Author Description

This first English anthology of Israeli Holocaust drama makes available five important dramatic works, focusing on the more controversial productions of the last two decades. Although it once relied on a repertoire drawn largely from other countries, the fledgling Israeli stage is coming into its own, and a hearty generation of native writers makes this volume a welcome tradition to what has been a dearth of contemporary Hebrew drama available in English. This collection brings together for the first time the dramatic responses to the Holocaust from two generations of Israel playwrights. Leah Goldberg, Aharon Megged, and Ben Zion Tomer survived the Holocaust and settled in Israel after the war. Their plays explore survival issues and the concepts of heroism and of good and evil in a candid, straightforward manner. Motti Lerner and Joshua Sobol are the children of Holocaust survivors. Written some forty years after the events, their plays question the conventional notion of heroism, of good and evil, and the more ambiguous moral issues of collaboration and the failure to resist.