Page 2-The Canadian Jewish News, Thursday, August 10, 1989
WorM-National
M-T
. By.
KABBI W. GUNTHER PLAUT
At first glance, John Hirsch — a one-time import from Winnipeg — was just another of the many Jews who left the prairies to make it in the big town. And now that he is dead, much of the emphasis the media gave to his career was placed on things that did not touch the real core of this gifted man.
We ail live on two plains: one that is visible to everyone, and one that belongs to the realm of self and soul. We can always recall the former when we speak of someone, arid rarely the latter. So it was with John Rabbi Plaut , ■ Hirsch.
The media dealt only with the landmarks of his life. To be sure, they were impressive enough: TTiere wasXhe young immigrant fh)m Hungary who could not speak a word of English, yet got the highest marks in English when he graduated fi'om the University of Manitoba. There w^s his penchant for the arts: the writer of plays, the poet, the painter aind stage-designer, and aboye all, his love for the theatre, Amateur productions were followed by semi-pro ventures arid, iri time, by the founding of the first regional theatre, the Manitoba Theatre Centre,
Erorii there, the tiek to Toronto led him to ria-tipnal prominence: Stratford, where in the '6()s he was an associate director aind in the '80s its full-fledged head; CBG, where he was for years in charge of dramatic productions, teaching posts at Yale and ScwAernMrthodist University; and guest director in many lands, including Israel, where he produced Chekhov's The Seagulls at the Habimah in Tel Aviv.: All the world was his stage, and titie Order of Canada acknowledged his stature.
At 59, he died of a form of meningitis which, as the media pointed out time and again, was AIDS-relatai. They could not let him depart this life Nvithout dwelling on the nature of his death, that is to say, on his private life style, I am not sure what this continued emphasis was meant to convey. Was it a moral judgment designed to take hirti down a peg or two? Or was it to point up that the disease ravages the unknown as well as the famous, like a Rock Hudson and John Hirsch? Or did it signify nothing, in that it was inerely an iriiplicit recognitiori that AIDS has now assumed epidemic proportions and strikes everywhere arid anywhere?
Whatever the reason, the cold footnote said nothing about the need for compassion and understanding, for education, and for an end to prejudice and mindless fear.
And the media only hinted at the inner man behind the black beard, who rose to the heights of his craft because he was possessed by a deep passion fiielled by a vision of excellence. He was hard on himself and On others, he wanted the best. Whence came this drive?
I see it iiiike4 to the trauma of his childhood, which he once described as ''the bottom of human existence": the young boy, thrust into the Budapest ghetto by the Nazis, orphaned at l4 when his parents were murdered; alone in the world but for a cousm, surviving somehow, then, after the War, dwelling in a ramp for displaced persons in Germany, and fiiudly, the chance to start life anew in Canada. Why Winnipeg? According to Michael Schonberg it happened when during the trip across the ocean Hii^h was shown a map of Canada. I want to go tberej he said. It's right in the middle of the cmmtry and probably the safest iriace to be. It became that hideed, when the Shack family adopted him.
lAlihough Hirsch was not part of striictured Jewish life he was always part of his people. Perhaps nowhere did this become more evident than when he produced TheDybbiik — dealing with the demons he himself had known. -
He wrote a poem once, entitled "On the anniversary of riiy escape. "It iends with these words: A traveller will be I, / a transient among pet^le/ who still believe in prayers, / rightness, dogmas, and both / Heaven and Hell.
Jews also in van of poHtical HberaUzation
tn
JOSEPH POLAKOFF
WASHINGTON-
Jewish religious and cultural life is reviving in Lithuania among its approximately 10,000 Jews and some of them are taking a prominent part in the aistbnishing political changes taking place as a result of perestroika, a leading Lithuanian reform leader has reported here.
Vytautas Landsbergis, who Is president of the Lithuanian Reform Movement, Sajudis, said Jews within that organs ization are "strongly supporting Lithuania's rebirth," noting one of the 35 members of its executive committee is Emanuel Zingerius, a Yiddish-speaking activist in his early thirties.
Zingerius, who is chairman of the country's Jewish Cultured Society, was engag^ in an intensive course in Jewish studies at Columbia University in mid-July under the sponsorship of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York.
Another member of Sanjudls, Landsbergis said, is "the prominent Jewish writer," novelist Giregory Kanovius (Kan-ovich). He Is author of Candles in the Wtad, which concerns Jewish experiences. Kanovius is a member of Lithuania's National Assembly of People's Deputies. His son, Dmitri, is a budness-manui Toronto.
Met the
Landsbergis was interviewed at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where he gave a news conference. Charles Maynes, editor of the endowment's Foreign Policy magazine and a former assistant secretary of state, introduced him as head of the largest reform organization in Lithuania.
While in Washington, Landsbergis visited the Lithuanian embassy that has been functioning here since 1940 — the United States never having recognized the Soviet absorption of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in World War Two. He also met with Congressmen and Bush administration officials to explain his movement's goals.
Landsborgis, a member of the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies, said the mpvemoit is not a poK litical party but a force to unify elements among Lithuanians working for indepei^nce, including the country's Communist Party. Tbie movement's natioiial assembly— Sei-mas>r-adopts tion on restoration of Lithuanian statehood at its fifth sesskm hi Vibiius on June 18.. ^
While Jews numbered about 1% of the population, some 225;OpaLirh^
Lithuania's general population prior to World War Two — perhaps 1,500 remain. The large majority of Lithuania's Jews today are imniigrants from other areas of the Soviet Union, Landsbergis said. "Statistically we see them all as one," he said.
"We're glad there is a Jewish presence in Lithuania/' he said. *'We like them." They are engaged in the full spectrum of Lithuanian life — from intellectuals to workers in factories. Many have been more highly educated than Lithuanians, he said. In small towns Jews have be-
come integrated to the point that they speak the local dialects.
Landsbergis said he ber^ Ueved there was no anti-semitlsm hi his country. *'We watch and empathize with the plight of Soviet jews," he added. "That explains why Russian Jews are coming to Lithuania."
Lithuania had a miserable record during the German occupation in World War Two. Many Lithuanians joined the Nazi forces and served in the death camps. .
Before World War Two, the 55,000 Jews in Vilnius
constituted 28% of its general population. For generations, Jewish institutions there produced many of Jewry's outstanding scholars. In 1941, the Jewish population increased to 80,000 as refugees from other areas came seeking reftige in the city. Only several months after Nazis entered Vilnius they put 35,000 Jews to death. By September of that year, the remaining Jews were interned in two ghettos and then transferred to death camps. Few survived.
Today, Landsbergis said, few "indigenous" Jews maintain "a func-
tioning synagogue" in Kovno, which before World War Two had one of the most elite Jewish communities In Eastern Europe. New Jewish communities now exist in Slaulai and Memel.
The Lithuanian Cultural Society is currently working on three projects: starting a newspaper establishing a newspaper, establishing Yiddish schools, and constructing a museum in Vilnius, he said. If external funds are not forthcoming for the museuin the movement will aid the society to build it, Landsbergis added.
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By ; ELLEN GOODMAN
Jerry Falwell, the man who turned a flock into a constituency, the minister who quoted pollsters as fluently as prophets, the pol who spoke from a televised pulpit, has now pulled off a trick that the Pentagon would envy: he has declared victory and quit the fight.
Speaking from the very heart of Sin City, Las Vegas, he told his ev'SMMHSHIIpedia congregation that the Moral Majority Was closing up shop. "Our goal has been achieved," he said. "The religious right is solidly in place and . . . religious conservatives in America are now in for the duration." .
So out with the bumper stickers that proclaimed, "The Moral Majority is Neither.'' Gone is the favorite whipping dog of the left and the target of the editorial cartoonists. They won't have the 10-year-old organization of televahgepoliticians to kick around any more.
Typically, Falwell's victory declaration was one part hype, A more objective benediction over the body would say that this grass-roots lobby group died of its excess, not its success.
At its peak of power, in 1984, the Moral Majority raised $11 million and counted Ronald Reagan as its man. After being infected by the contagious disease of the two Jimmys — Swaggart and Bak-ker —the group saw its revenue cut by tworthirds and its political candidate Pat Robertson stopped in the South.
Falwell didn't accomplish his agenda of getting prayer in the schools and evolution out of them, of making abortion illegal and labeling parody pornography. The Moral Majority was painted as the Moralistic Minority.
Yet the group he founded on a mountaintop in Virginia did change the way we talk in politics.
The religious right injected "values" into the public debate. Moreovor, they defined that word in conservative, traditional and fundamentalist terms. Like political arbitrageurs, they took over powerful codewords from "family" to "American" to "life," even the word "moral" itself. They left liberals uneasy at such language and literally at a loss for words to express the range of their two beliefs to Americans in the middle — the ambivalent m^ority. ; "The Moral Majority set morals and ethics as
an agenda long before you had political candidates talking in those terms," says Kathleen Jamieson, who has taught and written about political rhetoric at the University of Texas. Indeed, by staking out the extreme edge, she says, they made it easier for politicans like Bush to move farther, to the right, to talk in its terms while still sounding moderate.
Falwell not only encouraged religious conservatives to get involved in politics, he helped to mute the long-standing American concern about separation of church and state. Bible-based, church-taught tenets about abortion, the role of women, homosexuality, were not matters of religious belief but of basic "values.'' His people were brought together and held together by the fear of assorted "isms": godless conimunism, secular humanism, feminism. Even pluralism.
In contrast, liberals have been far too slow in finding their own words. Some continue in the dated language of the New Deal. Others sound as mechanistic as Dukakis in his appeal to the allure of "competence." Still others like Jackson try to retake, piecemeal, co-opted words like family or patriotism. As Jamieson says: "There hasn't been a comparable discourse of values coming frorii the political left and that's a real loss."
Despite the attempts of some like Mario Cuomo there is no unified, overarching description of die modem liberal view: a value-system that is egalitarian, anti-war, comfortably pluralistic arid aware of the responsibility members of a community and world have to each other.
But this is as much a moment of change for liberals as for conservatives. One threat which fused the many sub-sects of the religious right — the fear of the Soviet Union — has diminished. The fear of environmental disaster now emerges as Threat Number One. Can that be a new vocabularly of caring for the left?
Now, direct from Las Vegas, comes the news that the Moral Majority, sullied by its evangelical brethren, is going into retreat. Amen to that. But conservative sounds dominate institutions from the Supreme Court to the White House, And meanwhile liberals are still struggling to find their tongues.
(c) The Boston Globe Newspaper Compa-nyAVashington Post Writers Group
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