Moni Ovadia

Ovadia was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in 1946 to a Sephardi Jewish family,[3][4] His father, a violinist, had Greek-Turkish roots, while the family of his mother, a singer, was of Serbian origin.[5][6] In March 1943, the 1,500 Jews of Plovdiv, including Ovadia's family, were saved from the Holocaust by the actions of Metropolitan of Plovdiv, Kiril, one of the heads of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church who threatened to throw himself before the train were it to depart with the community's Jews, whom the Nazis planned to deport to a concentration camp.[4][lower-alpha 1] His family's sense of Judaism was restricted to observing key feastdays. They shifted to Italy in 1949 to flee a rise in anti-Semitism in post-war Bulgaria, which had otherwise protected its Jews.[7]

Ovadia in 2019

Ovadia speaks Italian with a Milanese accent.[8] In Milan, he attended its Jewish school.[9] There he was taught to sing Yiddish songs, but only began to learn the language much later, from a Chabad Lubavitch rabbi, after an acquaintance, Rudi Litwak, insisted that, instead of frequenting Milan's Central Synagogue, with its Italian rites, they visit a small synagogue, Beit Shlomo, at Porta Romana, an apartment used as a shul or shtibi where the language was being spoken passionately by elderly Holocaust survivors and that rabbi.[10][11][lower-alpha 2]

A formative influence in this period, particularly for his interest in Jewish culture, was the mathematician and psychoanalyst Haim Baharier, who had studied under Emmanuel Levinas,[lower-alpha 3] and who opened up for him the riches of Yiddish culture.[lower-alpha 4] Ovadia graduated in political science and made his debut in the theatre world under Roberto Leydi, as singer and musician in the band Almanacco Popolare.

In 1972, he founded a company, the Gruppo Folk Internazionale, dedicated initially to the study and playing of traditional Italian music, a focus which quickly expanded to embrace traditions of songs and music in the Balkans.[12] He renamed it the Ensemble Havadià in 1978, a name drawn from his remote family origins.[6]

In 1984 Ovadia made his debut as a theatrical actor. In 1986, he produced Dalla sabbia dal tempo ("From sand, from time"),[13] staged in collaboration with his friend from his Jewish lyceum days, Mara Cantoni, with an accompanying orchestra that also plays a role in the spectacle. Here Ovadia adopts his future format, of recitations interleaved by Yiddish songs and music.[14] The unnamed protagonist (Shlomo in the script) is a Bundist émigré from an eastern shtetl in the process of assimilation. The period may be the 30s, and the ambiance either that of Vienna or Paris.[14]

The Polish director Tadeusz Kantor, whom he met in 1983, became an important influence on his work.[15][16] Throughout the 90s, Ovadia's performances drew rave reviews in Italy, and played a seminal role in the rise of a vogue for Jewish culture in that country.[15] In 1990, he created the Theatre Orchestra, which became a stable component of his theatre, a backing of some 11 musicians. The innovation was perhaps influenced by Max Reinhardt's Gesamtkunstwerk and aspects of pre-war Yiddish theatre.[14] Around this time 1990-1991, he developed the idea of Golem, a cypher for Jewish diasporic identity, which crystallised in 1992 with his production of Oylem Goylem,[lower-alpha 5] Based on H. Leivick's Yiddish play The Golem,[14] Ovadia's version, (Oylem Goylem is Yiddish for "The world is dumb"), skillfully melded satire and klezmer music sung by himself and deploys a range of accents: the Italian parts being recited by a Polish actor while Ovadia himself, when speaking Italian, pronounced it with a species of szmonces, a comic Yiddish accent used by Jewish actors in the interwar years when speaking Polish in cabaret performances.[17] Ovadia and his team then toured Italy, France, Germany and USA with the play. In 2005, the spectacle was broadcast by RAI, Italy state TV.

Moni Ovadia during one of his shows.

In 1995, Ovadia wrote Dybbuk, which addresses the Shoah. His treatment drew inspiration from both S. Ansky's Yiddish drama Der Dibbuk and the Yiddish poet (murdered at Auschwitz) Itzhak Katzenelson's Song of the Murdered Jewish People.[12][lower-alpha 6] Dybbuk has come to be regarded as one of the most important Italian theatrical shows of the period. In the same year, he produced Taibele e il suo demone and Diario ironico dall'esilio, written with Roberto Andò. His following spectacles include Ballata di fine millennio (1996), Pallida madre, tenera sorella (1996), Il caso Kafka ("The Kafka File", 1997, with Andò), Trieste, ebrei e dintorni (1998), Mame, mamele, mamma, mamà... (1998), Joss Rakover si rivolge a Dio (1999), il banchiere errante (2001), L'armata a cavallo (2003).

In The Kafka File, he plays the role of Yitzchak Löwy, whose Yiddish theatre fascinated the Czech writer.[11] The premier of his Trieste piece, which took place on the eve of the Jewish holiday, Simchat Torah, was full of topical allusion to the Jewish experience of that city, which Ovadia noted drew on the work of his friend Claudio Magris,[18] combined readings of the Torah with Jewish jokes and songs. In the finale, the lights are doused, to symbolize the erasure of that rich culture, which exists only in imaginative reconstructions like his own.[19]

In 2005, he collaborated with the band Modena City Ramblers for their album Appunti partigiani. In 2007, a poll revealed that he was regarded as one of the six most popular cultural figures in Italy.[20]

In 2009, he appeared in the movie Memories of Anne Frank. In 2010 together with artists from nomadic cultures, such as the especially Roma and Sinti he performed a theatrical piece entitled Rom & Gagè after France took measures to expel its gypsy population.[21]

A long time advocate of the cultural rights of persons with disabilities, on 20 June 2013 Ovadia held for the first time a full representation in Italian Sign Language of "Il registro dei peccati", one of his most famous monologues. The project was commissioned by and held at SoundMakers Festival, the only Italian multidisciplinary art festival fully accessible to persons with sensory disabilities.[22]

In 2016, in an event that was broadcast by RAI Television to an audience of millions, Ovadia was chosen to deliver one of the eulogies at Castello Sforzesco on the occasion of the funeral of Umberto Eco, Italy's most prominent post-war public intellectual and writer.[23] He chose to honour his friend by recounting one of the numerous Yiddish jokes he'd heard from Eco's vast repertoire.

Ovadia says of himself that he is "proudly extremist", qualifying this by stressing his opposition to any form of violence.[7][lower-alpha 7] He has been an outspoken opponent of racism, also within Italian society, which, he says, has absolved itself of any sense of guilt for its massacres in Ethiopia, Cyrenaica and ex-Yugoslavia.[24] He received an award from the University of Pavia in October 2007; in his acceptance speech he denounced the treatment of immigrants, especially Roma and Sinti.[21] Ovadia states that his deep affinity for these people reflects his own sense of what being a Jew entails:

In western civilization, no one has been regarded as "the other", "the foreigner", the minority existing outside of its proper place, more than the Rom, the Sinti and the Jews. Yet while, in the wake of the great catastrophe, the Jews have taken their place in the winners' salon, of those everything about whom is to be duly acknowledged, this has not been done for the Rom and Sinti. Everybody recognizes the word Shoah, no one Porrajmos, which means the devouring: their extermination has yet to be acknowledged in the Europe that produced it.[lower-alpha 8]

He identifies as Jewish and agnostic.[9] His first visit to Israel took place in 1966.[lower-alpha 9] His characteristic headdress is not a kippah.[lower-alpha 10] His distinctive woolen cap bears close similarities to those worn by Moroccans, a likeness which has often led to Arabs in the street greeting him as one of them. It has, he says, something of the comfort factor of Linus's blanket.[7] In 2013, he broke with the Milan Jewish Community, which he joined out of respect for his parents, after complaining that it had become a propaganda office for Israel, and in protest at what he called attempts to "Israelianize" Judaism.[9][25][lower-alpha 11] Ovadia is highly critical of Israel and of the double standards used by the United States in sanctioning human rights violations elsewhere, but never against Israel.[lower-alpha 12]

In response to the possible impression his comic performances of a constructed stetl "Jew" might feed into anti-Semitic stereotypes, such as that of a putative Jewish greed and Jewish noses,[lower-alpha 13] Ovadia has remarked that:

The merit of my success is that I simultaneously satisfy vast categories of people: Jews who love to laugh at themselves, those who feel a sense of guilt for that which happened and finally can laugh at Jews along with a Jew; anti-Semites who see their stereotypes confirmed.[26]

In a learned article penned for Corriere della Sera in defence of Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful, panned in some quarters as fabricating a version of the Holocaust and distorting its horror by introducing humour into its narrative of the tragedy, Ovadia documented the importance of the comical in Judaism and Jewish civilization generally. In appreciation of Benigni's work, he called him "a Jew honoris causa".[27]