Possessed Voices: Aural Remains From Modernist Hebrew Theatre by Ruthie Abeliovich (review)

In this groundbreaking book, Ruthie Abeliovich excavates from the audio recordings of Modernist Hebrew theatre the diasporic voices that ghost the Israeli soundscape. Placing sound at the center of her research, Abeliovich analyzes the Habima and Ohel theatre troupes' recordings in the interwar period. Tracing the actors' movements from Europe to Mandatory Palestine and plumbing Habima's textual archives, including artist memoirs and pre- and post-production documents, Abeliovich constructs a genealogy of the Hebrew language vis-à-vis its theatricalization on Habima's and Ohel's stages. In doing so, she highlights the conditions of the Hebrew language's revival within the crucible of anti-Semitic violence, Zionism, and nation-building.

To carry out her study, Abeliovich deploys an analytical framework in which listening is both a historical method and a theory to uncover how sound itself is performative and so has great implications for Jewish cultural memory. Abeliovich complicates Habima's position as a symbol of the Zionist enterprise such that despite the actors' efforts to assimilate their vocal aesthetics to the modern Sephardic pronunciation of the Hebrew language, their voices still carry vestiges of their Ashkenazi heritage. In the first chapter, Abeliovich examines Habima's performance of The Eternal Jew. Through a close reading of the Messiah's mother's lamentation, Abeliovich explores how Habima's deployment of traditional synagogue melodies affectively enfolds the spectators into the story through their shared experiences of performing public mourning traditions. Here, Abeliovich probes the extralinguistic abundance of synagogal practices, made intelligible in the way audience members, though unable to understand the Sephardic dialect, still knew what was happening on stage and could apply the destruction of the First and Second temples in Jerusalem portrayed in the Eternal Jew to their own experiences of anti-Semitic violence and forced migration post–World War II.

In the second chapter, Abeliovich probes the audio recording, released in 1965, of Habima's 1922 performance of The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds. Through the prism of the "rise-fall"—where the modern Hebrew spoken by the actors contains the melodies of the Yiddish language—she examines the recording as a hybrid, multilingual space in which to track the evolution of this theatricalized Hebrew as well as the tensions between old worlds and new as Jewish people were forced to migrate and assimilate within modernity. Reading the recording through Raymond Williams's concept of structures of feelings, Abeliovich argues that listening to Modernist Hebrew theatre empowered audience members to create an imagined, nostalgic space in which to mourn pre-diasporic traditions and communities lost.

The third chapter is built around an analysis of Habima's The Golem, the radio broadcast of which coincided with the Eichmann trial and the unprecedented dissemination of the testimonies of Holocaust survivors on Israeli national radio. Abeliovich begins by arguing that radio's broadcasted voices are different from theatre's disembodied voices, in that radio transforms voices into a metaphysical spectacle conjured by the act of listening and the force of memory (9). She further demonstrates that the radio station Kol Yisrael (literally, the Voice of Israel) was the driving force behind the renewal of the Hebrew language needed to bolster the Zionist community's linguistic infrastructure, which was, at the time, fragile. With these foundational claims in place, Abeliovich offers a persuasive reading of The Golem as the staging of an ambivalent refusal to erase Ashkenazi immigrants' voices from the linear historical narrative that fabricates the continuity between the ancient past and the present state of Israel.

In the fourth chapter, Abeliovich examines a radio adaptation, released in 1952, of Ohel's 1928 performance of Yaakov and Rachel. Through the concept of the aural "return," whereby Jewish immigrants to Palestine symbolically came home to the ancient biblical language of Hebrew, Abeliovich explores, first, how Jewish immigrants made sense of Hebrew in light of the contradictory Zionist narrative of "return" to Israel, the Promised Land, and second, how, through the mediums of audio recording and radio broadcasting...