Harry´s Blog

A Reading of

LAMENTATIONS

Four One-Act Plays
by
ALTER BRODY

took place
on
June 13th, 2009
at
The Jewish Theater: The Window
Kandlgasse 6/1
1070 Vienna

The American Jewish poet Alter Brody published A Family Album, a volume of poetry,  in the last year of World War I. He continued to publish in journals during the Twenties. In 1928, Brody published Lamentations, Four One Act Plays. After that, he fell into obscurity.
The English poet and publisher, Anthony Rudolf published poems by Brody in his Voices in the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets and tracked him down just before his death in 1981. Brody’s place in American poetry and world literature is waiting to be occupied by him.

Alter Brody’s Four-One Act Plays, which were published in New York in 1928, have not yet been produced. They were read in Ilse Zelenka’s German translation by young actors, who were confronted with them for the first time. The dialogue came alive as the actors became the characters

It was the first time that I had heard the plays read aloud, and I was struck by the effectiveness the language. It is ingenuous and yet poetic.

Lamentations gives us insight into the lives of Jews of the Old World who lead lives in the New World.

In Lowing in the Night a married couple that owns a candy store in the Bronx serves children every day but can have none of their own. They give vent to their frustration but are bound to each other by love and affection.

Recess for Memorials takes place in a synagogue where two old women who bemoan the demolition of tradition that life in the New World has brought about.

Rapunzel is about a young girl who became blind after losing her balance when she leant out of the window like the storybook character. Braille provides her with a fantasy world that she is afraid of losing when she suddenly regains her sight.

The mourning in A House of Mourning comes after a father has unsuccessfully tried to force his maverick daughter back to the pious life.

Brody the poet and playwright wrote with his heart, as well as his intellect. In the plays, as in his poetry, the lives of Old-World Jews are presented with love and compassion. The conflict is between them and their children, who are taking on the ways of the New World.

As in his poetry, Brody’s love and compassion for his fellow man is omnipresent. The locations of Brody’s work are Brooklyn, Manhattan and the shtetl.

Although some Jews had encountered persecution, their microcosm was still relatively intact. The great juggernaught lay in the future.

Lamentations was published in 1928. After that, Brody went more or less unheard from until his death in 1981.

Five years after the publication of Lamentations, the Third Reich was established, ushering in
the Shoah. After World War II, it became impossible to deal with Jewish subjects without its echo and shadow.  Some of Brody’s later poems, which are in the manuscript, take on that tragic and calamitous subject. The Holy Ledger and Sermon of a Text, which were written after the Shoah, are eloquent expressions of despair in which he challenges and reproves the deity.

Although the plays were published in the Twenties, in some respects things have remained unchanged. Let us look back in Lamentations!
Herbert Kuhner
Alter Brody’s Four-One Act Plays, which were published in New York in 1928, have not yet been produced. They were read in Ilse Zelenka’s German translation by young actors, who were confronted with them for the first time. The dialogue came alive as the actors became the characters

It was the first time that I had heard the plays read aloud, and I was struck by the effectiveness the language. It is natural and yet poetic.

Lamentations gives us insight into the lives of Jews of the Old World who lead lives in the New World.

In Lowing in the Night a married couple that owns a candy store in the Bronx serves children every day but can have none of their own. They give vent to their frustration but are bound to each other by love and affection.

Recess for Memorials takes place in a synagogue where two old women who bemoan the demolition of tradition that life in the New World has brought about.

Rapunzel is about a young girl who became blind after losing her balance when she leant out of the window like the storybook character. Braille provides her with a fantasy world that she is afraid of losing when she suddenly regains her sight.

The mourning in A House of Mourning comes after a father has unsuccessfully tried to force his maverick daughter back to the pious life.

Brody the poet and playwright wrote with his heart, as well as his intellect. In the plays, as in his poetry, the lives of Old-World Jews are presented with love and compassion. The conflict is between them and their children, who are taking on the ways of the New World.

The language of the plays is ingenuous and yet poetic. As in his poetry, Brody’s love and compassion for his fellow man is omnipresent. The locations of Brody’s work are Brooklyn, Manhattan and the shtetl.

Although some Jews had encountered persecution, their microcosm was still relatively intact. The great juggernaught lay in the future.

Lamentations was published in 1928. After that, Brody went more or less unheard from until his death in 1981.

Five years after the publication of Lamentations, the Third Reich was established, ushering in
the Shoah. After World War II, it became impossible to deal with Jewish subjects without its echo and shadow.  Some of Brody’s later poems, which are in the manuscript, take on that tragic and calamitous subject. The Holy Ledger and Sermon of a Text, which were written after the Shoah, are eloquent expressions of despair in which he challenges and reproves the deity.

Although the plays were published in the Twenties, in some respects things have remained unchanged. Let us look back in Lamentations!
Herbert Kuhner

Lewis Mumford

LAMENTATIONS by Alter Brody

In the notable succession of novels of Jewish life, in which the intellectual spokesmen of a generation of assimilated American Jews are vainly trying to recapture something which they call their Judaism, this book is an arresting phenomenon.

Here, for the first time is the Jew himself - not a sentimentalized interpretation of him, seen through nostalgic minds clouded by conflicts alien to the real Jew; not novelized essays on Assimilation; Zionism, Judaism, The Mission of Israel. etc. - but plain everyday Jews, far too profoundly Jewish to be conscious of it; Jewish peasants of the Greater East Side, living and dying loving and hating in a circumscribed universe of their own, whose inhabitants are as little aware of the “Jewish Problem” as the peasants of Synge’s folk plays are of the “Irish Problem.” Here are Jews speaking for themselves without prompting - sometimes brutally, sometimes beautifully, in a series of folk plays, in which poet has magically transmuted the bold unabashed rhetoric and rhythmic garrulity of Yiddish in English, to enrich our multi colored new literature.