolerated what was subtle in the beginning. And how that occurs today,” Simon said.
In light of this, a question looms large: What should be done with Charles Krafft’s Hitler teapot, Ahmadinejad hot water bottle, and swastika windmills?
Krafft, who has been long considered by admirers as a “provocateur” and encyclopedic in historical knowledge, skirts around his artistic intentions. In an email correspondence he avoided that topic, instead adjuring me to “do my homework,” which would have involved watching several Holocaust revisionism YouTube videos and blog posts. He denies the Holocaust denier title, but appreciates “revisionist research that includes the study of the holocaust as a psy ops,” according to a comment he left on a blog. In a short documentary film produced for the Seattle Channel around 2007, he says, “I know exactly what I’m doing, and any good artist knows exactly what buttons they’re going to be pushing, or they wouldn’t be artists. So I take full responsibility for the imagery I use.”
While the revelation of Krafft’s affiliations stunned the art world, the general response has been to shrug off this fringe outlier. There is an assumed separation between art and artist.
Akiva Kenny Segan, a Seattle-based artist and human rights educator whose “Under the Wings of G-d” series portrays Holocaust victims with angel wings, is understandably disturbed by Krafft’s views.

Akiva Segan and three “Under the Wings of G-d” mosaic-drawings at the Seattle
Central Community College exhibit, April 25.

“I find it troubling that people are willing to divorce a famous art person’s politics from whatever their works are, even if their work
doesn’t reflect it directly,” Segan said. “If this guy is a professed anti-Semite or racist…and his work was continuing to be popular, I would find it troubling.”
But as an artist, Segan finds it difficult to answer the question of intentionality versus interpretation. When an artist puts his or her work out for public view, “it’s out of their hands,” he said. “It’s up for grabs in terms of what people are going to make of it.”
On that note, Segan dismisses Krafft’s work as boring.
“In terms of creativity I don’t find it exciting at all,” he said. “It’s just kitschy to me.”
According to Mark Mulder, a museology master’s student at the University of Washington and the collections assistant intern at the Holocaust Center, whatever Krafft’s intentions were, the exposure of his views changes the game.
“It’s easy to see Hitler’s head on a skunk body as being kitschy, as being ironic, a way of showing absurdity,” he said. But when the artist is revealed as a Holocaust revisionist, the pieces are “not as ironic as they once appeared.”
Mulder, like Segan and many others, squirms when asked what museums and art collectors should do with the art of offensive artists. He says he’s not sure if it’s the responsibility of museums to say he’s a Holocaust denier.
“It’s contested argument,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any one answer.”
“How should the Jew react to this so-called gentleman’s beliefs? That’s a difficult question to answer,” said Michael Ehrenthal of Moriah Judaica in New York. “Ultimately, it depends [on] each one’s personal belief and opinion.”
Ehrenthal’s father’s collection of anti-Semitica is on display at the Wolfson Museum of Jewish Art at Hechal Shlomo in Jerusalem. His catalog, “The Jew in Anti-Semitic Art,” includes benign Jewish figurines and vicious Nazi propaganda, as well a porcelain ashtray with a Jew beckoning a naked little boy, captioned “The Yiddish Clipper.” This souvenir is marked “Niagara Falls, N.Y.” and dates to around 1900. Decorative plates, a porcelain tobacco jar in the shape of a Jew’s head, and (conversely) a chamber pot with Hitler’s face populate the collection.
Is Charles Krafft’s so-called Disasterware really as unique as everyone thinks, then? And should we be outraged?
“This is really nothing new under the sun,” said Ehrenthal. “We Jews have experienced this over the centuries.”
But Ehrenthal separates it from anti-Semitica. “Mr. Krafft has not exhibited or shown anything that is anti-Semitic other than personal beliefs,” he said. “You don’t necessarily have a good criticism regarding his artwork, at least up until now, unless he comes up with some thing anti-Semitic.”
Segan hopes Krafft will come around to education, especially “if he were amenable to folks like me.”
But should a rendering of Charles Manson’s swastika-engraved head show up at the Holocaust Center’s door someday, they will just have to keep educating about the dangers of propaganda.
“Propaganda can be a powerful tool to show institutional bigotry, brainwashing,” said Mulder. “It can start conversations about how the public was okay with acts that were committed.”

Only one of the four books featured here is an actual detective novel, and that’s “The Missing File,” a new murder mystery from Israel by D. A. Mishani (Harper, cloth, $25.99).
Set almost entirely in the Tel Aviv suburb of Holon, the novel is cleverly bracketed by references to Israeli detective literature, something our detective protagonist, Avraham (Avi) Avraham claims on page two, doesn’t exist.
“Why doesn’t Israel produce books like those of Agatha Christie, or ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo?’” he asks a mother who comes in to report a missing son.
Avi claims it’s because life in Israel, and crime in Israel, is just too ordinary.
He’s wrong on both counts, it appears, as Mishani unfolds the plot of the missing boy. With its requisite twists, turns and red herrings, the book leaves the reader guessing until almost the very end and, of course, the book becomes that Israeli detective novel Avraham claims doesn’t exist.
A morose and neurotic chain smoker, Avi is a bachelor whose bickering parents live nearby. We wonder if he really knows what he’s doing as he goes up against faster-moving detectives, tangles in office politics, and tries to figure out what to do with the missing boy’s neighbor, who behaves more and more strangely as the book progresses.
A bonus for American readers are Mishani’s vivid images of Israel and Israeli life, aptly translated by Steven Cohen, and a glimpse into neighborhoods and lives rarely seen by tourists.
Nancy Richler’s new novel, “The Imposter Bride” (St. Martin’s, cloth, $24.99), is less a whodunit than a “where-went-she.”
Lily Azerov is a mail-order bride, a refugee from World War II Europe whose entire family perished. She arrives in Montreal to marry Sol, a stranger to her and who rejects her immediately. But Sol’s brother Nathan falls for Lily, and they are soon married and have a daughter, Ruth. As time passes, it becomes clear to family and friends that Lily is not who she says she is.
Shortly after Ruth’s birth, the already quiet and retiring Lily disappears and Ruth grows up with the mystery of her mother’s disappearance and true identity weighing on her.
Richler uses multiple points of view and shifts back and forth from third person to first person, which can be confusing and frustrating, especially in the beginning of the book. However, Ruth’s first-person narratives always feel most authentic and bring out the author’s best writing. As Ruth grows up, her voice takes over the story and it begins to flow. The reader will be on tenterhooks until the very end trying to figure out Lily’s identity, motives and fate.
Richler, the author of “Your Mouth is Lovely,” also uses the plot to illustrate the horrors of war, and explore the challenges of the new immigrant and the psychological damage of extreme loss.
Local author Patty Lazarus has documented her journey to find a daughter in “March into My Heart: A Memoir of Mothers, Daughters and Adoption” (independent, paper, $14.95).
In her quest to complete her family with a daughter and to overcome both the grief of losing her own mother too early and the grief of infertility, Lazarus sets out to adopt a daughter through open adoption.
The mystery here is, Will She or Won’t She? Will the birth mother come through in the end? As with many memoirs, the reader knows the answer — here it’s in the cover photo — but Lazarus skillfully and movingly constructs the story and keeps up a good level of tension that leaves the reader guessing till close to the end. Lazarus acknowledges she is already blessed when she begins her quest, with a loving husband and two sons, but she’s smart enough to be emotionally honest with herself and to share that honesty with her readers. Her willingness to be open about her life and her feelings adds to the success of this book and the story of the adoption will certainly encourage others seeking to adopt children in this country.
Finally, in “The Art Forger” by B.A. Shapiro (Algonquin, cloth, $23.95), we meet Claire Roth, a talented young artist who earns a living copying famous works of art for a publisher. Claire is caught up in the intrigue of art forgery when she is asked to copy a work she is sure is stolen. Flaunting morality for ambition, she agrees to do it in exchange for a one-woman show at a gallery.
The foundation of this novel is a true story: In 1990, thieves stole $500 million worth of art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, including Degas’ “After the Bath,” featured in Shapiro’s novel. Shapiro writes from Claire’s perspective, going into great detail about the painting process itself, about art forgery and learning, as Claire does, about 19th- and early 20th-century art and the relationship between Degas and Isabella Gardner.

We may be Boomers or Millennials, Gen-Xers or Generation Thumbs, but all of us alive in this era are witnesses to the Holocaust. Survivors are still among us. We hear their reports, document them, read them, and work to maintain them accurately in the face of a forgetful world. It’s a heavy burden to carry, this witness thing. Many of us complain, “enough!” and would happily bid farewell to the name “Auschwitz” and all the baggage it deposits at our 21st-century doorstep.
But it’s ours, this baggage, and thank goodness some of our contemporaries bravely pick it up, examine it, and work it into art. Their efforts reveal that in every generation, and in the most surprising places, human creativity both survives us and helps us survive.
That is what Krystyna Zywulska’s poems and songs did for her and her fellow prisoners at Auschwitz. And that is what American composer/librettist duo Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer are doing with Zywulska’s poems in their third work commissioned by Seattle’s Music of Remembrance. Their chamber ensemble version of Zywulska’s poetry, “Farewell, Auschwitz!” will receive its world premiere at MOR’s May 14 concert at Benaroya Hall’s Nordstrom Recital Hall.
One of America’s most acclaimed contemporary opera composer/librettist teams, Heggie and Scheer created “Another Sunrise” for MOR last season. That one-woman show introduced the drama of Zywulska herself; that is, her struggle with the morally wrenching choices that allowed her to survive. Hiding her Jewish identity — she changed her name from Sonia Landau — she walked out of the Warsaw Ghetto. It was resistance work that landed her in Auschwitz-Birkenau, unacknowledged as a Jew and at first unaware of her gifts as a writer.
MOR founder and artistic director Mina Miller, a dogged researcher of such stories for over 15 years, didn’t learn of Zywulska until a presentation at a 2007 Holocaust studies conference in Warsaw by the American scholar Barbara Milewski of Swarthmore College, who researches amateur music-making in Nazi camps.
When Miller took Zywulska’s story and poems to Heggie, she said he “was more interested in social justice and the moral complexity of survival” than in simply setting Zywulska’s poems to music. In fact, the original poems had indeed been set to music — most of it lost — including resistance anthems and popular tunes of the day.
For “Farewell, Auschwitz,” Heggie says he composed music in the style of those tunes, ranging from sarcastic to comforting. The half-dozen songs are set for three voices — soprano, mezzo-soprano, and baritone — with clarinet, violin, cello, double bass, and piano.
Librettist Scheer says he “was surprised that it was such a diverse collection of concerns and hopes.” His Polish-speaking in-laws translated Zywulska’s work literally so that he could create his own poetic, singable versions in English.
“It was not what I expected,” he says. “There was gossip, all these sort of revealing cross-currents that were going on in the camps.” Scheer, who is Jewish, traces his own roots to Lodz and Warsaw, so “the cultural terrain for me starts here.”
Soprano Caitlin Lynch, who created the role of Zywulska in “Another Sunrise,” returns with mezzo-soprano Sarah Larsen of Seattle Opera’s Young Artists Program.
The baritone is Morgan Smith, who will also perform another Heggie/Scheer premiere at the May 14 concert, a song cycle version of their mini-opera “For a Look or a Touch.” Commissioned and premiered by MOR in 2007, with Smith as co-star, “Look” dramatizes a gay man’s heartbroken memories years after Nazis murdered his young lover.
Though Miller has been with MOR for 15 years and shows no interest in retiring, she has named Smith “artistic advisor,” with an eye toward the future. Even though he makes his home in Leipzig, Germany and travels constantly for his skyrocketing operatic career (his Starbuck in Heggie and Scheer’s “Moby Dick” had critics swooning), his connection to MOR has him thinking ahead.
In an interview for a Hadassah magazine story on MOR last year, Smith told me that even as he considers expanding the subject matter of MOR’s work, “The crimes of the Holocaust of course will always be central.
“There is value in telling stories through music,” he says, “especially as the generation that can give firsthand accounts is passing.”
Ironically, MOR’s spring concert on May 14 coincides with the first evening of Shavuot.  Miller says she regrets the unfortunate timing, which will mean the absence of some valued staff and supporters.
But MOR is first of all a music organization, albeit one with an urgent sense of mission forged in Jewish tragedy. Just last week, the National Endowment for the Arts announced a grant of $15,000 to MOR in support of its Sparks of Glory community outreach concerts-with-commentary. These concerts are held on Saturday afternoons, further proof that MOR’s outreach stretches way beyond the observant Jewish community.
As Heggie puts it, “I don’t know anything quite like what Mina does. She is a force of nature. It’s almost like she’s a vessel through which these messages come.”
Scheer concurs: “It’s an amazing testament to what one person can do.”

Stephen Tobolowsky has appeared in films and sitcoms from Groundhog Day to Mississippi Burning, from Glee to Californication. Tobolowsky is in Seattle this weekend to talk about his new collection of personal stories, “The Dangerous Animals Club.” He talked to JTNews about his book and his deep relationship to Judaism.

JTNews: Tell us about “The Dangerous Animals Club.”
Stephen Tobolowsky: “The Dangerous Animals Club” is a collection of stories that are all true, and they all happened to me. If I were to characterize what the entire book is about, they’re stories that are about the beginnings of things. Stories like first love, first heartbreak, first agent, first job, first dog. The Dangerous Animals Club itself was the first club I was in. So it’s our entry point into life, both the happy parts and the sad parts.
The first major loss — when I lost my mother — that story’s in there too. Most of the stories are funny. A few of them are not. I usually see most things in life as funny. It’s just kind of a barometer of who I am.

JT: Jewishness seems to factor into your work quite a bit. How does it function in the book?
ST: It’s funny. I gave the book to my Hebrew teacher to read, and she said, “You know, Stephen, this is a very Jewish book.”
We grew up in a very strange part of Texas, and there were only three Jewish families. Growing up I was always a stranger in a strange land. You grow up being like, “why couldn’t I just be like everybody else?” Our family was not particularly religious. We didn’t celebrate the Sabbath, we didn’t celebrate Hanukkah because I think Dad didn’t want to buy presents for eight days. Heaven help us, we never had any wine. But we were a very ethical family. I think that was what my Hebrew teacher was telling me. We followed Jewish values even though we weren’t educated in them that well.

JT: How about in your life today?
ST: When I came out to Los Angeles, I kept telling Mom, “I’m going to find a synagogue.” [Years later] I was working on a sitcom and the producers were Jewish. And they said, “Well, we’re going to work on Rosh Hashanah. Does that bother any of you?” Richard Kind says, “Oh, you don’t have to worry, the only Jews here are me and Tobolowsky, and we’re the best kind of Jews that there are. You know, the Jews in name only.”
Everybody was laughing, and it hurt me when he said that, but there was truth. I guess what hurt so much was that it was a barb of truth. It had been over a decade since I had been in a synagogue, maybe two.
I remember I woke up the next morning at, like, dawn, and I just couldn’t sleep all night. I had just done a movie with Larry Miller, and he was telling me about the synagogue he went to, which was one of those tiny hole-in-the-wall synagogues, just like a little house. I went over there first thing in the morning, and there was an old man sweeping up in front of the place. And I said, “Excuse me, could I have a ticket for Rosh Hashanah?” And he says, “We don’t have any tickets.” I said, “Please, I just need one. I just need one.” And he says, “There aren’t any. I’d give you one, but there aren’t any.” I said, “I’ll stand. You have to understand. I have to go this year.” He says, “There’s nothing. I wish I could help you, but there’s nothing.” I said, “Well, do you know when the guy who’s in charge of stuff? And he says, “Well, I’m the rabbi! I’m the one who’s in charge.”
And I said, “Please, please.” He said, “Well, tonight is Friday night. Why don’t you come to synagogue tonight and see if you like it, and then we’ll see if there’s any room for you on Rosh Hashanah.”
And I thought, Oh damn, I just got shnonkered! I called up my wife, Ann, and said I’m going to be home late. I said, “I got shnookered by this old man, and I’m gonna go to services.”
I was sitting in the back of this tiny little room, and the rabbi comes out and says we’re going to start with a prayer about how happy we are when brothers are united. And I had never heard the song before. Everyone sang along, and I pulled a prayer book out of the back and tried to look reverent, try to appear inconspicuous.
The rabbi goes “Stop, stop, stop! Now is not the time to be in prayers. Now is the time just to sing with joy. Sing with joy and we’ll do our prayers later.” It was obvious that I had no clue what was going on.
The rabbi does not look at me, he just says “You know, there may be some of us who haven’t been in a synagogue for a very long time. And maybe they don’t know the songs anymore; maybe they don’t know Hebrew anymore. Well, guess what, I know Hebrew very well, so I’ll do the Hebrew for you, and all you have to do is sing ‘la la la’ and be happy.” And I thought, This guy is for me! So I told the guys on the TV show that I was going to go to Rosh Hashanah. They were going to have to come up with other plans.
I ended up going every Friday night and every Saturday morning for the next 10 years. By the end of that 10 years, Larry and I were helping him with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services.

JT: Wow.
ST: You gotta have exodus at some point in your life before you’re able to come back. I began to see the wisdom in Judaism that I’d never really seen before. I didn’t understand how profound it is on so many levels. Of course, my generation is one that was very taken in the 60s with Buddhism and counter culture and all this kind of stuff. It was all there in the Torah before. The genius of the Torah — you cannot go too deep. However that came about was such a miracle, such a blessing for everybody. To have this book of wisdom that’s available for people to look at.
So I go to minyan when I can in the morning when I’m not working. I go to services Saturday when I’m not working. My wife and I, our goal is to have a real Shabbat once a month. If it’s possible. With no electronics, no nothing, no TV, where you just read, stay with your family. Just try — once! But it’s so hard because showbiz does not recognize such things. You work all the time. It’s difficult to maintain that.
This is really humiliating: I’m going to read from the Torah for the first time in my life on Shavuos. Heaven help me. Heaven help everyone. It’s terrifying.

JT: You had a near-death experience yourself, when you were thrown from a horse and broke your neck. How did that impact your faith?
ST: I’ve had in my life an unfortunate experience with the miraculous. The doctor told me I had a “fatal injury.” I felt like it was a miracle to be alive. And from that experience I understood what the Talmud talks about when it talks about the afflictions of love. Sometimes a curse is not a curse. Sometimes a curse happens to be a blessing that enables you to see your life through new eyes.
I think is what I want my stories to do. That’s what I’ve found Judaism’s done for me. I’m very appreciative of all the giants in our faith that have laid their ideas down…great minds throughout history that have embraced this idea of how to see your life through new eyes. The key to rejuvenation is all right there. That’s why I love it and embrace it.

JT: Any other projects in the works?
ST: I’m working on a second book called “My Adventures with God,” which is a series of stories about people and their relationship to things. I always saw life as two kinds of people: People who are good at algebra and people who are good at geometry. People who are good at algebra are good at finding x. To be good at geometry, you have to know the answer before you start the problem and get to the end in the fewest steps possible. That ain’t me. People’s relationship to faith is more like calculus, and most of us have dropped out of math by the time we get to that point in the book. Calculus is learning the shape of a curve. The change of trajectory, the change of minimum force, and as you go through life it all changes very much. When you’re a child religion means one thing to you, and when you start a family it means something else, and when you encounter death and near death in your own life it develops and changes again. So this book is a series of stories that starts when I was a little kid. My first exposure to God and Judaism and the Torah when I was 5 going to religious school, and the first time I broke the 10 commandments and knew it, and wanted to break them. We all have that desire to just implode on ourselves.

The story of Sala Garncarz is full of heartbreak, horror, injustice, and, somehow, hope. Through the five years she spent in Nazi slave labor camps, Sala kept a diary and collected hundreds of letters she received while in the camps. For 50 years she kept the letters a secret.
But in 1991 she revealed the collection to her daughter, Ann Kirschner. From this moment grew a book, and now a play, “Letters to Sala,” which is experiencing its Northwest premier this week at Seattle Pacific University.
“My mother was one of those Holocaust survivors who never talked about her experiences at all,” Ann said. “In 1991 she was having open heart surgery, and right before the surgery she brought me this box, and said, ‘Here I want you to have this.’ And inside the box was what turned out to be 350 letters, which she had received while she was in not one camp, but seven different Nazi slave labor camps, as well as a diary that she had kept very early in her period as a slave laborer.”
(Indeed, the Germans were organized enough to enslave a population without letting mail service slide.)
After a family kerfuffle over what should be done with the letters — Ann thought they belonged to history, while her daughters thought they should remain private — Ann succeeded in her argument and proceeded to write “Sala’s Gift: My Mother’s Holocaust Story.” She donated the one-of-a-kind collection to the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library.
“Letters to Sala” bounces between Sala’s experiences during the war and modern-day New York City, where she reveals the collection to Ann, and Ann’s dispute with her daughters over the letters’ fate.
There are ideas in “Letters to Sala” that are intriguing, like the question of which types of artifacts are better served within the community, as opposed to kept private within a family, or the reality of what exactly it cost Sala to hide her letters while in the camps.
Ann says the letters were a way for her mother to save the lives of family and friends, most of whom were killed. “Nobody was going to take her letters. She would have died for them,” she said. “It was an act of resistance on her part, and also an act of tremendous spirituality and faith.”
Ann is happy with playwright Arlene Hutton’s adaptation of the book for the stage. “This is a wonderful way for history to find different audiences,” she said. SPU’s status as a Christian college makes the story all the more important. How many more non-Jewish people, who may not have a personal relationship to this dark period of history, will now be touched by and connected to a survivor’s incredible tale?
While the production’s set design is strong, and the use of projection provides some of the strongest moments in the show (like when Sala and romantic interest Harry pose for a photo in a camp and the real-life photo of Sala and Harry is projected above them), ultimately the play’s subject matter is the reason why it struggles and sags at times. It is a play about letters. And with letters frequently being used as substitutes for live dialogue — an especially unavoidable convention when the play itself is based on letters — why write a play when the actual artifacts and book seem to be most effective?
Perhaps Arlene Hutton’s thought was not “Why?” but “Why not?” With that in mind, it is easier to observe the ways in which the play does succeed. It shares an inspirational Holocaust story with audiences who may have otherwise never known about it, it keeps Sala’s legacy alive, and it reminds us that — in one of the play’s stronger bits of dialogue — “We will tell ourselves to endure. After all, Jews are used to it.”

Emily K. Alhadeff contributed to this story.

Did you know Wyatt Earp was buried in a Jewish cemetery?
This question was all it took for Ann Kirschner to tug at a loose string in the tightly knit fabric of codified history, unraveling an alternative narrative of the American frontier and opening a window onto Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp, the Jewish common-law wife of legendary Wild West lawman Wyatt Earp.
The result of Kirschner’s research is “The Lady at the OK Corral,” a biography of a woman who never wanted a biography. Kirschner was in Seattle to talk about Josephine at Town Hall on April 18.
“Here was this woman that I never heard about, never read about, and the fact that she was Jewish and married to the man who was arguably the best-known lawman of the American frontier — wow, that was pretty irresistible,” Kirschner told JTNews.
Josephine Marcus Earp lived an exciting life by all accounts, let alone as a daughter of poor Jewish immigrants between the years of 1860 and 1940. Having moved from New York to San Francisco by steamer with her family around 1870, in 1878 she took off for Arizona Territory to become an actress, only to return home a year later with her tail between her legs. But soon she was back on the road to Arizona, this time to marry her suitor, the persistent divorcee and lawman of Tombstone, Johnny Behan.
It didn’t take long for Josephine’s common-law marriage to Behan to go south; meanwhile, the dirty town of Tombstone was succumbing to chaos, with Wyatt Earp competing with Behan for leadership. Tensions mounted until October 26, 1881, the day of the infamous gunfight between Wyatt Earp and his brothers, and Johnny Behan’s cowboy faction. What is lesser known, however, is that Josephine Sarah Marcus may have been at the apex of a love triangle between Johnny Behan and Wyatt Earp.
It’s a Jewish parent’s worst nightmare. Your rebellious daughter comes back home to live with you, only to be whisked away by the nationally known, infamous, gun-wielding goy she’s in love with. For Josephine (and probably many other Jewish girls throughout history) it must have been unbearably romantic.
These are the scrappy pieces of history Kirschner chased around the country, hot on the tail of an elusive woman who never held a permanent address once in her adult life.
Not only that, but Josephine deliberately covered her tracks.
“She had a lot of skeletons in her closet,” said Kirschner. “She was a willing accomplice to the suppression of her own story.”
So many skeletons, in fact, that Josephine put a curse on anyone who dared to tell her story and fought throughout her life to suppress books and films that would expose the unsavory details. Josephine, Wyatt Earp’s fourth common-law wife, was particularly intent to silence the story of Mattie Blaylock, his third wife, the former prostitute he left who became addicted to opiates and eventually took her own life.
But so far, Kirschner has not been crushed by any falling pianos.
“I think Josephine would turn that curse to a blessing,” she said. “I think she would feel that I tried to follow the truth and tell the intimate stories about her life without trying to whitewash it in any way.”
But just because Josephine’s role in history, like many other women’s, disappeared, does not necessarily mean she should become a heroine.
“She’s a complicated figure,” said Kirschner. “I guess most biographers have a love-hate relationship with their subjects.”
But Josephine is a hero to Kirschner in some ways. “She was an artist of reinventing herself,” she said. “I love that about her. I love her love of the unconventional. I also admire her fierce love and loyalty for her husband, and the incredible modern and smart way that way she understood celebrity, and how to control the legacy of Wyatt Earp.”
Now, the answer to the question you’ve been waiting for: How did the non-Jewish Wyatt Earp’s cremated remains end up in the Marcus’ Jewish family plot in the Jewish Hills of Eternity Memorial Park?
It’s a question Kirschner gets at every talk. “The answer, I think, is just California,” she said. Josephine’s remains are also cremated and rest beside Wyatt’s and near her parents and brother.
Kirschner’s visit to Seattle coincided with an event related to her first book, the opening of “Sala’s Gift” on stage at Seattle Pacific University. Before undergoing open-heart surgery, Kirschner’s mother, a survivor of seven Nazi slave labor camps, handed her a box with a diary and 350 letters she’d received during her imprisonment. (Indeed, the Germans were organized enough to enslave a population without letting mail service slide.)
Kirschner says the letters were a way for her mother to save the lives of family and friends, most of whom were killed. “It was an act of resistance on her part, and also an act of tremendous spirituality and faith.”
Kirschner is proud of the stage adaptation, another venue for education.
“These letters were extraordinary,” said Kirschner. “But like Josephine, my mother didn’t think her story was particularly relevant or important. And she had other reasons for keeping silent. She thought that the letters might harm us, that they might make her children frightened, that we might be intolerant ourselves.”
Like the thrilling nuggets of history Kirschner obtained in her research, including a box of recorded interviews from 1960 with people who remembered Josephine clearly, the box of letters was a gift for posterity.
“[They’re] a time capsule,” she said, “a bridge back to the past.”

It’s hard to imagine, with the abundance of Holocaust literature and films, that stories of mind-blowing value still remain largely untold. In 1942 Ukraine, 38 men, women and children slid deep into the earth to spend 511 days hiding from the Nazis and their neighbors in pitch-black caves. Though they all emerged from the cave, their story, for the most part, remained until recently underground.
When adventure-seeking spelunker Chris Nicola traveled to Ukraine in the ’90s to trace his ancestry, he heard rumors of Jews who hid in the caves during the war. Indeed, deep inside Priest’s Grotto he came across a shoe, a comb, and an antique key and buttons. Nicola began the intensive process of locating the cave dwellers, whose fates no one in that part of Ukraine knew anything about. Eventually, back in North America, he found 14 of the survivors. So he began to tell their story.
That story is coming to the screen. Part reenactment, part documentary, “No Place on Earth,” opens May 3 at the Varsity Theater in Seattle.
When the Gestapo circled the village of Korolowka and rounded up the Jews to send to the camps or to dig their own graves before killing them, Esther Stermer knew that her family would submit to neither. Instead, she, her husband and their six children, along with four other families, fled about five miles away and slid through a narrow passage into Verteba cave. Verteba is exceptional among caves, carbon dating back to 5,000 BCE for probable use as a burial grounds (roughly 3,600 years before Moses’ birth, for perspective). Finding it unsuitable for life due to poor ventilation and lack of water (not to mention a Gestapo invasion), the group moved to nearby Priest’s Grotto, the 11th longest cave in the world and so complex that even experienced cavers take the fatal risk of getting lost.
“No Place on Earth” tells the harrowing story of what may be the longest-ever human underground existence, and follows Sam and Saul Stermer and Sonia and Sima Dodyk back to Ukraine to enter the caves that protected them 71 years ago.
In a phone conversation with JTNews, director Janet Tobias said a former colleague brought her the story, which was featured in National Geographic in 2004 and in Nicola’s book, “The Secret of Priest’s Grotto.” Though she was cautious at first to venture into Holocaust filmmaking territory, the Stermers won her over with their story.
“They had such pride in telling it,” she said. “They had such spirit in telling it. I thought, ‘I just need to do this.’”
Once the Stermers decided they could trust Tobias with their story, the production crew was tasked with a number of challenges, namely, transporting four elderly people down into a dangerous cave, normally accessed by a 100-foot-long rusty pipe. They built steps inside the cave and kept an ambulance on call. And then there was the gear.
“That was all very, very complicated,” said Tobias.
But the results made it worth it.
“For each of them, it was watching a person go back in time,” Tobias reflected. “Watching them remember things that happened to them at that age was really profound.”
In a Manichean twist, “I’d always thought of this as a story where light and dark were switched,” said Tobias. While the dark place was safe, “the scary place was outside…the second you popped your head out of the cave you could be dead.”
Tobias recalls being in the cave with the Stermers when Saul told Sam to turn out their light. Encased in darkness, Sam said, “Now I feel good; now I recognize where I am.”
“They loved the cave,” said Tobias. “It’s like a second mother to them.”
The group’s survival is credited to their skills and resources, said Tobias, from Esther’s “Golda Meir-like” leadership to others’ engineering skills, wits, connections with the outside world for food, and bravery.
Tobias hopes educators will use the film in the classroom.
“The way you stop genocide is one person at a time,” she said. “It is the younger generation’s opportunity and responsibility.” Kids, she continued, should see “how crazy brave and wonderful young people can be.”
On the film’s website, Nicola is quoted as saying, “I learned the Holocaust isn’t one story of how 6 million people perished; it’s 6 million individual stories.” From “Defiance” to “In Darkness” to “Inglourious Basterds,” tales of resistance and survival are joining the vast library of Holocaust stories focused on persecution and senseless acts of inhumanity. 
“They came out, and they had an intact family, and no one had an intact family,” said Tobias. “So they view their experience with incredible pride. It was a story of triumph, not defeat.”
When the film screened at the Toronto Film Festival, the survivors in attendance received a standing ovation.
“How incredibly right and deserved,” Tobias thought at the time.
“They’ve kept their humanity and spirit,” she said. “I have a 92-year-old who laughs on the phone. It’s about as good as it gets.”

Christopher Huh is not Jewish. He has no European heritage and he’s not even old enough to drive.
But like thousands of other non-Jewish young people over the last 70 years, Huh, a 14-year-old Korean-American, became deeply affected by the historical account of the Holocaust.
As he sat in his 7th-grade class at Rocky Hill Middle School in Clarksburg, Md. and absorbed the overwhelming information from his teacher, he knew that sitting idly by while the rest of his peers appeared unaffected was not an option. So he went home, started digging deeper into the stories and the wealth of information on the Holocaust, and began to draw. His story developed into “Keeping My Hope,” a complex and beautiful narrative about an individual’s struggle in Poland during the war.
The 170-page graphic novel gives readers a meticulous account of Ari Kolodiejski and his family, as their small town in Poland transforms from a carefree village to a ghetto. Huh chooses to tell the story through the eyes of a grandfather passing on his tragic experience to his grandchildren.
“When I first decided to write the book, I thought the best way for people to learn was through a grandpa’s point-of-view,” says Huh. “I always liked it when I get to listen to my grandparents talk.”
Through his research, Huh decided to set his story in Poland, as it had the biggest Jewish population before World War II broke out. The detail that Huh puts into painting an accurate picture of pre-war Poland and then each stage of the war’s progression draws the reader in completely.
“I thought that this book should not only be a good story, but also be an opportunity for people to learn. Every little detail, I thought, should be something that spoke out,” says Huh. From towns to battles, from names to actual events and people, Huh wanted to be sure that everything in his novel was historically accurate.
“It was painstakingly difficult, but it was worth it,” he said. “I also asked my teacher, who is fluent in German, to double-check my translation.”
Huh read other Holocaust-related novels, such as “The Diary of Anne Frank,” Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” and Hans Peter Richter’s “Friedrich,” becoming well versed in the genre. Before launching into his own graphic novel, his teacher introduced him to Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” the award-winning and most recognized Holocaust graphic novel. With all of this research under his belt, Huh set out to shape his own story to share with the world.
From his home in Maryland to as far as Israel, the community response to Huh’s self-published work has been incredible. Huh even received a letter from Elie Wiesel this month, praising his effort.
“Many people love the fact that I published this,” says Huh. “My schoolmates and teachers support me, along with my family, of course.”
As the story evolves, Huh goes into vivid detail as to Ari’s experience not only living in the ghetto, but also his transportation to and years living in Auschwitz. “The most important message in my book is that racism and prejudice are humanity’s greatest enemies and that we should always be aware of that,” says Huh. “It is explained on page 91, in the first speech bubble when Ari shows his number to his grandchildren.”
Through writing and illustrating “Keeping My Hope,” Huh has discovered his passion for both writing and drawing and plans to continue both in future.
You can find out more about “Keeping My Hope” and Christopher Huh at keepingmyhope.com. The graphic novel is available for purchase through Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

“I felt he’d found my letters, and read each one out loud…”
You know why you love that song, “Killing Me Softly.” It’s not just the unabashedly confessional lyrics. It’s that heart-tugging tune that reached up into your life when you didn’t even know you needed it, and hasn’t left you since.
Charles Fox composed that tune, and hundreds more that have defined decades of American life on TV and radio, in the movies, on stage and in the concert hall. The theme songs for “Happy Days,” “Laverne and Shirley,” “The Love Boat,” the fanfare for ABC’s “Wide World of Sports,” and memorable movie-to-pop-chart hits including “I Got a Name” have earned him Emmy and Grammy awards and a lifetime of creative satisfaction, not to mention a spot in the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame. Who wrote the music in “Barbarella”? In “Goodbye Columbus”? Who wrote everything but the title song in “Nine to Five”? Charles Fox.
On Sunday, April 28, Fox will present a unique at-the-piano visit about his life and his work at the Stroum Jewish Community Center as part of its Jewish Touch lecture series.
“I’m happy to come to Seattle to sing my music,” he said via cellphone from the car as Joan, his wife of 50 years, drove them down the coast from L.A. to visit grandchildren. He reflects on what matters: “Our three children all saw me working day and night, and my wife Joan providing support for this career, so they grew up with this great work ethic,” he said. The couple has a daughter, an attorney, and two sons, one a businessman, the other a movie writer.
“I know where I got that work ethic,” he continued. “My father was a hard-working window cleaner. But he left home and came home every day in a suit and a tie, like he was ready to go to synagogue.”
In 1959, Charles Fox was an 18-year-old musically talented kid from the Bronx, already experienced making Latin music in the Catskills, when he was welcomed into the 20th century’s preeminent composers’ training studio, that of the legendary teacher Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Back home, his Jewish mother lovingly saved all his sweet letters, and Fox, one of the nicest, most humble guys show business has ever seen, published many of these in his 2010 memoir, “Killing Me Softly: My Life in Music.”
“I was just going to call it ‘A Composer’s Journey,’” he confesses, “but some friends made me reconsider.” Good move, obviously, from a publicity point of view. But not just that. “The title really has two meanings,” said Fox — the allusion to the blockbuster hit song, and the sense that, although life does have to end eventually, his life’s journey is as soft as that song.
“I feel so privileged,” said the man who has spent his career among the most competitive talents in the world. Educated in the best classical tradition, Fox creates work that transcends popular music and media: He composes and conducts for stages and concert halls around the world. Like Stravinsky and Copland, who also studied with Boulanger, he has created ballets: First for San Francisco Ballet, and then for its offshoot, Smuin Ballet, for which he is working on something new.
The Polish government commissioned Fox to compose and conduct the 2010 premier of “Fantaisie, Hommage à Chopin,” for the 200th anniversary of the birth of that legendary Polish composer. He conducted it in Gdansk for an audience of 22,000 at the birthplace of the country’s Solidarity movement.
That same year, Fox scored the documentary film “100 Voices: A Journey Home,” a powerful exploration of Jewish cultural history in Poland (it played at the 2011 Seattle Jewish Film Festival). In it, he joined his own synagogue rabbi, Nathan Lam, and over 300 others in walking paths his own father had known as a child. Fox composed an oratorio for orchestra, baritone soloist, chorus and children’s chorus called “Lament and Prayer,” a setting of Pope John Paul’s message of atonement to the Jewish People (the one he tucked into the Western Wall in Jerusalem).
“It was a very significant thing,” Fox said, to conduct the world premier at the Warsaw Opera House with the Poland National Opera Company Chorus and Orchestra.
Right now, Fox is eagerly anticipating a return to Poland. He’s been commissioned to compose a piece for the 2014 opening of the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.
Earlier this month, Joan and Charles Fox celebrated with a synagogue in Stamford, Conn., where a Torah from his father’s home synagogue in Poland has come to stay. “Every Jew from that town perished,” Fox said, grateful that his father made it out before the worst. “One man in the town preserved that Torah wrapped in a horse blanket.”
Fox has received a lifetime achievement award from the Society of Composers and Lyricists. He chairs the music branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He’s been honored by the Polish Ministry of Culture for contributions to the arts and rebuilding Polish-Jewish relations.
“I have no less an excitement now than I did when I was I starting out,” Fox said. “The work makes me feel just as passionate and young.”

“I felt he’d found my letters, and read each one out loud…”
You know why you love that song, “Killing Me Softly.” It’s not just the unabashedly confessional lyrics. It’s that heart-tugging tune that reached up into your life when you didn’t even know you needed it, and hasn’t left you since.
Charles Fox composed that tune, and hundreds more that have defined decades of American life on TV and radio, in the movies, on stage and in the concert hall. The theme songs for “Happy Days,” “Laverne and Shirley,” “Love Boat,” the fanfare for ABC’s “Wide World of Sports,” and memorable movie-to-pop-chart hits including “I Got a Name” have earned him Emmy and Grammy awards and a lifetime of creative satisfaction, not to mention a spot in the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame. Who wrote the music in “Barbarella”? In “Goodbye Columbus”? Who wrote everything but the title song in “Nine to Five”? Charles Fox.
On Sunday, April 28 Charles Fox will present a unique at-the-piano visit about his life and his work at the Stroum Jewish Community Center as part of its Jewish Touch lecture series.
“I’m happy to come to Seattle to sing my music,” he said via cellphone from the car as Joan, his wife of 50 years, drove them down the coast from L.A. to visit grandchildren.  He reflects on what matters: “Our three children all saw me working day and night, and my wife Joan providing support for this career, so they grew up with this great work ethic,” he said. The couple has three children: A daughter, who is an attorney, and two sons, one a businessman, the other a writer of movies.
“I know where I got that work ethic,” he continued. “My father was a hard-working window cleaner. But he left home and came home every day in a suit and a tie, like he was ready to go to synagogue.”
In 1959, Charles Fox was an 18-year-old musically talented kid from the Bronx, already experienced making Latin music in the Catskills, when he was welcomed into the 20th century’s preeminent composers’ training studio, that of the legendary teacher Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Back home, his Jewish mother lovingly saved all his sweet letters, and Fox, one of the nice, most humble guys show business has ever seen, published many of these in his 2010 memoir, “Killing Me Softly: My Life in Music.”
“I was just going to call it ‘A Composer’s Journey,’” he confesses, “but some friends made me reconsider.” Good move, obviously, from a publicity point of view. But not just that. “The title really has two meanings,” said Fox — the allusion to the blockbuster hit song, and the sense that, although life does have to end eventually, his life’s journey is as soft as that song.
“I feel so privileged,” said the man who has spent his career among the most competitive talents in the world. Educated in the best classical tradition, Fox creates work that transcends popular music and media: He composes and conducts for stages and concert halls around the world. Like Stravinsky and Copland, who also studied with Boulanger, he has created ballets: First for San Francisco Ballet, and then for its offshoot, Smuin Ballet, for which he is working on something new.
The Polish government commissioned Fox to compose and conduct the 2010 premier of “Fantaisie, Hommage à Chopin,” for the 200th anniversary of the birth of that legendary Polish composer. He conducted it in Gdansk for an audience of 22,000 at the birthplace of the country’s Solidarity movement.
That same year, Fox scored the documentary film “100 Voices: a Journey Home,” a powerful exploration of Jewish cultural history in Poland (it played at the 2011 Seattle Jewish Film Festival). In it, he joined his own synagogue rabbi, Nathan Lam, and over 300 others in walking paths his own father had known as a child. Fox composed an oratorio for orchestra, baritone soloist, chorus and children’s chorus called “Lament and Prayer,” a setting of Pope John Paul’s message of atonement to the Jewish people (the one he tucked into the Western Wall in Jerusalem).
“It was a very significant thing,” Fox said, for him to conduct the world premier at the Warsaw Opera House with the Poland National Opera Company Chorus and Orchestra.
Right now, Fox is eagerly anticipating a return to Poland. He’s been commissioned to compose a piece for the 2014 opening of the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.
Earlier this month, Joan and Charles Fox celebrated with a synagogue in Stamford, Connecticut, where a Torah from his father’s home synagogue in Poland has come to stay. “Every Jew from that town perished,” Fox said, grateful that his father made it out before the worst. “One man in the town preserved that Torah wrapped in a horse blanket.”
Fox has received a lifetime achievement award from the Society of Composers and Lyricists. He chairs the music branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He’s been honored by the Polish Ministry of Culture for contributions to the arts and rebuilding Polish-Jewish relations.
“I have no less an excitement now than I did when I was I starting out,” Fox said. “The work makes me feel just as passionate and young.” 

Film historian Bob Birchard describes an anti-Jewish prejudice in American culture that existed well into the 20th century, not at the level of the Nazi desire to exterminate the Jews, but rather looking down upon Jews as inferior to the mainstream Protestant class that developed in the U.S. Famed actor Kirk Douglas was raised against that social backdrop.

“This [anti-semitism] came about because of the large number of Jewish immigrants that came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the perception that they were undereducated and undercapitalized and somehow lesser than the old Anglo-Saxon stock. I think that is reflected in Kirk Douglas’s persona,” Birchard told JNS.org.

The 96-year-old Douglas—who was born Issur Danielovitch in New York to poor, Yiddush-speaking Jewish immigrants from Gomel (now Belarus) and embraced Judaism late in life after surviving a helicopter crash—has appeared in 70 films and has been nominated for the Academy Award of Best Actor three times, for “Champion,” “The Bad and the Beautiful,” and “Lust for Life,” over the course of a six-decade acting career. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981 and the National Medal of the Arts in 2001. Listed by the American Film Institute lists as its 17th-greatest actor of all time, Douglas’s latest accolade came this February when he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Cinematographers Guild (ICG).

According to Steven Poster, national president of the International Cinematographers Guild, Local 600, when Douglas took the microphone at the ICG Publicists Award Luncheon, his vibrancy and youthful exuberance belied his 96 years.

“The ICG [at its ceremony this February] had just recognized a publicist member who is still active at 95 years old,” Poster told JNS.org. “The first thing Mr. Douglas said was, ‘I’d give anything to be 95 again. I’m 96.’ The audience erupted in laughter and applause. The depth of his career as an entertainer and the quality of the work that he did as one of America’s most important talents belies the fact that he has committed his life to his work in philanthropy and his involvement with his community.”

Growing up, Douglas sold snacks to mill workers to earn enough to buy milk and bread. Later, he delivered newspapers and worked at more than 40 jobs before becoming an actor. He legally changed his name to Kirk Douglas before entering the Navy during World War II.

Douglas’s 1988 biography, The Ragman’s Son, notes that his father was denied work in the carpet mills because he was Jewish.
“So my father, who had been a horse trader in Russia, got himself a horse and a small wagon, and became a ragman, buying old rags, pieces of metal, and junk for pennies, nickels, and dimes. Even on [New York’s] Eagle Street, in the poorest section of town, where all the families were struggling, the ragman was on the lowest rung on the ladder. And I was the ragman’s son.”

Looking back on his career, Douglas has said the underlying theme of some of his films, including “The Juggler,” “Cast a Giant Shadow,” and “Remembrance of Love,” was “a Jew who doesn’t think of himself as one, and eventually finds his Jewishness.”

In February 1991, Douglas survived a helicopter crash in which two people died. This sparked a search for meaning that led him, after much study, to embrace the Jewish faith in which he was raised. He documented this spiritual journey in his 2001 book, Climbing the Mountain: My Search for Meaning (2001). In The Ragman’s Son, he wrote, “Years back, I tried to forget that I was a Jew.”

But Douglas’s attitude changed after the helicopter crash, and he went on to say that coming to grips with what it means to be a Jew “has been a theme in my life.” He explained his personal transition in a 2000 interview with Aish.com.

“Judaism and I parted ways a long time ago, when I was a poor kid growing up in Amsterdam, N.Y. Back then, I was pretty good in cheder, so the Jews of our community thought they would do a wonderful thing and collect enough money to send me to a yeshiva to become a rabbi. Holy Moses! That scared the hell out of me. I didn’t want to be a rabbi. I wanted to be an actor. Believe me, the members of the Sons of Israel were persistent. I had nightmares—wearing long payos and a black hat. I had to work very hard to get out of it. But it took me a long time to learn that you don’t have to be a rabbi to be a Jew,” Douglas told Aish.com.

Although his children had a non-Jewish mother, Douglas has said in interviews that they were “aware culturally” of his “deep convictions,” and that he never tried to influence their own religious decisions. At the age of 83 in 1999, Douglas celebrated a second bar mitzvah ceremony.

Birchard—editor of the American Film Institute’s Catalog of Feature Films and the author of several books including Cecile B. DeMille’s Hollywood and Silent-era Filmmaking in Santa Barbara—told JNS.org that Douglas “is interesting not only because of his presence as an actor onscreen but also for his role as a pioneering independent producer.”

“He’s produced a number of films that are classics, such as ‘Spartacus’ and ‘Paths of Glory,’” Birchard said. “He is one of the people who helped form a new approach to filmmaking. As the studio system began to break down in the 1950s, Douglas was among the pioneering independent producers who was able to cash in on his screen popularity in order to make films that might not otherwise have been made.”

Douglas is one of the last surviving actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age. In 1996, he received the Academy Honorary Award for 50 years as a creative and moral force in the motion picture community. He also played an important role in breaking the Hollywood blacklist (also known as the “Hollywood Ten,” a list formed in the mid-20th century of actors, directors, musicians, and other entertainment professionals who were denied employment in their field due to political beliefs or associations) by making sure that screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s name was mentioned in the opening and ending credits of “Spartacus.”

“Trumbo had been blacklisted in the early 1950s, and his only credits after 1953 were under another name because he couldn’t write under his own name,” Birchard said. “It was certainly a principled stand by Douglas. Douglas felt Trumbo wrote the script so he was entitled to the credit. There were a few other companies and producers, not many, who defied the blacklist before, but Trumbo was certainly one of the more important of the blacklisted Hollywood people and it essentially broke the back of the blacklist.”

New Century Theatre’s adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial opens tonight, April 5, at the INScape Arts Building. JTNews spoke with Darragh Kennan, the company’s artistic director who will also be leading the cast as Josef K., to discuss the play and NCTC’s goals for the production.

JTNews: What is The Trial about?
Darragh Kennan: The basic plot is that Josef K., who is Kafka’s everyman, wakes up one morning and realizes he’s been placed under arrest. He doesn’t know why he’s been arrested, and he spends the length of the play trying to find out what he had done that caused him to be arrested. It deals with his own relationships, his ego, his insecurity, what becomes his paranoia, and his humanity. He’s trying to figure out what he can take back and what he’s at the mercy of. [Kenneth Albers’ adaptation] is exciting, it’s sexy, and it’s really funny in a dark way. And ultimately, it’s poignant. It reflects our own humanity. People will be able to look at the play and think, “What am I abdicating right now in my life? What am I not taking ownership over? What am I taking for granted? What am I fighting for?” All these bigger questions of why we’re here on this planet.

JT: What made NCTC choose to produce The Trial at INScape, which used to be the INS building?
DK: We looked around for a place to do it, and this really unique situation with this great theater company called Satori Group [came up]. They were just moving into their new space [in] the old INS building. I thought, “That’s just too good to be true,” in terms of Kafka. The room that we’re performing our play in is the room where people used to be sworn in as US citizens. And the story of The Trial, with personal freedom and isolation and identity and government bureaucracy — it was a great fit for us.

JT: How did you translate the ambiguity and dreaminess of the story to the stage?
DK: There’s so much in terms of ambiguity. People might be spying on him, or it might be in his head. There might be a friend in the room, or that person might be working for the government. It questions everything. So I think it’s engaging and electric and dangerous at all times, and it’s very active. I don’t think of it as “dreamy” in terms of the pursuit and the forward momentum of the play.

JT: NCTC’s motto is “where risk and craft collide.” What risks are you taking with this production?
DK: I think it’s risky to do Kafka. But more risky than that is to not hide behind anything in our production. It’s going to be in a tiny room, and you’re going to be surrounded by people in a tiny rectangle. It’s a very little set. In order to have a moving evening of theater, we have to put ourselves out there. Emotionally, it’s risky. It’s vulnerable and raw to try and create truth in a tiny space like that where the audience is right there with you. And the craft is putting our experience to work and really calling each other out when we feel something is phony and not authentic in a storytelling sense. It’s theatrically risky, too. It’s about doing things that challenge the audience’s imagination in a theatrical way.

JT: Tell us about New Century Theatre Company’s background.
DK: [NCTC] got started in 2007. We’re unusual because we’re mid-level career professionals — we’re not young twenty-somethings getting started right out of college. There’d been a loss of theaters that were in the mid-range in terms of professional theaters in town. The Empty Space had closed, and Tacoma Actors [Guild] had closed. There were the big professional theaters like Seattle Repertory Theatre, Fifth Avenue Theatre, and ACT, but there wasn’t really a middle ground. There wasn’t a way for young actors to take the next step before they bridged the gap into the bigger houses. There was a need, we thought, to keep people in town — a lot of people had been leaving. We also thought we could do theater that was more centered on acting and storytelling, and not doing other people’s thinking for them. People could come to a show of ours and it would be a very theatrical experience, with a very small, stripped-down set and just actors in a room telling stories. That was exciting to us. We’re trying to blend dangerous theatricality with human stories.

JT: What do you hope the audience takes away from The Trial?
DK: We don’t do our audience’s thinking for them. I don’t necessarily expect people to explore moral and ethical issues, but we as a company look for plays that have that potential. For this show, I would love it if the audience could think about where they abdicate responsibility in their lives, or where they make choices that are almost passing the buck. But if they can see themselves in any way, and think about something in their life, then that’s a home run for me. I don’t necessarily need them to have the exact same response, nor do I want that. And I don’t want to tell them what the response needs to be. I just want to set it up in such a way that humanity is what’s in front of them. And if we do it right, they’ll see themselves in that humanity.