Book of Joseph: Stories Untold

Playwright Karen Hartman and author and native Baltimorean Richard Hollander were kind enough to sit down with us and talk a little about their experiences with creating “The Book of Joseph” and bringing the story of Richard’s family to life.

In this clip Karen and Richard discuss pieces of the story that weren’t included in the translation to the stage.

Interview by JMM Marketing Manager Rachel Kassman. Filming by Carmen Venable. This interview was filmed on April 11, 2018 at the Everyman Theatre in downtown Baltimore, MD.

“The Book of Joseph” runs at the Everyman Theatre May 9 –June 10, 2018. It’s companion exhibit, The Book of Joseph: Giving Voice to the Hollander Family, is on display at the Jewish Museum of Maryland April 22 – June 3, 2018.

Transcript:

Karen Hartman: There are so many letters that go into such detail about the richness of these lives in Poland, and just the limits of human attention dictate that we have to hear these letter in what I hope will be these jewel-like, hologram-like fragments where you understand, “Okay, I just hear a couple sentences here but underneath there’s all of this.”

There’s this tremendous love story that opens up in the Krakow ghetto between the youngest of the sisters, who’s been in a terrible marriage her whole adult life, and now her husband who had kind of left during the war seems to have died. And she falls suddenly and completely in love with this other man. And they both write in the book, and they’re making all of these plans to be together, and it’s pages and pages of detail.

And reading those love letters was one of the most heartbreaking pieces of the play because they don’t make it, and yet, they’re planning their futures together. And that story is in the play, but just, you know, it’s like twenty seconds, right? And the reason that it’s so exciting is because it happens after the sad part, right, after they’re already in the ghetto.

And so we’re looking at it and the way and audience wants to look at something is, “Well, we already got to the ghetto, we know they’re not going to make it,” we can’t take that much time to go deeply into this love story, and that’s just human audience facts. But, I wish we could, because it’s very, very beautiful.

Richard Hollander: Well, the key point is that the family in Poland, when they wrote the letters, did not know that they were going to concentration camps. They did not know they weren’t going to survive, so the letters talk about the day-to-day life, the day-to-day trials, so when a teenage niece says, “Well, I guess I won’t be going to the movies or the beach anymore, she is looking at the restrictive laws against Jews through the eyes of a teenager, not somebody later on in retrospect.

So it’s– the letters have an immediacy to them, in the moment, which is really important. Is there a part– to answer your question– is there a part that perhaps I would have liked if it was in the play? Which adds the whole irony to the whole thing– yes. I mean, in the late nineteen thirties, my father was able to save perhaps a hundred Jews by getting them passports and exit Visas to get out of Poland prior to the Nazi invasion, and many of those people went to Central America.

Of course, ironically, though he tried very hard, he was unable to save his immediate family. So, to take it back to where we were before, the– I didn’t, metaphorically and literally open the briefcase because I didn’t want to somehow tarnish an idealized image of my father, but when I finally got into it, quite the contrary, his image, his persona was enhanced by what I discovered through the research.

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jewish museum of maryland Past Exhibits

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