The cycle of oppression and persecution has continued, always presenting itself with another face, another name, another reason for unfathomable bigotry throughout time.
The Detroit Public Theatre’s presentation of Jennifer Maisel’s Eight Nights confronts us with this ongoing cycle with the story of a Holocaust survivor named Rebecca Blum. She arrives in the United States to reunite with her father in December of 1949 on the first night of Hanukkah. We can’t imagine the horrors she’s seen. The play unfolds through Rebecca's lifetime on the eight nights of Hanukkah as we see her go from a frightened young girl to a protective mother and grandmother all the while, her grief threatens to swallow her whole.
Along the way, she builds a multicultural family including an African-American couple who become her close friends, her daughter’s Japanese-American boyfriend, and her granddaughter’s lesbian partner. It’s a tale of both resilience and human connection.
It’s also a story of how trauma etches its way into us becoming a sort of prison that we can only escape by allowing others to bear witness to our stories, no matter how uncomfortable and tragic they are. Rebecca comes so close to telling us about what she witnessed at the concentration camp. But when we finally learn the harrowing secret that she’s buried during a moment of dementia in her old age, the moment is so fleeting that it’s almost lost. She’s been carrying this secret her entire life, and though her daughter and granddaughter don’t know exactly what happened to her, they too feel their weight. It wedges its way in between them like a ghost whose presence is always felt though unseen —a silent harbinger of intergenerational trauma.
Of course, there are actual ghosts in this play too though, at first, I didn’t realize why (or how) Rebecca’s mother was standing in the background, silent and motionless as a faded memory. But as the play goes on, it becomes clear that when characters we’ve come to know in the play appear in this manner, they’ve passed away.
We won’t spoil the ending for you, but it’s one of those melancholy moments that makes you want to cry but you can’t because the pain is so deeply entrenched. It digs a well in you, as it dredges up the collective weight of oppression, genocide, racism, and discrimination felt by marginalized groups.
Whether it’s Jews during the Holocaust, African Americans fighting for civil rights, or Japanese Americans being forced into internment camps, the weight of oppression doesn’t simply end when these tragedies cease.
At the end of the play, Rebecca and her granddaughter are welcoming a new tenant — a refugee from the Middle East. As I write, I cannot help but think with despair about the ethnic cleansing we are watching unfold in Gaza in the Israel-Hamas war. I am grieving for my brothers and sisters who are dying, and though we are not connected through ancestry, our humanity makes their suffering my own.
The cycle of oppression and genocide continues, but so does the call for us to stand together against hate.
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