A Russian ‘Enemies’

Herman Broder as Roman Freud and Liza Kaymin as his Jewish mistress in Slava Stepnov’s “Enemies: A Love Story.”

Herman Broder as Roman Freud and Liza Kaymin as his Jewish mistress in Slava Stepnov’s “Enemies: A Love Story.”

by Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week

‘To everything, there is a season,” the third chapter of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) begins, before going on to catalog various occasions, including “a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together.”

This line kept ricocheting in the head of Russian stage director Slava Stepnov as he prepared to stage Isaac Bashevis Singer’s post-Holocaust novel, “Enemies, A Love Story.” For only when the characters learn that it is a time for gathering, Stepnov realized, can they free themselves from the terrible weight of the past. The play is now running at Stepnov’s theater company, the Steps Theatre in Greenwich Village, in a Russian-language version (with no English translation) prepared by the director himself.
“Enemies, a Love Story” was published serially

in the Yiddish Daily Forward in 1966. It was translated into English in 1972, six years before Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was filmed by Paul Mazursky in 1989 with an all-star cast featuring Ron Silver, Anjelica Huston and Lena Olin.

The main character, Herman Broder (Roman Freud), is a Polish Holocaust survivor who immigrates to New York. He marries Yadwiga (Marina Byrko), the illiterate non-Jewish peasant who saved him from the Nazis, but continues to keep a Jewish mistress, fellow survivor Masha (Liza Kaymin).

When Broder’s first wife, Tamara (Inna Yesilevskaya) whom he thought dead, also suddenly turns up in New York, Broder finds himself caught in a love rectangle from which he cannot extricate himself. As R.Z. Sheppard wrote in his original review of the novel for Time magazine, “Broder’s attempts to manage the three women seem a likely retribution for his real and imagined sins.”

Stepnov, who is not Jewish himself, first came to the United States in 1995 to work at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, where he produced “Hurray, We’re in America,” based on the triumphant last part of Sholem Aleichem’s comic novel, “Motl, the Cantor’s Son.” He moved to New York two years later and directed plays by a wide range of playwrights, including Chekhov, Shakespeare, Pirandello and Albee.

Speaking through an interpreter, Stepnov told The Jewish Week that he became “infatuated” with Singer several years ago, and in particular with “Enemies,” whose main character appeared as “almost a sign of the history of humankind.”

His approach to the play is essentially non-realistic, with a set comprised almost entirely of suitcases, which are piled up to create “furniture.” He said that the suitcases symbolize the characters’ almost constant motion among various locales, from the Bronx to Brooklyn and back again. “The actors act realistically,” he said, “but they are surrounded by the fantastic, the mystical, the mysterious.”
At the end of the play, the actors use flashlights to illuminate the stage, signifying, in Stepnov’s words, that they “have to search for light with whatever means they have; however dark it is, there is still the possibility of light.” n

“Enemies, A Love Story,” runs through July 12 at the Philip Coltoff Theatre, 219 Sullivan St. Remaining performances are June 27 at 7:30 p.m., June 28 at 6 p.m., July 10 at 7:30 p.m., July 11 at 7:30 p.m. and July 12 at 6 p.m. For tickets, $25, call the box office at (212) 841-5454 or visit www.stepstheatre.com/tickets.php.