Published: 6 July 2020
Last updated: 5 March 2024
PEOPLE DON’T USUALLY THINK of Jews as acrobats, or circus artists. Or rather, says Stav Meishar, Jewish humour is associated with a Woody Allenish “nebbishes trope with glasses” type, not the physicality of circus entertainment. So when the Israeli-born Meishar, herself a circus person, performance artist and Jewish educator for young people, began researching circus Jews and found the story of the Lorch German-Jewish circus dynasty, she was immediately captivated. It was, she says, “like lightning struck, love at first sight.”
It’s a love affair that’s continued for seven years, during which she has created The Escape Act – A Holocaust Memoir, a performance centred on a survival story in Nazi Germany. Now, during Covid-19, Meishar is crowdfunding for a book on the Lorch story. “Corona is quite demoralising, but I’m looking at the silver lining and saying, ‘God just handed you the gift of time’. I don’t want to die and take this information to the grave with me… Jews in the circus - who knew?”
One of the first references Meishar found was a New York Times obituary for Adolf Althoff, another German circus owner who, with his wife Maria, was honoured as “Righteous Among the Nations” at Yad Vashem in 1995 for sheltering the Lorch family during the holocaust. Her research took her to archives, libraries, cemeteries and museums world-wide, and she collected first- and second- hand testimonies.
The one-woman show is told from the perspective of Irene Danner-Bento, the daughter of Alice Lorch and Hans Danner, who sought shelter with the Althoff circus in 1941 and was in 1943 followed by her mother, sister and then later her father, none of who were turned away.
Irene fell in love with a circus clown and it is their children that Meishar met with, and also, significantly, Mohamed Sahraoui, a Moroccan Muslim acrobat, their closest friend, who helped them hide when the Gestapo would pay a visit. The whole circus kept the secret of the four illegals.
The Lorch circus itself was founded in the 18th century by Hirsch Lorch and had been very successful. Even more so, as Meishar tells it, was the family’s Icarian troupe, which saw the son of its patriarch Julius Lorch performing feats such as three consecutive double somersaults on his father’s feet.
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They were billed by the famous Ringling Brothers circus as having a higher salary than any attraction before, and in the early 1800s toured all over Germany, the US and South America.
Some members of the Lorch family were murdered in the Holocaust or died as a result of their persecution. Others left Germany either before or during the war and started anew in England and in the United States. Post-war, Irene and her husband Peter returned to Irene’s hometown of Eschollbruecken where they lived out the rest of their lives in the compound that Irene's ancestors built, and that had served the family and their circus for generations. Irene and Peter had five children, three of whom still live at their family's compound. All five had careers in the circus but are now retired.
They are by no means the only Jewish people in the circus - Meishar says there are Jewish circus people "galore" in Israel and worldwide, in traditional and contemporary circuses. The Swede Circus Scott is run by a family of Jewish origin and in the Netherlands, while the Strassburger Circus no longer exists, some of the descendants of the family who fled Germany during the Holocaust still work in circuses today.
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So far, Meishar’s Kickstarter funding for the book’s printing, which closes on July 11, has garnered AU$10,392, well over the deliberately low target she’d set. Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing platform, releasing money only if the target is met, so Meishar wanted to be sure to get there. But the real cost of self-publishing is much higher, so she says anything further would be most welcome.
Meishar, who lives in Bristol with her husband, is herself the grand-daughter of a survivor and a “Holocaust refugee”, and her immersion in the Lorch family story has brought a certain personal sadness as she thinks about her own lost ancestry.
Is there perhaps a little jealousy in the mix? “Absolutely. Basically, the climax moment (of the performance) toward the end is when I talk as myself and how I’ve been doing this research for seven years and I know the biographies of every family member stretching back generations. I could write more than one book, but if you ask me about my own family, everything I know can be summed up in half a page.
“If someone came to me and told me stories about my family that I didn’t know, I would be so happy I’d kiss them.
“At the end of day, it’s not my story, it’s theirs and at the same time, like you say, I feel a little jealous because their family was famous enough that there’s something surviving them, posters, postcards, stories… They can learn about their ancestors and I’m never going to have that. There is something absolutely heart-breaking about that.”
As far as she knows, her grandfather never shared much, because in Israel telling the stories was discouraged in the ‘40s and ‘50s by the national ethos that everyone had come to build a new country with their own hands. Talking about past atrocities was seen as victimising yourself.
After the Eichmann trial in 1961, Holocaust survivors were encouraged to speak out, but she was eight when her grandfather died, too young to ask. All she has is fragments she has salvaged, worked into the show.
Multi-generational trauma, not just that of the Holocaust, is real, and never stays just with the survivors, but is passed on to the children and grandchildren, says Meishar. Her family was from Poland, and she’s “had a bellyful” about how Poland is processing its WW2 experience, but thinks Germany is doing a “spectacular job of owning up”, when compared with other countries, and any country that has ever been responsible for a genocide.
“People don’t like [it]when I say that’s an area in which we, as Jews, have a privilege. Our genocide is widely recognised, widely talked about … the leading narrative. There are some (genocides and atrocities) that are not even recognised, that are not talked about, swept under the rug.”
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Nevertheless, she’d never feel comfortable living in Germany as many of her friends do. While Berlin is very artsy, young and hip and has become “a sort of mecca” for young Israelis, every time she sets foot in Germany or Poland, she can’t breathe the same way. While part of her knows it’s ridiculous because there is barely a place in Europe that doesn’t have a history (of anti-Semitism), it’s about the energy in the air: “I feel it sits on me.”
When she visited the German town where the Lorch family is from, she asked if she could do a Kabbalat Shabbat in the synagogue, which had been partly demolished on Kristallnacht, became a garage during the war, and is now used as a - mostly empty - cultural venue. The woman in charge at the town hall asked for hire money.
“But I can’t be angry… I don’t think she realised… for her that building is no longer a Jewish building, it belongs to the town and if someone wants to host an event in it, they rent it like everyone else.
“For me that building is a relic from a massacre done to the Jewish people, a Jewish building that hasn’t had a Jewish (event) in decades. She had no ill intentions, someone had to pay to maintain that building.”
Last year, invited by the synagogue society, Meishar got to perform her show there on the anniversary of Kristallnacht - the story of a Jewish family, told to a full house at the synagogue where their grandparents used to pray, with townspeople of every age, teenagers and octogenarians.
“There’s a moment in my show where I sing the Yom Kippur prayer of Avinu Malkeinu and I almost started crying, thinking this is the first time a Jewish prayer is being said in that synagogue since Kristallnacht, I’m the first Jewish person to do this.”
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https://circustalk.com/news/how-a-german-circus-saved-a-jewish-family-of-circus-artists
http://www.theescapeactshow.com/the-history.html
