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Reviewed by:
  • La Shikse by Sebastián Kirszner
  • C. Tova Markenson
LA SHIKSE. Written and directed by Sebastián Kirszner. (La Pausa) Teatral at La Pausa Theatre, Buenos Aires, Argentina. November 18, 2017.

According to theatre critics in Buenos Aires, millennial playwright and director Sebastián Kirszner is ushering in a new era of Jewish theatre. As seen in La Shikse, Kirszner’s new era critically engages with contemporary performances of Argentine Jewish identity. In particular, Kirszner polemicizes the 180,000-person Argentine Jewish community for valuing class, race, and gender privilege over connection to religious rituals and traditions. Garnering enthusiastic support from Buenos Aires’s independent theatre audiences—and skepticism from Jewish institutions—La Shikse contends that Jewish communal leaders refuse to accept performances of Jewish identity that depart from social conventions.

The protagonist of Kirszner’s one-woman play is a Paraguayan domestic worker named María, who wishes to convert to Judaism after decades of labor in an Argentine Jewish home. Soon after I took my seat in La Pausa’s black-box theatre, María entered stage-left and stood beside a large red velvet–upholstered chair adorned with a small Jewish star. Wearing a plain navy dress and apron, María explained that she was 42 years old, cared for the Sucovsky family’s two children, and hoped to leave tonight with a new name, Malka—Hebrew for queen. Regardless of the personal identities that María’s audience members held, according to María, her audience comprised the court of rabbis that determined whether she would become a Jew. Her ensuing performance challenged La Shikse’s audiences to witness her experiences behind the closed doors of the Sucovsky family’s home vis-à-vis the viewpoint of a rabbinic tribunal.

La Shikse’s audiences were supposedly gatekeepers to the Jewish identity that María desired, yet the Yiddish word in the play’s title suggested that her performance would never be sufficiently authentic. Shikse is pejorative for gentile woman. Although contemporary Jews in Buenos Aires rarely speak Yiddish, shikse remains in the vernacular to connote the non-Jewish women who emigrate from less prosperous countries, such as Paraguay, seeking work in upper-class Argentine homes. María’s strong Paraguayan accent marked her as doubly outside: not only was she not Jewish, but she was also not Argentine and thus implicitly not of white European descent.

As María illustrated her deepening connection to Judaism through episodic vignettes, she danced precariously between perpetuating and critiquing the antisemitic assumption that Jewishness and class privilege go hand and hand. Several of the allegedly Jewish experiences that María described—frequently through fast-paced songs that two live musicians accompanied—were not religious practices, but upper-class Argentine stereotypes. Strategically placed objects marked these experiences as Jewish, such as the Jewish star covering the photo album that she used to illustrate her experience on the Sucovsky’s beach vacation in Brazil. Vacationing in Brazil earned María 3 percent of her total Jewish identity, María said with an extended wink, probing the antisemitic conflation between Jews and wealth. María’s exaggerated tone edged toward satire, yet tonally, La Shikse never lingered anywhere for long.

La Shikse emphasized the contradiction that María’s efforts made Jewish cultural traditions possible, yet Argentine Jews refused to recognize her as one of their own. This dynamic was clear when María began teaching the audience to cook potato knishes, swiveling the chair’s upholstery ninety degrees to transform it into a kitchen shelf. As she retrieved baking tools from behind the chair, she quizzed the audience about the recipe’s ingredients and asked a volunteer to peel a potato. Shortly after, María opened a hidden cabinet to display a toaster that was warming six fresh knishes, and in turn revealed the façade of the audience’s support. She shared the warm knishes with a select few and announced that this experience comprised 2 percent of her total Jewish identity, drawing attention to the artifice of quantifying identity and showing [End Page 105] that her effort and skills had little impact on her performance’s perceived validity.


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