Diary unlocked: First English translation of Israeli short story

Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin’s play The Patriot was banned for damaging his homeland’s values. His response, the short story Diary of a Censor, is translated for the first time into English for Index

MARKING THE FIVE-YEAR anniversary of Hanoch Levin’s death, Michael Handelzalts wrote in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in 2004, that Levin’s works had an impact on his country. “In all of his writings, both satirical and dramatic, he dissected Israeli society and described it in detail: the crudeness, the insensitivity, the interpersonal violence, the oppression, the gluttony, the intolerance and the cruelty.”

Levin, who maintained a certain distance from the public by refusing to give interviews, was frequently in the cross hairs of censors including political groups, who forced the closure of 1970s play The Queen of the Bathtub – which mocked Prime Minister Golda Meir – after just 18 performances. Israel’s Film and Censorship Board later banned his 1982 play The Patriot for being damaging to Israeli values and Judaism. The ban was defied in Tel Aviv and it had rave reviews, provoking a parliamentary debate on arts censorship.

In The Patriot, Levin portrayed a Palestinian being tortured with Sabbath candles. Diary of a Censor, published here, was his rejoinder to the ban.

When Levin died from cancer in 1999, aged 55, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Barak was quoted in The New York Times as having called him “one of the greatest playwrights that Israel has ever had”.

Diary of a Censor

Dear Diary,

As is my habit of an evening – a few heartfelt words before I sleep. Today once again, dear Diary, as happens day by day, I saved a Jewish life. He was some tragic figure in an antique play, a negro, army general, brave, but pathologically jealous. He took to wife this white nobleman’s daughter, who loved him, but suffered bitterly from his jealous outbursts to the bitter end, when he strangled her. Dear Diary, I don’t quite know how the idea suddenly came up for me, but right after the start of the play it dawned on me beyond a shadow of a doubt that the source of all evil was the untrammelled and overflowing urges of the poor negro. In light of his suffering I could no longer contain my compassion, got my scissors, and right at the end of his first scene two Turkish soldiers entered and cut off his balls and sexual organ altogether. In half a minute flat the poor negro calmed down, all his outbursts of jealousy throughout the play vanished as if they never were. While I was at it, dear Diary, I couldn’t very well leave his wife as she was with her husband short of a sexual organ, in case her own urge bestir itself and she should be unfaithful to him. So I inserted into the next scene two further Turkish soldiers who cut off her breasts, amputated her womb and filed away her clitoris with a nail file. Diary, their love scene was now so tranquil and serene. But the job wasn’t done yet. There was this conspirator there too, hatching plots, looking to disrupt the cute couple’s matrimonial bliss. In his soliloquy, where he confesses his schemes, I inserted another two soldiers, Turkish naturally, and they grabbed him and cut off his balls. All his motivation for wickedness and malice instantly disappeared. Against a backdrop entirely filled with Turkish soldiers he now stood, weak, passive and indifferent, barely completing his soliloquy before he got off stage.

High school students produce, direct and perform Hefetz by Hanoch Levin in Jerusalem in 2012

Credit: Nir Alon/Alamy

Straight off the second act began, and our negro went up on stage, pure, free of contamination, with no nonsense in his head, with no secreting or sexual organs, and the entire lower half of his body covered in sterile white bandages, to sit down and drink a nice cup of tea with his wife, whose lower half was also covered in identical bandages. And so they sat quietly drinking tea with the Turks standing behind them waiting, till toward the end of the second act there was nothing left for me to do but the natural and rational thing appropriate to their condition, that is – convert them. First I whitened the negro, introduced a rabbi, but as the rabbi was standing before that fortress in Cyprus, I realised it was an impossible proposition because I’d already amputated the negro’s sexual organ. I instantly added an extra operating theatre scene to the third act, ten surgeons grafted a new sexual organ on to the white negro, then the rabbi appeared to circumcise him, and just at the end of the circumcision ceremony two more Turkish soldiers appeared to cut his circumcised organ off again. I’ll grant you we got in a bit of a muddle with sexual organs in that act, but at least we were now left with a white, kosher Jew on stage, converted by the book, and with no evil urge.

The fourth act opened with a bang. I gave our Jew a handsome beard, yarmulke, and so, as he was now, a good-looking Jew with a high, sweet voice, how could I leave him an army commander in Cyprus? What has a Jew, one of ours, to do with the Turks and their conflicts? Quick as a flash I turned him into a cantor and changed his name from Othello to Otl, Reb Otl the Cantor. And what remained for a renowned cantor like Reb Otl to do in Cyprus? Why there’s no Jewish community at all there! I also had to get rid of the battalion of Turkish soldiers on stage. In the twinkling of an eye, right at the end of act four, I had him emigrate to the land of Israel, him and his humble spouse, formerly known as Desdemona, and as of today – Mrs Dina daughter of Mina, long may she live.

The fifth act, dear Diary, opened on our couple atop the hilltop cliff of a new settlement in the West Bank. And who drop in on them there suddenly towards evening, around the end of the play? Hugo, formerly known as Iago, Hugo Cohen, a one time Argentinean left-wing journalist born again due to anti-Semitic persecution as an ardent Zionist, turned religious and just arrived in the new settlement in the West Bank with his spouse – formerly known as Emilia, now Malka. And so they are standing at the end of the play all four: Reb Otl, Dina daughter of Mina, Hugo and Malka, with white sterile bandages on the lower halves of their bodies and mouths bespeaking songs of praise, the stage cleansed of Turks.

Dear Diary, that’s all for today. Tomorrow I’ve got a play about some prince of Denmark, with a murdered father, lust for vengeance and the devil knows what. It seems to me, dear Diary, it may be advisable to remove the balls right away in that case too and pour oil over troubled waters. We’ll see after that. The West Bank is hungry for settlers. Sweet dreams, dear Diary.