Dramatic reading from Efratia Gitai's letters

European preview: Efratia Gitai’s Correspondence, CPL Editions New York 2019. Featuring: Makram J. Khoury, Yael Abecassi, Hanna Schygulla, Clara Khoury and special guest, Claire Bloom.

One woman’s intimate record of the tumultuous world in which Israel was born.

Efratia Gitai was born in Haifa, 1909. Her parents had arrived only a few years before from Białystok. She was one of the founders of a youth movement that embodied the pioneer spirit of the time. In the late 1920s, she traveled to Vienna to get acquainted with Freud and Adler’s theories. There, she experienced the last gust of artistic vitality before the Nazis took power. Back in Palestine, she married Munio Weinraub Gitai, a young Bauhaus architect.

The reading portrays a woman who belonged to a secular milieu. We encounter her family, political figures, poets, intellectuals, and above all a group of extraordinary women. Efratia wanted to preserve traces of seven decades of masterfully crafted letters. She knew that the sphere of intimacy was another way to understand her country’s history and the events that shaped it.

“In the beautiful gallery of my life, I have encountered extraordinary people. Among them was a group of rare women with whom I  forged deep friendships. I’ve  always thought that societies that do not respect women are destined to extinction.”

The reading will mark the European preview for the book whose official launch will take place in March 2020 at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.  Copies of the book will be for sale at the theatre. 

Efratia Gitai Correspondence was previously published  in France by Gallimard (and read at The Odeon in Paris by Jean Moreau), In Israel by Yediot Sfarim and in Italy, by Bompiani.