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by Alex Cigale
WARNING: this is a feel good story.
Tiny tropical town on northern coast of the Dominican Republic saves 800 Jews from certain death. The year is 1938; Franklin Delano Roosevelt convenes an international conference in Évian, France to discuss what to do about the one million Jews displaced by Hitler's Anschluss, the annexation of German-speaking territories of Austria and Czechoslovakia.
Of 31 countries attending, one does not beg off with excuses, or worse, voice open racism: the Dominican Republic.
“Sosúa: Dare to Dance Together,” a musical teen theater production at the YM/YWHA on Nagle Avenue opened with two shows during the weekend of June 5 and 6.
What better way to memorialize suffering? It’s not just “Never Again!” but “We Are Still Here!” We will transform the nightmare of history into a cry for “Unity!”
It is 1940 again on the stage, and the Jewish immigrants, working together with the town's residents, clear the jungle to create a dairy and cheese cooperative, Productos Sosúa, that exists to this day. Many intermarry and stay, though most emigrate to the United States after the war.
The memory of this earlier collaboration comes to life in the musical, and this living thing now brings with it a very real potential to unite the various communities of the Heights.
Conceived by the Y's Chief Program Officer Victoria Neznansky and directed and written mostly by legendary Broadway director Liz Swados, “Dare to Dance Together” owes much of its substance to the local teens, ages 11 to 17, who bring the material to life. Each has made a contribution to the script in the form of their personal experiences of racism, difference and difficulty, and three of the numbers were composed by teens Kaitlin Abreu, John Guiterrez and Thalia Pignanelly. These, and the songs immediately preceding, are some of the most effective in the play.
Having myself come to the states at age 11, I was particularly touched by “Stay.” On stage, the Spanish-speaking kids stand separate from the Jewish kids. They circle the Jews, intoning something mysterious (or is it menacing?) and then, once the song is repeated in English, the work and pleasure of learning from each other’s cultures begins.
My friend Henry Regensteiner, who sat next to me, came to the Heights at a similar age from Germany in the late 1930s. When “Stay There” sounded, tears came to his eyes as he was able to remember, mourn, and once again say farewell to the many who where left behind and died. And so each person in the audience seemed touched, as were the lives of the child actors by their participation in this piece of community theater.
And I too was moved in a very personal way.
These kids have now given me the courage to one day return to my birthplace in Western Ukraine to seek out the mass graves in which my grandparent’s families were shot and buried or incinerated, and to look for genuine signs of Jewish revival in those “borderlands.”
Our story will also continue. Another local artist, Renee Silverman, is making a documentary that stands a good chance of being picked up by PBS or HBO. The new Y Teen Theater will have at least another season, and might potentially permanently revive this historic theater as part of a larger proposed arts program.
The forthcoming school budget cuts are likely to disproportionately affect the arts; the Nagle Y’s efforts to step in to fill the void are desperately needed. Most importantly, our children, working together, will not just sanctify the memory of the Holocaust, but bring the promise of Sosúa home, transforming their own lives and relationships through experiential, authentic learning and, in the process, meld the next generation of leaders while building and knitting our uptown community.
Alex Cigale is a poet and translator of Russian poetry who lived in Inwood from 1985-87 and again since 2001. He and his work can be found online on his open Facebook page.
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