Justin Hayford’s review of Ghetto (November 12) reveals both his ignorance of Israeli culture and of the Holocaust.
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He seemed to have culled from an entire play about the Vilna ghetto just one point: that Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol should be commended for his “disquieting honesty” in pointing out the “human contradiction” in all of us. Because the character of the Nazi Kittel, who is both a murderer and an art aficionado, is moved to tears by a beautiful song, Hayford writes, “Kittel may have done monstrous things, but he was human–after all, intolerance, brutality, and genocide are the rules, not the exceptions, in history. For Ghetto to succeed we must be charmed and seduced by Kittel; we must see ourselves in him. Only then will we understand that Nazism breeds inside people like us.”
Finally, I don’t think Hayford sufficiently understands what it meant to be living in the ghetto in Lithuania during Nazi occupation based on statements like this: “For a time it seems that being a Jew in Vilna entails walking slowly, stooping slightly, and cringing.”
