Performing Captivity, Performing Escape: Cabarets and Plays from the Terez?/Theresienstadt Ghetto (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781803092027)

A meticulously researched book that collects twelve playscripts written by European Jews imprisoned in the Terez? ghetto during the Holocaust.

The concentration camp and Jewish ghetto at Terez?, or Theresienstadt, in what is now the Czech Republic, was a site of enormous suffering, fear, and death. But amid this horrific period, there was also a thriving and desperately vibrant cultural life. While the children's drawings and musical pieces created in the ghetto have become justly famous, the prisoners' theatrical works, though a lesser-known aspect of their artistic endeavors, deserves serious attention as well.

Performing Captivity, Performing Escape collects twelve theatrical texts--cabaret songs and sketches, historical and verse dramas, puppet plays, and a Purim play--written by Czech and Austrian Jews. Together these works reveal the wide range of ways in which the prisoners engaged with and escaped from life in the ghetto through performance. The anthology opens with an insightful prologue by novelist Ivan Kl?a, who was interned in the ghetto as a child and contains a detailed introduction by editor Lisa Peschel about the pre-war theatrical influences and wartime conditions that inspired the theater of the ghetto. The array of theatrical forms collected in this anthology speaks of the prisoners' persistence of hope in a harrowing time and will be a moving read for students and scholars of the Holocaust.


Author: Lisa Peschel
ISBN-10: 1803092025
ISBN-13: 9781803092027
Publisher: Seagull Books
Language: English
Published: 10/11/2023
Pages: 444
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.29lbs
Size: 7.65h x 6.19w x 0.79d