How a Comanche Indian Came to Write the First Opera About the Nazi Holocaust
by David A. Yeagley
Originally published at FrontPageMagazine.com | April 24, 2001
The Jewish Holocaust has always held special meaning to me as a Comanche Indian. The threat of extinction is a fear to which I can strongly relate.
Last year, I composed what I am told is the first grand opera on the Holocaust, "Jacek," a three-act story based on the personal life of Jack P. Eisner, 75-year-old survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 and several concentration camps.
I met Mr. Eisner in Caesarea, Israel, on January 8, 1998. I was there for the debut of my newly composed chamber music, "Three Spirit Dances On The Bark Of An Ancient Stump." It was a three-movement duet for oboe and bassoon. I had rehearsed the music with Ayalet Ballin (bassoon) and Mirav Kadichevski (oboe), two young, brilliant music students from the Rubin Academy at the University of Tel-Aviv.
Mr. Eisner was kind enough to attend the concert. I was introducing a new system of harmonic organization and tonality, and gave my first public presentation of it in a pre-concert lecture.
I also introduced a new style of Hebrew cantorial chant, which I sang myself, and finally ended the concert with a performance on my Comanche flute, the type designed and made famous by Doc Tate Nevaquaya. (The late Doc Tate was noted as one of the top five Indian flute players in recorded history.)
As Mr. Eisner, my Israeli host Ted and I were walking home from Shabbat morning services, Ted – who had introduced me to Mr. Eisner – said, "Hey, Dave, you’re a good composer. Why don’t you write an opera on Jack’s story?"
"A Holocaust opera?" I said.
Jack stopped, turned and looked me straight in the eye. "That’s never been done."
There was my invitation.
Jack and I made arrangements to meet Sunday night, and I immediately began to contemplate this incredible charge.
Why had Jack entrusted the personal treasure of his life story to me, a non-Jew and a Comanche Indian to boot?
No doubt he’d heard enough during my performance to realize that I could handle the music. But what had Jack seen in me that gave him confidence that I could fathom the pain in his life and recreate it in an opera?
I still wonder. Perhaps I will never understand. But, having read Jack’s memoir of the Warsaw Ghetto, The Survivor of the Holocaust (Morrow, 1980; Kensington Books, 1998), I know that he survived many crises by making quick, shrewd judgments of people’s character – decisions upon which his life often depended. He has a gift for reading people’s souls. He must have read something in me.
After my performance, Jack lent Ted and me a copy of his autobiography. By Sunday, I was ready to make my offer.
"I would love to do it," I told Jack. "But I have to do the story line, the libretto, the music, and the orchestration." Ordinarily, each of these tasks is done by a different person. But my feelings about the material had grown so strong, I could not bear the thought of anyone else meddling with it.
"We have a word for you in Jewish," Jack smiled quietly. "Chutzpah."
He said yes without hesitation. I was amazed and thrilled at his trust. I had never before written an opera. In fact, no American Indian ever had. Sure, I studied at Oberlin Conservatory, The Hartt School, and then with Dan Asia at the University of Arizona. Yet, there were many famous Jewish composers in New York far more experienced in writing opera.
Jack must have sensed something deeper.
The truth is, I had studied Judaism and Hebrew scriptures for years. I was intimately acquainted with the stories of the Jews. I’d studied religion at Yale.
Also, I had studied some Freudian psychoanalysis at Emory, and had discovered also the interdisciplinary field of psychohistory in which nations or peoples are regarded as a single human personality, and are analyzed accordingly.
Essentially, I reversed the metaphor. I applied psychohistory to the individual. Jack’s story was a Jungian archetype. As a Comanche, I knew that shape. I knew personal suffering, and I knew the genetic, psychohistorical shape of genocidal fear.
My story line for "Jacek" is simple: the deconstruction of the human ego. It uses a modernist approach, a series of vignettes, rather than a conventional plot. The hero is a young teenager, who survived. There are no honors, no awards, and no recognition. All he did was survive. And that was enough.
This is the power of the story, in my mind. It’s a story every Indian knows well. It’s written in our genes.
Perhaps Jack simply sensed all this, intuitively. He did not question me about my background. He knew of my education, and he knew something of Indians. In his book, he remarked that, as a young boy, he used to love watching American films about cowboys and Indians. He always wanted to play the cowboy. Perhaps now, he had come to realize that the Indians were not the enemy.
Back in New York, I visited Jack several times. He always showed me around the various synagogues in Manhattan in a delightful temple-hopping frenzy. In the one at 5th Avenue, Jack introduced me to Eli Weisel, who smiled with real curiosity at the word of Jack’s Holocaust opera, written by an American Indian.
In two years, by 2000, I had completed the piano-vocal score. Jack introduced it to Zubin Mehta, and later Kristoff Penderecki. Mehta said it was a worthy effort, and "deserves to be heard." Penderecki said it was "heavy."
Israeli Opera, however, declined to produce it. Jack explained to me that Holocaust stories are not popular in modern Israel, where warriors are more honored than victims. There is a "prejudiced approach to Holocaust survivors," he has written, "treating them ... as Diaspora rejects and remnants of an unhealthy mentality."
Currently, "Jacek" is being considered by the Munich State Opera.
At the destruction of Jerusalem, 2500 years ago, the prophet Jeremiah cried, "Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?" (Lamentations 1:12)
Jack Eisner knows how Jeremiah felt.
Jack knows what it’s like to have a story that only the brave heart can hear. Jack knows what it’s like to bear tragedy within. He knows the obligation to speak for the dead. He also knows what it’s like to have people resist his story, and make him feel guilty for even wanting to tell it.
I know, too. It means something to me.
I have shown that I can write a Holocaust Opera. This one was for the Jews. The next one will be for the Comanches.
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