Kindergarten
by Peter Rushforth
It is Christmas Eve in a tiny English country town, and we watch and
share as four people -- three young boys and their grandmother --
prepare to enact the traditions of a family festival. But a blackness
surrounds the ceremonies of joy: the children's mother is dead,
murdered some months before in a terrorist attack on an airport in Rome;
their father cannot be with them -- he is away in America raising
money for the relatives of her fellow-victims. Only his love is present,
palpable, supporting them. And from outside, their personal sense of
loss and desolation is echoed by the barbaric invasion of chaos loose in
the world -- another terrorist attack, more atrocities dominating the
television screen. As the evening moves toward its climax, Corrie, Jo,
Matthias, and Lilli, their grandmother, are drawn into a circle of
discovery and memory as richly compressed and resonant as one of Grimms'
fairy tales (whose characters in their wanderings and ordeals haunt the
lives of all four) ...both Past and Present merge and are opened up to
us: the England and Germany of story-book times and the nightmare
historical yesterday of the Holocaust. Each child, in his way, is led
by Lilli through the terrors of love and loss, just as she, in her turn,
is drawn by their needs to reveal her full self and to give them an
accounting of who they are. She is German-born, a Jew, a painter driven
from home and country as a young woman by the rising Nazi persecution.
Traumatized into abandonment of her gifts, mourning in utter silence
the annihilation of the family she had to leave behind, she has been
almost a mysterious stranger until this last death, of her only
daughter, impels her to live again, to reach out to a new generation,
using her artistic genius to give these bereaved children her vision
of everyone she loved, and loves, and remembers. For Corrie, Jo, and
Matthias, so keen, so startlingly aware, and so open to her, Lilli's
story gives shape to their griefs, their fears, their imaginings, and
their own precocious awareness of the world as it is, and was. By
Christmas's end, all four have brought each other by the hand from
farkness into light, finding a shared path that can lead them to
reconciliation and a larger peace.
Hansel and Gretel
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