Rising from the Ashes Vol 1: Beyond the Abyss

By Ronald John Vierling

"All three character driven two-act plays in Beyond the Abyss Adams Daughter, Common Ground, and Sederare set in present day Chicago. Of note, while each explores themes that attend the tragedy of Holocaust, none of the plays attempts to portray the vile and violent conditions inside concentration or death camps. Rather, the plays portray the profound moral, social, and psychological ramifications of the Shoah as the horrors and dislocations of World War II continue to influence modern Jewish life."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 9, 2010
• ISBN: 9781453537381

Ronald John Vierling

In addition to Falling in Love at the End of the Road, Ronald is the author of the Clementine Camille trilogy of novels: Volume One: An American Romance; Volume Two: An American Memoir; Volume Three: An American Life, all of which are available from bookstores. He published his newest novel, Crossing the Continental Divide: Three American Diaries: 1853-1854, in 2012, available from bookstores or online as an e-book. Ronald’s two volumes of plays, written while he was Writer-in-Residence at the Holocaust Memorial and Resource Center of Central Florida, were published under the titles Rising from the Ashes: Volume One: Beyond the Abyss and Volume Two: The Chronicles of Zion. The two volumes of plays are available from bookstores or online as e-books. At present, Ronald is in the process of writing a new novel, Going Sane: A Serious American Comedy.

Book preview

Rising From

The Ashes

Volume One

Beyond the Abyss

Three Judaica Plays

By

Ronald John Vierling

Readers’ Guide to the Plays

By

Joyce Davidsen

Copyright © 2010 by Ronald John Vierling.

ADAM’S DAUGHTER Copyright 1991 and 1996 Ronald John Vierling

COMMON GROUND Copyright 1991 Ronald John Vierling

SEDER Copyright 1992 Ronald John Vierling

Cover Photo: Jerusalem 1990 by Faith Amon,

Frecklefoot Creative, Orlando, Florida

Back cover photo by Green Photo, Uskudar, Istanbul, Turkey

Library of Congress Control Number:     2010910267

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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Contents

ADAM’S DAUGHTER

A Drama in Two Acts

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Act One

Act Two

COMMON GROUND

A Drama in Two Acts

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Act One

Act Two

SEDER

A Drama in Two Acts

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Act One

Act Two

Readers’ Guide to the Plays

ADAM’S DAUGHTER

A Drama in Two Acts

For Reba Rosenberg and Leah Strigler

I know him only so far as I know him, and only in those terms

in which I know him; and all of that depends as fully on who I

am as who he is.

James Agee

LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Act One

Date: February 3, 1987

Time: 8 p. m.

(A bare stage; lights come up slowly to playing level as Natalie emerges out of the darkness.)

NATALIE: (Slowly, carefully, precisely) I walk among ghosts every day . . . my father’s memories. I keep waiting for them to talk to me, but they don’t. They talk to each other, but they don’t talk to me. My father’s dead, now. He’s one of them. But that hasn’t changed things. They still don’t talk to me. Which means what? Should I try to somehow get rid of his memories? Dismiss them? Give them up. Could I do that? Or is that impossible? If I tried to forget his stories and poems and memories would I be giving up a part of my own life at the same time? Because I can’t imagine my life without them. I don’t know who I’d be without them. But I’m not sure I can live with them either.

(Natalie moves; then she looks to her left and then back at the audience.) This stage . . . I got my start here . . . the Student Union Players’ Company. This was a good place for me . . . this theatre . . . this university. My father taught here . . . the University of Chicago. Poetry. Jewish poetry . . . Slavic poetry. Polish . . . Hungarian . . . even Russian . . . .

(Adam is seated at a writing table, his head bent over scattered papers. He is writing in longhand. Natalie looks at him.)

NATALIE: I remember my father sitting at his desk hunched over his work, writing in longhand. When I got old enough, I used to type what he’d written . . . lectures . . . articles for journals. (Lights dim on the man) But not poetry. He didn’t write any poetry after the war. He taught poetry, but he didn’t write any poetry. Not after what happened in Poland. It cost too him much . . . his family. It took too much out of him. (A short pause; her voice pitches slightly, as if tightening.) He was a wonderful teacher. He never raised his voice, but students listened.

(Lights come up on Adam again as he stands up behind his desk. He speaks as if he were in mid-sentence.)

ADAM: . . . it was in Pozarski’s modern sonnets that he spoke to us most clearly. It is the value . . . the emphasis he was able to achieve in every single word, every single syllable sound, that raised his verse above not only his contemporaries in Poland but all of his contemporaries in Eastern Europe. For his poetry . . . his poetry was a world of brilliant clear images that became brilliant moral expressions. Even the tragedy of death was turned into a symbol of life. For that is what Pozarski loved most: life. Life. The profound power of life lived so passionately that his images resonate in the deepest deep chambers of human consciousness, this veil of . . . . (he goes on, whispering) eternal tears . . . (as the lights go down on his area.)

NATALIE: (Looking at the now darkened area from which Adam had been speaking) I would sit in his classes and listen, amazed at what he knew, at what he could explain, because when we were at home together, he was just my father . . . my . . . father. (Moves away) Sometimes when he finished a lecture and left to go back to his office or left campus and walked to Abraham’s house . . . Abraham was his friend . . . they’d grown up together in Poland and survived the camps together . . . sometimes they would sit on Abraham’s back porch or in the little garden Abraham had planted in his backyard, and they’d drink very hot sweet tea . . . it was all very European . . . (hesitating as if remembering what she had been saying; then going on). When he finished a lecture, I’d go out into the hallway at the University, and, without telling anyone I was his daughter, I’d listen to what other students had to say about him. Seeing him in public that way, sometimes I almost forgot he was my father.

(Lights go down on Natalie; lights come up on three students.)

STUDENT ONE: I never understand the poetry when I read it myself, but when the Professor explains it, it’s so clear . . . it’s so simple.

STUDENT TWO: When he reads poetry out loud . . . which he says is the only way to read poetry . . . when he reads the poetry out loud, it comes alive. No one has to say anything or explain anything. Everything makes sense. The words make sense. The sounds make sense.

STUDENT ONE: It’s as if he’s showing me a world . . . a place I wouldn’t have seen without his help . . . a place I couldn’t have seen without his help.

STUDENT TWO: He makes me see what’s in me. I mean, it was always in me. I just couldn’t see it until he . . .

STUDENT THREE: (Interrupting) When I write essays for him, I have to be exact. I have to be absolutely certain about what I’m saying, or he sees my uncertainty right off.

STUDENT TWO: He wants me to explain what I see . . . what I learn. That’s hard. Saying what I see in the poetry and then in me . . . that’s hard.

(Lights go down on the students and up on Natalie simultaneously.)

NATALIE: Sometimes, when I watched him teach, when I heard students, I almost forgot about the pain I knew he carried with him every day . . . the beautiful life he’d known in Poland. The life the Jews had made in Poland. The life they lost. The life he lost.

(Lights down on Natalie; lights up on two women dressed in multi-colored blouses and skirts. Their skirts reach the ground. Their heads are covered by scarves. To achieve the effect of Yiddish being translated into English, their English is heavily accented.)

GERSKA: But Tessa, you know you cannot serve the Rabbi chicken. The Rabbi is an important man. He will expect more than one skinny chicken.

TESSA: I will serve what I will serve. He knows who we are. He’s known us for years . . . since I was a girl. Besides, it’s the heart of the cook that is important. It’s the heart of the . . .

GERSKA: Oh, Tessa, you are so naïve. Do you really think the Rabbi will care about what’s in your heart when he sits down to eat?

TESSA: If he does not, then he is too proud. And a proud man cannot do the work of God.

GERSKA: But your children. Think of Adam and Stella. They will be embarrassed.

TESSA: I am thinking of them, Gerska. I teach them of the heart every day. I teach them that is enough. The heart . . . the heart is enough.

(Lights go down on the women and up on Natalie simultaneously.)

NATALIE: Yes . . . the heart. The heart is enough. That is what my father says. His mother was a woman of great heart . . . a big heart . . . but his father . . . his father was a man of the mind . . . the intellect . . . a scholar. Not the way we think of a scholar in this country . . . an academic . . . but a scholar in the old-world way . . . a man who came home from his labors every day, then sat down with his books and studied and thought and talked with friends who did the same. Read and think. Read and talk. That is what my father’s father loved most. That is what made my father into a man: his mother’s great heart and his father’s great mind.

(Lights stay up on Natalie as they go up on Adam and Natalie, the ten year old girl. Adam mimes telling Natalie the girl the story that Natalie the adult tells the audience.)

NATALIE: My father never tired of telling me about his mother and father. When I was old enough . . . ten . . . eleven . . . he would sit with me and tell me stories about Grandmother Tessa and Grandfather Aaron.

(Adam continues miming.)

NATALIE: He told me that once a great disagreement took place in the village. Elders came to complain to my grandfather that they did not like it that Adam, my father . . . that Adam was going about reading stories that he’d written about the village to anyone who would listen.

(Natalie the adult with Adam the younger and Natalie the younger watch as four men gather. Like the women of the village and for the same reason, their English is heavily accented.)

JACOB: We have come to tell you it is not right.

AARON: That my son makes the old people of the village laugh is not right?

JACOB: That he tells tales. That he uses the names of people we all know. That is not right.

AARON: The people in the stories love to hear their own names. That’s why he uses them.

ISAAC: But the stories are not always true. Adam is making a fiction.

SOLOMON: Has anyone complained that he did not wish to be in Adam’s fictions?

ISAAC: That is not the point.

AARON: Then what is the point, Isaac? Why are you and Jacob so angry?

ISAAC: You know why we are angry. You are a scholar. You know the stories of the Torah.

SOLOMON: No man in the district knows the stories of the Torah better than Aaron.

JACOB: That is true. And for that reason, you should know better than any other man in the district that only Torah stories that instruct us in the ways of God are good to hear. Stories that men make up to amuse are evil. They mislead.

AARON: And in what way do Adam’s stories mislead? He tells them to me even before he writes them down.

SOLOMON: And to me. Last night he told me another. It was a wonderful story about a farmer who owned two beautiful bulls. Now, the problem was, the farmer only had one cow. So the bulls began to grow more and more restless, for the farmer could not make up his mind which of the bulls should be with the cow when it came time for . . .

ISAAC: (Interrupting) It does not matter about the bulls!

SOLOMON: You don’t want to know how the farmer decided between his bulls?

ISAAC: It is not in the Torah. There is no farmer with two bulls in the Torah. No one should make up stories about farmers and bulls or about anyone in our village. It is an evil thing!

SOLOMON: An evil thing? Are you saying Adam is an evil man?

JACOB: A bad thing, Solomon. Maybe not an evil thing. But a bad . . .

ISAAC: (Angrily) It is evil! It is the devil’s work!

AARON: To tell a story about a man who is just like us and to make us laugh at the man’s dilemma . . . tell me how such a thing is the devil’s work. Where does it say in scripture that making people laugh is evil? Tell me how a story that makes children gather around at night and beg for more is the devil’s work.

JACOB: You know what I mean, Aaron. Adam must be sent away to a

Yeshivah. He is a brilliant boy, but he must become a serious man. He cannot waste his years making up stories that make us laugh at ourselves, no matter how true they may seem to be when he is telling them.

SOLOMON: But Adam does not want to go to a Yeshivah. He wishes to attend the University in Warsaw.

JACOB: (Aghast) The University in Warsaw?

ISAAC: That is just what I mean. See! See! His head is filled with foolishness.

AARON: Is it foolishness that he loves this village? That he loves all of us?

JACOB: God is not interested in Adam loving us. God wants a boy like Adam to grow up to tell us what is right and wrong.

SOLOMON: Adam does that. Don’t you understand? He does that with his stories.

AARON: He has even started writing poetry.

(Both Isaac and Jacob react as if they are horrified.)

AARON: Yes. Poems. And