SOME THOUGHTS ON ROALD HOFFMANN’S NEW PLAY

By SHELBY STEPHENSON

Roald Hoffmann: Something That Belongs to You: A Play (Dos Madres Press: 2015) settles into two memories, one in 1943, Gribniv, Ukraine, another, 1992, in the Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia. The horrific beauty of the dialogue you can imagine:

“HEATHER: She never wants to talk about it. I have a project at school, about the Holocaust …

EMILE: Who can blame her, Heather? She lost her father, her husband, her young sister. Let her be.”

I have a friend whose father and family came over from Kiev when the father was sixteen. I said, Manny, you must have family there, do you visit them?

He said, No, Hitler took care of that.

And that was the end of the conversation.

In Hoffmann’s play, the memories blur and shape like children going fast around a flagpole.

As a boy I remember seeing the KKK. Here’s a scene from Something That Belongs To You:

“FRIEDA: (Maybe a little insulted.) A shtetl? Is Philadelphia a shtetl? It was a town, 12,000 people –Ukrainians, Jews, Poles. It was a good Polish town. (She is quiet for a moment.) The Poles didn’t like us much either. When Daniel … your grandfather… went to school at the Polytechnic, the Polish students beat him with razor blades on sticks.

HEATHER: Why?

FRIEDA: Because he was Jewish; they made the Jewish boys sit in ghetto benches.

HEATHER: I don’t understand.

FRIEDA: Like blacks in the back of the bus? You’ve heard about that?

HEATHER: Yes, a long time ago, in the South.

FRIEDA: At the same time, in Poland, The Jewish students had to sit on special benches. (Bitterly.) It was the nice Polish students who made them do it. They made a law.”

Tamar, a psychologist, says: “Memories have a way of coming back.”

Something That Belongs To You is an autobiographical drama of survival. Good and evil live in the hearts of the characters and work to instruct instinct to live and forgive and to try something as impractical as Love.

Roald Hoffmann was born in 1937 in Zloczow, then Poland. I met him some years ago when he accompanied the poet A. R. Ammons to Wake Forest University. Hoffmann is a poet and a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry. He is Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, Emeritus, Cornell University.

Shelby Stephenson

Poet Laureate of North Carolina

Anarchist

He seemed to enjoy not answering greetings. Although you couldn’t really tell that from any facial expression. He seemed to enjoy leaving them in quandary as to whether he had ignored them or merely not heard them due to the noise of the street scene. Or the subway. Or the suburban cacophony of sprinklers and familial spats; of skateboarders and cyclists; of minor celebrities as they arrived home.

Most considered him reclusive. Most, if they thought of him at all, thought him rude and abrasive. Yet, he had never responded to their inquiries as to his health or state of mind, or remarked in agreement or dissent as to the quality of the weather. Still others believed him to be hard of hearing, or even fully deaf, and quite unqualified to participate in the meaningless verbal badinage of everyday discourse.

Regardless of the basis of their disdain, they all considered him to be a nonentity, not even a cipher of daily life. And the left him alone and compounded this lack of consideration by forgetting immediately each encounter. And he disappeared entirely from view.

Even after the explosion, the few survivors on the subway platform couldn’t recall seeing him. They tried for weeks, but no one could conjure a plausible reason for his explosion. He wasn’t unknown, just unremarked.

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Many people have just celebrated Samhain, Halloween, Day of the Dead or All Souls’ Day, when we contemplate the mysteries of life and death and remember those who have gone before us.

This month’s contributions bring to mind different aspects of the life cycle. A recent San Francisco production of French dramatist Fabrice Melquiot’s absurdist play The Unheard-Of World, reviewed here by Christopher Bernard, consists of interactions among fanciful characters whose identities play with the concept of time and mortality: a child who chooses annihilation over birth, a woman desperate to conceive, a man with a supernaturally long life span.

Huck Shelf’s short story reflects on the possibilities of childhood, the courage it can take to follow one’s imagination and how we can fear what we don’t understand. Kathy Montoya’s artwork, created to illustrate Melissa Heye’s children’s book Fearless Beans, shows a small dog growing up and heading off to doggie daycare for the first time. In this case the young character, rather than the parents, faces fear of the unknown, but overcomes it and enjoys his experience. Ryan Hodge, in his monthly Play/Write column, suggests that authors can create more realistic child characters by showing the children learning from others rather than having to make them completely independent from the beginning.

Maria Evans writes of learning experiences common to many people throughout life: unrequited love, nostalgia on seeing a younger person’s enthusiasm, finding and questioning one’s talents and creative abilities. She also remarks through her two final poems on our capacity for both great compassion and horrifying cruelty.

Joan Beebe communicates the fun of Western celebrations of Halloween, where children visit neighbors trick-or-treating in costume for candy. Her other pieces reflect explicitly on time, encouraging readers to remember to make the most of the holidays and commenting on how much, paradoxically, young children and old people have in common.

Adelayok Adeleye excoriates Nigerian officials for the rising fuel prices in his home country, bringing up a widespread concern: the cost of living.

Michael Robinson’s poetic verse expresses the cost of living, and dying, in a different sense, through his sorrow over the death and despair he sees on the streets of the American inner city. Rather than impersonal statistics concerning violence, he shows us vignettes that bring home the humanity of those within that environment. A simple gift of a lily evokes the memory of children who will not grow up, the young son of an incarcerated woman misses his mother, blood has replaced ladybugs on a preteen’s arm.

Shawn Nacona Stroud memorializes a friend who has passed away in one of his poems. Other pieces from him explore his creative process, the feelings of a Shakespearean witch, and the emotions brought up by a past intense relationship, reminiscent of being caught as a fish. He plays with language in ways more apparent to readers than in Robinson’s intentionally spare prose, inviting people to enjoy the craft of his writing along with the natural settings he describes.

Julian Raine reaches deep into consciousness to create her pieces, lush and unvarnished by formal capitalization or punctuation as they evoke the intoxicating sensuality of the sun, dandelions, orchards, memory and love. Tempest Brew brings us small, crafted pieces that assert the speaker’s personality and individuality. We see his small objects, notice what sets him apart since his teen years, hear his angst over love gone wrong, and watch him assert artistic control over his work.

J.D. DeHart also creates a set of short pieces that highlight various facets of life: our weaknesses, our motivations, our mild arguments, and our stubbornness when we’ve already made up our minds. He references an image from Greek mythology to illustrate the foolishness of adjusting the facts to fit one’s opinions.

Dami Lare’s short story about orphan children draws on cultural myths to convey the nebulous fear the children experience in a world where so much is shocking and beyond their control. When reality holds angry adults who confront them while selling food and accidents that send friends to the hospital, the existence of the scary Baba Yaga witch makes sense.

Adeolu Adesanya shows the power of words to invade and devastate people’s psyches in a highly visceral, physical poem. It’s not so easy to separate our minds and thoughts and language from our bodies and material lives.

Bruce Roberts considers this idea from another direction, as his poetic speaker gets captured, bound, pulverized and harpooned by literary monsters and pirates within the pages of his local library’s offerings. And Elizabeth Hughes gives guidance to those seeking to donate books to help get kids interested in reading.

Although your introduction to Synchronized Chaos may be less dramatic than Roberts’ poem, we hope that you will also find yourself captivated by this month’s submissions.

Butterfly Life Cycle, photo by Laurie Williams. http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=3549

My Flying Phase

    Since I was eight, I didn’t make a big deal out of it. I was able to get snacks from the top shelf, and I could show off to my friends.

    The first person I told was my best friend, James.

    “No you can’t!” he said. “That’s impossible.”

    “I totally can!” I yelled back.

    “Fine. Show me.”

    I concentrated, willing myself to lift until my feet dangled above the playground floor. “There. See?”

    “Wow, that’s cool.”

    “Yup.”

    “You’re like a superhero! Anyways, wanna see my new Pokemon cards?”

    “Sure,” I said.

I also showed Sarah. At first, she didn’t believe me either.

I showed her the same way, floating down the sidewalk as we walked home.

She smiled. “It’s like you’re an alien!”

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