Never again
“How can there be art after the Holocaust?” asked my mother, who survived Bergen-Belsen. Then she asked, “How can life be worth living if there is no art, if life becomes only about survival?” As a second generation survivor, or child of the Holocaust, these questions have shaped my trajectory as a person and an artist. My mother’s story was the oldest story I knew, and I tried to make sense of it, and to understand how dancing could be meaningful, until finally I was given the chance to tell her story. I often wondered how to make sense of my own career choice to be a dancer and an artist. How could I do something that mattered in a world that was so full of injustice. These are questions I have thought about and struggled with and worked with over the years. When I was a young dancer my mother and grandmother took me to see the Green Table, the seminal anti-war ballet. It was created by German choreographer Kurt Joos between the world wars; he subsequently was targeted by the Nazis and escaped from Germany to England. The GT was danced around the world and my mother and her mother had seen it in Europe and been deeply affected by it. They felt it was essential that I see it and they introduced me to it with great seriousness and reverence, and when I saw it as a young dancer studying ballet at the Joffrey, it became my North Star. I understood what I wanted to do with my art and my legacy.
It’s a heavy legacy to have, and I struggled with how something as “frivolous” as dance could possibly hold that weight in a world where what happened to my mother was possible. How can we, as Jewish artists, speak to the existential chasm that is our heritage, without seeming maudlin or worse, opportunistic?
When I was in my early 30’s I was given the opportunity to create a work of my choosing in the former Yugoslavia. I was invited to a multi-national, multi-ethnic, multi-faith theater in Serbia, where I was given resources that were unprecedented to me: access to a ballet company, a composer, a theater company and a full complement of accomplished designers. After first meeting the theater directors in Subotica I was on the train back to Budapest, which was my family’s home before the war, I realized there was only one story I could tell in that part of the world. The story of my family’s experience, how they were deported from that home while their neighbors looked on. I had a deeply creative four months working with Macedonians, Serbs, Bosians, and Croatians on an evening-length choreodrama, or narrative ballet, I titled Sh’ma. “Why would anyone want to see that?” asked my brother, who knew our family story better than I. I responded by girding myself with history, poetry, novels and memoirs. But some things can be best expressed through what my mother called the language of emotion: dance. My grandparents came alive on that stage, and I stood in the wings feeling the relief of afterbirth.
I was the only Jew, or I thought I was, until opening night when my physical therapist - who’d been helping me for weeks - came up to me and very quietly told me that he, too, was a Jew and thanked me for telling the story of “our people.” Of course most of the Jews in that part of the world had been driven out or exterminated. In fact, the beautiful abandoned synagogue in the town of Subotica was used as a theater, which was not the worst use I could think of. I had prepared myself for encountering antisemitism before this journey, however I did not experience it. Instead, I experienced an almost eerie lack of semitism. I had ridden the train three hours and cross back into Hungary in order to find a cantor who could record the Sh’ma for my score. My second cousin accompanied me to the great Budapest synagogue, but got angry when I asked why she didn’t embrace that part of her heritage. She had adapted to her upbringing in post-war Hungary under Soviet rule, and she scolded me for never being able to understand because I had grown up in a democracy. I didn’t realize how scary it must have been for her and how stubbornly hate persisted, mutating in the shadows. Of course today that hate is out of the shadows, and what was shocking a few years ago is now not even surprising.
But I experienced my time in Central Europe as transformative. The process of creating Sh’ma freed me in many ways. For as long as I could remember I had had war dreams. While working on the ballet I had the last nightmare I would have for years. It was after I staged the rape scene, based on someone my mother called the Red Headed girl, who had refused to wear her yellow star. My mother alluded vaguely to what might have happened to her defiant friend before she was “shot into the Danube.” While I was trying to create the scene, the company dancers mutinied; they felt it was too graphic, and they refused to do it. The director of the company came to my defense, and claimed that one rape was not enough. She said that 100 rapes would not be enough to represent the horrors inflicted on women in war, and they should do the scene the way I directed it. Of course she was prescient. In a few years the Serbians themselves would use rape as a weapon of war in Bosnia.
Telling my mother’s story freed me. It freed me to go on to other subjects, to dance about joy and love and irony, to release the dead weight of responsibility. And yet. When the Bosnian war began to rage, I heard from the ballet’s brilliant Serbian set designer, Bojana Ristic. “It’s happening again,” she cried over a scratchy long distance call, “the story we told is happening here, now, again.” Within the context of the Bosnian War, and then the Rwandan genocide, there was no escape. A few years after dancing this story in Yugoslavia, there was no Yugoslavia left. So I told the story in New York, using the Holocaust as a metaphor for new “Never Agains” taking place around the world. Building on the sole support of a rehearsal grant from the 92nd Street Y, long a home for Jewish dance and dancers, I cobbled together a group of excellent dancers. All the while we did what dancers do: fundraising, going into debt, looking for performance space and press coverage. One Orthodox dancer requested a counterpart to dance her role on Shabbat, and special costumes to cover her knees and shoulders. But her parents wouldn’t watch her dance our history, because Orthodox women are not permitted to dance on the stage. The city beat writer at the New York Times said, “I’m tired of the Holocaust.” We all are. And yet, we told the story again.
History’s similarities reverberate in our bones. “Never again,” we say. But this story keeps insinuating itself, coming up in the international zeitgeist, and coming up in my personal worldview. Some of you know I recently lost my mother. She taught me to dance czardas around the living room, and we danced it on her last birthday when she turned 87. She looked for joy in a life she never took for granted. But last fall, at the end of her life, she talked about how she lay awake in her comfortable bed in Santa Fe, remembering her fear as a child, waiting for the Nazis to knock on the door. She said she couldn’t stop thinking about her immigrant neighbors, about children in her city waiting for the knock on the door, about them wondering if they would be deported, or separated from their parents, as she had been. And I think about how the story of my family is reflected in what is happening again and again. If I say I’m trying to dance “never again” we know it has happened again. Bosnia, Rwanda, Burundi, the Rohinga, whether it’s called genocide or ethnic cleansing, it keeps happening.
“Art can not change events,” said Leonard Bernstein, “but it can change people.” So I hold onto that idea, and I try to embody the truth of my experience, because sometimes the body can be more articulate than words. Having left the oldest story I know behind, I think I must tell it again, this time while living in Texas, surrounded by Confederate flags and immigrant detention centers. “All Jewish choreographers have a Holocaust ballet,” one of my colleagues says dismissively. Maybe that is as it should be, since the language of emotion reaches in and grabs us by the kishkes. What is our responsibility as artists in a world that does not value art, much less dance, in a world where the lessons of the past go unlearned? This time I will tell the story as I always imagined it should be told: with dancers in hijab and war-bonnets, dashikis and burkas, turbans and yarmulkes. Because we are all immigrants, we are all refugees, we all have a story to tell. And it is my hope that while we may not be able to change events with our art, we may be able to change people.
Suki John
It’s a heavy legacy to have, and I struggled with how something as “frivolous” as dance could possibly hold that weight in a world where what happened to my mother was possible. How can we, as Jewish artists, speak to the existential chasm that is our heritage, without seeming maudlin or worse, opportunistic?
When I was in my early 30’s I was given the opportunity to create a work of my choosing in the former Yugoslavia. I was invited to a multi-national, multi-ethnic, multi-faith theater in Serbia, where I was given resources that were unprecedented to me: access to a ballet company, a composer, a theater company and a full complement of accomplished designers. After first meeting the theater directors in Subotica I was on the train back to Budapest, which was my family’s home before the war, I realized there was only one story I could tell in that part of the world. The story of my family’s experience, how they were deported from that home while their neighbors looked on. I had a deeply creative four months working with Macedonians, Serbs, Bosians, and Croatians on an evening-length choreodrama, or narrative ballet, I titled Sh’ma. “Why would anyone want to see that?” asked my brother, who knew our family story better than I. I responded by girding myself with history, poetry, novels and memoirs. But some things can be best expressed through what my mother called the language of emotion: dance. My grandparents came alive on that stage, and I stood in the wings feeling the relief of afterbirth.
I was the only Jew, or I thought I was, until opening night when my physical therapist - who’d been helping me for weeks - came up to me and very quietly told me that he, too, was a Jew and thanked me for telling the story of “our people.” Of course most of the Jews in that part of the world had been driven out or exterminated. In fact, the beautiful abandoned synagogue in the town of Subotica was used as a theater, which was not the worst use I could think of. I had prepared myself for encountering antisemitism before this journey, however I did not experience it. Instead, I experienced an almost eerie lack of semitism. I had ridden the train three hours and cross back into Hungary in order to find a cantor who could record the Sh’ma for my score. My second cousin accompanied me to the great Budapest synagogue, but got angry when I asked why she didn’t embrace that part of her heritage. She had adapted to her upbringing in post-war Hungary under Soviet rule, and she scolded me for never being able to understand because I had grown up in a democracy. I didn’t realize how scary it must have been for her and how stubbornly hate persisted, mutating in the shadows. Of course today that hate is out of the shadows, and what was shocking a few years ago is now not even surprising.
But I experienced my time in Central Europe as transformative. The process of creating Sh’ma freed me in many ways. For as long as I could remember I had had war dreams. While working on the ballet I had the last nightmare I would have for years. It was after I staged the rape scene, based on someone my mother called the Red Headed girl, who had refused to wear her yellow star. My mother alluded vaguely to what might have happened to her defiant friend before she was “shot into the Danube.” While I was trying to create the scene, the company dancers mutinied; they felt it was too graphic, and they refused to do it. The director of the company came to my defense, and claimed that one rape was not enough. She said that 100 rapes would not be enough to represent the horrors inflicted on women in war, and they should do the scene the way I directed it. Of course she was prescient. In a few years the Serbians themselves would use rape as a weapon of war in Bosnia.
Telling my mother’s story freed me. It freed me to go on to other subjects, to dance about joy and love and irony, to release the dead weight of responsibility. And yet. When the Bosnian war began to rage, I heard from the ballet’s brilliant Serbian set designer, Bojana Ristic. “It’s happening again,” she cried over a scratchy long distance call, “the story we told is happening here, now, again.” Within the context of the Bosnian War, and then the Rwandan genocide, there was no escape. A few years after dancing this story in Yugoslavia, there was no Yugoslavia left. So I told the story in New York, using the Holocaust as a metaphor for new “Never Agains” taking place around the world. Building on the sole support of a rehearsal grant from the 92nd Street Y, long a home for Jewish dance and dancers, I cobbled together a group of excellent dancers. All the while we did what dancers do: fundraising, going into debt, looking for performance space and press coverage. One Orthodox dancer requested a counterpart to dance her role on Shabbat, and special costumes to cover her knees and shoulders. But her parents wouldn’t watch her dance our history, because Orthodox women are not permitted to dance on the stage. The city beat writer at the New York Times said, “I’m tired of the Holocaust.” We all are. And yet, we told the story again.
History’s similarities reverberate in our bones. “Never again,” we say. But this story keeps insinuating itself, coming up in the international zeitgeist, and coming up in my personal worldview. Some of you know I recently lost my mother. She taught me to dance czardas around the living room, and we danced it on her last birthday when she turned 87. She looked for joy in a life she never took for granted. But last fall, at the end of her life, she talked about how she lay awake in her comfortable bed in Santa Fe, remembering her fear as a child, waiting for the Nazis to knock on the door. She said she couldn’t stop thinking about her immigrant neighbors, about children in her city waiting for the knock on the door, about them wondering if they would be deported, or separated from their parents, as she had been. And I think about how the story of my family is reflected in what is happening again and again. If I say I’m trying to dance “never again” we know it has happened again. Bosnia, Rwanda, Burundi, the Rohinga, whether it’s called genocide or ethnic cleansing, it keeps happening.
“Art can not change events,” said Leonard Bernstein, “but it can change people.” So I hold onto that idea, and I try to embody the truth of my experience, because sometimes the body can be more articulate than words. Having left the oldest story I know behind, I think I must tell it again, this time while living in Texas, surrounded by Confederate flags and immigrant detention centers. “All Jewish choreographers have a Holocaust ballet,” one of my colleagues says dismissively. Maybe that is as it should be, since the language of emotion reaches in and grabs us by the kishkes. What is our responsibility as artists in a world that does not value art, much less dance, in a world where the lessons of the past go unlearned? This time I will tell the story as I always imagined it should be told: with dancers in hijab and war-bonnets, dashikis and burkas, turbans and yarmulkes. Because we are all immigrants, we are all refugees, we all have a story to tell. And it is my hope that while we may not be able to change events with our art, we may be able to change people.
Suki John