Hanoch Levin

Levin was born in Tel Aviv in 1943 and lived in the city for most of his life.[1] His parents had immigrated from Łódź, Poland, in 1935, and he grew up in a traditional family.[4][5] The family lived on Akiva Eiger Street in Neve Sha’anan, where his father, Israel, operated a neighborhood grocery store.[4] Levin grew up in a low-income household in this southern Tel Aviv neighborhood.[2]

His father died when Levin was twelve and a half.[4] By fifteen, Levin had begun working in a neighborhood grocery store to help support his family.[5] During his military service, his writing consisted mainly of humorous songs.[2]

In 1964, at the age of twenty-one, Levin began undergraduate studies in philosophy and Hebrew literature at Tel Aviv University.[2] He attended the university from 1964 to 1967 and published satirical sketches and poems on the back cover of the student journal Dorban.[1]

Writing, particularly satire, was his principal interest at university, where he expanded beyond the humorous songs he had written during military service.[2] Amnon Tzaban, the editor of Dorban, recalled his first encounter with Levin’s submissions: “I saw the texts; they were unlike anything we had published until that day.”[2] Levin’s column, “Daf ha-Aḥorayim,” or “The Back Page,” included the recurring character Grandma Elijah.[2] His early satire addressed class divisions within Israeli society, including, but not limited to, attitudes toward Arabs.[2]

Levin also reflected on the limitations of the form he was developing.[2] In a column dated November 29, 1965, he explained that satire works through absurdity and can distort reality by selecting a single aspect of a situation or bending facts toward a predetermined purpose.[2] He wrote, in translation, “The problem of the Arabs in Israel is really much more complex and difficult than can be offered a solution in calls to action or public rallies.”[2] He argued that satire could not resolve that complexity and might misrepresent it, calling on satirists to retain skepticism about their own methods.[2]

Before the Six-Day War, Levin wrote “Come, Chocolate Soldier,” which Shmulik Kraus set to music.[5] The song appeared on the sole album released by the High Windows in 1967.[5] His movement between songs, short satirical prose, and theatrical writing was already evident before the productions that brought him wider public attention.[2][5]

In June 1967, Levin was called up for military service and assigned to an antiaircraft unit at el-Arish in Sinai, arriving after the fighting had ended.[2] The destruction he encountered, together with the treatment of Egyptian prisoners and their dead, affected him deeply.[2] After the war, he left university and worked on You, Me and the Next War, a satire intended to puncture the prevailing euphoria over the victory.[2] The work was staged in 1968.[1][6]

His early stage satires included You, Me and the Next War in 1968 and Ketshup in 1969.[1] These works juxtaposed the ordinary soldier’s desire to return home alive with the military rhetoric of politicians and generals, and their performances before small audiences drew mixed responses.[1]

Levin’s theatrical career also developed through independent production. Hillel Ne’eman directed Levin’s comedy Solomon Grip at the Open Theater in 1969 and appeared in the title role.[1][6] In 1970, the Cameri staged The Queen of the Bathtub, directed by Levin’s brother David, bringing his political satire into a major established theater.[1]

With Hefez and Ya’akobi and Leidenthal, both from 1972, Levin developed a tragicomic treatment of ordinary people living in poor and overlooked neighborhoods.[1] Their struggles to create meaningful lives became central to this part of his work.[1] Ya’akobi and Leidenthal is a three-actor play about two men competing for the affection of Ruth Sheches.[7] It was the first play Levin directed himself and marked the beginning of his directing career at the Cameri.[7][1] A major audience success, it ran for 200 performances.[8]

The Cameri subsequently became Levin’s principal theatrical home, although he also directed at other established Israeli theaters.[1] He repeatedly collaborated with the same actors, designers, and composers, and these working relationships helped shape his distinctive theatrical language.[1] His neighborhood and domestic comedies used short scenes, lean dialogue, and sentimental songs to express difficult relationships and frustrated desires.[1] Across this work, he examined social class, romantic attachment, desire, and family relations without relying on polite or idealized accounts of human motives.[7]

His production history included Shitz in 1975 and The Rubber Traders in 1978.[6] Beginning with Execution in 1979, he developed another direction centered on mythological plays and the strategies of tragedy.[1] These works drew on Western myth, Greek tragedy, biblical stories, and Christian tragedy, placing Jewish religious material alongside other literary and religious traditions.[1] Their stage worlds combined violent events with compassion expressed through poetic language.[1]

In The Sorrows of Job, staged in 1981, Levin reworked the biblical story as an existential and agnostic drama.[9] Job’s suffering arises not only from the shortsightedness and selfishness of other people but also from his own moral corruption.[9] His death becomes a spectacle and an anti-heroic representation of purposeless human existence.[9] This use of biblical narrative belonged to a broader body of work that combined recognizable references to Israeli life with mythical, literary, and legendary settings.[9]

The Great Whore of Babylon reached the Cameri stage in 1982, while The Patriot, a satirical revue from the same year, again placed Levin’s political theater at the center of public attention.[10][6] Israel’s Film and Theater Censorship Board banned The Patriot in 1982.[3]

In 1983, the Cameri premiered Packers, also known as The Suitcase Packers, a comedy comprising eighteen short scenes and eight funerals.[11] Its characters repeatedly imagine lives elsewhere: Elhanan talks of going to Switzerland, while his neighbor Bella plans to leave for London.[11] Levin had intended to shelve the play and did not direct it; Michael Alfreds directed the production, which became both a box-office and critical success.[11] The imagined departures, recurring deaths, and compressed scenes brought together several of the concerns found throughout Levin’s neighborhood comedies.[11][1]

Bella’s farewell dialogue subsequently acquired a life outside the theater.[11] Hava Alberstein adapted it into “London,” the title song of her 1989 album, released six years after the play’s premiere.[11] She recalled, in translation, “When I read the dialogue between Bella and Bianca for the first time, I felt there was a refrain hidden in it.”[11] The song’s success surprised both Alberstein and Levin, and it remained on the radio decades later.[11][8]

Levin continued to direct works concerned with survival and suffering, including Everyone Wants to Live in 1985, The Child Dreams in 1993, and The Walking in the Dark in 1998.[6] His work ranged across political satire, domestic comedy, and plays based on ancient myths and biblical texts, combining macabre and comic elements with poetic language.[12] Questions about suffering and survival linked these different theatrical forms.[12]

Murder examined the capacity for killing through three episodes set in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.[13] In the first, soldiers torture and kill a boy; in the second, the boy’s grieving father takes revenge on a newlywed couple because he mistakenly believes the groom was among the killers.[13] In the third, a harmless voyeur becomes the victim of a senseless murder.[13] Levin received the Israel Theater Prize for the work in 1997.[13]

Requiem premiered at the Cameri on March 19, 1999.[3] Based on three short stories by Anton Chekhov, it was written during Levin’s own struggle with cancer.[13] It treats death comically and differs from his other plays in allowing its characters to accept or embrace death rather than simply flee it.[13] The production was designated Israel’s Best Play of the Year in 1999.[13]

Levin continued working while seriously ill, holding auditions from his hospital bed in Tel Aviv for Crybabies, a play about terminally ill patients in a hospital ward.[12] He died of cancer on August 18, 1999, in Tel Aviv.[1][13] His death ended a theatrical career extending across approximately three decades.[3]

His writing was not confined to stage drama.[1] It included two prose books, collections of satirical sketches and songs, poems, screenplays, and essays.[1][14] Published collections included six volumes of plays, two volumes of satirical programs, sketches, and songs, and two collections of stories.[6] His screenplays included Floch and Fantasy on a Romantic Theme.[6] One of these, Floch, became a dark, absurdist film in 1972.[15]

Levin was a co-recipient of the Bialik Prize for literature in 1994.[3] His other honors included the ACUM Prize and awards from cultural bodies, an international theater organization, and Israeli newspapers.[6] Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s description of him as “one of the greatest playwrights that Israel has ever had” reflected the high standing he attained despite the frequently abrasive character of his work.[3]

His plays continued to be performed regularly in Israel after his death.[3] Revivals and later productions included Krum, The Sufferings of Job, and Winter Funeral, staged by theaters and training institutions.[6] Requiem, which he directed while seriously ill in 1999, eventually exceeded 300 performances.[16] So did Make My Heart Flutter, first staged in 2007 from material in his estate.[16] These extended runs brought both a late work and a posthumously produced work to substantial audiences.[16]

Levin’s widow, actress Lillian Barto, recalled that he had worried theaters might lose interest in his plays and that his reputation might prove a passing fashion.[17] By 2019, she had managed his estate for eighteen years, while his plays were being produced in countries including China, Poland, Slovakia, and Argentina.[17] His family also established a website containing his works and making them freely available to the public.[17] Unstaged material remained an important part of the estate: an earlier account of his international reception reported that nearly twenty plays had not yet been staged anywhere.[12]

International exposure had begun during his lifetime.[6] Ya’akobi and Leidenthal represented Israel at the Theatre of Nations festival in Sofia, and The Suitcase Packers represented Israel at the festival in Nancy.[6] His work was translated into French, German, and Arabic, and later accounts described translations into more than twenty languages.[1][12] The Cameri’s first Hanoch Levin International Festival presented twenty productions in eight languages, with more than 24,000 people attending festival productions.[12]

Translation efforts continued to expand his readership and performance possibilities.[18] A 2019 translation workshop brought together people working with Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese, among other languages.[18] English translations by Evan Fallenberg and Jessica Cohen included Krum, The Wanderers, The Thin Soldiers, and The Lamenters.[18] At that time, The Queen of the Bathtub was described as his only play translated into Arabic, and Motoko Sugare was preparing the first Japanese translations.[18]

His poetry also circulated in translation. Atar Hadari’s Lives of the Dead: Poems of Hanoch Levin was published by Arc Publications in 2019 and received a PEN Translates award.[19] Together with the theatrical translations, such publications extended access to writing beyond the plays most familiar to Israeli audiences.[18][19]

Levin’s theatrical language has also been examined as a source of pleasure that does not depend on reassurance.[20] A 2007 academic study asked how plays experienced as “unpleasant, irritating and even repulsive” nevertheless continued to fill auditoria.[20] It examined the ways his theater engages audiences intellectually and emotionally rather than sending them home “cleansed and contented” or affirming a rational, orderly world.[20] Its account associated the pleasure of his plays with Roland Barthes’s concept of “jouissance” and proposed that Levin offered a new kind of catharsis.[20]

Other responses emphasized sympathy within the apparent bleakness.[12] Director Jan Englert described Levin as writing about people “with sympathy and empathy and with feeling” and rejected a simple characterization of him as a pessimist.[12] This understanding placed emotional involvement alongside the grotesque, provocative, and macabre features of the plays.[12] The combination of violent stage events and compassionate poetic language was likewise an important feature of his mythological dramas.[1]

Music remained another route through which his writing reached audiences.[8] Besides “London,” the songs embedded in his plays included the comic “Big Toches” number from Ya’akobi and Leidenthal, a woman’s confession about her body.[8] The Israeli Opera created Hanoch Levin – The Opera for the year that would have marked his eightieth birthday; after a wartime postponement, it received a brief run.[8][21] Librettist-editor Ido Ricklin assembled songs and sketches from the plays, with music by five Israeli composers: Yossi Ben Nun, Yonatan Cnaan, Yonatan Keret, Roni Reshef, and David Sebba.[8] The production combined operatic interpretations of excerpts from seven plays with songs based on his poems.[21]

The international circulation of Levin’s work sometimes encountered political obstacles unrelated to the original reception of the plays.[22] In May 2011, the Cameri canceled a planned Sunday-evening performance of his comedy Thrill My Heart at the second International Antalya Theater Festival in Turkey after warnings from Turkish authorities and consultations with embassy security staff.[22] The event coincided with the first anniversary of the Mavi Marmara raid, amid announced protests.[22] Lead actor Rami Baruch responded: “We are actors and we are familiar with the phrase ‘The show must go on.’ Suddenly, that has become ‘The show must go home,’ so it can’t be a good feeling.”[22]

Levin’s early political theater provoked particularly intense disputes over the military, bereavement, war, and national solidarity.[1] You, Me and the Next War was initially expected to appear at Tzavta, but its managers canceled the production after learning its subject matter.[5] It was staged elsewhere, and at a performance in Kibbutz Netzer Sereni, veterans dismantled the stage and attacked performers.[5] His plays continued to address sensitive subjects, including Israel’s relationship with territories captured in 1967 and recurring violence between Israelis and Palestinians.[3]

The Cameri’s April 1970 production of The Queen of the Bathtub drew forceful reactions both inside and outside the theater.[1] Its satire targeted Golda Meir and the War of Attrition, while Levin was accused of attacking the army, war widows, and bereaved parents and undermining Jewish solidarity during wartime.[3][1] An “Akedah” scene reversed the familiar biblical dynamic by having Isaac urge Abraham to kill him.[5] Performances were interrupted by angry spectators, and pressure from actors, audiences, journalists, and political figures brought the production to an early end.[1][5]

Censorship became a direct obstacle with The Patriot in 1982. The Film and Theater Censorship Board banned the revue, part of the broader official and public reaction to Levin’s political theater.[3]

That same year, The Great Whore of Babylon prompted a separate controversy over graphic theatrical material.[10] Its plot concerns a woman who is raped, later orders the killing of the son conceived through the rape, and serves the boy to his father.[10] At the April 2 dress rehearsal, actor Yossi Yadin interrupted the performance in protest; spectators also shouted objections and walked out.[10] The production was altered and shortened but closed after twenty-nine performances.[10]

Levin answered the protests in a public letter defending freedom of expression and criticizing Cameri actors who had encouraged interruption of the performance.[10] He wrote that “the real prostitution was against the stage, not on it.”[10] Reactions remained sharply divided, with some actors and spectators condemning the production while others defended its artistic purpose.[10] Critics also disputed the implications of less graphically confrontational work: some attacked Packers as anti-Zionist, an interpretation that was itself contested.[11]