COPYRIGHT © 2007 LIBBY SKALA

SAN DIEGO JEWISH JOURNAL

November 2004

            

           The real Yentl?

                          

                     By James Giza

--------------------------------------------------------------------

  When Libby Skala started studying acting as a

teenager, her parents told her to find her bliss.

  When Deborah, the main character of Esther

Singer Kreitman’s autobiographical novel, asks her

father what she’ll be one day, he tells her, “Nothing,

of course!”

  First published in Yiddish in 1936, “Deborah” has

recently been reprinted by the Feminist Press. The

book charts the plight of a woman living in a tradi-

tional Polish Jewish family at the turn of the 20th

century as she is barred from formal education, con-

fined to the household and exiled into an arranged

marriage.

  Deborah’s experiences are almost identical to Kreit-

man’s as a member of the famous literary Singer

family. Her brother Isaac Bashevis based the prota-

gonist of his novel “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” – about a girl who disguises herself as a boy to study at a yeshiva – on his sister. But unlike Yentl, Kreitman never received any formal education.

  Skala will be performing a dramatic presentation based on “Deborah” – a creation of New York theater director Ronald Rand – at the San Diego Jewish Book Fair. Getting into character has been challenging.

  “To live under those oppressive circumstances and conditions where you’re told you will amount to nothing but a drudge your whole life doing housework… In a way it seemed very easy to identify with the frustration that she must have felt,” Skala says. “But, on the other hand, she had nobody to tell her she was justified in the way she felt, and that’s what I think would drive a person insane and to become sick and have epileptic fits. Because when you think that you’re the only one who feels this way, and you’re the crazy one, and nobody else around you is supporting your viewpoint – that’s I think the difference between what it must be like to actually have been her and to play her.”

  Skala draws inspiration from her grandmother, Lilia Skala, who fled from Austria and the Nazis in 1939.

  Lilia was the first female architect in Austria, but she defied her parents and became an actress, performing all over Europe and, eventually, on Broadway and in American movies. (She was nominated for an Academy Award for her role as a nun opposite Sidney Poitier in the 1963 film “Lilies of the Field.”) Libby Skala developed a one-woman show about her grandmother – “Lilia!” – which she has performed across the United States and Canada and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland.

  Although her grandmother – who Skala says was five years younger than Kreitman – certainly did not come from as strict and conservative a family as Kreitman’s, growing up listening to her stories gave Skala a sense of the culture and values of eastern Europe at that time and stoked her passion for that era.

  “Part of the reason I love playing my grandmother, who’s from this other world, is because it’s so different and it’s so fascinating and intriguing,” she says. “I think it has to do with the desire to enter that world and just kind of experience what it’s like.”

San Diego Jewish Book Fair: “Deborah”

When: Sunday, Nov. 14, 9:30 a.m.

Where: LFJCC, 4126 Executive Drive, La Jolla

Free. Breakfast included. Performance by Libby Skala & speech by Hazel Carr, Esther Singer Kreitman’s granddaughter. (858) 362-1348.

Last Updated: 3/4/2009

LIBBY

SKALA

Performer Writer