Despite living in a horrific Nazi concentration camp, Jaap Polak and Ina Soep continued to write love letters to one another. The couple’s letters were published in 2000 and were featured in a documentary film of this same title. Their relationship inspired Composer Gerald Cohen and librettist Deborah Brevoort ‘s first opera together, “Steal a Pencil for Me.
” The couple was present at the first workshop performance of the opera which coincided with celebration of Jaap’s 100th and Ina’s 90th birthdays. “Steal a Pencil for Me” was then given its premiere production in 2018 by Opera Colorado . And now the opera is available for all to listen to via a new audio recording released on August 23, by Sono Luminus.
Marlan Barry served as Producer and Recording Engineer, along with Co-Engineer Scott Burgess. Denise Burt designed the album cover. Original cast members Gideon Dabi , Inna Dukach , Adriana Zabala , and conductor Ari Pelto are featured on this recording.
Cohen and Brevoort spoke to OperaWire about their experience with this unique opera and its immortalization in the new recording. OperaWire: Why this story? Gerald Cohen: My parents are both refugees from Europe, my mother from Germany fleeing the Nazis in the 30s, and my father left in the 30s from Poland. He had many friends and family who were killed by the Nazis, so I grew up hearing stories, and also hearing survivor’s stories at my synagogue.
The thing about survivors’ stories, is that they are both unique and the same story. It’s like every story is heroic and not heroic at the same time. So, growing up with these stories I knew that at some point I wanted to tell a story in opera or at least in some form.
Jaap and Ina came to my synagogue in 1987, so I’d known them for about 25 years before even doing this. When the book of their letters came out and the documentary it suddenly hit me that this is the story I should tell. Margaret, their daughter, felt like there was always something hanging over the house.
She knew they were survivors but they didn’t talk about it. It was through her finding the letters in the attic and getting her father to translate them, that they really opened up, Jaap especially. Once he started talking about it, you couldn’t stop him.
Jaap had told the story many times, he had it scripted almost. He went all over the country, to lots of schools educating kids. So, when we spoke to them about it was more about how do we best tell their story.
OW: What was the process like working directly with the main characters? Deborah Brevoort: Ina would tell me, “Well, that’s not exactly how it happened.” I remember explaining to her that, “although Rudi died before this begins, if we only hear about Rudi as an off-stage name, it won’t mean anything to us. I told her that, in terms of the truth of the story, Rudi was very much alive in your mind and heart.
At the time you didn’t know he was dead, so I have to keep Rudi alive because he was alive for you. I said, he has to be alive for us, otherwise, we won’t feel it. We’ll create this opening scene to bring you all together.
I know this opening party didn’t happen, but everything in that party did happen; it just occurred at different times.” She completely understood that. When we needed to change things, we explained why, and she was totally gracious about it.
After the performance at the Jewish Theological Seminary, she came up to me and said, “I don’t know how you did this. You captured my life even though it didn’t happen that way. How did you do that?” I replied, “I listened to you,” and she said, “Well, that’s my life.
You got it. You captured it.” GC: Ina was a real theatergoer so we told her, “sometimes in theater you have to change things.
” From then on, she was okay with however we needed to tell it. One of the most amazing experiences was in 2013 when Ina and Jaap came to a lunch with the cast. It was deeply emotional for the cast to meet them, and for them to meet the cast.
It was also kind of funny because at the lunch, Jaap started flirting with characters who played his wife. At the performance, they sat in the front row, and the singers performed their story on stage. There was a moment when Jaap’s parents were being taken off to the train, and Jaap covered his face with a handkerchief.
He couldn’t watch that scene. I’m sorry they didn’t live to see the full production, but their presence at that production was a deeply emotional experience for everyone. OW: Deborah, how did you incorporate the letters in the libretto? DB: Whenever I’m doing something that is based on a real story or real characters the first thing that I do is I try to make sure that the language that I’m writing is not my language, that it’s rather their language.
So, I try to find their rhythms and their odd little ways of saying things. Everybody has a language signature and so I always try to catch that language signature. Specifically, the ordinariness of this story was actually part of what was so appealing about it to me.
Very often a story about two people who just survived the most horrific thing possible you know there’s a spirit of survival, but here it was not only surviving, but thriving. We tend to approach those stories with big heroic terms and big heroic characters, but what was so moving about it was how relatable it is, how everyday and ordinary these folks were. This superhuman survival story was achieved through the most mundane things through the importance of imagining everyday what it would be like to have an ordinary breakfast, or imagining what it would be like to have a chair when you eat, or how great it would be to have a cup to drink out of, just the small things that were imagined became the lifeline for them and was the key to their survival.
So, then you have epic horror taking place but yet you have folks who are just doing what human beings do. Just that, creates complexity of character, creates complexity of theme, and those letters were full of little details, that to me actually had great poetic power. OW: Tell me about the title.
DB: It’s a line from one of the letters where Jaap says, “My pencil stub is worn out. You work in the office, so steal a pencil for me.” I think it was both meant to be a request for a pencil and a little bit cheeky.
GC: We used to think it was a throwaway line, but then it gets more serious. The book’s original Dutch title was “Behind the Barracks,” not “Steal a Pencil for Me.” When it was translated into English, for some reason, the title changed.
Deborah felt a bit funny about it because it wasn’t really what the book was about. However, in writing the libretto, Deborah used the pencil in many interesting ways as a thematic element. DB: The pencil is the core metaphor of the story.
It was the instrument of death; it was used to check off names during roll call and dispatch people to Auschwitz. By stealing the pencil, it symbolizes reclaiming life. Ina, who worked in the commandant’s office, took discarded pencil stubs to write letters.
Those pencils, once used to send people to their deaths, were now used to write love letters, turning into an instrument of life. To me, the pencil conveys the full thematic and emotional journey, from death to life. It’s the perfect metaphor and title for the story.
OW: In the CD booklet, it was mentioned that having a visual representation created a “special electricity.” How did this energy transfer to the audio recording? DB: There’s a lot of storytelling that always happens visually on stage through the scene and the staging, but I am very firmly in the writing school that, if you want something on stage you do not put it into a stage direction, you make sure it’s incorporated in the dialogue, or in the text, or in the music. You have something in the dialogue which sort of forces your team to physicalize the thing that you want.
I subscribe to that school, but of course, I’m not trying to take over the directing job by doing that, but if there’s something really important in terms of storytelling that physically has to happen it needs to be supported in the text. So, there’s a clarity there even when you take the staging away you still know physically what’s going on. GC: I would certainly agree with that.
The thing about music, is that music makes things go at a certain tempo. It delineates what emotions are coming out in a way a certain line is said, as well as the pacing. So, hopefully when you just have the audio, and not the visual that it still is having the same impact.
OW: Gerald, tell me about the music in “Steal a Pencil for Me.” GC: I just love the voice, and as a singer I want to write music that’s grateful to the singer. The importance of using voice as an expressive instrument is to give emotion and to tell a story, because it’s really all about the storytelling.
There are a couple of pieces in the opera, one “An Ordinary Breakfast” and Jaap’s other aria, “There’s the girl I should have married,” which I wrote at the very beginning and those themes kind of made their way through everything. The whole opera is not based on that but it’s the idea of having certain musical ideas which then in both obvious and and more subtle ways make the way through the piece. For me, with writing an opera, even more than with writing a different kind of pieces, is that really important to let the emotions of the words and of the situation dictate what’s happening.
I’m writing music which I want to be beautiful and I want to be musically interesting but that is always serving the story and the drama. OW: Were you influenced by any Jewish music specifically? GC: As far as Jewish music influences, I’d say that Jewish music is so much in my bones, in my marrow, in my blood, and in what I sing every week as a Cantor, it’s just there. However, in the Passover scene, where they’re singing the Passover story I did use the the way that the Torah is chanted specifically in the Netherlands, which is slightly different than what we do in the United States.
It’s subtle differences but I went to a Dutch colleague of mine and asked her to record for me how they said things. So, in a way, that became the basis of that whole scene, it was the centerpiece of building out the chorus expressing their resistance to the Nazis..
OW: Why is it important to tell these stories through music? GC: The importance of telling the story of the Holocaust is about the urgency of it for me. With the passing of time, most of the people who actually lived through it are no longer alive. I feel urgency to get their stories while they’re still alive.
As the descendant of (not survivors of the camps) people whose lives were completely upended and deeply affected by these events, I want to be sure that these stories are told. Jaap told us to, “Write it quickly.” Jaap’s had six lessons he always taught, “Don’t discriminate; Don’t generalize; Don’t be a bystander; Choose to work for peace; Appreciate life and remember you’re living in a great country.
” Some Jews take the lesson of “never again, the Jews be attacked and destroyed this way.” It’s about preventing persecution and destruction of the Jewish people. But, I think that the most important thing, this is certainly what Jaap was talking about, is that it sensitizes us to the necessity of working to prevent such things from happening to anyone anywhere.
The lesson that hopefully for us, the lessons of the Holocaust, is we suffered as many others did during that time, and it teaches us the things we have to do differently, so that there’s not further suffering for any peoples in the world. It’s both a very particular story and therefore a very universal story at the same time. DB: Unfortunately, stories like this seem to happen; they repeat themselves.
I think the seeds for this are within all human beings and within all cultures. Some of the things happening in this country have parallels with what was happening in 1937, and that is a little alarming. You can’t ever think for a minute, “Oh, it can’t happen here.
” It can happen anywhere and does happen everywhere, though obviously at different scales. The Holocaust is the worst of the worst. I just think that, as human beings, we have to pause and look at these stories, hear them, and remind ourselves that it’s easy to treat the Nazis as distant evil monsters when, in fact, the seeds for what they did exist everywhere.
We must guard against it. Stories provide a good vaccination against such things. We learn more powerfully from stories than from just being told, “This is the lesson.
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