In “Playing Shylock,” now showing at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in New York, Saul Rubinek walks on stage every night to play a version of himself.
Dressed in tzitzit and payos, the son of Holocaust survivors and star of “Hunters” and “Fraiser” informs the audience that his production of “The Merchant of Venice,” where he plays the infamous Shakespearean Jew Shylock, has been cancelled.
What follows starts as Rubinek raging at those vying to cancel the play, but becomes a deconstruction of everything — antisemitism, Jewish representation in film and TV, assimilation, the Bard’s true identity, the very life journey that led Rubinek to this moment.
It sounds cerebral, and it is, but it is also deeply felt, deeply emotional and deeply relatable.
The Jewish actor chatted with Kveller about growing up speaking Yiddish, the Jewish desire to disagree about everything and the most personal work he’s ever created.
This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity and length.
I went to your play with my mother, who is also the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and we were both crying at the end. What does it feel like to channel your father every night, playing Shylock in Yiddish every night?
It’s complicated because every night, I sit backstage and I look at this.
[Rubinek shows me an old black and white photograph on his phone.]
This is my zayde; he must be in his 30s here. He buried each of his seven children, except for my father. They all died of starvation in the Lodz ghetto. Then he was sent to Majdanek and was also murdered.
So I look at this picture in order to ground myself. And then he says to me — I’ll do it in the Yiddish accent. He says: “Relax. Don’t get so heavy about this. The only thing you have to remember is you’re going to go out there. You’re not going to try to impress anybody. You’re not going to try to be good. What you’re going to do is, you’re just going to go there, you’re going to tell your story, and then you’re going to finish and go home.” And that’s all I do.
In “Playing Shylock,” you talk about your grandfather being a dayan — a religious judge — and it brings up this Jewish desire to pick apart at things. And there’s nothing you don’t pick apart in this play.
I mean, if you want a play, a Jewish play, to answer questions, then you haven’t met a lot of Jews. Our Talmud is filled with one generation of rebbes disagreeing with the next generation of rebbes.
You’re slowly chipping away at the ground underneath your feet!
You have to, in order to be a human being. This is what we have to offer other cultures — just as other cultures have a great deal to offer us. One of the great things that we have to offer is lack of certainty.
You speak Yiddish on stage. It’s the language of your youth, right? You spoke Yiddish before English?
I grew up with Fridish — French and Yiddish — in a very violent Montreal, working-class, French-Canadian, antisemitic world, and in an immigrant Jewish Catholic-French-Canadian-goyim-hating world. We children were in gangs; not organized, but there was violence. We were very poor.
Then, my father got a better job and he moved 120 miles away from Montreal to Ottawa. There, for the first time, I was put into a public school instead of a Jewish one where I spoke Yiddish.
I was violent. People laughed at me and I went after them. My father had no money, [but he put me in] children’s theater. Theater was free, because if boys went to a theater school in 1955 they were called faggots or queers or sissies. I didn’t know those terms. So I went at 7 years old, with my fists clenched, and like I do in “Playing Shylock,” at a certain point I opened my hands.
I started to play storytelling with other children, and I never left. That’s where I lived for the last 70 years.
Is this the most personal play you’ve ever done?
The most personal thing that I’ve ever worked on is this: I wrote a novel, “All in the Telling,” based on a play that I wrote that I’m hoping will be on in Toronto in 18 months. It’s a play about my family.
In “Shylock,” I talk about how in 1986, I took my parents back to Poland to have a reunion with the Polish farmers who hid them during the Holocaust. Now, what I don’t tell the audience in “Shylock” is that I shot that as a 1986 documentary, “So Many Miracles,” which played all over the world. And I wrote a book based on interviews with my parents with the same name.
“All in the Telling” is about how that book and that documentary — both titled “So Many Miracles” — came to be. It’s described like this: “When Saul falls in love with a non-Jewish woman, he discovers his immigrant Holocaust survivor parents are not as cool with it as he said they’d be. Their reaction is biblical. Desperate to fix his relationship with his parents, he lies and tells them he’s writing a book about their story of love and survival. In chronicling their lives, Saul discovers their extraordinary loyalty and bravery, but also the lies, the secrets and deceptions buried in his family’s past.”
It’s a story that relates to all families affected by the trauma of war and human experience through generations, no matter who they are or where they’re from. It’s the most personal thing I’ve done in my life.
