'In blood, in blood thou shalt remember': David Mamet's 'Marranos'

Abstract

Inspired by a story of the persecution and extermination of his mother's relatives killed in a forest during World War II, David Mamet's Goldberg Street is a minimalist gem in which a father teaches his daughter about her ethnic identity, her history, and her responsibility as aJew.1 To illustrate his lesson, the father relates two cryptic stories, the focus of which is antiSemitism. M1\ore recently, David Mamet has addressed anti-Semitism and his growing reaffirmation ofJudaism in essays, in his screenplay, Homicide, and in his trilogy, Old Neighborhood.2 But the earliest example of ethnic representation in the Mamet canon is to be found in his little known, unpublished play entitled Marranos. Commissioned in 1975 by the Bernard Horwich Jewish Community Center, for whom Mamet had previously written Mackinac (which also remains unpublished), Mamet was paid the handsome fee of$ Iooo and 'provided only with the subject Marranos not even stipulated to be a title'. Douglas Lieberman, director of Marranos and the Bernard Horwich Jewish Community Center Acting Company which mounted the play's only production, recalls that Mamet's primary concern was the 'feelings of the Jewish family as they discover they are coming unmasked'.3 Not surprisingly, Mamet has set his play in the home of a wealthy Portuguese merchant on the same evening that the family has been denounced to the Inquisition and is hurriedly completing preparations to flee to Holland with immediate and extended family. Although the term Marranos is typically associated with the expulsion and extermination of covertJews during the Inquisition in Spain in the fifteenth century and Portugal in the sixteenth, the practice of Jewish existence in disguise in the Iberian Peninsula may be traced to the fourth century when the Visigoths ruled Spain and first promulgated anti-Jewish laws. The