Ordinary Time

From July 30-August 9, I will be reviewing Fringe Festival shows.  Reviews will appear on the Minnesota Fringe Festival website of each show, although long reviews will be truncated.  All reviews will also appear here.  For general information about the Minnesota Fringe Festival, go to www.fringefestival.org .  

Death Camp Diaries
Howard Lieberman / Jaded Optimist Productions
U of M Rarig Center Xperimental
July 30 @ 5:30, July 31 @ 8:30, Aug 2 @ 7:00, Aug 5 @ 7:00, Aug 8 @ 4:00 

http://www.fringefestival.org/2009/show/?id=991

What is the difference between a pilgrim and a tourist?  And which one is Howard Lieberman – devout agnostic, secular Jew – as he “does” the Death Camps?   Your guess is as good as Howard’s.  Because clearly he identifies with both.

We know what a pilgrim is, don’t we?  One whose journey into sacred space is a quest.  A tourist – well, a tourist is just on vacation.  A pilgrim encounters the Other.  A tourist consumes it.  Been there, done that.  Got the t-shirt. 

And yet the distinction is not so simple, and never has been.  Nor is it simple for Howard.  The honesty and ironic humor with which he explores that paradox in himself is one of the best elements of Death Camp Diaries.  If Howard is going to go on a psychologically grueling journey, he will at least travel first class.  Not with those other Jews, always looking for a bargain.  He will stay in a nice hotel.  Living well is the best revenge, isn’t it?  He will find a good jazz club, and friend the vocalist on Facebook. 

Pilgrims have been tourists since the merry band of the Canterbury Tales first got the springtime itch.  The rich Saracen and his entourage were a major force in the economy of every little oasis on his haj.  For better or for worse, trade, travel and transformation have always been entwined. 

Transformation is never a one way street.  If you cannot visit the Death Camps without being transformed, you also cannot do so without contributing to the economy of the descendents of those who ran them.  It is easy for the locals to resent tourists.  They swarm everywhere, make the check out lines longer, insist you speak English.  Is it Anti-Semitism I saw in their eyes, these people who claim they never knew?  Or are we just being Ugly Americans?

This is a once in a lifetime experience, the Orthodox rabbi said.  One you will be processing for a long time.

Howard had been back two days when he opened at the Fringe.  Where he finally really does have a Good Venue.  The fact that this is a work in progress does not bother me in the least.  We are all works in progress. 

Besides, I love watching Howard grow.  In many ways all of his previous work as a storyteller – particularly his most recent performance in June with Noa Baum at Loren Niemi’s venue, Two Chairs Telling – has been preparation for this experience, so that even in its rawness, certain themes are emerging.  The one that intrigues me most is the quest for identity, and how inseparable this is from community, even when an iconoclast like Howard defines himself against it.  

“You call yourself a Jew?”  The Orthodox says this to the Conservative, the Conservative says this to the Reformed - and all of them say this to Howard.  Who gets to decide?  Enquiring Howard wants to know.  What does it mean to be a Jew?  Is this a cultural category, an ethnicity, or a religion?  I like the rabbi; I like my brother and his wife, who are also on this trip – but the rest?  Do I really even want to associate with these people, with their narrow perspectives and prejudices, their “organized superstitions,” their lack of taste?    If I don’t, who am I? 

One way of handling this dilemma is to plunk yourself down in Lutheran Minnesota, where you are Jewish by default.  No need to Measure Up.  Or, for that matter, to Put Up With.  But there are limitations to this approach. 

Academia has a special word for people who go sightseeing at scenes of death:  they are thanotourists.   There are less intimidating, but no less equally bizarre alternative phrases:  dark tourist, grief tourist.  The category includes trips to the sites of battlefields, cemeteries, natural and unnatural disasters, prisons, slaveholds.  Concentration camps.  You do not need to travel outside the United States to be a thanotourist – you can go to Gettysburg, Wounded Knee, New Orleans, Ground Zero, Alcatraz, Manzanar.  Eventually, no doubt, if we ever find homes for the current tenants, you will be able to tour Guantanamo.  And take home a refrigerator magnet.

Thanotourists are not necessarily morbid – though Sarah Vowel capitalizes on that brand, and builds much of the quirky appeal of Assassination Vacation upon it.  Theirs are educational trips.  This is a safe, neutral term – even a secular humanist can use it.  But is it enough to call visiting the site of an atrocity “educational”?  When you can map an archipelago of such sites  across Europe?   And visit them on a package tour? 

George Santayana said that those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it.  The spate of “histories” purporting that the Holocaust didn’t happen are reason enough to justify the trip.  See for yourself – and never forget. This is one of the primary justifications for atrocity tourism, which comes close to being a moral obligation for Jews and Christians alike.  For different reasons.    

In the middle of the journey of our life
I came to myself within a dark wood
where the straight way was lost.

It didn’t matter to the Nazis if you were a good Jew, a bad Jew, or even a practicing Jew.  What mattered was that you were vermin.  To visit the camps as a Jew is to confirm your solidarity with other Jews – whether you are Orthodox, Conservative, Reformed, secular, or Devout Agnostic.  Whether you live in Israel, or Brooklyn, or Stillwater. 

Those of you who know Howard know that he is always threatening to get naked on stage.  What’s different is that this time he does it.  And that it is not gratuitous.  Indeed, it was one of the most moving parts of the performance.  I do hope that by now he has stopped apologizing for possibly offending people for this afterwards.  Although the fact that I do not believe there was originally a nudity warning on the Fringe site might have been the real issue.

 If I was offended by anything, it was by the way he occasionally lumped all his audience members together as “you Christians” – as if he was the only Jew in the room.  As if there were only two religions in Minnesota.  As if we were all religious.  At times Howard’s attempt to talk about his own prejudices seemed unreflective, which I do not think was intentional.  But admitting that you stereotype Poles at one point and that you know those stereotypes are not an accurate reflection of reality, then talking as if those stereotypes were true several minutes later was confusing.  Which Howard am I listening to now – the one reacting to his experience, or responding to it?    The one who is buddies with the great grandson of the King of Poland, or the one who is convinced that given the chance, the bastards would all do it over again?

Like another reviewer, I would like to see this again in a year, or two, or five.  While I deeply respect the authenticity of Howard’s personal experience, I cannot really say I was challenged by the piece – though it was clearly heartfelt.  But though I am not a member of any organized religion, I have been so.  And I know that religious people have the capacity for complex and nuanced thought. Unlike Howard, I don’t happen to believe religion is “organized superstition,” and I have a healthy appreciation for the Jewish theologians who have struggled with this problem – Emil Fackenheim, Richard Rubenstein, Arthur Cohen – in ways that did indeed challenge me, and remain with me, even after thirty five years.

I cannot say I know these thinkers well.  But the fact that I do know them is attributable to an Introduction to Religion class taught thirty five years ago at a small Catholic university in the southern tier of New York State.  By a Franciscan friar.  Father Tony Struzcynski.  I think he was Polish.