One Family’s Letters Bring to Stage the Emotions of World War II

The narrator of “The Lucky Star,” Richard, sits centerstage on the edge of a small table holding a book of correspondence. Breaking the fourth wall as he welcomes us to his lecture, he says: “A letter is an offering. For most of history, a letter was how we conjured the missing.” The book, “Every Day Lasts a Year: A Jewish Family’s Correspondence from Poland,” is a compilation of more than 200 Hollander family letters, written back and forth during World War II. The most significant correspondence to survive the Krakow Ghetto, the documents are the source material for Karen Hartman’s script, which serves as the first part of 59E59’s inaugural VOLT Festival.Our narrator shares with us the story of his father, Joseph Hollander, a 35-year-old Polish Jew who escapes the Nazis and attempts to snatch his family from the jaws of persecution. “It’s a tale of human triumph,” Richard says, “if you stop in the right place.”The play begins in 1939, the year Hitler’s army entered Czechoslovakia and occupied Austria — the year the Western powers did not react. After fleeing for Portugal, Joseph Hollander is rerouted to Ellis Island. We hear, in large part, the exact words written by the Hollanders as Joseph establishes a life in New York and scrambles to evacuate his family from a quickly deteriorating situation in Krakow. In the beginning, the letters are hopeful. “I am content with everything,” his mother, Bertha, writes. “We are all comfortable.” Soon, though, the letters are read meticulously by Nazi censors who decide what to deliver. They arrive stamped with swastikas. The Hollanders become masters of omission. “From tomorrow, we will wear uniforms,” his eldest sister, Mania, says in reference to the infamous yellow star. “I suspect we will look quite fine in them.” Ultimately, the family’s hopes are dashed altogether when the Nazis forbid Jews from leaving the Third Reich. As the narrator points out, these letters are a powerful offering. They’re a way to conjure the dead. They’re also an exceedingly difficult base on which to structure a play, it turns out. They stand in direct opposition to the golden rule of writing: Show, don’t tell. Act I of “The Lucky Star” tells us a lot, serving primarily as exposition. It’s written using as much of the text from the letters as possible, which while a noble pursuit, can feel preachy and tired. This presents a significant challenge for the actors, who are speaking largely across the fourth wall instead of to each other. The dim hues of the set, projections, and costumes don’t help. At intermission, I couldn’t help but feel I should’ve just read the book. Happily, Act II was where the magic happened. We open on a train car ripping through New Jersey in 1944. Joseph, who has enlisted in the army, is wearing his dress greens and reading a book of Polish poetry. A lovely American girl sitting next to him, Vita Fischman, asks what he’s reading. Their eyes meet, and the world comes into color. Act II also introduces Richard’s son, Craig, a scholar of African-American slave narratives, who cuts through his father’s always-sunny attitude and exposes both Joseph’s anger and Richard’s agony. While Richard runs from his pain, Craig is drawn toward it. As we bounce between the past and the present, he reveals a briefcase full of newfound letters. Despite its slow start, this show has its own lucky star — the inherent power of its story. The technicalities of staging a play hardly matter for those who have loved and lost, searched and not found, faced grave persecution, risked an old life for a new one, or longed for just one more day with their late parents. Audience members wiped tears from inside their masks. The woman next to me could hardly suppress her sobs. “If it will happen that I will not have anything to leave our children,” Joseph writes to Vita in Act II, “I will leave them our letters.” Thanks to “The Lucky Star,” he has many more children now than he could ever have imagined.

One Family’s Letters Bring to Stage the Emotions of World War II

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