To the Editor:
I was particularly distressed by the mean-spirited piece on the Millard Lampell-John Hersey play, The Wall [George M. Ross, January]. As a theater professional, I am able to say categorically that Mr. Ross was unable to distinguish between the faults of the playwright and the faults of the director. He praised Joe Buloff’s characterization of Shpunt (it is the best work by any actor that I have seen this season), but as a working playwright Mr. Ross should know that an actor does not create above the words he speaks. There are fine things in this uneven play; it may not be an important piece of theater, but it is an important emotion. . . .
There are moments of tenderness as well as terror in this play. And Mr. Ross could have said so. There is, to go back to Fishel Shpunt, the complete evocation of the gallows’ humor of the Yiddishe golos. There is Halinka’s cry to her fleeing father, “Take me with you, I don’t look Jewish.”
Mr. Ross disparages Mr. Lampell’s line, “Life goes on!” Life does. If it is a cliché, people live by their clichés, and they address one another by them. And how outrageous of Mr. Ross to condemn the futility of the Warsaw uprising. (I write from memory; I do not have his words before me.)
One of the punishing reasons for the commercial failure of The Wall was that it was silently boycotted by Jewish theater parties. I called the producer’s office, as Mr. Ross should have done, and found to my dismay that as of November of last year not a single temple, sisterhood, or Jewish charitable organization had booked this play. Instead they were patronizing Irma La Douce and Under the Yum Yum Tree, proving the merit of Harry Hirschfield’s thesis, that “If it’s a play about Jews, the Christians won’t come and the Jews will want passes.”
When I was a student, one of the books we read, belonging to that dead era, was Jews without Money. Now there are suburban Jews with money but without tears. How sad!
Finally, to prove that there is equity in the world, I suggest that when Mr. Ross’s play opens, you ask Mr. Lampell or Mr. Hersey to review it.
Morton Wishengrad
Wynnewood, Pa.
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To the Editor:
George M. Ross tends to misrepresent and to misunderstand Dr. Bettelheim’s inquiry into “behavior in extreme situations.” Mr. Ross suggests that Dr. Bettelheim would have called the Jews [in the Warsaw ghetto] “cowards”. . . . [But] Dr. Bettelheim is attempting to understand what happened during World War II—he is not passing moral judgment. In his own words (from The Informed Heart): “Here, and at other places I cannot help discussing issues of morality. But if I do so, my purpose is not to presume that I know what is right or wrong for others. . . . I write as a psychologist, trying to explain why what happened, happened.” Mr. Ross could have quoted the following passage to explain Dr. Bettelheim’s theses rather than distort them: “It seems that an institution like the concentration camp permits of no really successful defense—the only way not to submit to it in some measure would have been to destroy it.” One senses that Mr. Ross has examined Dr. Bettelheim’s ideas as superficially as he claims the play The Wall examined the question of resistance.
Bernard H. Pucker
Youth Director
Beth Shalom Congregation
Kansas City, Missouri
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Mr. Ross writes:
To choose not to distinguish between the faults of the director and those of the playwright I agree was bound to be somewhat unfair to the playwright. I did not however find the distinction sufficient to relieve Mr. Lampell of his failure to deal with the morality of resistance in anything but clichés (by Mr. Wishengrad’s own admission) and melodrama.
Do people in the heat of living and dying really live by their clichés? I don’t believe so, but if they do, this kind of truth can better serve the bitter parodies of Eugene Ionesco than a play which hopes to move us and convince us of the efficacy of resistance. I think Mr. Wishengrad is rationalizing. It may be difficult for a writer to avoid clichés. It is foolish to defend them as true.
I did say, to Mr. Lampell’s credit, that the character of Fishel Shpunt was brought faithfully from the book to the stage “by both text and actor.”
I have nowhere “condemned the futility of the Warsaw uprising.” Its relative futility in terms of physical survival is a historic fact. I have on the contrary pleaded in effect that (1) this fact be faced, and that (2) its moral implications be met and felt—and not with palliative clichés—in behalf of human dignity and sanity. Otherwise the futility of the Warsaw uprising is absolute. John Hersey let us see this. Mr. Lampell did not.
As for Mr. Pucker, in writing about The Wall, it was not my purpose to “examine” Dr. Bettelheim’s “ideas,” superficially or otherwise, nor to “represent” his inquiry into “behavior in extreme situations.” For an expression of an attitude I found particularly harsh and dangerous, I referred to a foreword [to Miklos Nyiszli’s Auschwitz] that Mr. Pucker has obviously not read, in which Dr. Bettelheim does not write as a psychologist and does not in the least shy from passing moral judgment. In that foreword Dr. Bettelheim says not once but many times that the only way not to have submitted to the concentration camp was to die fighting back. While I find this position dangerously oversimple, I admire Dr. Bettelheim’s courage in pronouncing without equivocation his hard-headed moral judgment much more than Mr. Pucker’s softhearted attempt to disguise it behind the scientific method.
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