Salomone "Moni" Ovadia (born Solomon Ovadia on 16 April 1946) is a Bulgarian-born Italian Jewish actor, musician, singer, and theatrical author. His theatrical performances recall the lost world of Eastern European Jewish culture, its Yiddishkeit core, with its profound "burden of pain, wisdom and folly", as it was before the devastations of the Holocaust cancelled it,[1] and murdered almost half of the world's speakers of Yiddish.[2]
Ovadia was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in 1946 to a Sephardic Jewish family.[3][4] His father, a violinist, had Greek and Turkish roots, while the family of his mother, a singer, was of Serb origin.[5][6] In March 1943, the 1,500 Jews of Plovdiv, including Ovadia's family, were saved from the Holocaust by the actions of Metropolitan of Plovdiv, Cyril, one of the heads of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church who threatened to throw himself before the train were it to depart with the community's Jews, whom the Nazis planned to deport to a concentration camp.[4][a] His family's sense of Judaism was restricted to observing key feastdays. They shifted to Italy in 1949 to flee a rise in anti-Semitism in post-war Bulgaria, which had otherwise protected its Jews.[7]
Italy
Ovadia in 2019
Ovadia speaks Italian with a Milanese accent.[8] In Milan, he attended its Jewish school.[9] There he was taught to sing Yiddish songs, but only began to learn the language much later, from a Chabad rabbi, after an acquaintance, Rudi Litwak, insisted that, instead of frequenting Milan's Central Synagogue, with its Italian rites, they visit a small synagogue, Beit Shlomo, at Porta Romana, an apartment used as a shul or shtibi where the language was being spoken passionately by elderly Holocaust survivors and that rabbi.[10][11][b]
A formative influence in this period, particularly for his interest in Jewish culture, was the mathematician and psychoanalyst Haim Baharier, who had studied under Emmanuel Levinas,[c] and who opened up for him the riches of Yiddish culture.[d] Ovadia graduated in political science and made his debut in the theatre world under Roberto Leydi, as singer and musician in the band Almanacco Popolare.
Artistic career
In 1972, he founded a company, the Gruppo Folk Internazionale, dedicated initially to the study and playing of traditional Italian music, a focus which quickly expanded to embrace traditions of songs and music in the Balkans.[12] He renamed it the Ensemble Havadià in 1978, a name drawn from his remote family origins.[6]
In 1984 Ovadia made his debut as a theatrical actor. In 1986, he produced Dalla sabbia dal tempo ("From sand, from time"),[13] staged in collaboration with his friend from his Jewish lyceum days, Mara Cantoni, with an accompanying orchestra that also plays a role in the spectacle. Here Ovadia adopts his future format, of recitations interleaved by Yiddish songs and music.[14] The unnamed protagonist (Shlomo in the script) is a Bundist émigré from an eastern shtetl in the process of assimilation. The period may be the 30s, and the ambiance either that of Vienna or Paris.[14]
The Polish director Tadeusz Kantor, whom he met in 1983, became an important influence on his work.[15][16] Throughout the 90s, Ovadia's performances drew rave reviews in Italy, and played a seminal role in the rise of a vogue for Jewish culture in that country.[15] In 1990, he created the Theatre Orchestra, which became a stable component of his theatre, a backing of some 11 musicians. The innovation was perhaps influenced by Max Reinhardt's Gesamtkunstwerk and aspects of pre-war Yiddish theatre.[14] Around this time 1990-1991, he developed the idea of Golem, a cypher for Jewish diasporic identity, which crystallised in 1992 with his production of Oylem Goylem,[e] Based on H. Leivick's Yiddish play The Golem,[14] Ovadia's version, (Oylem Goylem is Yiddish for "The world is dumb"), skillfully melded satire and klezmer music sung by himself and deploys a range of accents: the Italian parts being recited by a Polish actor while Ovadia himself, when speaking Italian, pronounced it with a species of szmonces, a comic Yiddish accent used by Jewish actors in the interwar years when speaking Polish in cabaret performances.[17] Ovadia and his team then toured Italy, France, Germany and USA with the play. In 2005, the spectacle was broadcast by RAI, Italy state TV.
Moni Ovadia during one of his shows.
In 1995, Ovadia wrote Dybbuk, which addresses the Shoah. His treatment drew inspiration from both S. An-sky's Yiddish drama Der Dibbuk and the Yiddish poet (murdered at Auschwitz) Itzhak Katzenelson's Song of the Murdered Jewish People.[12][f] Dybbuk has come to be regarded as one of the most important Italian theatrical shows of the period. In the same year, he produced Taibele e il suo demone and Diario ironico dall'esilio, written with Roberto Andò. His following spectacles include Ballata di fine millennio (1996), Pallida madre, tenera sorella (1996), Il caso Kafka ("The Kafka File", 1997, with Andò), Trieste, ebrei e dintorni (1998), Mame, mamele, mamma, mamà... (1998), Joss Rakover si rivolge a Dio (1999), il banchiere errante (2001), L'armata a cavallo (2003).
In The Kafka File, he plays the role of Yitzchak Löwy, whose Yiddish theatre fascinated the Czech writer.[11] The premier of his Trieste piece, which took place on the eve of the Jewish holiday, Simchat Torah, was full of topical allusion to the Jewish experience of that city, which Ovadia noted drew on the work of his friend Claudio Magris,[18] combined readings of the Torah with Jewish jokes and songs. In the finale, the lights are doused, to symbolize the erasure of that rich culture, which exists only in imaginative reconstructions like his own.[19]
In 2005, he collaborated with the band Modena City Ramblers for their album Appunti partigiani. In 2007, a poll revealed that he was regarded as one of the six most popular cultural figures in Italy.[20]
In 2009, he appeared in the movie Memories of Anne Frank. In 2010 together with artists from nomadic cultures, such as the especially Roma and Sinti he performed a theatrical piece entitled Rom & Gagè after France took measures to expel its gypsy population.[21]
A long time advocate of the cultural rights of persons with disabilities, on 20 June 2013 Ovadia held for the first time a full representation in Italian Sign Language of "Il registro dei peccati", one of his most famous monologues. The project was commissioned by and held at SoundMakers Festival, the only Italian multidisciplinary art festival fully accessible to persons with sensory disabilities.[22]
Ovadia says of himself that he is "proudly extremist", qualifying this by stressing his opposition to any form of violence.[7][g] He has been an outspoken opponent of racism, also within Italian society, which, he says, has absolved itself of any sense of guilt for its massacres in Ethiopia, Cyrenaica and former Yugoslavia.[24] He received an award from the University of Pavia in October 2007; in his acceptance speech he denounced the treatment of immigrants, especially Roma and Sinti.[21] Ovadia states that his deep affinity for these people reflects his own sense of what being a Jew entails:
In western civilization, no one has been regarded as "the other", "the foreigner", the minority existing outside of its proper place, more than the Rom, the Sinti and the Jews. Yet while, in the wake of the great catastrophe, the Jews have taken their place in the winners' salon, of those everything about whom is to be duly acknowledged, this has not been done for the Rom and Sinti. Everybody recognizes the word Shoah, no one Porrajmos, which means the devouring: their extermination has yet to be acknowledged in the Europe that produced it.[h]
Relationship to Judaism
He identifies as Jewish and agnostic.[9] His first visit to Israel took place in 1966.[i] His characteristic woolen headdress is not a kippah,[j] but rather bears close similarities to those worn by Moroccans, a likeness which has often led to Arabs in the street greeting him as "one of them". It has, he says, something of the comfort factor of Linus's blanket.[7] In 2013, he broke with the Milan Jewish Community, which he joined out of respect for his parents, after complaining that it had become a "propaganda office for Israel", and in protest at what he called attempts to "Israelize" Judaism.[9][25][k] Ovadia is highly critical of Israel and of the double standards used by the United States in sanctioning human rights violations elsewhere, but never against Israel.[l] He previously labeled himself as a "non-Zionist", moving on to identifying as an anti-Zionist.[26]
In response to the possible impression his comic performances of a constructed shtetl "Jew" might feed into anti-Semitic stereotypes, such as that of a putative Jewish greed and Jewish noses,[m] Ovadia has remarked that:
The merit of my success is that I simultaneously satisfy vast categories of people: Jews who love to laugh at themselves, those who feel a sense of guilt for that which happened and finally can laugh at Jews along with a Jew; anti-Semites who see their stereotypes confirmed.[27]
In a learned article penned for Corriere della Sera in defence of Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, panned in some quarters as fabricating a version of the Holocaust and distorting its horror by introducing humour into its narrative of the tragedy, Ovadia documented the importance of the comical in Judaism and Jewish civilization generally. In appreciation of Benigni's work, he called him "a Jew honoris causa".[28]
Critical reception
The American writer Ruth Gruber, while noting the seminal role Ovadia's work has played in promoting (especially Eastern European) Jewish culture, adds a reservation:
Ovadia's performances, the image he projects and his immense influence in Italy illustrate another trap: the risk that Jews themselves can create or buy into or perpetuate Jewish worlds that are just as "virtual" or "absolutely fake" as those created by non-Jews. The world presented by Ovadia, Italy's most visible Jewish cultural figure, had little to do with either the physical image or popular culture of Italy's largely assimilated Jews themselves.[29][30]
Gruber also notes the apparent contradiction of an Italian Jew using Yiddish, a language never adopted among Jewish communities there, as a vehicle for celebrating the Jewish tradition generally.[31] Though despised by intellectuals of the Haskalah, who used it satirically in plays to mock the "backwardness" of their traditional communities, Yiddish nonetheless became in turn, also through theatre, a "civilizing agency par excellence" for the Jewish masses under the stress of modernity.[n]
1999 – La Porta di Sion. Trieste, Ebrei e dintorni, Libreria editrice goriziana, ISBN978-8-886-92823-6
2000 – Ballata di fine millennio (book and CD)
2001 (1998?) – Speriamo che tenga – Viaggio di un saltimbanco sospeso tra cielo e terra (a hilarious autobiography)
2002 – Vai a te stesso
2005 – Contro l'idolatria
2007 – Lavoratori di tutto il mondo, ridete – La rivoluzione umoristica del comunismo
2010 – Il conto dell'Ultima cena – in collaboration with Gianni Di Santo,
2010 – Introduction to the Italian edition of Yehudi Menuhin's book, Musica e Vita Interiore
2013 - La meravigliosa vita di Jovica Jovic
- in collaborazione di Marco Rovelli
Discography
1991 Oylem Goylem (Fonit Cetra)
1995 Dybbuk (Sensible records)
2004 Sulla memoria, con Yesh Gvul di Marco Fusi (CNI Audiocoop)
2011 Oltre i confini – ebrei e zingari, con Moni Ovadia Stage Orchestra, (Promo Music Records/Edel)
2013 Benvenuti nel ghetto, con gli Stormy Six (BTF)
Notes
↑ "the deportation of the 1,500 Jews of the Bulgarian city of Plovdiv began, local Bishop Metropolitan Kiril succeeded in halting it. Kiril sent a personal telegram to the King begging for his mercy towards the Jews, and contacted the head of the local police, threatening to end his loyalty towards to Bulgaria and to act as he wished. Further testimony claims that he threatened to lie across the railway tracks in order to stop the deportation. When told that his actions had proved successful, and that this deportation order had been cancelled he rushed to the Jewish school – which the authorities had turned into a roundup point for the Jews – and told them the good news." (Yad Vashem 2002)
↑ "An important turning point came when 'during prayer service at the big temple of Milan, someone pestered me and hounded me until I followed him to an apartment where two hundred 'Yiddishkeit' Jews were sitting. I discovered the Yiddish theatre right here, in Milan. They spoke Yiddish, laughed in Yiddish and argued in Yiddish the whole time.'" (Zaikowsky 2003)
↑ Both Baharier and Levinas came under the sway of the charismatic vagabond Monsieur Chouchani, a polymath with a reputed total command also of the Bible, the Talmud and the entire literature of commentary succeeding it, as well as the Qur'an (Costantino 2014)
↑ They later drifted away from each other, despite the latter's extreme refinement in rabbinical studies:"a painful separation bound up with the contradictions many Jews lodge within themselves. When he speaks of Talmudic hermeneutics, his thinking is as consummately refined, daredevilish, head-spinning as anything one might imagine, while when he speaks of the state of Israel and the Palestinian question, it sinks to the level of mediocre agit-prop." (una separazione dolorosa legata alle contraddizioni molti ebrei albergano in sé. Quando lui parla di ermeneutica talmudica, il suo pensiero è quanto di più raffinato, spericolato, vertiginoso si possa immaginare, mentre quando parla dello Stato di Israele e della questione palestinese, scade al livello di un mediocre agit-prop.) (Ovadia & Pepino 2021)
↑ Ovadia recalls that when his cabaret version was attended by the wife of the Chabad rabbi of Milan she rang later and said: "I won't change an iota of this show...This isn't an orthodox play, not at all, but it helped people working with our school better understand us. In just two hours, this show accomplished what we have not been able to accomplish in two months: to clarify who we are, where we came from, why and how." (Zaikowsky 2003)
↑ dos lid fun oysgehargeten yidishen folk (Mincer 2000, pp.149–150).
↑ Highly critical of the United States whose policies since 2001, in his view, effectively fomented wars in the Middle East and are thereby responsible for the terrorism of Salafi, Wahhabite and Isis groups, Ovadia states that "All contemporary wars are criminal, as Gino Strada so eloquently maintained. That is because 90-95% of the victims are innocent civilians." (Tutte le guerre di oggi sono criminali come diceva straordinariamente bene Gino Strada. Perché il 90-95% delle vittime sono i civili innocenti.) (De Giovannangeli 2021)
↑ "Nella civiltà occidentale nessuno è stato considerato 'l'altro' e 'lo straniero', la minoranza fuori posto, più di rom, i sinti e gli ebrei. Però gli ebrei, dopo la grande catastrofe, sono entrati nel salotto dei vincitori, di coloro ai quali va riconosciuto tutto. I rom e i sinti no. Tutti conoscono parola 'Shoah' nessuno 'Porrajmos', il divoramento: il loro serminio non ha ancora avuto un riconoscimento nell'Europa che lo ha prodotto." (Calvini 2010)
↑ When asked of his feelings about the country, Ovadia replied: "Let's start by saying that I prefer 'Land of Holiness' or 'Land of the Holy One' to 'Holy Land'. It's a land whose (proper) destination is that of constructing holiness. In the Bible indeed the Blessed Holy One states: 'You shall be holy because I am holy'. To build holiness means therefore to pursue the imitatio Dei (imitation of God), while avoiding falling for the Luciferean temptation of substitutio Dei (Taking God's place); ...The land in itself therefore is not holy." (Cominciamo con il dire che io preferisco a 'Terra Santa' 'Terra di santità' o 'Terra del Santo'. È una terra la cui destinazione è di costruire santità. Il Santo Benedetto dice infatti nella Bibbia: Sarete santi perché io sono santo. Costruire santità significa allora perseguire l'imitatio Dei, evitando di cadere nella luciferina tentazione della substitutio Dei; ...La terra dunque di per sé non è santa) (Caffulli & Giorgi 2016, p.1)
↑ As has been suggested by Ruth Gruber, it was knitted for him by his wife,[9] a fashion designer.[12]
↑ Ovadia's withdrawal, more directly related to protests about the policies of Binyamin Netanyahu, occurred 10 months after a similar step was taken by Gad Lerner in protest against the Milan community's failure to take a clear stance when former PM Silvio Berlusconi at a Holocaust ceremony dropped some remarks praising Mussolini (Forward 2013).
↑ "After what happened to Navalny, Russia was hit with sanctions. On the other hand, the approach of Israeli policies against Palestinians – which are illegal, oppressive, colonial and sadistic with regard to a defenceless people – are justified with a string of buts/howevers. I'm sick and tired of this stuff." (Dopo il caso Navalny, la Russia ha subito le sanzioni. Invece la politica degli israeliani nei confronti dei palestinesi – che è illegale, oppressiva, colonialista, sadica nei confronti di un popolo indifeso – si giustifica con una serie di però. Io sono stufo di questa roba.) (De Giovannangeli 2021)
↑ Rüthers' impression, drawing also on Gruber, is that he drops Yiddish witticisms with at times anti-Semitic punchlines before enthusiastic audiences (Rüthers 2010, p.88).
↑ "Beginning in Berlin in the latter half of the 18th century, the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment movement) stigmatized Yiddish speech as inimical to realizing the modern, Westernized Jew, which was this movement's project. Yiddish became an object of performative parody and satire, among both maskilim (Jewish advocates of the Haskalah) and non-Jewish Germans. The former wrote scathing satirical plays in Yiddish-which they often derisively referred to as zhargon (jargon)-using the language as a weapon of attack upon itself and its speakers; among the latter, Yiddish-inflected German speech (known as mauscheln) became a stock feature of comic performances mocking the integrationist efforts of German Jewish parvenus. The modern Yiddish theatre, which began in Romania in the 1870s, quickly emerged as an epitome of secularization and modernity-a 'civilizing agency par excellence' -for Yiddish-speaking masses in Eastern Europe and in immigrant centers, especially New York." (Shandler 2004, pp.22–23)
Mincer, Laura (May–August 2000). "La tradizione rivisitata nel teatro yiddish di Moni Ovadia" [Tradition revisited in Moni Ovadia's Yiddish theatre]. La Rassegna Mensile di Israel. 3 (in Italian). 66 (2): 145–154. JSTOR41287429.
Puppa, Paolo (31 May 2009). "La Scena di Moni Ovadia" [Moni Ovadia's stage]. Belfagor (in Italian). 64 (3): 315–322. JSTOR26143525.
Rüthers, Monica (January 2010). "Sichtbare und unsichtbare Juden: Eine visuelle Geschichte des "Ostjuden"" [Visible and invisible Jews: A visual history of the 'Eastern Jew']. Osteuropa (in German). 60 (1): 75–93. JSTOR44935446.
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