David Bergelson's play I Shall Not Die but Live takes place during the Nazi invasion of the USSR in a collective settlement adjacent to an agricultural experimentation farm in Ukraine. The world premiere of the play took place in Habima in May 1944. It was the first theatre production performed in an Eretz-Israeli theatre that engaged with the extermination of the Jews during the Holocaust.
This lecture will explore how the play imported into the Yishuv a symbolic conceptualization of the Holocaust, the Jewish struggle against Nazism, and a deep sense of Jewish solidarity. The lecture points to the centrality of the transnational Jewish cultural mechanism in shaping a national and Eretz-Israeli Jewish identity in the Hebrew speaking theatre.
Referentin:
Dr. Shelly Zer-Zion is a theatre historian and Chair of the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Haifa.