A Shayna Maidel
By Barbara Lebow
Directed by Steve Tangedal
April 8 - May 6
Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30, Sundays at 2:00
Two sisters, one a survivor of Nazi concentration camps, the other brought up as an American, meet in New York in 1946 after a separation of almost 20 years. Although born in Poland, Rose, now in her 20s, came to the United States with her father, Mordechai, at the age of four and is now completely “Americanized”. The plan had been for Rose’s mother and sister to join the others, but the sister fell ill with scarlet fever, the mother stayed on to care for her, and soon the rise of the Nazis cut off their escape. Their ordeal in the concentration camps, which only the sister survived, has brought a burden of guilt to the aging Mordechai and deeply mixed feelings as he awaits the arrival of his elder daughter, Lusia, who has, at last, found her way to America. A powerful, haunting and deeply affecting portrait of a family conveying the aftermath of the Holocaust through a poignant, imaginatively conceived examination of one divided family’s experience.
