Images: Photo 1 - The extermination of Slovak Jews was started by the Jewish Code approved on September 9, 1941. Photo 2 - Playwright Luba Lesna with Lydia Piovarcsyova-Steinerova.
The Steiner Bookstore tells the story of the famous Steiner Antiquarian Bookshop in Bratislava, Slovakia. It takes place during the anti-Jewish repressions in the early 1940s in the Nazi Slovak state when the antiquarian bookshop was subject to Aryanization, meaning expropriation.
The story is told through the recollections of Lydia Piovarcsyova-Steinerova whose parents perished in a concentration camp. Her father, Jozef Steiner, was the original co-owner of the bookshop. Lydia herself, even after all these years, tries to come to terms with her past, to overcome it by living an active life and understanding the actions of Ludo Ondrejov – the man who, in her eyes, is the real culprit of the Steiner family’s tragedy .
Playwright: Luba Lesna. Director: Alexandra Aron. Cast: Becca L. McLarty, Deborah Beshaw-Farrell, Peter McCabe, Katarina Vizina. Translated by: Julia and Peter Sherwood.
The play is based on true historical facts and on the novel of the same name by Luba Lesna.
Free and open to the public. Suggested donation $10. Seats are limited, on first-come first-served basis. RSVP through Eventbrite is required. The reading will be recorded and available at Havel Foundation YouTube channel later.
About
LUBA LESNA graduated from the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava. Before 1989 she worked as a theater critic, after the Velvet Revolution as a journalist and political commentator, among others at the daily Verejnost, Radio Free Europe, Slovak Television, the private TV JOJ, the weekly English-language The Slovak Spectator, and others. She moderated the discussion show "Pod Lupou" (Under the Magnifying Glass) on West Slovak Television. She worked as an analyst at the Office of the Government of the Slovak Republic and as an advisor to Prime Minister Iveta Radicova. Currently, she works as an advisor to Environment Minister Jan Budaj and writes blogs.
Luba’s most important investigative works include The Kidnapping of the President's Son or A Short History of the Secret Service (1998) that deals with the kidnapping of the son of former Slovak President Michal Kovac that was awarded The Erwin Kisch Prize for Non-Fiction (1999); Being decent is not enough (2020) - interviews with dissident, philosopher and political scientist Miroslav Kusy. In 2017 she published TheMillennium Woman, stories of four women who have lived at different times across the millennia, all accused of crimes they did not commit or are fighting against a hostile and unjust state machine. Vultures versus Clarinetis a docudrama from 2016 about Hartmut Tatz, a young clarinet player who tried to escape to the West in 1986 and was bitten to death by border guard dogs. Confused Identity (2015) is a TV documentary about the Sonnenfelds, the family of Luba Lesna. Virtually all who lived in Slovakia were murdered during the Holocaust, but one branch lives in Israel and the US. Lesna's relative, Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld, was chief rabbi of Jerusalem in the 1920s.
ALEXANDRA ARON is an international director and producer, based in New York City. She has been at the helm of more than 25 world premiere productions in New York City, at major regional theaters, and internationally from 1990 to the present. Highlights include A Night in the Old Marketplace (music by Frank London, lyrics by Glen Berger, seen in São Paulo, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Toronto, Milan, MASS MoCA, and Bard Summerscape among others), Naked Old Man by Murray Schisgal starring David Margulies (EST, NYC), Imagining Madoff by Deb Margolin (Theater J, DC), Eloise and Ray by Stephanie Fleishmann (New Georges), Judith Sloan’s It Can Happen Here, and Salomé: Woman of Valor by Adeena Karasick and Frank London (Vancouver, Toronto, ART’s Oberon Theater). She was a Fulbright Scholar to Argentina (1995). She is looking forward to directing the forthcoming Off-Broadway production of Mulberry Tree by Hanna Eady and Ed Mast for Loose Change Productions. She is the Producing Artistic Director of Remote Theater Project and a graduate Wesleyan University.
JULIA SHERWOOD (née Kalinova) was born and grew up in Bratislava. After her forced emigration in 1978 she studied English and Slavonic languages and literature at universities in Cologne and Munich, and then London, where she now lives. For over 20 years she worked for Amnesty International, traveling widely in Eastern and Central Europe and the former USSR following the changes in 1989. From 2008 to 2014, while living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where her husband, Peter Sherwood, was a professor at UNC, she took up literary translation from and into Slovak, Czech, Polish, Russian and English. Her main focus is on translating – jointly with Peter – and promoting Slovak literature in the English-speaking world.
Since 2013 she has served as editor-at-large for Asymptote, an online journal for literary translation, regularly reporting on the literary scene in Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland. She administers the Facebook group Slovak Literature in English Translation and jointly with fellow translator Magdalena Mullek curates the website slovakliterature.com, launched in 2019 as part of Raising the Velvet Curtain, a series of events she organized to promote Slovak literature and culture in the UK. In 2019 she was awarded the Pavol Orszagh Hviezdoslav prize for translating and promoting Slovak literature in the English-speaking world. Julia’s most recent book-length translations from the Slovak are But Crime Does Punish by Jan Johanides and Mothers and Truckers by Ivana Dobrakovova, both published in June 2022.
Cast
BECCA L. MCLARTY is an actor, improvisor, singer, and teaching artist. She has performed in NYC and regionally with companies such as Vivid Stage, Arden Theatre Company, The Brooklyn Generator, Luna Stage, and Mt. Gretna Theatre. Becca holds her MFA in Acting from Brooklyn College and is an instructor of voice and speech at Montclair State University.
DEBORAH BESHAW-FARRELL is an actor, singer and puppeteer who, for the last 25 years, has worked with Drama of Works, Puppeteers Cooperative and the Czechoslovak American Marionette Theatre. In her work with CAMT, she's played Mefistofl in Johannes Dokchtor Faust: A Petrifying Puppet Comedye; Horatio, Ophelia, Gertrude and all of Fortinbras' army in Hamlet (in Prague, Buson, South Korea and parks all over Manhattan); 28 different individuals in Once There Was a Village at LaMama, and many others. Her voice-over work can be heard in the video production John Singer Sargent and Music, produced by Quill Classics. Deborah read narration/stage direction in Alexandra Aron's staged reading of Uršuľa Kovalyk's play Waif T's Private War in the Rehearsal for Truth Festival 2022.
PETER MCCABE is a New York based writer, teacher, actor, producer and dramaturg. He writes off-off Broadway plays, and burlesque operas- recently publishing his Emperor and the Queen Operas. He has taught writing and literature at the City University of New York, has acted professionally since 1987, produced Lizzie – a rock and roll musical about the double bludgeoness Lizzie Borden, and Shaken Not Stirred – a kitschy immersive cabaret of the music of James Bond, that performed at a real Bond Villain’s lair. He was the Resident Dramaturg at the HERE Arts Center from 2009-2019. He is married to the absurdly beautiful Hillary Richard and lives in Brooklyn, and is working on Street Macbeth, and a show about Cuba in the 1950s.
Katarina Vizina, native of Bratislava, Slovakia, holds an MA in Musical Theater from the Czech Republic and an MFA in Acting from Brooklyn College where she received the Fellowship for Outstanding Contribution to Theater. Katarina has been part of the traditional as well as the avant-garde New York theater scene since 2002. She has performed in plays, musicals, one woman shows, cabarets, sketch comedy, radio shows, movies, and countless voiceover spots. She sings and performs in English, Slovak, Czech, German, and Russian (you can talk her into Yiddish). When not performing, Katarina is the general to her three handsome sons, personal stylist to her lovely little princess and a tsarina to their father.
The program is organized by the Vaclav Havel Library Foundation and the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews, with support of the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association.
The event is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. The program is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.