The golem rises again, this time in Spanish with a Yiddish lilt
Having fled Caracas after tear-gas bomb attack, Michel Hausmann launches new venture in Miami with play inspired by his Holocaust survivor grandmother
Renee Ghert-Zand is the health reporter and a feature writer for The Times of Israel.
After the late Hugo Chávez ascended to power in Venezuela in 1999, life became more difficult for artists, and for Jews. But it wasn’t until 2010, when masked assailants set off a tear-gas bomb backstage at his Caracas production of “Jesus Christ Superstar” that prominent Jewish theater director Michel Hausmann finally decided it was time to leave his native country.
“The attack on the theater — while the show was going on and the house was packed — was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me,” Hausmann told The Times of Israel in an interview from his new home in Miami, Florida.
“I’m in exile. It was a choice I made. I was attacked and I had to leave,” he said.
The attack had come after a conflict arose between the show’s financial backers and Hausmann and producer Yair Rosenberg. According to consular documents revealed by WikiLeaks in 2011, the Canadian company RIM (maker of the Blackberry) and its local telecommunications partner, government-owned Movilnet had offered $300,000 to sponsor the musical production’s five-week run at the 2,600-seat main theater of the Central University of Venezuela — the only theater still operating independent of the Chávez government’s control.
Hausmann is quoted in the WikiLeaks documents as saying that RIM added a clause to the sponsorship agreement three weeks before opening night, prohibiting the production from buying advertising (even at its own expense) in media not approved by RIM and Movilnet.
Hausman, 34, and Rosenberg refused to comply, and RIM and Movilnet pulled the funds. The show went on, but after the tear-gas attack, theatergoers stayed away.
Venezuela’s loss is the United States’ gain. After living and working several years in New York, Hausmann has set his sights on creating regional theater in Miami, where none currently exists.
Together with acclaimed Venezuelan theater professional Moisés Kaufman, Hausmann recently founded the Miami New Drama company, with the aim of building it into a respected theater institution similar to American Conservatory Theater (ACT) in San Francisco and Arena Stage in Washington, DC.
Miami New Drama brings together English-language and Spanish-language theater, which now exist separately in Miami. The intention is to reflect the bilingual and multicultural diversity of the city, which has a population of 5.5 million and is home to the largest Cuban-American community. Although the majority of Miami residents are Hispanic, not all Cuban. Immigrants from all over Central and South America, as well as from the Caribbean, especially Haiti, make the city their home. Some 123,000 Jews reside in the greater Miami area.
Miami New Drama launched its inaugural season in January with “The Golem of Havana,” a musical play written and directed by Hausmann. The play, which combines Klezmer with Latin music, is set in Cuba in 1958, just as the island nation descends into revolutionary chaos.
‘I’m in exile. It was a choice I made. I was attacked and I had to leave’
In the play, an immigrant Jewish family of Hungarian Holocaust survivors tries to rebuild their lives as tailors in Havana. The father, Pinchas, is lured by business promises made by the mysterious Arturo, who has ties to the government of dictator Fulgencio Batista. Daughter Rebecca dreams of a golem-like hero who will save the Cuban people, while being drawn to Teo, the guerilla-fighter son of the family’s maid Maria. Mother Yutka struggles over who to trust as she is haunted by her past, including having been betrayed to the Nazis by the person who had hid her.
The play is inspired by Hausmann’s own grandmother’s life story. In 1944, when she was 26, the war reached her small Hungarian village where non-Jewish neighbors betrayed her and her family to the Nazis. Among the 14 people in her immediate family, only she and three of her siblings survived. The surviving siblings died soon after the war.
After being liberated from Auschwitz, Hausmann’s grandmother went to Sweden, where a relative helped arrange for her to go to the US. In Michigan, she met a young Hungarian Jewish man who had immigrated to Venezuela before the war. They married, and she returned with him to South America.
“My grandmother is still alive at 98, and she still has rage and anger about what happened to her,” Hausmann said.
Growing up, Hausmann often wondered about what he, had he been alive at the time, could have done to save his grandmother — and thus rescue his mother from the emotional trauma of being a second generation survivor.
Hausmann also wondered what his grandmother would have done had the tables been turned in that Hungarian village. He plays this out in “The Golem of Havana” by having Yutka grapple with whether or not to shelter the injured Teo, an act of treason punishable by death in 1958 Cuba.
The golem that looms over the production is a metaphor for the revolution. Like the magical creature from Jewish folklore, the revolution is created with the intention of saving people — but ultimately ends up turning on them.
‘Our filling a theater with 3,000 people for a musical became a political event. The government viewed it as a movement it couldn’t control, and thus a threat’
The Bolivarian Revolution led by Chávez in Venezuela turned the country against its Jews.
“The position of the Jews in Venezuela, and in Latin America in general, was great when I was growing up,” Hausmann said.
“There were around 25,000 Jews in Venezuela when I was a boy. Now there are only about 5,000. What’s happened really breaks my heart. The Venezuelan Jewish community was outstanding. It integrated Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews, and it produced extraordinary members of society who contributed to all fields,” he said.
With Chávez’s ascent, Jews went from being admired to being suspect. Hausmann recalled military raids on Jewish schools and the ransacking of the main Sephardic synagogue in Caracas. When his Israeli-born wife and he were married in Venezuela, none of her family could fly in from Israel for the wedding because the Chávez government had cut off diplomatic relations with Israel.
“Our filling a theater with 3,000 people for a musical became a political event. The government viewed it as a movement it couldn’t control, and thus a threat,” Hausmann said.
“The Golem of Havana,” which had limited off-Broadway and regional runs before its current staging in Miami, has been playing sold-out shows at the Colony Theater in Miami Beach. Its run was extended to February 14.
Hausmann credits the play’s universal themes, and the fact that it touches on the traumas of both the local Cuban and Jewish communities, for its success. He plans on bringing more impactful and resonant productions to Miami New Drama going forward.
‘The theme of exile relates to everyone in Miami in one way or another’
“There are more exciting and intricate stories than the ones that are currently being told. The theme of exile relates to everyone in Miami in one way or another,” he said.
Exiled from his home country, the director and playwright worries about the current political climate in his adopted one, especially the anti-immigrant rhetoric voiced during the presidential election race.
“I know first-hand that demagoguery, populism and blaming others can destroy a society,” he said.
