Allan Appel Photo
Onstage, Bertha Kahn recalls a childhood spent in Nazi Germany.
A kiss that convinces you the kisser will be your partner for life.
Your Bronx public school third-grade teacher’s very first words: “Open the windows. I can’t stand the smell here. You Jews, don’t you bathe?”
And this obituary notice recommendation for the fall of 2016: “In lieu of flowers, please don’t vote for Trump.”
Evelyne Siegel recalls Bronx anti-Semitism.
Those recollections and pointed observations for the present, woven into a moving group monologue, emerged during the performance of the sixth edition of the Tower One/Tower East Elder Play Project at Long Wharf’s Stage Two Theater.
Thanks to the sixth year of a grant from Long Wharf Theater, 16 senior residents at the Tower One/Tower East complex got to see each of the six plays in Long Wharf’s last season. Their teacher and the director of the project, Beth Milles, met with them before going to see each play and afterward, at which time she offered a writing prompt to connect the themes of the play with the themes of the seniors’ lives.
The program, which began with a modest number of participants in 2010, had 20 people apply for this go-round, nearly triple the original number; 16 participated, with some not able to attend the performances.
Sunday’s seated reading, around an Oriental rug and a vase of yellow and red flowers, featured 14 seniors, a dozen women and two men.
The collective work, “I Count My Blessings,” wowed a crowd of nearly 100 family members, friends, and admirers. They included Evelyne Siegel’s powerful recollections of anti-Semitism in the Bronx. As a 10-year-old, having just moved to a new neighborhood, the little girl encountered her first anti-Semitic slur.
Kahn, Rosenthal, Laniado, and McDonnell
Bertha Kahn remembered being a 7‑year-old in Hitler’s Germany and the “blood-curdling” cries of work crews whom she and her family passed in a train bound for refuge. The family struggled to hide what money they had until the train left Germany and entered French territory.
Herb Mermelstein and Howard Laniado featured other perspectives of the World War II era, with Mermelstein remembering how a barrel of oatmeal fell on him when the troop ship he was on suddenly lurched as it crossed the Atlantic.
Laniado, a thespian for 15 years in New York and a playwright as well, wrote lines about his experience at Annapolis as a young midshipman. He evoked the tenseness of graduation and said “the moment when the parchment [of the diploma] touched my fingertips, a jolt of joy shot through my body.”
The themes of joy, hiding, fears, and courage were among the prompts that the senior playwrights were offered, and by the rapt attention of the audience, they came through, sometimes in stirring fashion, as in Siegel’s recollections.
Love and connection, and their importance in a range of forms — romantic, familial, and otherwise — were also through-lines. Gladys Pine remembered that first kiss from her then-boyfriend as the two of them fled from a nasty guy who was chasing them off his field where the young couple had gone berry picking. As they ran away, they encountered a stone wall. Pine’s fella jumped over and then extended his hand and urged her to jump. When she did, they fell into each others arms and kissed. Pine said that was the precise moment she knew she’d spend her life with this man, and she did.
Siegel wrote — and performed — a vignette about her husband’s love letters. She said she hid them from her children at the beginning of her marriage. “I didn’t think they’d understand some of the sentiments. After nine years of marriage, I threw them out. I regret it now because my son would have been able to see the wonderful prose that attracted me to him.”
In the last section of the performance, occasioned in part by having seen, among the shows of last season, Having Our Say: The Delaney Sisters’ First 100 Years, several of the writers commented on contemporary politics. The consensus: there’s a little more compassion in the world, as witnessed by the acceptance of interracial, interreligious, and gay marriages.
Everyone was on board with that, although Terry Berger — whose quoted obituary recommendation against Donald Trump drew broad and laughing approval — was far from the only one of these senior writers, each with a long perspective of history, to offer warnings about the Republican nominee.
Siegel, who had recalled her anti-Semitic third-grade teacher in the Bronx, put it simply: “When I hear Trump speak, he takes on the voice of Hitler.”
A Van Would Equal More Culture for Seniors
Son Alan Siegel did not tell his mom to “break a leg.”
Evelyne Siegel’s son, about whom Siegel had written, happened to be one of the appreciative members of the audience. He is also the chairman of the board of Tower One/Tower East.
Alan Siegel presented his mom with a bouquet of flowers. He also made a pitch for the program to continue. In a larger sense, he said that transportation is the single greatest impediment to his mom and other Tower One/Tower East residents going to plays at other venues, to art shows, or to take in all that New Haven has to offer.
The Long Wharf grant included van transportation to all the season’s plays; the senior complex does not own its own vehicle, Siegel said. Transportation from the complex to plays, concerts, and so forth is usually up to each family.
There’s a transportation fund of $10,000 that is fundraised annually, from which van rentals at $650 a pop are taken, he added. To have its own van, including vehicle, driver, and insurance, Siegel said Tower One/Tower East would need to raise $100,000.
“This isn’t a pitch,” he said to the happy audience, but, of course, it was.
But the night was for the elder thespians. Siegel presented his mom with a bouquet, as did many of the other adult kids and other family members who gathered round after the standing ovation.
Other writer/performers not mentioned who participated include Barbara McDonnell, Sylvia Rosenthal, Vicki Smith, MaryAnn Ettinger, Lillian Ketaineck, Esther Brochin, and Ellen Duboff. Ruthie Maxim and Bettye Morrison also participated in the program but were not part of the culminating performance. The lines of 100-year-old Gert Lerman were read by the director, Beth Milles, because at the last moment Lerman was unable to attend.
This was a worthwhile read until I got to Siegel's offensive use of the event to make a cheap partisan attack on Trump. Trump is not my preferred choice (neither is Hillary), but to liken him to Hitler was not only over-the-top offensive, but irrational. Trump's daughter Ivanka is an observant Orthodox Jew, (three of his children are married to Jewish people), Trump's grandchildren are Jewish, his daughters-in-law are Jewish, he is a strong supporter of Israel, and there is NOTHING in Trump's background or his policy positions that are remotely anti-Semitic. If anything, Trump, however controversially, has taken a strong position on blocking from entry into the U.S. THE most vile haters of Jewish people - Muslim terrorists and their sympathizers. Such casual and irresponsible invoking of Hitler to slur candidates is just shameful.