acting

Why would you ask “Why am I here?” ?

I was having dinner at a Polish restaurant with two groups of people from the festival – a director, her daughter, and her nanny, and three actor/artists. I was talking to the daughter, a six-year-old. I love talking to kids. You can tell them exactly what you’re thinking.

“Babe,” I said, “I feel like I want to call my mom, but it’s too early in California.” She was also monitoring the time difference between Poland and LA, since they were making phone calls to her dad pretty frequently.

“Why do you want to call your mom?” she said.

“So I can be like, “Mom, why am I here?” I said. I didn’t mean to tell her the truth – I just didn’t think of a lie in time.

“Why would you ask “Why am I here?” ? ” she said.*

At this point, one of the actor/artists overheard the conversation, turned back to us, and said “Did you just say
“Why would you ask “Why am I here?” ? ” That’s such a profound existential question!” I used the laughter after this as a way to avoid answering her.

The truth was that I did not know why I was on this trip. I am one of the younger and less experienced directors on this trip, and I have sometimes let that fact make me feel inadequate – as if I don’t deserve this experience, as if someone else could have contributed more in my place. Talking to the other participants, I have learned that we all feel something like this, a bit. Everyone has moments of insecurity. But knowing that other people share these feelings does not prevent me from feeling them.

However, today, I think I have figured it out.

I am here precisely because I am young and less experienced. I am still untethered enough that, if my life needs to be changed by this experience, it can be. This might not be true if I were older and had done everything I want to do already. This seems obvious. I had formulated it before in a kind of “I’m here to learn” thing. But that wasn’t really enough.

I am here because I am still a questionmark.

Realizing this makes me feel very powerful, somehow – as if having nothing means we have everything

*For extra points, tell me if I have punctuated this properly.

a propos of nothing, wordage

No, you are not required to do anything.

That’s a line from a recent online chat with a Bank of America representative, assuring me that all the appropriate steps have been taken to get me a new ATM card. I saw it as I was glancing at the transcript and it popped out at me. No, you are not required to do anything. I think it’s an important thing for me to remember. We have a choice in everything we do. I have a choice in everything I do.

I am not required to do anything. So I must be here, in Wroclaw, for a reason. I must have chosen it.

Judaism, Poland

ok,

I have new posts up on the US Artists Initiative weblog including one about the experience at the synagogue.

This afternoon after our session ended, I got to wander a little bit in the alleys behind the Square. I am starting to feel like I know my way around here a bit, after one week. It’s nice. I am not so lost. I wonder if it’s really because I know the geography better now, or if going to the services this morning helped me be comfortable with being here. I felt like my head was screwed on straight for the first time since arriving.

More theater tonight.

Judaism, Poland

I just want to say

that T and I went to services at the Wroclaw synagogue this morning. It was amazing. More soon on that. And my roommate, who is wonderful, just gave me money, coffee, and advice, all of which are good. And tonight I get to see three plays in one night, again.

Yes.

Judaism, Poland

in which I don’t see a play, for a change

My parents told me, when I spoke to them on the phone, that I don’t need to spend this entire trip thinking about WWII, and that I am, in effect, “continuing something that never should have been disrupted” – that is, the presence of Jews in Poland.

Even their names now appearing in the database of the Polish police system is somehow part of that return. We have not been eliminated from history, from Europe, or from Poland. I found this very uplifting and shared it with some of my friends here at the conference, and they agreed that it was a good way to look back and forward.

But today, my policy of “I’m not going to read anything about what these plays are beforehand so that I am a completely surprised audience member” backfired when I learned, two minutes before curtain, that this evening’s play was by Sarah Kane, and all about concentration camps. I turned in my ticket at the door and walked back to my housing.

I saw no reason to go into that theater when the reality of that story is all around me. I didn’t come to Poland to see someone else’s representation of my family’s history. I came to make my own.

So I’m at home tonight. Maybe it’s good to have one evening without a play.

a propos of nothing

Shenandoah

you hear me crying?
A-way
you rolling river…
Oh, Shenandoah –
I’ll not deceive you –
Come away,
Oh, come away,
Cross the wide
Missouri.

Been stuck in my mind’s ear for awhile. Schankman twins and their brother. I don’t remember its name. Probably “Shenandoah.”

Judaism, Poland

all the way back

My friend T, who I spent the whole bus ride to Michalowice with yesterday, has been to Poland with her father before, specifically to visit the camps. I told her I had no intention of doing that.

“Well,” she said, “I did it so you don’t have to.”

But as we doubled back to Legnica, she told me that we passed a sign pointing to one, anyway.

“You can’t avoid them,” she said. “They’re everywhere.”

T and I have been talking lots about what it feels like to be an American Jew on this trip. I’m glad she’s here, because I really needed someone to share all this with. In the course of the conversation, I learned that she’s also a Los Angeles Valley Girl, went to high school just a few years apart from me, and in many other ways has a parallel background to mine. We’ve worked together for a year without knowing this.

I guess it takes coming all the way back to Poland to figure out who your countrymen really are.

California, can you hear me now? I know that over half of your residents don’t believe in gay marriage, and I know that probably the same over-half would like to deport undocumented immigrants and their children. I know. But compared to the world I see here, which is, I know, a world of the past, but still a world I and T cannot avoid seeing – you look, Home State, like the paradise you always make yourself out to be.

Poland

wood on the stones

One more thing before I go out to call my parents, the credit bureaus, and my cell phone company. As I was walking out of the Rynek supermarket on the Square, my arms full of toilet paper, laundry detergent, Q-tips, Kleenex, and a bag of rusks for midnight snacks, I saw a pile of wood shavings on the stones.

I looked up, and saw an old man, his face deeply sunburned, carving a wooden head of Christ by hand. To his right was a pile of other icons and images – saints, crucifixes, Holy Families – all carved in wood, all beautifully detailed and handmade. His face had as many lines in it as there were shavings of wood on the stones.

It is always good to see an artisan at work. I don’t know why we like that so much. Maybe because it gives us the illusion that we might be so useful ourselves – that our hands might make things, that our minds’ ideas might be midwived by our fingers into wood and stone and embodied objects. (I am avoiding saying “flesh” on purpose.)

But this image was more troubling to me than inspiring – I thought immediately of the Jews of Poland, again, and wondered what it would have been like walking through this same Wroclaw Market Square, past a man carving the head of Christ in wood, five hundred years ago. Would it have been safe? I wouldn’t have wanted to be a Jew here then, or two hundred years ago, or in 1937. I’m not sure that I really want to be a Jew here now.

Uncategorized

In which Dara gets to meet the Polish police

Here is a story which is too weird for the official weblog of the US Artists Initiative.

I have hitherto not mentioned on this blog the sad fact that I lost both my wallet and my cell phone on my very first day in Poland, and I’m pretty sure they were stolen. I didn’t want to do anything official about it.

“Rachel,” I said, “my only goal in coming to Poland was to avoid any contact with the Polish police. When my grandfather left here, in 1937 (Rachel has been very patient about listening to all my stories that begin with “When my grandfather left here, in 1937”), I assure you that he did not seek out any kind of unnecessary contact with the Polish police. It goes against fundamental Weinberg principles to voluntarily go to meet with the police. Consequently, I am not going to the police station.”

“Well,” she said, “someone might turn it in. You never know.”

I let her convince me to go with a nice volunteer, Anna, to the station to fill out a report.

Anna, who has studied in Edinburgh but is from Poland, and was able to translate for me, was no more enthusiastic than I was about going to the police station, but she kindly helped me anyway. We took a cab to a different part of town, and entered an oppressive building painted in shades of decaying blue, with ceilings lower than ceilings should be. After going in one wrong entrance and then another, describing my wallet and phone to both Anna and a desk officer, and calculating the value of my phone in zlotys, we had to wait to file the actual report.

“There are three people ahead of us,” said Anna.

We sat down on the steps of the station, and waited. All the chairs inside were being occupied by other people who didn’t look too happy about being at the police station.

At length, Anna and I were ushered down a narrow, terrifying Matrix-esque decaying blue hallway, with the officer’s heels clicking on the tiles ahead of us like the second hand on a watch. We turned left into Room 6, which I thought was going to be a Law-And-Order style interrogation room, with two-way glass, a table, and a good and bad cop.

“Don’t leave me,” I whispered to Anna.

My fears turned out to be unfounded. Room 6 was an ordinary office with desks and carpet. The officer, a Polish woman with long fingernails and blonde hair, took my statement, one item at a time, through Anna. She was very thorough.

“What is your name?” said Anna.

“Dara Weinberg,” I said.

“Do you have any identification?” said Anna.

I thought that that was already getting weird, but I took out my passport.

“What are your parents’ names?” said Anna.

My parents’ names? I had visions of my entire family being harassed by the Polish police, or worse yet, my statements implicating them in some kind of “file,” like in that The Lives Of Others movie.

“Why do you need that information?” I said, in my best child-of-Sixties-radicals tone. The officer did not look happy, and barked something at Anna that sounded something like “Documentariat!”

“For the documentation,” Anna translated. I gathered that the computer wouldn’t let the officer move forward without entering something in that field.

I reluctantly gave her my parents’ names, feeling like I had betrayed the Weinbergs. I’m sorry, Mom and Dad. I didn’t tell her where you live.

The statement-taking moved forward with no further incidents. We were done in about ten minutes, and Anna and I escaped into the sunlight of a beautiful Poland afternoon. We walked back to the Festival Club, crossing the river along the way, for lunch.

I do not expect them to find my wallet.

Uncategorized

my friends,

I have about ten new posts, from three days in Wroclaw, Michalowice, and Legnica, live now at the US Artists Initiative weblog. Check it out – I’m afraid that to duplicate it all here would kill me. That blog is going to be much more active than Style Over Substance for the next two weeks, and you should turn there, not here, for the day-by-day blow-by-blow Poland Experience.

I will keep checking in here when I have stories to tell that don’t fit within the framework of the Initiative. I have many.