Forward | November, 2000

Returning to the Fold On Their Own Terms
by Stanley Mieses
The Art of 'Secular Spirituality'

A couple of years ago, a woman I had met recently invited me to a "healing service" at an Upper West Side synagogue. This was not my idea of a dream date, but I sensed my presence there was important to her. Plus, she said, the service featured the appearance, at no extra cost, of the popular-in-those-circles Jewish renewal folksinger Debbie Friedman. I relented.

The audience was mostly women of varying ages and sizes and hair lengths and fashion sensibilities, united in sisterly expressions of comforting and implicit support. I could only surmise the specifics of the issues requiring healing, but it seemed to me that these were not observant folks, and so the quest for this sort of spiritual healing struck a wistful note. If I've ever sat in a chamber where inner torment was palpable, this was it.

But, to paraphrase Arthur Miller, attention must be paid to such an experience, and to a rising degree, attention is being paid to the underlying issue of disconnection (a theme mined by a previous generation of male American playwrights including Mr. Miller and Clifford Odets). The new millennial urge of American Jews to merge with their past has been recognized not only by Jewish religious institutions. This secular ba'al teshuvah movement is also finding expression on screen and stage, in recordings and memoir, even in painting and conceptual art. What I experienced on that dreadful date has sought a more sophisticated (in secular, aesthetic terms) and personal expression over the past few years.

To a notable degree this expression is being generated by Jewish women. Two works-one an ongoing art installation by Hana Iverson called "A View From the Balcony" (shades of Arthur Miller) at the Eldridge Street Synagogue, and the other a recently closed one-woman show called "Looking for Louie" (shades of Clifford Odets), written and performed by Stacie Chaiken-illustrate the underlying issues and, to some degree, the creative challenge of the secular returnees. Both works were motivated by a need to connect with the life of a great-great-grandparent who came from the other side to the Lower East Side; both invoke the metaphor of stitching and both strike a poignant note, albeit in very different voices.

Hana Iverson, whose great-great-grandmother migrated to Hester Street from Sweden, told the Forward: "There's a real strong desire in people to rewrite history for their children. I wanted to do it through myself." Her installation is deceptively simple. Its site is a shaftway rising from the floor of the Moorish-Gothic, late-1880s synagogue (currently being restored) up to the balcony, from which the piece is to be viewed. Inside the vertiginous shaft hang large pieces of white fabric upon which is projected a video loop of two pieces of Torah parchment being mended. But what is drawing about Ms. Iverson's piece is the sound of it: A six-and-a-half-minute audio loop of women's voices echoing up and down in Hebrew (the women's blessing "Thank you O Lord for making me what you will"), Yiddish (a recitation of a strudel recipe) and English (Jewish storyteller Laura Simms). Ms. Iverson has successfully created a kind of music from these speaking voices, neatly skirting, at a synagogue with a still-active Orthodox quorum, the issue of kol isha, the tradition preventing men from hearing the voice of women in song.

The result is a hypnotic, meditative effect. It allows the viewer-listener to absorb all the metaphor and implication of the piece: the fabric as makhitza, the barrier that separates men from women in Orthodox synagogues; the stitching as a wound being healed and the connections between voices; of the shaftway as the measure of distance between past and present, and the place of men and women both in and out of synagogue. Appreciation of "A View From the Balcony" relies on the participant spending time with it, as its tone is subtle and ethereal.

Those are not adjectives to be applied to Ms. Chaiken's "Looking For Louie," a personal memoir written for theatrical performance that ran November 8 to November 18 at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Perhaps owing to the form, its stitching strained more at the seams. First of all, no metaphor was utilized-we had a live person acting out in front of us, sometimes artfully, sometimes indulgently. But the issue of connectedness was laid out plainly for the audience, and there was no mistaking what Ms. Chaiken was looking for: her great-great-grandfather Louie, the first person in her family to immigrate from Russia to-where else?-the Lower East Side and about whom no one in her family had ever spoken.

Like Ms. Iverson's piece, the environment of Ms. Chaiken's performance-a basement space with a stamped-tin ceiling-lent contextual depth to the subject matter. But Ms. Chaiken's work was not site-specific: It was all over the map, befitting someone who, as she told the audience, "attended 14 schools before college, was engaged three times, had 67 boyfriends and hair-color changes-oy!" And who was baptized in order to marry a Catholic-convert husband whom she left because she wouldn't have been able to raise her children as Jews.

In her piece, Ms. Chaiken also attempted to rewrite her family history through herself, employing the stitch of forgiveness. Growing up in Covina, Calif., as the "alien child of alien parents, always in flight"-"chaiken," she explained, means "bird'' in Russian-she felt emotionally and culturally cut off from her inheritance, which brought her to her own private Idaho: the Norfolk Street address of her ancestors. While Ms. Chaiken is a very attractive performer, the tonal quality of "Looking for Louie" was uneven. Occasionally she spoke sincerely and intimately the words of a memoir to the audience; at other times she delivered the lines of a theater piece with the giddy energy of an acting student.

Nevertheless, attention must be paid. For if "woman is the door that reconciles us with the world," as Octavio Paz has written, Jewish men might attempt at least to visit with Jewish women's discomfort-even if out of self interest. Or as Ms. Chaiken said, "This may all sound like self help, but we're talking Talmud."

Mr. Mieses is a commentator for National Public Radio and WNYC-FM.
Link to Article

01: Art In America
Hana Iverson at Eldridge Street Synagogue
by Miriam Seidel


02: Village Voice
On Edge
by C. Carr


03: Forward
Returning to the Fold On Their Own Terms
by Stanley Mieses


04: Jewish Week
Fabric of Their Lives
by Susan Josephs


05: Time Out New York
Immigrant Song
by Billie Cohen