One Summer in Ivye Brought to Life on Screen

Author: Laura Rockefeller

A man dressed in traditional shtetl costume walks softly forward out of the woods. He greets us in Russian, Yiddish and English with a caution that we should only follow him into his world if our hearts are open and our eyes and ears are ready to take in every possible sensation.

So began Tamar Rogoff's film "Summer in Ivye," shown in Dana Auditorium last Thursday. It described the creation of Rogoff's experimental theater production, which commemorated the massacre of 2,500 Jews on May 12, 1942, in Ivye, Belarus.

Through interviews with Rogoff, members of her international cast, villagers of Ivye and clips from the final production, the film leads the audience on a journey through the process of recreating history.

When Rogoff first visited Ivye while working on another project in Eastern Europe early in 1994, all she knew about the town was that her family's roots were there. A conversation with a local she met on the street gave her a new perspective on the place and on her connection to it.

Soon after the outbreak of World War II, Ivye fell under Soviet occupation, but on July 1, 1941, the German military took control of the town.

Nearly a year of terror followed for the 3,700 Jewish inhabitants of the village. The pogroms and persecution culminated in the mass murder of the remaining 2,500 Jews in the village on May 12, 1942.

Villagers, some of whom remembered the episode and the members of Rogoff's family who had been killed in the massacre, recounted this story to Rogoff. Already an acclaimed choreographer, Rogoff decided that she would use her artistic skills to create a theatrical piece that explored the world of Ivye before the arrival of the Nazis.

The film allowed the audience to watch this theatrical piece develop over the summer of 1994, from the assembly of the cast through to the first performance.

As her stage, Rogoff chose the forest around the mass burial site of the massacred Jews just outside of Ivye.

The audience watched as Rogoff and her cast — including performers as diverse as Kostas Smoriginas, an acclaimed actor of the Lithuanian National Theater, and David Rogow of New York City's Yiddish theater — battled the mosquitoes and the heat to bring together dance, music and spoken word to tell their story.

In clips of the final stage production, audience members were given green cloaks so that they would blend into the forest as they followed Rogoff's uncle, played by Smoriginas, back in time to see the life of a village that was destroyed by prejudice. The audience was exposed to a series of vignettes: a school scene where local children played the parts of their ancestors who had been killed in the tragedy, and a scene where actual survivors of the May 12 massacre gave their treasured samovar to Christian friends for safe keeping.

The production values of the film itself were sometimes shaky, with periodic black spaces mid-scene and the camera sometimes being slow to focus when it did not seem intentional, but the story of self-discovery was powerful. Watching this story of loss and hope come together moved Rogoff, the actors and the Middlebury audience.