East of Berlin
East of Berlin
Hannah Moscovitch
Standing outside his father’s study in Paraguay, Rudi is smoking cigarettes, trying to work up the courage to go in. It has been seven years since he stood in that same spot; seven years since he left his family and their history behind him.
As a teenager, Rudi discovered that his father was a doctor at Auschwitz. Trying to reconcile his inherited guilt, Rudi lashed out against his family and his friends, and eventually fled to Germany.While there, he follows in his father’s footsteps by studying medicine, and falls in love with Sarah, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor.
Questioning redemption, love, guilt, and the sins of the father, East of Berlin is a ‘tour de force’ that follows Rudi’s emotional upheaval as he comes to terms with a frightening past that was never his own.
Available
2010
978-0-88754-849-9
Drama
Playwrights Canada Press
Hannah Moscovitch
Hannah Moscovitch, born on June 5th, 1978, in Ottawa, Canada, is a playwright who rose to national prominence in the first decade of the 21st century. She received the 2021 Governor General’s Award for English-language Drama for her play “Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes”. Moscovitch has gained considerable notoriety with two short plays written for Toronto’s SummerWorks, “Essay”, in 2005, and “The Russian Play”, in 2006. Her first full-length play, “East of Berlin”, premiered at the Tarragon Theatre in 2007. The play (available on DCPAS) focuses on the legacy of the children of those involved directly in the Holocaust. The play returned to Tarragon Theatre 2009 and 2010.
2013 saw the premiere of “This Is War”, a play depicting the lives of Canadian troops in Afghanistan. In 2015, Moscovitch wrote “Infinity” (also available on DCPAS), about a physicist who becomes involved in a love story while contemplating the nature of time. She collaborated with Lee Smolin to lend verisimilitude to some of the theoretical ideas.
Moscovitch’s plays have been widely produced across Canada, including at the Magnetic North Theatre Festival, Ottawa’s Great Canadian Theatre Company, The National Arts Centre, Toronto’s Factory Theatre, Edmonton’s Theatre Network, the Manitoba Theatre Centre, Vancouver’s Firehall Arts Centre, and the Alberta Theatre Projects.
In 2021, she created the series “Little Bird” with Jennifer Podemski for the Canadian television channel Crave.