Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a literary treasure that all of us should commit to heart. This week, Bernard-Henri Lévy reflects on Jean-Claude Grumberg’s 1974 “Dreyfus in Rehearsal,” a play about the Dreyfus Affair, whose themes are hauntingly relevant amid today’s resurgence of global antisemitism.
The play is now the subject of a new production, “Dreyfus in Rehearsal Again,” in New York City—and for two nights only, on June 2 and 3, it will feature BHL himself. You can purchase tickets here.
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Do you know Jean-Claude Grumberg?
He is one of the rare French playwrights to have entered the classical repertoire while still alive.
The son of a Jewish tailor deported and murdered at Auschwitz, Grumberg spent his life speaking not about the heroes of history but about its survivors, its ghosts, and that post-catastrophe humanity that continues to joke, love, breathe, and work.
He produced a masterpiece, L’Atelier (The Workshop), which brings together, in the Sentier district of Paris, seamstresses in the years after the Second World War talking about clothes, boys, and vacations, while also knowing that, behind the sewing machines, hovers the shadow of the Holocaust.
He created another masterpiece, Dreyfus in Rehearsal, which I remember seeing in 1974 at the Odéon Théâtre in Paris for its premiere. It portrayed a theater troupe in 1931, in a Lithuanian shtetl during the rise of Nazism, attempting to stage a play about the Dreyfus Affair.
He is one of those creators thanks to whom France still understands that antisemitism, in all its forms and colors—from barracks nationalism to a form of progressivism that has become delirious, is never merely an opinion but a monstrous crime.
Now, do you know Yonatan Esterkin?
