By
– August 26, 2011
Teo Levin, the 85-year-old choreographer of a ballet called Obsession, explains its title to his new friend, Vivi, a woman half his age. The word comes from the Latin, he notes, where “it means ‘siege’ or ‘blockade,’ as if one’s senses are besieged by the object of one’s desires.”
Vivi knows something about such desires. Her mother, a Holocaust survivor, has long been obsessed with the need to talk about the Shoah wherever she can find an audience. Vivi herself ended up in military prison because her intense involvement with a man — a non-Jewish German man — clouded her judgment. After meeting Teo, a regular at the Tel Aviv café where she works, she becomes possessed by the need to learn everything about him and to create a tribute to his life and work.
Her quest to uncover a hidden part of Teo’s past leads him to reveal to her the secret he had buried for sixty years: he survived the Holocaust because he was the object of a Nazi officer’s erotic obsession. Deeply damaged by that experience, Teo nevertheless incorporates in his art the same unbounded passion, revulsion for mediocrity, and urge to “reach for the stars” that in a different way drove his protector/ tormentor.
In spare and precise language, and with extraordinary verisimilitude about the world of dance, Evan Fallenberg has created a modern parable about the thrills and the dangers of succumbing to obsession.
Read Evan Fallenberg’s Posts for the Visiting Scribe
Elaborate Lies with Convincing Details
Making it “True”
Vivi knows something about such desires. Her mother, a Holocaust survivor, has long been obsessed with the need to talk about the Shoah wherever she can find an audience. Vivi herself ended up in military prison because her intense involvement with a man — a non-Jewish German man — clouded her judgment. After meeting Teo, a regular at the Tel Aviv café where she works, she becomes possessed by the need to learn everything about him and to create a tribute to his life and work.
Her quest to uncover a hidden part of Teo’s past leads him to reveal to her the secret he had buried for sixty years: he survived the Holocaust because he was the object of a Nazi officer’s erotic obsession. Deeply damaged by that experience, Teo nevertheless incorporates in his art the same unbounded passion, revulsion for mediocrity, and urge to “reach for the stars” that in a different way drove his protector/ tormentor.
In spare and precise language, and with extraordinary verisimilitude about the world of dance, Evan Fallenberg has created a modern parable about the thrills and the dangers of succumbing to obsession.
Read Evan Fallenberg’s Posts for the Visiting Scribe
Elaborate Lies with Convincing DetailsMaking it “True”
Bob Goldfarb is president of Jewish Creativity International.
