Businessman Fefechts Schitz and his wife Tsesha eat well, but the aging couple are impatient to see their grownup daughter Schprachtzi get married and give them grandchildren. For her part, the daughter wants to get rid of her parents as expediently as possible, and longs to find a husband herself, a man upon whom she will be able to hang her life. Against the backdrop of rocketing meat prices Schprachtzi goes out to try her luck once more and meets Tcharchess, a former officer and tyro businessman. After making inquiries into the state of Fefechts’ business (“Two trucks and part owner of a shovel dozer”), the potential bridegroom enters into crude bargaining with the father of the bride, and they reach agreement on the marriage terms. Fefechts sums up the haggling thus: “You’re a Romanian thief, but I’ll turn you into a Persian carpet”.
The intrigues begin immediately: Tcharchess schemes to get rid of the elderly couple, first the father and then the mother, in order to inherit their assets quickly, whereas they, with their daughter’s help, seek to deceive Tcharchess, and play one against the other. In the loyalty war Schprachtzi shifts from the old people’s camp to that of the young.
The real war bursts into their life in the middle of the wedding. Tcharchess is called up for reserve service, “leaving a wife on the home front” to hoard food for emergencies. The war ends with a great victory: Tcharchess comes home, embarks on entrepreneurship, and within a short time realizes his ruthless capitalist “vision” by becoming a successful earthmoving contractor, rapidly overtaking his father-in-law Fefechts.
Schprachtzi becomes pregnant, and while her mother Tsesha hopes to become a happy grandmother, Schprachtzi mainly promises her lots of cleaning, washing, and so forth. The young couple enlists the mother to increase pressure on Fefechts. And indeed, the father, in the wake of a burst of gluttony, suffers a heart attack that almost totally paralyzes him. Tcharchess, who is deeply embroiled in loans and is keen to increase his credit, attempts to asphyxiate Fefechts in bed with a pillow in order to speed up the inheritance, but another war foils his plot. Tcharchess is called up again.
This time it is a different war that exacts the full price: Tcharchess is killed, and when the despairing Schprachtzi, with Tcharchess’ son in her belly, discovers how much she really loves Tcharchess and realizes that she will have to start everything afresh, we return to the opening situation: They are preparing to eat and are grumbling about the price of meat.
Towards the end of the play, the ghost of the dead Tcharchess appears in the Schitz home – he too wants a steak, and begs them to at least allow him to remain a sad memory. Fefechts, who is now completely paralyzed, miraculously gets to his feet and reassumes command of the family. He “accedes” to leaving the dead Tcharchess under the table to pick up scraps, and in a Churchillian speech announces that now he, Fefechts, will take the business in hand: “I’ll go on working in earth, water and air / I’ll double the capital… / I’ll double the war… / I’m building on the dead, building from the dead, / Dead, dead, dead…” And before they all sit down at the table – for what remains apart from eating – Tsesha summarizes the affair: “Had I known we were living history, / I wouldn’t have survived”.
Muli Meltzer
About Hanoch Levin’s Schitz
Schitz, which premiered in January 1975, was written in the course of 1974, a short time after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Together with a description of the mood in Israel following the victory of 1967, the play does not spare us Levin’s trenchant criticism of the social significance of that triumph – criticism he had already voiced in his political cabarets, You, Me, and the Next War (1968), and Ketchup (1969).
The first war in the play, which ends in “the great victory”, is of course the Six-Day War. As we know, the period that followed June 1967 provided many Israelis with an opportunity to get rich quick. This is aptly described by Tcharchess in his “vision”: “In my vision there is peace and quiet… No borders, no barbwire fences. In my vision the people work in field and factory without hatred, without fear, they work together, irrespective of nationality, religion, race, or gender, because everyone is working for a common cause, everyone is working for me”. In Levin’s view, this was also the beginning of a grave moral decline embodied, inter alia, in the gluttony of all the play’s characters.
The Israeli get-rich frenzy heightened, particularly from the end of 1968, when work commenced on “the Bar-Lev Line”, the Israeli line of fortifications along the Suez Canal. And again, as Tcharchess, who indeed got rich from the war, says: “There’s no shortage of earthmoving work, the army must dig in. / I submit invoices, and the Defense Ministry approves them”.
The crisis breaks with the second war in the play, which is clearly the Yom Kippur War (“Who starts wars between two and four in the afternoon?” Tsesha asks bitterly). Tcharchess is called up, and in this war is killed. If previously it seemed that Citizen Tcharchess manages to “screw” the state (“the Defense Ministry pays”), it transpires that the state has the last word. And Schprachtzi delivers a chilling monologue which is a bitter indictment of the brutality and frivolousness with which the state treats its citizens’ lives: “In the middle of fatiguing life, / The state came to my home, extended a vulgar hand, / And took my husband. / Now it wants me to greet it on death too; / Welcome, death…” And Tsesha’s words at the beginning of the play, “Human flesh has become cheaper than pork”, suddenly take on an awful meaning.
Prior to Schitz Hanoch Levin wrote on two parallel tracks: plays on the family as an arena of clashes between egotistical drives, and cabarets (sketches and songs) dealing mainly with war that brings with it not only death and bereavement, but also getting rich and exploitation. Schitz is the first work in which Levin integrates the sociopolitical aspect into a “family” play, and melds the two subjects into a work of great emotional, personal, and social potency.
Muli Meltzer
