Homens mapole: Hope in the Immediate Postwar Period

"The Downfall of Haman: Hope in the Immediate Post War World" analyzes a Yiddish play, written during the Second World War and then performed between 1945-49, on three continents, to resounding acclaim. The play's author, Dr. Haim Sloves, was both a Communist and a Yiddish author. The essay illustrates the way the play navigates between the particularity of the Jewish people and the demand to erase this very particularity. It also discusses the hope Communist Jews like Sloves placed in the Soviet Union , juxtaposed to a different, much more open-ended kind of hope. The first part of the essay examines how the Jewish people, in all its linguistic and bodily particularity is brought to life on stage, symbolically reenacting its return to life off stage. The second part focuses on the universalist ideologies that the play tries to satisfy, both Communism and French republicanism, thus neutralizing its particularity. The third part analyzes "Haman's Downfall" as a theatrical genre, a purim shpil, a parody with a long history in the Jewish tradition, bringing us back to the issue of the particular destiny of the Jews. Our claim is that the play, in its tension between particular and universal, communicates an affirmation of life's possibilities at a moment still tinged by despair.