Never Forget

Sunday, April 7 is Holocaust Remembrance Day. It's an observance that Peekskill Playhouse and The BeanRunner Cafe have marked in-tandem each year with a play reading or production fitting for the occasion, an occasion not pleasantly remembered, but rather, important never to forget.

This year, we'll read a stage production work-in-progress by Hollywood playwright and screenwriter, Max Eisenberg. Max Eisenberg grew up in Los Angeles, as American as Wally and The Beaver, but the son of concentration camp survivors. 'Leave It To' Max, he penned a fine feature motion picture back in 1997, A Call To Remember, that told the story of first-generation American kids of the fifties and sixties trying to assimilate while their parents bore the too-fresh pain of coming through a World War as those chosen to view the horrors of 20th Century genocide. The film starred Blyth Danner and Joe Mantegna as the tortured parents, David and Paula, struggling to raise childern who knew, and really tried to shed, the stigma that haunted all Jews in the decades after the war.

Your Bones Don't Have To Roll is Eisenberg's stage version of the Tobias family's (same family from the film) adaptation to American society, or the lack thereof, told by the youngest son, Ben. Cynical, sometimes bitter, sarcastic, with razor-sharp observations, Ben, played by Israeli-born actor Pe'er Klein, narrates his life through a minefield-strewn prism of modern Jewish life in America. He's neither fish-nor-fowl (but always foul), lucky or luckless, warrior or chief, faux-Jewish nor Jew-for-Jesus, token nor talisman, Yid Kid nor Kid Rock. 'Tis a tale told by an idealist, a young teen and 20-Something who wished "it" never happened. Don't we all.

But it did happen, more that 60 years ago, man's inhumanity to man, and we should never forget. Painful as it may be, we must remember. In my research on Your Bones Don't Have To Roll after I received the script from L.A., I was shocked at the volume of Internet deniers of the Holocaust. The Information SuperHighway has a traffic jam of prophets, proselytizers all speaking their twisted minds and false tongues to any gulible listener. It's quite amazing what the so-called miracle of technology has spawned. Anyone with a computer can claim just about anything without review or criticism, nor truth.

The Peekskil Playhouse, of which I am an artistic director, will never forget nor deny what took place in The Final Solution. To that end, we will continue to work for the Remembrance of atrocities past and present, to a peaceful solution to Middle East arguments, to a Palestine and an Israel of the future... brothers-in-arms rather than in armaments... and to American Jews and Islamic-Americans who can look back on a proud and peaceful history.

Previously, on Holocaust Remembrance Days the Peekskill Playhouse presented Don Monaco's To The Orangerie, the story of a young journalist who narrowly escapes the Anschluss in 1938 Vienna with the help of a Nazi soldier, and The Trial of Klaus Barbie by New York playwright, Fred Pezzulli, about the trial that put a country, and its collaborators, as well as an SS Commandant, The Butcher of Lyon, on the witness stand years after Barbie's escape and exile.

Sunday, April 7th @ The BeanRunner Cafe, 201 South Division Street in Peekskill. Seating at 4:00PM, curtain up at 4:30. $12 Donation. Cheese, Wine, and Music on-the-house. Remember.