Iram: Shalom Aleichem's shtetl life comes to London

Tonight at the Barbican's Pit, kicking off a run of ten performances, a rather unusual piece of theatre opens. It's not a big play, it probably won't make great waves and it does involve reading surtitles. Called Iram, it's an Israeli adaptation, in Hebrew, of the stories of the Yiddish writer Shalom Aleichem. Outside Israel - excluding, at a pinch, bookish circles in transatlantic Jewish communities (Aleichem emigrated from the Ukraine to the US before the First World War) - this prolific chronicler of late 19th-century shtetl life will grace few home libraries.

The word "shtetl" might also cause some to reach for a dictionary. It's Yiddish for any one of the thousands of small, poor, self-contained Hasidic towns and villages of eastern Europe and Russia: they became ever-more confined in the era of late-19th-century pograms, whose ferocity launched mass Jewish dispersal and, to some extent, Zionism. Marc Chagall filled canvases with shtetl imagery ('The Blue Violinist', pictured right); Aleichem reproduced it in stories such as "Tevye the Milkman". Transformed into a schmaltzy musical, this became Fiddler on the Roof, which, in the 1971 film, unleashed Chaim Topol on the world.

Iram, meaning "their town", eschews Fiddler-like sentimentality - the truth is it was Chagall who put violinists on roofs, not Aleichem - and presents an altogether darker picture of these vanished, idiosyncratic communities: Jews who were holy and not so holy; superstitious, avaricious, ambitious, loving and cruel. In Aleichem's invented town of Kasrilevke, where Iram takes place, a terrified woman rails against the local rabbi. A boy studying medicine loses his religion and is ostracised. A disabled girl, called “the creature”, is tormented by potential suitors and viewed as a curse. Another fully fit but defiant girl - she refuses to marry - humiliatingly has to drop her pants and submit to menstrual probing by an interfering matriarch (pictured below).

Jokes abound. A rich man seeking eternal life is told to go to Kasrilevke because "no rich man ever died there". The townsfolk celebrate Purim at completely the wrong time because a rogue stationer has got them all to buy calendars twenty years out of date. The characters drink, gossip, laugh and - in this play, in a number of surrealistic sequences - fall into grotesque gestures deliberately suggesting old caricatures of anti-Semitism: grasping hands, rolling eyes, finger-licking cash counting, and so on.

This, and a much harsher portrait of shtetl life than Aleichem is (wrongly) thought to have created, has got Iram's director into hot water in Israel; accusations there by her compatriots of anti-Semitism are notably bizarre. Ofira Henig, born fifty years ago in a kibbutz, is, it needs to be said, a soft-voiced, left-leaning, internationally minded Israeli theatre maker who in most western cultures would be seen as just that: an educated, rather right-on artist interested in pushing boundaries - in her case literally, as, along with Israelis in the Herzliya Ensemble, which Henig runs, she's worked and continues to work with Palestinian actors.

In Israel, where politics and history confront the citizenry on a daily basis like boxers in the ring, drifts from a perceived "norm" are loudly, perhaps artificially magnified. Henig's interests can make her feel isolated. "When Iram opened last August," she told me in Heidelberg in early May, "there were people hunting the director: who is this person and how can their treasured Shalom Aleichem be turned into this kind of stuff? They were looking for a man, so, as a woman, it was quite easy for me to escape the theatre after performances."


Henig has run various houses in Israel, including the Khan Theatre in Jerusalem. Now based in Tel Aviv, she's been artistic director of the Herzliya Ensemble, just to the north, since 2007, and through a career going back to the early 1990s has directed plays by everyone from Brecht to Barker. In Heidelberg, Iram was having its first European airing - in just one performance, as part of a festival - before visiting London, then returning to Israel for a summer run.

The play went down well with a local, and very German, audience: Henig had been curious to know how it would work in particular in Germany, for obvious historical reasons. At a Q&A afterwards she got her answer: these Heidelbergians were fascinated and touched, not hurt - and only one wondered whether Henig "needed Germans" (scenes evoking Nazi cattle trucks are unsurprisingly present) to underscore how doomed these late-19th-century Jews were.

"We have to keep dealing with the German issue because it will help us with the Palestinian issue,” Henig responded, matter-of-factly. This brash analogy, apparently between the Holocaust and the Israeli occupation, could have set ugly hares racing but in fact went uncontested. Modern Germans Henig's audience indeed were, but none amongst them, probably wisely, felt brave enough after a mere play to expatiate on the Middle East conflict.

"For me, in the reality we’re in," Henig explained, when over a very German breakfast I asked her about Aleichem's status back home, "it’s difficult to feel a sense of belonging to new writing in Israel, whether prose or drama, because it's always very direct, always somehow dealing with the conflict. That’s not my way of dealing with things. When I rediscovered Aleichem in recent years, I felt at first that he belonged only to people who know Yiddish - I don't. But then I found out there are two types of translator of Aleichem: a young group, in their thirties, grandchildren of people born in eastern Europe who might have had Yiddish at home, and for them this great Yiddish figure is like going back to their cultural roots.

"This is part of a revival in Yiddish - I felt this happening two years ago, when I began work on Iram, and now I’m absolutely sure it's going on. The other group is older, with people like me who are very lefty. For us, Aleichem is like a statement of anti-Zionism, a way of going back to real Jewish culture, to Jewish history, to recreate our old roots and not ones governed by the state of Israel."

Iram can be seen as a microcosm of Jews, or indeed any community - the Palestinian one, too - under siege, and wholly lacks even a whiff of nationalism or flag-waving. And though not about the Holocaust, it is powerfully alluded to when the cast of nine periodically marches round stage only to stop abruptly, with one of them raising his arm and asking: "Is there much further to go?" A train is heard rattling by. The camps await them. These people are marching to their deaths. Shtetls were wiped from the map by the Nazis; genocide was never Aleichem's theme (he died in 1916), but Henig's evocation of this lifestyle is all the sadder and more poignant with her placing of it, and its disappearance, in the fires of European conflict.

"I was born into the new state and call myself a new Jew, but of course we were brought up to remember everything, so we know the facts. But actually I was taught to reach a universal conclusion, about human beings and not just about the Jewish issue. Genocide is terrible but it happens all over the world, and we have to take care of the world."

• Iram is at the Barbican Pit Theatre 19-29 May
• Herzliya Ensemble on line
• Check out what's on at the Barbican this season