1939 -
Israeli playwright.
The plays of Yehoshua Sobol reflect common Israeli themes, including the Holocaust, the Zionist state-building enterprise, and the Arab-Israel conflict. A graduate of the Sorbonne in Paris, Sobol has worked as artistic director of the Haifa Municipal Theater since 1984, and most of his plays have premiered there. His most famous work is Ghetto (1984), one of three related plays about the Vilna ghetto. Other works include Soul of a Jew (1982), The Days to Come (1971), and Shooting Magda, or The Palestinian Girl (1985). Sobol has made it his artistic mission to explore the problematic roots of the Zionist project, as he did most forcefully in his 1977 production, Night of the Twentieth, and to show the consequences for both Jews and Arabs of succumbing to political interests rather than fulfilling nationalist ideals. Many of his later plays, such as Kefar (1996), have also probed the difficulties of trying to assimilate personal lives into paradigms created by historical developments. Looking at history as a way of examining contemporary Israeli society, Sobol is particularly interested in the intersection between the personal - even the emotional - and the political. His plays emphasize that while Zionist ideals could not extinguish personal desires, they did complicate the formation of strong, secure individual identities. Almah (1999) extends his focus on individual personality by meditating on the life of Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel and her torturous efforts to form an authentic, creative public life. Sobol's plays, always sensitive to the morally problematic compromises imposed upon by history and circumstance, have been produced all over the world and in many languages.
Bibliography
Abramson, Glenda. Drama and Ideology in Modern Israel. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Ben-Zvi, Linda, ed. Theater in Israel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.
Sobol, Yehoshua. Ghetto, translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger. Tel Aviv: Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, 1986.
Taub, Michael. Israeli Holocaust Drama. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996.
Taub, Michael. Modern Israeli Drama in Translation. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1992.
— JULIE ZUCKERMAN
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