Jewish-Canadian playwright awarded top literary prize
Hannah Moscovitch wins $150,000 Windham Campbell Prize for decade of work that delves into life’s hard moral questions
Renee Ghert-Zand is the health reporter and a feature writer for The Times of Israel.
Yale University’s first attempt in late February at notifying Hannah Moscovitch she had won a $150,000 prize was an email that ended up in her spam folder. Its second attempt was a voicemail message that Moscovitch almost didn’t bother answering.
As a sleep-deprived new mother who admits to being hard to reach these days, Moscovitch suspected the voicemail was a scam. It was only the mention of “Yale” that made her think she should probably answer.
When the fast-rising Canadian playwright called back, she learned that the $150,000 prize was very real, and for her work over the past decade.
Moscovitch is of nine recipients from around the world to receive 2016 Windham Campbell Prizes in recognition of literary achievements or potential. The 37 year old is the first Canadian playwright, and the first Canadian woman, to be given the prize. She is the third Jewish recipient: South African Jonny Steinberg and American-Israeli Adina Hoffman — both non-fiction writers — were awarded the prize in 2013, its inaugural year.
A new model of patronizing the arts
Administered by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, the the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes were established in 2011. Their endowment is from the estate of novelist and memoirist Donald Windham (1920-2010) and are named for him and his life partner of 45 years, actor and writer Sandy M. Campbell, who died in 1988.
The mission of the prizes is to not only highlight literary achievement, but also to provide writers with the opportunity to focus on their work without the constraints of financial concerns.
‘It’s a huge confidence builder, it’s emboldening’
The Ottawa-born Moscovitch had never heard of the Windham Campbell Prizes and did not even know that she had been nominated for the secretive selection process. Only after the fact did she learn that she had been recommended by the artistic directors of the Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary and Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, where she is playwright-in-residence.
“It’s an outrageous amount of money, but what’s most meaningful is that they’ve actually seen me and witnessed my development as an artist,” Moscovitch told The Times of Israel from Halifax, where she currently lives.
“It’s a huge confidence builder, it’s emboldening. It is really exceptional to be acknowledged outside of Canada and among Americans and Europeans,” she added.
An attraction to issues of moral complexity
While this particularly large prize seemingly came out of the blue, Moscovitch has not gone without recognition for her outstanding work during her short career.
Moscovitch, whose plays have been staged across Canada and internationally, has been lauded as “an indie sensation,” “irritatingly talented” and “the wunderkind of Canadian theatre.” She has won many awards, including the $20,000 Trillium Book Award from the government of Ontario in 2013 for her drama “This Is War.” Moscovitch was the first playwright to win the award since its inception in 1987.
“This Is War” is about the psychological toll the Afghanistan War took on Canadian soldiers. In the play, four Canadian combatants are each interrogated by an unseen and unheard interviewer about a possible atrocity committed in the Panjwaii desert during a joint operation with the Afghan National Army against the Taliban.
Moscovitch did extensive research for the play by interviewing returning soldiers, war journalists and photojournalists over the course of five years.
The prolific Moscovitch has taken a similar preparatory approach to her other plays, including “East of Berlin,” a drama about a young man who grew up in Paraguay and discovered as a teenager that his father was a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz. In the play, the son returns to Paraguay after having fled seven years earlier to Germany, where he ended up following in his father’s footsteps by studying medicine — and also falling in love with the Jewish daughter of a Holocaust survivor.
Moscovitch’s intense interest in the Holocaust started early. As a girl, she was obsessed with the subject, reading anything about it she could find at home or at the local public library.
“I was a creepy kid fascinated by the Holocaust. I was the only kid in middle school reading Primo Levi and ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,'” she said.
Even then, she was attracted to issues of moral complexity and had a tendency to ask big questions, like, “Is morality a necessary casualty of war?” or “Is there a limit to love?”
A playwright compelled ‘to disrupt simplification’
Moscovitch has been quoted as saying that she seeks “to disrupt simplification.” Her subject matter varies, but she always seeks out the most complex situations and approaches them with authenticity and nuance.
“In all of her work, Moscovitch focuses on the painful (and sometimes dangerous) ways that the past ruptures the present, and the difficult questions about responsibility and redemption that result,” the Windham Campbell Prizes selection committee wrote about her oeuvre.
‘Moscovitch focuses on the painful (and sometimes dangerous) ways that the past ruptures the present’
Artistic director of Toronto’s SummerWorks performance festival Michael Rubenfeld told The Times of Israel he doesn’t think he has ever met someone who works as hard as Moscovitch does on her craft.
“Hannah is one of the most sensitive and compassionate people I know. This, combined with a remarkable intellect and a dedication to always growing as an artist, has produced astonishing results,” Rubenfeld said.
“I think one of the mistakes that a lot of writers make is they approach their work as someone who believes they have something to say, or teach. Hannah approaches things as someone who wants to try to work through her own curiousities and a genuine desire to see a more aware and compassionate world. The result is a body of work that is endlessly searching, full of humanity that brings her audiences into a more complex, more problematized world, all in the name of building deeper understanding of the world around us and the people that live in it,” he added.
One subject she isn’t ready yet to tackle
Moscovitch went to Montreal’s National Theatre School of Canada to learn acting, but ended up a playwright. She never considered other genres.
“I like the live event. I want to write for a temporal, spacial event. I like the collaboration with others that happens in the theater,” she said.
Given her interest in complex subjects, the Times of Israel wondered whether Moscovitch might try tackling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The playwright (who has a Jewish father and non-practicing Christian mother) received a Jewish education, went on the March of the Living, and spent four months after high school in Israel as a volunteer on Kibbutz Kfar Hanassi.
To her mind, however, this is not enough to position her to write a play about Israelis and Palestinians.
“I believe in doing rigorous research. I would have to live in Israel for a substantial amount of time before taking on that subject. North American Jewish writers sometimes take it on and fail because they don’t know what they are talking about,” Moscovitch said.
“There are enough works out there about North American Jews who go to Israel and discover how much more complex the situation is than they thought or were taught to believe. I don’t have anything else I’d want to contribute to that genre,” she said.
‘There are enough works out there about North American Jews who go to Israel and discover how much more complex the situation is’
She would, however, consider writing something addressing the Jewish experience in Canada. Of late, Moscovitch has become “obsessed” with the Jewish gangsters of Montreal of the 1920s and 1930s.
“Maybe I’ll end up working on something on them,” she said.
Before getting to that, she has film and opera projects in the works. She is also writing the script for “X Company,” a World War II spy drama for CBC television, which is in its second season of filming in Budapest.
Her recent $150,000 windfall will give Moscovitch, her theater director husband Christian Barry and their baby son Elijah, some economic security for a while. It won’t however, detract the hardworking playwright from doing what she feels called to do, regardless of how audiences might receive her work.
“I can be sitting in the audience at one of my plays, and the whole audience may not like me because I am exposing them to something they don’t want to see. I do think about how what I write will be accepted, but it doesn’t stop me,” she said.
