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ART A R T WK: I don’t want to push too hard, this connection between the simultaneous building of St Peter’s Basilica and the ghetto. But it’s there. I was familiar with the restrictions from which my great-grandparents fled in the Pale of Settlement. It was a dark, dangerous place. Whereas Rome had never felt dark and dangerous. But, for many people, it was. I feel connected to Renaissance history. There are the things I’ve loved about Rome – the sculptures and architecture – and there is this other shameful history. One hundred and fifty years ago I would have been stuck in the ghetto. One takes these anomalies, these surprises, and they become the engine for work. JN: In these lectures you speak comfortably about the Jewish themes. Do you always talk about them? WK: No, I thought I would do that in England. There’s a history of genteel antisemitism here, so it felt like the right place. I’ve not hidden my Jewishness, but it’s never been as present as it is in these “Marx and Freud were like two 19th century secular rabbis” lectures. It’s been a chance to think aloud about some of these questions. When I was growing up, the figure of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda was intriguing – he was the Jew who makes it in London. And Benjamin Disraeli was a Jew who became prime minister. It gave me a somewhat false idea of an egalitarianism [in Britain]. The ease with which one forgets, that’s also part of history. It’s about saying: don’t forget who you were, who you are, how lucky you are to be where you are now. Compared to where you could have been, just before my grandfather was born. JN: You’ve made films where you are in conversation with yourself as the critic and the maker. It’s similar to chavrutah, the rabbinic approach to Talmudic study in which a pair of students debate the same text. Who has the last word? From top: Notes Towards a Model Opera, 2015, HD film installation; Sketches for the Refusal of Time (Procession), 2011 WK: I’m different people in those conversations. Sometimes I hear my brother’s voice. Sometimes my father’s voice. The rationalist and anti-rationalist. There’s a negotiation between them. Generally, the artist gets the last word. I’m interested in psychoanalysis. The connection between the patient and analyst can be seen as a kind of Hasidic or Talmudic learning. I talk about Marx and Freud as two great 19th century secular rabbis, even though both were antireligious. But the deep structure [of their thought] feels familiar. There are deeply rooted cultural things that are inside us. n William Kentridge’s current show, The Refusal of Time, is at the Louisiana Museum, Denmark. See kentridge.studio. You can watch The Natural History of the Studio series here: hoa.ox.ac.uk/ slade-lectures. Jacqueline Nicholls is a fine artist, award-winning visual poet and Jewish educator. I O S T U D I D G E K E N T R I A M I L L W 32 JEWISHRENAISSANCE.ORG.UK SPRING 2024
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A L A M Y THEATRE Zweig’s wake-up call resonates today Paris cafe, 1920s Below: The playwright Christopher Hampton Stefan Zweig’s 1922 novella, Letter from an Unknown Woman, has been reimagined in a new drama by Christopher Hampton. George Prochnik speaks to the playwright about the story’s dark undercurrents In the summer of 1921, the writer Stefan Zweig held a reception for the International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom at his home in Salzburg. In his diary, Charles Baudouin, the founder of a pacifist journal, describes an elegant, feline Zweig darting amid the “distinguished throng”. He observed that Zweig’s air of worldly intelligence overlay “a taste for the hunt converted”. It was this acute hunger for the experience of others that informed the “velvet-like glance” that sparkled from his “smiling, caressing eyes”. Aged a few months shy of his 40th birthday, Zweig was already a bestselling author, but it was in the following year, when novellas such as Letter from an Unknown Woman were published, that he achieved celebrity stature. Soon he became the most widely-translated author in the world and his works were regularly adapted for the stage and screen. When the letter writer of Zweig’s aforementioned novella described the story’s antihero, “‘R’, the famous novelist”, looking at all women with “a caressive and alluring glance, at once enfolding and disclothing, the glance of the born seducer”, Zweig was surely employing terms that chimed with others’ impression of his own gaze. Like ‘R’, Zweig had enjoyed sexual encounters so fleeting that they registered too faintly for him even to learn his partner’s name. In her memoir, Zweig’s first wife Friderike reported that when they met, Zweig’s confident demeanor suggested that he was “accustomed to speak to a woman with a glance that made words superfluous”. In 1920, the year they married, while Zweig was handling business in Vienna and she was at their new home in Salzburg, she informed him that she’d been irked to find letters to him “from women, dating from the time when I assumed you were too much taken up with me to have leisure for this sort of thing”. In the 1920s, Zweig was wealthy, successful and had an insatiable appetite for experiencing new places and people. Now, Christopher Hampton’s latest play, Visit from an Unknown Woman, which premieres at Hampstead Theatre this June, explores the political dimensions of Zweig’s tale – a work that he says “lingers and expands in the memory”. A TALE OF OBSESSIVE LOVE Zweig’s story consists of a letter from a nameless woman telling of her selfimmolating love for the gracious and feckless author. Its superscription, “To you who have never known me”, segues into the disclosure that her child has just died in the current influenza epidemic. In tones that flicker between the harrowingly stark, the cringingly masochistic and the transcendently romantic, the woman recounts how, from the first time she glimpsed the author, when she was a “thin, half-grown girl” of 13, and he had taken the flat opposite hers, she’d been enthralled by him. Even before she’d seen him, she wrote, “there was a halo round your head”, conjured by the exquisite aura of the belongings that movers were bringing into his apartment: Indian idols, Italian sculptures, colourful paintings and innumerable books. When she sees the author and discovers he is not the gentle, elderly sage she had pictured, but a vivacious young man, she is awestruck. From that moment, she becomes consumed by dreams of him, spying on him every chance she gets, and seeking to emulate his character by immersing herself in literature and music. So begins the account of a relentless love that leads her, at the age of 18, to SPRING 2024 JEWISHRENAISSANCE.ORG.UK 33 T H E A T R E

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ART

A R T

WK: I don’t want to push too hard, this connection between the simultaneous building of St Peter’s Basilica and the ghetto. But it’s there. I was familiar with the restrictions from which my great-grandparents fled in the Pale of Settlement. It was a dark, dangerous place. Whereas Rome had never felt dark and dangerous. But, for many people, it was. I feel connected to Renaissance history. There are the things I’ve loved about Rome – the sculptures and architecture – and there is this other shameful history. One hundred and fifty years ago I would have been stuck in the ghetto. One takes these anomalies, these surprises, and they become the engine for work.

JN: In these lectures you speak comfortably about the Jewish themes. Do you always talk about them? WK: No, I thought I would do that in England. There’s a history of genteel antisemitism here, so it felt like the right place. I’ve not hidden my Jewishness, but it’s never been as present as it is in these

“Marx and Freud were like two

19th century secular rabbis”

lectures. It’s been a chance to think aloud about some of these questions.

When I was growing up, the figure of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda was intriguing – he was the Jew who makes it in

London. And Benjamin Disraeli was a Jew who became prime minister. It gave me a somewhat false idea of an egalitarianism [in Britain].

The ease with which one forgets, that’s also part of history. It’s about saying: don’t forget who you were, who you are, how lucky you are to be where you are now. Compared to where you could have been, just before my grandfather was born.

JN: You’ve made films where you are in conversation with yourself as the critic and the maker. It’s similar to chavrutah, the rabbinic approach to Talmudic study in which a pair of students debate the same text. Who has the last word?

From top: Notes Towards a Model Opera, 2015, HD film installation; Sketches for the Refusal of Time (Procession), 2011

WK: I’m different people in those conversations. Sometimes I hear my brother’s voice. Sometimes my father’s voice. The rationalist and anti-rationalist. There’s a negotiation between them. Generally, the artist gets the last word.

I’m interested in psychoanalysis. The connection between the patient and analyst can be seen as a kind of Hasidic or Talmudic learning. I talk about Marx and Freud as two great 19th century secular rabbis, even though both were antireligious. But the deep structure [of their thought] feels familiar. There are deeply rooted cultural things that are inside us. n

William Kentridge’s current show, The Refusal of Time, is at the Louisiana Museum, Denmark. See kentridge.studio. You can watch The Natural History of the Studio series here: hoa.ox.ac.uk/ slade-lectures. Jacqueline Nicholls is a fine artist, award-winning visual poet and Jewish educator.

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32 JEWISHRENAISSANCE.ORG.UK SPRING 2024

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