July 24, 2017: Hannah Moscovitch’s poignant story of Jewish refugees

By Michael Regenstreif

The Canada Scene Festival at the National Arts Centre (NAC) has been a highlight of this summer in Ottawa. Celebrating Canada’s 150th birthday, the festival presented a wide selection of first-class music, theatre, dance and visual arts productions by Canadians from across the country.

As a music lover, I attended some wonderful Canada Scene concerts at the NAC. But the absolute highlight, for me, was the magnificent production of “Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story,” a musical theatre piece created by playwright Hannah Moscovitch, who grew up in Ottawa, singer-songwriter Ben Caplan and director Christian Barry of the Halifax-based 2b theatre company.

As the show opens, we meet Caplan as The Wanderer, the play’s narrator, a constant presence who sings the songs (most of which Caplan co-wrote with director Barry), tells stories, jokes with the audience, dances, and even puts on a tallit to perform a wedding. Caplan, bearded like an Old-World Chasid, is larger than life on stage playing The Wanderer with seemingly wild abandon – like a cross between Tevye and Tom Waits. While Caplan is definitely the star and always on stage, he also fades into the background when necessary.

“Old Stock” tells the story of Moscovitch’s great-grandparents, Chaim and Chaya, Jewish refugees fleeing antisemitic pogroms. Fresh off the boat in 1908, Chaim, 19, who had lost his family in a pogrom, and Chaya, already a widow at 24, meet briefly in a line to see the doctor at Pier 2 in Halifax (the forerunner to Pier 21), the entry point to Canada for immigrants and refugees from Europe at the time. Chaim was sent to the line because he had a rash and typhus had to be ruled out before he could be admitted into the country. Chaya was there because of a cough that, she insisted, was not tuberculosis.

The story picks up again in Montreal. Chaim, who was smitten with the cynical Chaya at first meeting, arranges a match with her through her father, and we see their hard life unfold in early-20th century Montreal. Although “Old Stock” is often very funny, it is a refugees’ story filled with great tragedy (and, ultimately, joy).

In addition to Caplan, there are four other musicians on stage including clarinetist Chris Weatherstone, violinist Mary Fay Coady, Graham Scott on accordion and keyboard, and Ottawa-based drummer Jamie Kronick. The songs and music – encompassing klezmer, folk, cabaret, rock, and even free jazz styles – are central to the play and are brilliantly performed by Caplan, who adds his banjo and guitar playing to several of the numbers, and the band.

As key musicians, Weatherstone and Coady sit with the band while playing music. But they also stand up and move to the centre of the set as the central characters of Chaim (Weatherstone) and Chaya (Coady). Their constant transitions from musicians to actors are seamless – thanks, no doubt, to Barry’s direction.

Based on the lives of Hannah Moscovitch’s paternal great-grandparents, “Old Stock” is a specifically Jewish story that many of us can relate to. My own grandparents arrived in Canada from Eastern Europe in that same era. It is also a universal story which will resonate with the successive waves of refugees and immigrants (and their children and grandchildren) who have continued to arrive in Canada over the 109 years since Chaim and Chaya Moscovitch got off the boat in Halifax.

The production was brilliantly staged and the play – which made me both laugh and cry – reminded me to appreciate the sacrifices and hard lives of my own ancestors.

The four-performance run of “Old Stock” at the NAC’s Azrieli Studio was all too brief. Chatting with Caplan at the opening night reception, I told him that I hoped the show would return to Ottawa for a longer run. He said discussions were underway to, hopefully, make that happen. I’m certainly anxious to see it again.

A warning though, “Old Stock” has mature themes and is not suitable for young children or those offended by profane language and/or frank references to sexuality.

February 17, 2014: Hannah Moscovitch confronts difficult subject in ‘This is War’

By Michael Regenstreif

Far too often recently, we’ve seen news reports of suicides committed by members of the Canadian Forces who have served in the war in Afghanistan. The post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suffered by many of these mostly young men and women are probably incomprehensible to those of us who have not been in their circumstances.

With This Is War, playwright Hannah Moscovitch focuses on the effect of war on soldiers in an attempt to bring some measure of understanding to what they go through in the unrelenting life-and-death circumstances in which they serve.

Moscovitch – who grew up here in Ottawa and is one of Canada’s most acclaimed young theatre artists – has never shied away from difficult subjects. In 2012, the Great Canadian Theatre Company (GCTC) produced Moscovitch’s East of Berlin, a play about the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and the son of a notorious Nazi death camp doctor who grew up not knowing about his father’s evil experiments. The GCTC production of This Is War opened at the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre earlier this month and continues through February 23.

The play, set in the Panjwaii district of the Kandahar province of Afghanistan in 2008, looks at war and inter-related issues of love, hate, sex and violence from the perspectives of four Canadian soldiers: Master Corporal Tanya Young (Sarah Finn), Sergeant Stephen Hughes (John Ng), Private Jonny Henderson (Drew Moore – well remembered for his lead role in the 2012 Ottawa production of My Name is Asher Lev) and Sergeant Chris Anders, the company medic.

The play takes the form of a series of interviews with an unseen journalist or, perhaps, a military debriefer. Each of the four characters, who all show varying signs of PTSD after a joint mission with Afghan forces that seemingly led to terrible consequences involving deaths of children and fellow soldiers, recounts what happens back at the base as suppressed tensions came to the surface and exploded. As each of the four tells the story in turn, we see the same events re-enacted from the differing perspectives.

If there is a central character among the four, it is Master Corporal Young, a woman determined to prove her toughness equals or surpasses any of the men. Her tough exterior, though, masks a psyche bearing an overbearing weight of guilt over what happened on the mission-gone-wrong and her role in it. Her guilt plays out in an encounter with the sergeant who is her military superior that is utterly devoid of any love or tenderness and a violent attack upon the private who is infatuated, if not in love, with her.

While all four of the characters are at least somewhat deserving of empathy in reaction to the horrors they’ve been through, it is the 20-year-old Private Henderson, a naïve and inexperienced boy who’s forced to grow up fast in the circumstances, who garners the audience’s pity. Reeling from the results of the mission he’s brutalized psychologically by his sergeant and rebuffed and then violently attacked by Young. It is only the intervention of the concerned medic that keeps him from turning his gun on himself.

Sergeant Hughes is a veteran soldier who has probably seen it all far too many times. His PTSD is manifested in his indifference to the encounter with Young, his cruelty to the young private over it, and, perhaps, in the macho suppression of his true sexual identity.

The smallest role belongs to the most sympathetic of the four characters. The openly gay medic, Sergeant Anders, seems only to want to help the other three. Only with the private is it clear he has some measurable success.

This Is War is not an easy night at the theatre. Those of us sitting in the seats represent Canadian society and it forces us to think about the consequences of our decisions to fight wars and about the ways in which we respond to those consequences and to the effects on the people we put in harm’s way.

April 2, 2012: Your opinion is just as important as our columnists

By Michael Regenstreif

There are primarily three different kinds of articles that we publish in the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin. There is a different approach applied to each of these kinds of articles.

The first are news stories, which are usually written by Bulletin staff or assigned to freelance reporters, or taken from JTA (Jewish Telegraphic Agency), the wire service to which almost all mainstream Jewish newspapers in the Diaspora subscribe.

We strive for measured objectivity in our news stories. The personal opinion of the reporters and editors should be irrelevant. When we cover a speaker at an event, we report on what the speaker has to say in the news story, not what our personal feelings happen to be about what the speaker has to say.

For example, I disagreed with much of what the well-known American commentator Daniel Pipes had to say when he spoke in Ottawa in 2008. But my news article was about what he said, not what I felt about what he said. Rereading the article more than three years later, I can confirm that my personal opinions were, indeed, irrelevant to the story I wrote.

The second kind of article we run are submissions that come from the various agencies and organizations in our community. The byline for such a submission will generally include the name of the organization that submitted the article, along with the name of the author. These articles might include news about the organization or its programs, or previews and reviews of its events. We edit such articles for space and newspaper style and fact-check the accuracy of what is said to the best of our ability. But, essentially, such articles reflect the message of the organizations that submit them.

The third kind of article we publish in the Bulletin are opinion-driven and include all of our various columns, guest columns and letters-to-the-editor. These pieces generally reflect the opinion of the individual, or, in some cases, the organization they represent. Such submissions are also edited for space, newspaper style and, when appropriate, fact-checked.

But we do not censor our columnists’ opinions. Within the mandate of their column, they are free to say what they want to say.

In a diverse community, and in a community newspaper that welcomes diversity of opinion, not everyone will agree with everything written in our opinion columns. Nor should they, and nor should a columnist generally refrain from expressing an opinion because someone will disagree or because someone with a vested interest will take offence.

Last issue, one of our columnists expressed a critical opinion that made some people angry – and that some people applauded in agreement. By press time, one person wrote a reasoned response, which is published in our Mailbag on page 8.

As I noted in a column last year when another columnist expressed an opinion that made some people angry, none of our opinion columnists, including me, has a monopoly on truth. You might agree with some things our columnists write and disagree with others. I’m the editor and I don’t agree with every opinion expressed in our pages.

If you want to dispute or applaud something you read in the Bulletin, please do so. Write a letter-to-the-editor or submit a guest column. While personal attacks are unacceptable, feel free to argue with opinions.

Yours is just as important.

East of Berlin

The night before this issue went to press, I attended the opening of Hannah Moscovitch’s East of Berlin at the Great Canadian Theatre Company (GCTC). I read the play a few weeks ago in preparation for an interview with Moscovitch published last issue so I knew it was a very strong work. But reading it on the page and seeing it come to life on stage are two different things.

In East of Berlin, Moscovitch explores the effect of the Holocaust on the son of a Nazi war criminal wracked by the guilt never felt by his father.

There are strong themes, language and sexuality, which make the play inappropriate for children, but the GCTC production, well acted by an all-local cast, is the most powerful play I’ve seen recently. It continues at the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre until April 8.

Passover

Passover, which I’ve always found to be the most inspiring of Jewish holidays, is almost upon us. As we sit down at our seder tables to retell the story of Moses leading the Children of Israel out of bondage in Egypt thousands of years ago, we should not forget the continuing relevance of the story in our own time in a world that still knows too much repression and even slavery. Until freedom reigns in every corner of the world, the journey begun by Moses continues.

On behalf of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin, I wish all a Chag Sameach.