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Ghetto
315pages. 19x13x3cm. Broché.
315 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 7, 2026
It’s a song that’s from the fields and from the flood.
It’s a song that’s tipped in steel and dipped in blood.
It’s a song that’s of our people and our land.
It’s a song that has a sickle in its hand…
Never say we will not reach the promised land.
But the music played inside a cordoned-off graveyard. In June 1941, the German army marched into Vilna, the vibrant intellectual capital known as the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," and systematically began rewriting its future in blood. Within months, a historic epicenter of Jewish culture, literature, and academic life was violently compressed into a few suffocating, starving blocks.
The transition from a bustling metropolis to an open-air slaughterhouse was immediate, measured not just in territory, but in human souls. Before the occupation, Vilna was home to a thriving community of nearly 60,000 Jewish residents. By the time the ghetto gates were locked and the borders stabilized, the Einsatzgruppen and local collaborators had marched tens of thousands into the nearby Ponary forest, executing them over open pits under the guise of "resettlement."
By December 1941, about 40,000 Jews had already been murdered. Two-thirds of a city’s heartbeat vanished in a matter of months. For those who remained, trapped inside the ghetto walls, existence became a state of perpetual, agonizing siege—a reality where the mere act of drawing breath was a daily battle against total annihilation.
It was against this backdrop of calculated slaughter that an impossible institution was born: the Vilna Ghetto Theatre. Its establishment split the surviving community along a profound psychological fault line. For many, the idea of stage lights, music, and performance amid ongoing executions felt like a grotesque distortion of reality. Herman Kruk, a prominent Bundist leader and the ghetto's meticulous chronicler, captured this agony in his diaries, famously noting the outrage of citizens who printed flyers declaring, "You don't hold theater in a graveyard."
Kruk’s resistance was not born of hostility toward art, but of a deep, aching reverence for the dead. To him and many observers, communal mourning was the only appropriate response to total devastation.
Yet, the artists who pushed forward looked at the same graveyard and chose a different weapon of endurance. For the performers and the audiences who packed the auditorium, the theatre became a vital form of psychological armor. In a place designed to strip Jews of their humanity, stepping onto a stage or sitting in a darkened theater was an act of radical reclamation. It was a space where they were no longer just prisoners waiting for the next selection, but creators, critics, and human beings capable of feeling something other than terror. By refusing to let their cultural heartbeat flatline, the artists turned the stage into a fortress of spiritual resistance—proving that even when survival was an objective uncertainty, the preservation of the human spirit remained a choice.
Decades later, Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol would look back into the ashes of Vilna and resurrect this agonizing history, not as a static museum piece, but as a living, breathing paradox. Utilizing a deeply researched, documentary theatre approach, Sobol built his script upon the actual diaries, songs, and historical records left behind by the ghetto's inhabitants. Yet, rather than delivering a conventional, somber historical drama, Sobol filters the horror through a jarring, meta-theatrical lens: the Purim-shpil cabaret style. By framing the tragedy as a cabaret, Sobol unleashes a naked, lacerating satire. The play forces the audience into an uncomfortable proximity with the existential agony of ghetto life, weaponizing music and traditional songs to sharpen the emotional edges of the narrative.
Through this theatrical prism, Sobol populates his stage with complex, deeply fractured historical figures who embody the impossible moral geometry of the time. At the center of this ethical storm is Jacob Gens, the Jewish police chief and ghetto leader. Portrayed not as a simplistic collaborator, but as a chillingly pragmatic figure trapped in an unresolvable "bad vs. worse" dilemma, Gens barters human lives to save others, defending his actions as a necessary form of physical preservation. His clinical utilitarianism stands in sharp contrast to characters like Weiskopf, the desperate entrepreneur who builds a uniform-mending empire within the ghetto walls, mistakenly believing that economic usefulness to the Nazis can buy genuine safety.
Hayyah provides the emotional and spiritual counterweight to this cold bureaucracy of survival. Her singing possesses an undeniable, haunting impact on both the audience and the narrative trajectory. Though she occasionally tries to deny her role or escape the crushing burden of being a symbol, her voice operates as a profound means of defiance. It is a raw, instinctual reclamation of humanity that bypasses intellectual debate; her music cuts through the terror, giving voice to a collective grief and endurance that the authorities cannot silence.
This subversive truth is echoed and amplified by Srulik and the Dummy. The ventriloquist and his doll filter the unspeakable reality through razor-sharp dark comedy, using the puppet to utter dangerous, volatile truths that a human voice would be executed for speaking aloud. They perform under the terrifyingly unpredictable gaze of Kittel, the enigmatic Nazi officer who patronizes the arts one moment and orchestrates mass murder the next, personifying the absolute, sadistic whims of the regime.
Ultimately, Sobol does not write to comfort us or to offer easy historical catharsis. His primary mandate is to force us to witness—to look directly into the raw wounds of a brutal historical tragedy, to acknowledge the devastating reality that real people endured these exact horrors, and to confront the boundless capacity for human cruelty.
Yet, Ghetto refuses to remain confined to the past. In an era marked by a chilling, global resurgence of antisemitism and escalating cultural amnesia, Sobol’s play remains dangerously alive. It ceases to be merely a historical document and becomes an urgent, flashing warning sign. It demands that we do not blindly repeat history, serving as a fierce reminder that the systems of hatred we look back on with horror are never fully extinguished—they merely wait for a society to grow complacent enough to let the music stop.
It’s a song that’s tipped in steel and dipped in blood.
It’s a song that’s of our people and our land.
It’s a song that has a sickle in its hand…
Never say we will not reach the promised land.
But the music played inside a cordoned-off graveyard. In June 1941, the German army marched into Vilna, the vibrant intellectual capital known as the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," and systematically began rewriting its future in blood. Within months, a historic epicenter of Jewish culture, literature, and academic life was violently compressed into a few suffocating, starving blocks.
The transition from a bustling metropolis to an open-air slaughterhouse was immediate, measured not just in territory, but in human souls. Before the occupation, Vilna was home to a thriving community of nearly 60,000 Jewish residents. By the time the ghetto gates were locked and the borders stabilized, the Einsatzgruppen and local collaborators had marched tens of thousands into the nearby Ponary forest, executing them over open pits under the guise of "resettlement."
By December 1941, about 40,000 Jews had already been murdered. Two-thirds of a city’s heartbeat vanished in a matter of months. For those who remained, trapped inside the ghetto walls, existence became a state of perpetual, agonizing siege—a reality where the mere act of drawing breath was a daily battle against total annihilation.
It was against this backdrop of calculated slaughter that an impossible institution was born: the Vilna Ghetto Theatre. Its establishment split the surviving community along a profound psychological fault line. For many, the idea of stage lights, music, and performance amid ongoing executions felt like a grotesque distortion of reality. Herman Kruk, a prominent Bundist leader and the ghetto's meticulous chronicler, captured this agony in his diaries, famously noting the outrage of citizens who printed flyers declaring, "You don't hold theater in a graveyard."
Kruk’s resistance was not born of hostility toward art, but of a deep, aching reverence for the dead. To him and many observers, communal mourning was the only appropriate response to total devastation.
Yet, the artists who pushed forward looked at the same graveyard and chose a different weapon of endurance. For the performers and the audiences who packed the auditorium, the theatre became a vital form of psychological armor. In a place designed to strip Jews of their humanity, stepping onto a stage or sitting in a darkened theater was an act of radical reclamation. It was a space where they were no longer just prisoners waiting for the next selection, but creators, critics, and human beings capable of feeling something other than terror. By refusing to let their cultural heartbeat flatline, the artists turned the stage into a fortress of spiritual resistance—proving that even when survival was an objective uncertainty, the preservation of the human spirit remained a choice.
Decades later, Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol would look back into the ashes of Vilna and resurrect this agonizing history, not as a static museum piece, but as a living, breathing paradox. Utilizing a deeply researched, documentary theatre approach, Sobol built his script upon the actual diaries, songs, and historical records left behind by the ghetto's inhabitants. Yet, rather than delivering a conventional, somber historical drama, Sobol filters the horror through a jarring, meta-theatrical lens: the Purim-shpil cabaret style. By framing the tragedy as a cabaret, Sobol unleashes a naked, lacerating satire. The play forces the audience into an uncomfortable proximity with the existential agony of ghetto life, weaponizing music and traditional songs to sharpen the emotional edges of the narrative.
Through this theatrical prism, Sobol populates his stage with complex, deeply fractured historical figures who embody the impossible moral geometry of the time. At the center of this ethical storm is Jacob Gens, the Jewish police chief and ghetto leader. Portrayed not as a simplistic collaborator, but as a chillingly pragmatic figure trapped in an unresolvable "bad vs. worse" dilemma, Gens barters human lives to save others, defending his actions as a necessary form of physical preservation. His clinical utilitarianism stands in sharp contrast to characters like Weiskopf, the desperate entrepreneur who builds a uniform-mending empire within the ghetto walls, mistakenly believing that economic usefulness to the Nazis can buy genuine safety.
Hayyah provides the emotional and spiritual counterweight to this cold bureaucracy of survival. Her singing possesses an undeniable, haunting impact on both the audience and the narrative trajectory. Though she occasionally tries to deny her role or escape the crushing burden of being a symbol, her voice operates as a profound means of defiance. It is a raw, instinctual reclamation of humanity that bypasses intellectual debate; her music cuts through the terror, giving voice to a collective grief and endurance that the authorities cannot silence.
This subversive truth is echoed and amplified by Srulik and the Dummy. The ventriloquist and his doll filter the unspeakable reality through razor-sharp dark comedy, using the puppet to utter dangerous, volatile truths that a human voice would be executed for speaking aloud. They perform under the terrifyingly unpredictable gaze of Kittel, the enigmatic Nazi officer who patronizes the arts one moment and orchestrates mass murder the next, personifying the absolute, sadistic whims of the regime.
Ultimately, Sobol does not write to comfort us or to offer easy historical catharsis. His primary mandate is to force us to witness—to look directly into the raw wounds of a brutal historical tragedy, to acknowledge the devastating reality that real people endured these exact horrors, and to confront the boundless capacity for human cruelty.
Yet, Ghetto refuses to remain confined to the past. In an era marked by a chilling, global resurgence of antisemitism and escalating cultural amnesia, Sobol’s play remains dangerously alive. It ceases to be merely a historical document and becomes an urgent, flashing warning sign. It demands that we do not blindly repeat history, serving as a fierce reminder that the systems of hatred we look back on with horror are never fully extinguished—they merely wait for a society to grow complacent enough to let the music stop.
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October 20, 2022heart = broken, thoughts = provoked
April 19, 2020
A compelling main character and some beautiful tunes, what more does a play need?
May 27, 2022
what a great play. heartbreaking, fascinating characters, dynamic staging possibilities. really would want to see this live!!
May 31, 2024
A beautiful emotional story set in a Concentration Camp. Proof that love prevails even in hell.
April 1, 2016
AMAZING. I had seen the movie (also recommended) before I read the play, but it didn't make it less good. The play is very confusing, and therefor I do recommend you'll see the movie first. But once you start to understand what is going on you understate how clever this play is. The characters are sophisticated and unique. You can understand and relate to any of them, even Kittel (Maybe more in the movie, but still..) the structure of the story and the stage is what gives the play its special voice, and the characters (especially Srulik and his dummy) are funny, interesting and taking. You will be happy to know the the play is quite accurate, in the limits of a literature work.
January 1, 2017
A play within a play that grips one with the realities of the ghetto life full of death and hard choices for the survival. The songs accentuate the theme and bring home the cathartic feeling of sadness so sweet that it makes the heart weep.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews