The premiere of “The Red Book” by Alexander Plotnikov was released at the Shalom Theater

The Shalom Theater hosted the premiere of “The Red Book” by playwright and director Alexander Plotnikov, unusual both in genre (reconstruction of a non-existent work) and in interaction with the audience (who are refunded for tickets when they come to the performance). According to Marina Shimadina, This is one of the most important performances this season.

The name “Red Book” refers to the unrealized project of Ilya Ehrenburg, which was supposed to be a continuation of the “Black Book” – a collection of testimonies about victims of the Holocaust in the USSR and Poland. It was compiled under the leadership of Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman in the 1940s, but was never published in our country until 2015. The Red Book was supposed to tell about the Jewish resistance during the Second World War, but this project was never realized, and most of the members of the dissolved Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, including Solomon Mikhoels, the creator of the first Jewish Theater, were killed or repressed at the end 40s – early 50s. So the premiere of “Shalom” redresses a historical injustice twice over—both for the Jews whose military exploits were deliberately forgotten in the USSR, and for those who tried but failed to give them the right to vote.

The performance is structurally based on the principle of Peter Weiss’s play “Inquest”: it was based on documentary materials from the Frankfurt trial of Nazi criminals in the 1960s, but the author defined its genre as “an oratorio in eleven songs.” Plotnikov’s production also looks like a meeting of some kind of Restitution Commission, where three actresses in modern office suits and under their own names – Veronica Patmalniks, Karina Pestova and Evgenia Romanova – interrogate witnesses. Their matter-of-fact questions and emphatically dry, strict intonations set a defamiliarizing frame for the terrible, sometimes unbearable stories of the characters.

All evidence is based on historical facts, but written almost in free verse; the performance, like Weiss’s, consists of “songs” with epigraphs from the Torah. “Song of the Invisible Struggle” tells about underground fighters in the Minsk ghetto, “Song about Forest Jerusalem” – about the Jewish partisan detachment of Sholom Zorin, “Song about the Masada Fortress” – about the self-immolation of Jewish families in Mozyr, and so on. Interrogations are filmed and broadcast on a large screen. At the same time, the artists manage to maintain a greater degree of naturalness and authenticity in close-ups.

The interrogators ask a young, modest girl (Alina Terentyeva) why she returned to the ghetto, although she managed to escape? She replies that she was pregnant, gave birth to a child, and had nowhere to hide with the baby. When asked if she took part in the resistance, the witness says that she worked in a bakery and every day she put aside a spoonful of flour for bread for the partisans – can this be considered resistance? Or can only Merke Bruskina, an active underground worker who asked her mother to give her a dress and jacket to be considered a heroine, so that she could go to execution “in good shape”?

The interrogators ask the curly-haired boy (Nikolai Tarasyuk) how he managed to escape from the concentration camp? He says that he hid in the forests for a long time and the partisans he met also did not believe him and did not want to take him with them, because they believed that “only traitors and spies can be living Jews.”

The interrogators ask a young male underground fighter (Albert Gorbachev) what he experienced the day he was caught by the Nazis? But he refuses to describe all the tortures to which he was subjected, so as not to cause suffering to his listeners. Although the story of the monstrous cruelty of the executioners could partly explain and make up for his cowardice – unable to bear the pain, he betrayed his comrades. But he does not want to justify himself and downplay the guilt that he will never forgive himself.

At the same time, the characters in the play say that they do not feel like victims – they did what they could, in the circumstances in which they found themselves. Igor Tsybulsky’s character tells how he participated in the storming of Berlin as part of the tank brigade of Abram Temnik, one of the 135 Jewish Heroes of the Soviet Union, whose names were for some reason erased from Soviet history. And the hero of Anton Ksenev, who fought at Stalingrad, is indignant that no one knows about the feat of the “Jewish Sailor” Abram Levin, who also covered the machine gun bunker with his body.

The theme of historical injustice and “negative work of memory” is continued by the Historian (Dmitry Urosov). He tells how in the Soviet Union not only the participation of Jews in the Great Patriotic War, but also the topic of the Holocaust itself was kept silent. To the point that hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews who died in Nazi concentration camps were simply called “civilian victims.” According to rapidly spreading anti-Semitic stereotypes, it was believed that all Jews “fought on the Tashkent front,” that is, they sat in the rear.

The return of names and voices, the restoration of historical truth is what, according to Alexander Plotnikov, the theater should do today, instead of creating abstract works of art: “The theater can engage in social work and focus the audience’s attention on untruths in some unthinkable hope “that sooner or later we will work off all this radiation load of the past and will be able to start working and living in a slightly more environmentally friendly space.”

The sketch of the “Red Book” was first shown back in the spring, on May 9. But by an evil irony of fate, the premiere took place on October 11 – literally a few days after the attack on Israel by Hamas militants, the start of a new war and the paradoxical growth of anti-Semitic sentiments throughout the world. Without wanting it, the performance became not just relevant, but scorchingly topical. And for “Shalom,” which considers its mission to develop tolerance, good neighborliness and anti-fascism in society, it is also programmatic. Therefore, they decided to make the screenings of “The Red Book” free: a “registration” fee of 1 thousand rubles. is returned to the audience when they come to the performance. However, some refuse and leave money to the theater as a sign of solidarity.