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Paper short abstract:

The paper offers a discussion of the stage-book of Shalom Aleichem's story "The Treasure", directed in Tel-Aviv by Aleksey Diky (1928). An examination of director's records in the margin of the text, allows to study the process of turning the marginal notes into meaningful art language.

Paper long abstract:

A director's stage-book comprises the text of the play, written by a playwright, and the director's notes in the margins. Usually this is a unique document that reveals both the process of creating the performance and the competitive relationships between the verbal and performative elements. Whereas the play is presented on the stage, the words become the behaviour, and the characteristics of this behaviour relate not only to art issues, but also to social and cultural phenomena.

The paper offers a discussion of the stage-book of "The Treasure", a controversial Hebrew performance staged in 1928 in Tel-Aviv by a Russian director, Aleksey Diky. The play was based on a funny and poetic story written by the prominent Jewish writer, Shalom Aleichem. However, its performative language was highly grotesque, and part of the public saw in the behaviour of the characters a cruel parody of the Jewish world. Diky offered laughter as an instrument for debunking the mythopoetic world created by Shalom Aleichem. The performance was accepted as a masterpiece of theatre art, while some voices accused Diky of an anti-Semitic approach.

An examination of Diky's stage-book, his notes and drawings in the margin of the text, allows us not only to reveal his implicit artistic intentions towards Shalom Aleichem's text, but also to study the process of turning the marginal notes into meaningful art language. The historical perspective of the discussed stage-book, comprising the issues of immigration, collective memory and the Second World War, stresses its importance.