Do you want to see the dead warriors come back, the fallen army come back,
crawling out of its million coffins and walking back across the sea and
across the prairie; the waxen face of youth come out of its million graves
and its uniform hanging from its limp frame? Do you want to see the war
dead, the young ones ripped to pieces in the trenches standing like tired
beggars at your back door, dead hands and dead eyes and wailing softly: "I
was so young. I died so soon. All of us from all the countries who died so
soon, we grow lonely on the other side. Ah, my unlived days! My uneaten
bread! My uncounted years! They lie in a little corner and nobody comes to
them!"
It's a Jewish play called "The Dead Man" and every night in Glickman's
Palace Theater on Blue Island Avenue a thousand men and women sit with
staring eyes and watch this figure in its grave-clothes come dragging back
like a tired beggar, come moaning back with the cry: "My unlived days! My
uneaten bread! My uncounted years!"
He stands between Hamlet and Peer Gynt, this strangely motionless one who
has thrown the west side into an uproar. There is no drama around him. He
is a dead young man in uniform walking slowly, limply through three acts.
This is all one remembers--that his eyes were open and unseeing, that his
arms hung like a scarecrow's and that the fingers of his hands were curled
in and motionless.
* * * * *
They talk to him in the play. The scene is a Jewish village in Poland. The
war has ended. Famine, disease and poverty remain. Refugees, dying ones,
starving ones, huddle together in the dismantled synagogue. No one knows
what has happened. The armies have passed. Flame and blood brightened the
sky for a time. Now the little village lies cut off from the world and its
people clutch desperately to the hem of life. No news has come. Wanderers
stagger down the torn roads with crazy tidings and the old men of the
synagogue sit shivering over their prayer books. A world has been blown
into fragments and this scene is one of the fragments.
Sholom Ash, who wrote this play, spent a time in villages abroad as a
Jewish relief worker and he brought back this scene. A bedlam of despair,
a merciless photograph that stares across the footlights for a half-hour.
The story begins. There is a village leader in whose veins the will to
live still throbs. He exhorts the shivering ones. There will be a wedding.
He will give his daughter in marriage. There will be feasting. The dead
are dead. The duty of the living ones is to live. Let the old women
prepare food and the men will sing. Life will begin over and a new village
will be built up.
But the daughter hangs back. She talks of the young man whom she married
and who went away to war.
"He is dead, poor child," the father says.
"No, no, he isn't dead. I dreamed he was still alive," she answers.
But the festival starts. The starving ones sing in the broken synagogue.
There will be a wedding. Life will begin. But there is something in the
ruined doorway. A uniform stands in the doorway. A dark, waxen-faced young
man who seems asleep, whose arms hang limp, whose fingers curl in. He
comes forward and stands, a terribly idle figure. He is the young man.
* * * * *
They greet him. His bride weeps with joy. His aged mother presses his
hands and weeps and murmurs in a whisper: "Oh, how changed he is!" The
synagogue shouts and cries its welcome. But the young man's eyes stare and
it would seem almost that he is dead. Then he talks. His voice has a
lifeless sound, his words are like a child reciting sleepily. There is a
gruesome oddity about him. But an old man explains. "They come back like
that," he says. "There is one who came back who shrieks all night. And
another who cannot remember anything."
Yet how strangely he talks! Of a country from which he has come--on the
other side, it lies. Hysterical questions arise. Is there food there, are
there houses there, is there milk for children and synagogues in which to
pray? There is everything one desires, he says. So the questions rise and
the answers come--curious child answers. But why is he so pale and worn if
the country whence he comes is so remarkable? Ah, because he was lonely.
All who are in this country are like him--lonely for the homes they left
so soon. For their people. All who are in the country whence he came sit
and remember only the things of the past. Yes, that is all one does in
this marvelous country--remember the things of the past, over and over
again.
* * * * *
They will go with him. The miser who has hidden away his gold, the widow
and her two orphans, the hungry ones and despairing ones--they will all go
back with him.
One comes out of the theater with a strange sense of understanding. The
dead have spoken to one. It is never to be forgotten. The youth that was
ripped to pieces in the trenches reached out his limp arms across a row of
west side footlights and left a cry echoing in one's heart: "My unlived
days! My uneaten bread! My uncounted years! They lie in a little corner
waiting and no one comes to them."
Propaganda? Yes, a curious undertone of propaganda. The war propaganda of
the dead, older than the fall of Liege by a hundred centuries. The
primitive propaganda of the world mourning for its lost ones.
You will see the play, perhaps. Or you will wait until it is translated
some day. But this month the west side is aglow with the genius of Sholom
Ash and with the interpretative genius of Aaron Teitelbaum, who plays the
dead man in uniform and who directed the production. I know of no
performance today that rivals his.