Shalev’s Russian stage

Mikro theater group’s adaptation of ‘As a Few Days’ draws on both the author’s and the thespians’ Slavic roots.

By BARRY DAVIS
As a Few Days (photo credit: Edward Kaprov)
As a Few Days
(photo credit: Edward Kaprov)
Like his debut, well-received 1988 novel The Blue Mountain, Meir Shalev’s As a Few Days is set in the early days of the Yishuv and is peopled by a rich spectrum of highly colorful, if not improbable, characters. There is also a strong whiff of Russian culture, mind-sets and accents in many of his books, which neatly makes the Jerusalem-based Mikro theater group’s rendition of Shalev’s 1994 novel all the more snug.
The production has been running for a couple of weeks at the small auditorium of the Khan Theater to highly enthusiastic audience response and will officially open at the premiere performance on Thursday.
Most of Mikro’s actors are Russian born – when the company was founded in 1994 everyone on board was Russian – which suits the plot and spirit of As a Few Days.
“My grandparents came here from Russia with the second aliya, and even though they spoke good Hebrew, they kept their strong Russian accent,” says Shalev. “So in that respect, too, I was very happy for Irena and Mikro to do the play.”
The Irena in question is Irena Gurelik, who directs As a Few Days and runs the troupe.
While the new show is clearly a labor of love, Gurelik and the nine-member cast, behind-the-scenes personnel and two musicians put a lot of effort into getting the production down pat.
“We worked on it off and on for seven months,” says Gurelik. “It is such a wonderful book, and Meir gave us carte blanche. He doesn’t play ego games. He let me interpret the book as I saw fit, but I never change the words. The text is always an important part for me.”
“As long as they don’t change actual events – for instance, if Irena decided that Yehudit should have four lovers instead of three as it is in the book – I don’t mind what they do,” confirms the author, adding, however, that not everything in the play is as he imagined in his mind’s eye.
“The character of Zeideh [Yehudit’s somewhat simple son whom all three men claim to have fathered] is a bit different from the way I saw him when I was writing the story, but that’s fine by me. I gave Irena full license to do whatever she wants with the book, and I don’t regret it. As soon as you allow a book to be performed on stage, it’s a different medium, so by definition there has to be a different form of portrayal of what you have written.”
Even so, the script did undergo a few changes, and there were some language issues to be dealt with.
“I wrote the play in Russian and had it translated into Hebrew so Meir could read it,” Gurelik explains. “He said the atmosphere of the play was gripping and that there was a sense of being able to breathe in it, but he asked me to tighten up on the plot. Of course, I was happy to do that.”
Mikro started out in 1994, shortly after Gurelik made aliya. Like any artistic enterprise with little or no institutional support, the fledgling theater group had a tough start to life.
“I worked on a voluntary basis for many years,” Gurelik recalls. “I took young people to begin with, all immigrants from Russia, and only later I started taking Israelis.”
There were no cultural discrimination considerations in that decision, it was simply a matter of practicality. “I didn’t know Hebrew. Actually, I didn’t even want to come to Israel. I have worked with texts all my life as a dramatist and writer in documentaries and animation films, theater and other stuff, so I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to do anything in Israel without knowing Hebrew. But my husband and my son, who was then 14, forced my hand and I came on aliya. Today, I am happy I came,” says Gurelik in impressively fluent, if heavily accented, Hebrew. Gurelik’s son, Ilya Kotz, is also “in the business” and designed the sets for the show.
Gurelik is wary of locking herself and most of her crew into the Russian category.
“I find that a bit offensive,” she says. “We are all Jews, regardless of which country we originate from.”
Even so, Gurelik had to traverse a steep cultural learning gap when she came here, even without the language-related obstacles. “I had read some books by Israeli writers – like Amos Oz and Bialik – in Russia, before I came here,” she says.
Shalev was not on her list of Israeli authors, but her son came to the rescue. “Ilya worked in a bookstore, and he introduced me to Meir’s books. Meir is a real artist who is always confused. For me, an artist who knows just what to do is not such a good artist,” Gurelik laughs. “Shalev has a lot of passion in his writing, but there isn’t always logic to it. He does a lot of things by instinct, and I like that. Sometimes I asked him what he meant by certain things in the book, and he wouldn’t explain it. He’d sort of intimate that the readers could make up their own minds.”
That said, Shalev invited Gurelik and the rest of the troupe to join him on a tour of Moshav Nahalal in the Jezreel Valley, where Shalev was born and which forms the geographical and social-cultural setting for As a Few Days and, for that matter, The Blue Mountain.
“That was wonderful and very informative,” says the director. “It was important to be there and feel the spirit of the place.”
That comes across clearly in the stage performance.
Shalev is obviously in vogue with the thespian crowd these days. There are two more productions of his books in the pipeline, with the Cameri Theater and Gesher looking to put on plays – based on Esau and A Pigeon and a Boy – over the coming year. And a couple of other Shalev tomes, Beginnings and My Russian Grandmother and Her Vacuum Cleaner, have been translated into English and are due to come out in the States and will be available here later this month. 
For more information about As a Few Days: www.mikro.co.il and www.khan.co.il