All his world’s a stage

Efim Rinenberg’s life as a ‘minority within a minority’ led him to seek refuge in the theater.

By PEGGY CIDOR
A scene from ‘Creon,’ which Rinenberg translated and adapted for the Martef Theater. (photo credit: POLARIZE PHOTOGRAPHY)
A scene from ‘Creon,’ which Rinenberg translated and adapted for the Martef Theater.
(photo credit: POLARIZE PHOTOGRAPHY)
What can happen to you if you are a persistent minority? What options do you have when, time after time, you are the only one of your kind, surrounded by a large majority that ranges from indifference to mistrust and even open hostility? In the case of Efim Rinenberg, it led him to the theater – as an actor, director, translator and set designer. For the past 10 years, Rinenberg’s life has become synonymous with stage life, totally intertwined with the fiction that is brought to the theater stage, which is, as he explains, “in fact, the most real situation depicted in artistic ways.”
Born in Soviet Georgia, Rinenberg made aliya in 1990 with his parents, who became religious upon their arrival here. They settled in the settlement of Ofra, where Efim grew up. By the time he went into the army, Rinenberg was no longer religious and today describes himself as an atheist. But, he stresses, his identity is profoundly Jewish, and Jewish culture and Judaism are the basis of his inner world. At the same time, he holds a broad perspective on life and events that goes far beyond his existence in the here and now.
“This is a Jewish outlook,” he says.
In regard to the current situation in Jerusalem and in the region, Rinenberg says he uses the experience of his childhood in what was then part of the Soviet Union and his understanding of the Islamic world that is looming at our gates and brings it all into his theatrical work.
“I recently read a newspaper interview with the military head of ISIS [terrorist group], and I can see how he is closely connected to my own life. He is from Georgia, like me. He is a Chechen from Georgia, and I am a Jew from Georgia. He is my age. We grew up in the same city, and we both left it at around the same time. I fled with my parents to Israel in the early 1990s, and he apparently left Georgia a little later. I’m pretty sure we went to the same school, probably met in the street here and there. And now I am doing theater in Jerusalem, while he is preparing an Islamic attack. But we are both together in this crazy Middle East. This similarity drove me crazy – how things happen in this region. It really troubled me,” he says.
RINENBERG SAYS he sees in his roots – away from Israel not only geographically but mainly from the somewhat Western culture he finds here and there – an explanation for anything that happens to us here.
“Despite the huge differences, the ISIS military chief and I somehow share the same culture. Him as a Chechen in Soviet Georgia, me as a Jew. We both grew up in the same country, had the same background. I came here and he went to Iraq, yet in a strange way I feel some kind of identification with him. It is an identification I share with minorities, any minority anywhere,” he says.
Does that mean that Rinenberg, the Jewish Israeli, the Zionist, could feel close to a man who is the leader of a cruel invasion not so far from here? Rinenberg responds: “I’m not sure that ‘understanding him’ is the appropriate term, but I understand that we did share something, and that something probably shaped us, although in very different ways. In Georgia I was a Jew, and an Ashkenazi Jew, which means I was a minority within another minority. My family did not belong to the Georgian Jewish community. I was an Ashkenazi, Russian-speaking Jew. I’d call that a four-square minority. And then I came to Israel, where overnight I became a Russian, and my parents chose to live in a religious settlement. So again, a minority with another minority. And then, when I went to an arts school, it was like an apotheosis. I was a Russian from a religious community and, above all, a settler. So, in fact, I can say that I had always been a stranger, a typical “other.” As a result, my reaction was to find refuge in the theater. It was my solution to my constantly being a stranger, a minority,” he explains.
Rinenberg, 35 and a married father of a young son, leads a life that is totally immersed in theater. He translates, adapts, writes plays, directs, does set design and has taken upon himself some of the technical aspects as well. And he works in four theaters: the Martef, the Micro Theater, the Aspaklaria Theater and the Malenki Theater.
Last week, the Martef presented Creon, the play Rinenberg translated and adapted, based on the work of Sophocles and French author Jean Anouilh.
Rinenberg explains that although it’s a work he developed two years ago, it is still so up-to-date that it surprises him.
“The play is about rulers who are not particularly democrats but try to establish some order, and their reaction and behavior when they are confronted by young idealists who challenge them and ultimately drag them to a place they honestly tried not to go to.
But at some point, they are left with no choice,” he says.
Rinenberg adds that when he worked on Creon, he didn’t know about the ISIS invasions but had in mind a political crisis that was much closer to home – the revolution in Egypt.
“I was shocked by what I saw on TV – the masses, the violence. I thought that president Mubarak was, in fact, the only person with whom I felt an emotional identification. He was in a way the inspiration for the Creon I created in the play. I am afraid of mobs. With Mubarak, I could somehow identify, mostly because I understood what he was trying to do, to save himself from the millions gathered in Tahrir Square, and from themselves as well,” he says.
“And the peak for me was the reaction of so many Israelis who said, ‘Where is our Tahrir? Where is our revolution?’ The comments here were ‘What are we doing? Debating over a cup of coffee? Let’s do the same.’ I asked myself, astounded, ‘What do they mean? Do they want to throw people from the windows to the mob down there?’ Because that’s what was going on really in Tahrir, and that frightened me so much. I couldn’t understand those comments,” he says.
“I can still remember the beginning of the fall of the Soviet Empire. I can remember how, all of a sudden, people coming out of nowhere were running in the streets in Georgia’s cities, dressed all in black, shouting, ‘Georgia to the Georgians!’ And I thought to myself, ‘We don’t want that here. We couldn’t really want that in our cities, it’s a nightmare.’ These people here, the Israelis, just don’t know what they’re talking about,” he says.
Rinenberg adds that now, almost two years later, he is still shocked at the lack of understanding he has found here about the real meaning of a revolution.
“It’s not just about beating representatives of the establishment. A revolution – and I’ve lived through one – means chaos. It means the end of normal life. It means starvation, death and misery. I think Israelis just don’t understand what it is about,” he says.
PROBABLY AS a result of his own experience, Rinenberg’s Creon is human, almost compassionate. The ruler tries very hard to save his brother’s daughter, Antigone, who defies him and his laws.
For Rinenberg, Creon is a beacon of stability. He is the answer to the chaos and the tragedy that threaten the public both in the play and in the present reality.
“Creon brings order – not that order is always a synonym for justice. In fact, men in power rarely exact justice, and Creon’s order is certainly not a just one. But order is needed, otherwise there is no life. Antigone is young, passionate, seeks total justice, and she is ready to die – firstly because she is young and doesn’t know what it means to die. I have never liked the idealization of youth, which too often despises life and prefers death – you know, as a means of glorification,” he says.
Hamartef is a small and very special theater. Professional actors, graduates of the Nissan Nativ Acting Studio in Jerusalem, share the stage with at-risk youth who are gifted in the theater arts.
Rinenberg is totally invested in his theater work. The lines between his artistic work and his personal life are not always clearly defined, and he often looks at what he does in one of the small theaters where he works as a reflection of the real life outside. That also happened with his dedication to the life and actions of another great figure, Theodor Herzl, to whom he dedicated a one-man play.
The Micro Theater was established by a group of Russian immigrants, but now more than half of the members are locals.
It is the second place where Rinenberg lives his passion. The Micro Theater, which puts on its productions in the small hall of the Khan Theater, will soon be moving to its own premises – the old studios of Tel-Ad in the Jerusalem Theater complex. There, too, Rinenberg writes, adapts, translates and directs – and even performs.
He also adapts and translates and occasionally performs at the Malenki Theater in Tel Aviv. Fifteen years ago it, too, started out as a theater group of immigrants from Russia and is now a mixed group, with more than half of the members native Israelis.
Rinenberg teaches Jewish theater at the Adin Steinsaltz Institute, which runs the Masa program, where young adults from the FSU come for a six-month stay in Israel and study a wide range of topics, mostly linked to Jewish studies.
“I started with this when I formed a group of students at Beit Hillel on the Hebrew University campus. We studied Jewish texts and tried to bring them to the stage. It was a wonderful experience, generally speaking, learning ancient texts and performing a drama on stage using some of the same tools to reach understanding. We did a lot of diction exercises, and we found that in this thing – learning a midrash or studying Gemara – we merged two things that ultimately we realized were closer than we thought. I am not a believer, but Jewish culture is very important and a part of me. We analyze a text, we deconstruct it and reconstruct it, and we bring out the inner part – like the inner part of a character in a play. So it all led to what I am doing now with the young adults from Masa,” he says.
And to close the long list of his activities, Rinenberg also teaches at the Nissan Nativ Acting Studio, mainly the younger grades.
He may be part of a minority, but to many in the local theater world,Efim Rinenberg is considered a major player.