Page 4 - The Canadian Jewish News, Friday, December 16, 1977
Vational News
M-T
(Michael Rumack photo)
Grade three class at Beth TUrvah congregational school hi Toronto entertain at Maikham 'Mall daring Chanoka, one of several presentations sponsored by North-East Jewish Commonit>- Services duing eight days of holiday. From left in front are Wayne Die-tel, Mami Filer, Stacey Fmitman, Jacqueline Kott and Suzanne Tepperman. Back are Mami Tomer, Amy Rosen and Naomi Sheldon.
' Theatre cannot be branded'
BvJENIVABERGER
TORONTO —
English language theatre in Montreal is in a precarious state these days, and if the proposed white paper on culture is adopted. Toronto may
welcome another director to its folds. .Ale.xander Hausvater. in town recently to direct the production of Kaspar at the Cafe Sohp. has suddenly rediscovered Toronto through new eyes and he's delighted with its ethnic-itv.
Israelis hecuUine unicfue art show
TORONTO fStaff] —
The Canada-Israel Cultural Foundation and a : : leading Haifa gallery owner have teamed up to : bring a unique exhibition here next year that will : : mvolve 10 local galleries and a display of over 400 Israeli works in all mediums.
Billed as the largest Israeli exhibition of art abroad, the three-week-long event is planned to > coincide with celebrations for Israel's 30th anni-versary next May.
Behind the impressive organizational feat is Herbert Goldman, a German-bom gallery owner : who came to Israel in 1933 and established a : gallery prior to the state's independence.
He regularly travels throughout Europe and North America, promoting Israeli art and arrang-mgexhibits.Itwilltakeclosetoayearofplanningto ' arrange the Toronto show and a smaller-scale exhibit at the same time in Ottawa's National Art Centre.
.Aside from being a business venture, the project aims at familiarizing the Canadian public with a cross-section of Israeli art from sculpture to kinetic pieces, paintings to tapestries, graphics to posters — in modes from the figurative to the avant-garde. A number of Yorkv'ille area galleries are participating in the event, each handling a' different subject area.
For Goldman there is a political motive as well to the exhibit. "The image of Israel as a belligerent military power is just not true," he remarked in a recent interview, while in town to co-ordinate the show. "It is a big mistake not to promote art that shows Israelis are human — people who suffer, enjoy, cry, laugh."
Noted Joel Slater; president of the Canada-Israel Cultural Foundation: "It's a way of creating goodwill for Israel, of showing that the country has a viable cultural base...its human side is.best exemplified by its artists."
For the North American tourist who associates Israeli ail with bearded Chassids, depictions of the Western Wall at sunset and a Sabbath supper scene, there will be some surprises.
Goldman ranks Jews as his largest group of clients, but he said they ofteti have mis-concefptions about Israeli art, based on the tourist trade in realistic, biblical or landscape paintings.
The third generation in a family of gallery owners, he said that although art is international - m its expression, Israelis do have a characteristic manifestation: their use of brilliant/ colors mfluenced by an environment of sun and sand; a brightness seldom found in North European artists.
Thematically. artists have been affected by the horror of Holocaust and war. An older generation of painters, like Jerusalem-bom Moshe Castel, employ an abstract form using letters of the alphabet in works of KabaJlistic and symbolic value.
War-time immigrant Yigael Tumarkin, a 44-year-oId painter and sculptor depicts subjects devoted to war, peace, and social injustice and even employs machine gun parts in his pieces.
Affected by international influences, Yaacov Agam. a well-known kinetic artist, studied at the , Bezalel school of art and now works in Paris. A number of realist and figurative painters still draw their inspiration from the biblical landscapes.
Goldman is also planning to print a catalogue for the exhibit and hopes to bring a little bit of Canadian cuhare to Israeli soil, with a showing of Eskimo art in his Haifa gallery.
The 30th anniversary exhibit has also had the assistance of the Canada-Israel Chamber of Commerce. An Israeli cabinet minister is expected to officiate at the' show's opening.
The Montreal-based director, whose Montreal Theatre Lab has blossomed into the most experimental voice in English language theatre in the city says, "local grants are being held back if everything isn't done in French. The Lab is perhaps the only pure experimental theatre in Canada. But. we may have to leave the province."
Hausvater, who was bom in Romania in 1947 and started his theatrical career at the age of six in the Romanian Natiotial Theatre's production of Richard HI, has done a lot of travelling in his 30 years, much of it as the result of what he terms "a chauvinistic attitude toward the arts."
He was 12 when he moved to Israel, where he completed his BA in English and the arts ind was subsequently engaged with a company of performers who dramatized the news of the day on types of medieval pageant wagons which they took throughout towns. They were verbally anacked for their, critical views and Hausvater recalls, "I was choking personally. I left Israel and went to Ireland.^ But Ireland is a country of dreams and I developed mto a different kind of anist."
He completed his MA oh J.M. Synge and took over the direction of The Peacock, the experimental theatre connected with Dublin's Abbey Theatre. Then came the directive, "only Irish plays." Haus-
Alexander Hausvater
vater packed and left. "Theatre cannot be functional." he argues. "It cannot be branded."
When he came, to Canada in 1971. it was primarily for the purpose of finishing his PhD at McGill University, but once again the lure of breaking theatrical ground ' interfered with the call of academe, and Hausvater worked his way into Montreal theatrical circles by directing at the Saidye Bronfman Centre, the Pendulum Theatre, Sandwich Theatre, Sir George Williams University^ and the University of Montreal.
Shortly afterwards, he established the Montreal Theatre Lab. dedicated to the production of foreign plays w-hich have never been done in North American and the development of new plays.'One of the Lab's most startling successes was with Arrabel's
And They Put Handcufis on the Flowers. "It was," Hausvater says, "the Woodstock of Montreal."
Kaspar. a co-production of the Montreal Theatre Lab and Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille, was presented last year in Montreal. Because of the timely premise of the theme — the destructive force of language — Hausvater >ays. "the reaction was tremendous. In Montreal, the degree of reaction is much larger anyway, because of the nationalism. English people live on a day-to-day basis and they're more open to hew artistic direction."
En route to direct the second show of the season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Chelsea Theatre. Hausvater retums to Montreal to do a play at the Lab that he's been working on for six months. Called The Solzhenitsyn Show. Hausvater has collaborated with the Nobel Prize-winning author whom he compares to "the prophet of doom — like Isaiah or Jeremiah. He cannot write anything except that which he has experienced personally." An episodic show which uses nine actors, each one portraying a different stage of Solzhenitsyn's career, it is the reason that the Montreal Theatre Lab is politically oriented this year. It points up Haus-vater's influence on his company..
"There's no point in dreaming." he explains, "unless you can translate it in jpolitical terms."
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By A.J. ARNOLD WINNIPEG —
Two additional community responsibilities involving considerable financial resources have been announced by Al Omson, president of the Winnipeg Jewish Community Council.
At the joint annual, meeting of the council's delegate assembly and campaign contributors, Omson disclosed that for the first time since 1965, the YMHA Community Centre has again become a Combined Jewish Appeal beneficiary, and that the council has also assumed full responsibility for financing university student programing. "The return of the 'Y' centre as a major local beneficiary became necessary due to the change in funding support of the 'Y* by the United Way from deficit financing to a limited annual grant.
The taking over of student programing was inade necessary by a Hillel Foundation decision to withdraw its director and most of its support from the University of Manitoba.
The YMHA'received its first grant of some $30,000 from the Community Council in September. The extent of ongoing financial support for the YMHA and the basis of its continuing association with the council is still in negotiation.
With regard to campus programs, the council board has approved a budget of $22,000 based on proposals made by the YMHA and the Winnipeg office of the Canadian Zionist Federation. The 'Y' is to assume responsibility for campus programs for 1977-78 in cooperation with the Zionist Federation.
Negotiations on the relationship of the 'Y' Centre to the Community Council involve other things in addition to fund-jpg. Omson • expressed confidence that "our future working relationship
with the 'Y* will be closer and more productive than it has been in the recent past."
Later in the meeting Dr. M.J. Lehmann, a past president of the YMHA, expressed concern "at the slow rate of progress" in the Council-YMHA negotiations.
"I implore the board to expedite these discussions," he said. "Other-viise. there will be a death in our community — the death of one of our senior communal agencies, the 'Y'Centre."
Dr. Lehmann also referred to the capital fund and membership campaign
which the 'Y' has been conducting during 'the past year and charged that "the response from many so-called civic minded individuals, including senior board members of this organization (the Council) has been abysmally poor." Responding to Dr. Leh-
mann's criticism, Omson, said that the 'Y' Centre was "one of 10 or 12 major priorities" that the council is now dealing with. The problem had only come to his attention about 18 months ago, he stated, and discussions have been underway for over a year.
EmeSt Klein: no sfa'anger to intellectual acclaim
By DANIEL ACKS
TORONTO —
After 12yearsof research. Rabbi Ernest Klein, regarded by many as the world's greatest scholar in linguistics, has completed another major work — the first Hebrew etymological dictionary.
The manuscript, purchased by the University of Haifa and currently awaiting publication in Israel,' involves a detailed examination of the origins of the Hebrew language. Moshe Kones, executive director of the Canadian Friends of Haifa University, spent three years collaborating with Rabbi Klein in preparing the manuscript for publication. He regards Klein's work as an "historical event in the life of the Hebrew language."
Already possessing five doctorates, including a recent Doctorate of Literature from McMaster University and Doctor of Letters from the University of Guelph, Klein is no stranger to intellectual acclaim. His first work, Klein's Comprehensive Et>-mologicaI Dictionary of the English Language, took him 18 years of research to complete and was regarded as the "greatest lingusitic achievement of the century," by scholars in Men of Achievement (1974).
Klein's latest dictionary, which will not be published for another two years, is still awaiting the $150,000 in Canadian funds required to print the massive work. J. A. Lord, a Toronto businessman and archdeacon of the Anglican Church, who is currently writing Klein's biography and helping to raise funds for the book's publication, states that "only a man of Klein's knowledge of language could write such a work."
Klein, who speaks 40 languages, regards his latest achievement as a labor of love. An energetic 82-year-old, he is eager to show a visitor to his study the numerous commendations bestowed upon him by the city of Toronto, including the Golden PhD awarded in honor of the 50th anniversary of his promotion to Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Vienna in 1975.
Had it not been for Chaim Rabin, professor of linguistics at the Hebrew University who recognized the worth of Klein's efforts, it is assumed that the manuscript would still remain unknown within the rabbi's study today.
It was Rabin who brought the existence of the
'-''Mm.
Rabbi Ernest Klein of Toronto
valuable work to the attention of Beatrice Wintrob, a Toronto patron. Haifa University was receptive to Mrs. Wintrob's efforts on behalf of Klein in finding a sponsor for the manuscript.
Presently sitting upon the shelves of Klein's study is another completed work, a medical etymological dictionary, for which he has yet to find a sponsor. This new book, which contains a history of 3.000 scientists and a grammar section that will enable doctors and scientists to develop new terminology that is stylistically accurate, may not be published due to lack of financial support.
Klein told The Canadian Jewish News he has distanced himself from the problems of publishing his unrecognized manuscript. "I cannot make any plans to have the book published. People know about my work and if they are so unwilling to print a work which is unique in the whole world, then they distinctly show where their priorities lie. I am not a wealthy man and I cannot devote so much money to printing all the works I have written."
For Klein, language has always been his passion and not merely his vocation. "The development of words is like the development of any plant or animal. To look at words they seem to be alive. A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver."
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