Women were invisible, I’ve put them on stage
Playwright Julia Pascal tells the stories of her grandmother, mother and aunts, all marginalised and denied chances in their own time
HEN MAINSTREAM British theatre explores Jewish experience, it is mainly the history of men. There is a huge absence of complex Jewish female characters on the English stage. A Manchester Girlhood is an evocation of my Romanian grandparents, Esther and Emanuel Jacobs, and their three daughters: my mother, Isabel and her sisters, Edith and Pearl. The play is one of several I have written to counter this absence of vibrant Jewish women.
Each of the three sisters, who are seen in moments between childhood and death, is an archetype. Isabel is the romantic dreamer and artist. Edith is a soldier whose happiest years are in the army fighting Hitler. Pearl is the adventurer, escaping the Old World for the New as an American War Bride. Life changes at 14 — Esther fights with her husband for the right for their daughters to stay in school until 16 and this decision gives each girl the chance to train as a business secretary. This gives them a sense of purpose and importance in the world.
Esther’s defiance of Emanuel was provoked by her own lack of education in Romania where she was removed from school to protect her from antisemitic attacks. She felt how much her lack of education limited her adult life and indeed, in her eighties, she lost the little English that she had learned and only seemed happy when speaking Yiddish. Her final years of widowhood were lonely and silent. As a young, multilingual Jewish immigrant whose husband forbade her from learning English in night school, in case other men were attracted to her, she was a prisoner in the home.
Esther had been a Good Jewish Wife and Mother but her life was empty. “Education is never too heavy to carry around,” she told me. It is a message that I have never forgotten.
The play reflects the choices offered to Jewish girls in the first part of the 20th century. Although my mother and her sisters worked, employment was merely a filler before the “real job” of being wife and housewife. And yet the Jewish girl and woman had a birthright that she was never even offered: a rich intellectual heritage steeped in debate and rigorous argument. My grandmother, aunts and mother had no access to the mental stimulation common to Jewish men from the same Ashkenazi background.
A Manchester Girlhood hints at this huge loss of female creativity. Their invisibility in the public sphere frustrated their ambition and potential. To make them visible, I decided to write a play that might offer my grandmother, and her daughters, and the women they represent, an afterlife in English drama and literature.
Even though much of the text comes directly from the mouths of Esther, Isabel, Edith and Pearl, it is not a documentary. Rather it is a collage, juxtaposing memory, dream and desire within central and eastern European theatre styles and English music hall. It flashes back to pre-First World Bucharest and forward to postwar England and Louisiana. Embedded in the dramatic structure is a synthesis between Yiddish and Lancashire humour.
When I was a child, my grandparents took me to films inflected by their own European backgrounds. I was far too young to understand Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel or decode what it meant when they spoke of murdered brothers or of those relatives imprisoned by the Romanian Communists but a miasma of this atmosphere was something I absorbed. The transplantation of a Romanian Jewish culture into the Lancashire landscape is a migration I have not seen dramatised. It is an exciting mix. My parents lived in Blackpool and visits to the circus and theatre, as well as my own dance classes, interspersed with moments of Yiddish song, form the base of the production. These creative impulses are not only for entertainment. There is also a political element to the story — The Jew as Outsider, the woman always living on the margins. And, of course, there are taboos. Edith encounters lesbians in the army and is horrified. Esther discovers her 70-year old husband, Emanuel, wants to divorce her for a younger woman. Pearl finds that her German Jewish husband is prejudiced against African Americans. Mental health is an issue for Isabel. These are not idealised women or female, Jewish stereotypes, they are nuanced Jewish characters who reflect important crucial events in British and international history.
The Arts Council did not finance this work but, with very little funding, the show goes on. To present Jewish immigrant theatre is an act of resistance against British establishment indifference.
Education is a birthright that I have been lucky enough to access, therefore my ability to realise a history that has been blanked out feels like a triumph.
Education is never too heavy to be carried around, she told me. It is a message that I have never forgotten