Immigrant Punk: A Review of “Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story”
Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story
Created by Hannah Moscovitch, Ben Caplan and Christian Barry
In their song ‘Immigrant Punk’, Gogol Bordello include the lyrics: “Of course, we immigrants wanna sing all night long / Don’t you know the singing salves a troubled soul?”. It’s a sentiment that is shared by Hannah Moscovitch, Ben Caplan and Christian Barry in their stage play Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story. Set in Canada in 1908, Old Stock is a raucous and mournful neo-klezmer folk musical that bursts onto the stage via a shipping container. As the container opens the audience is introduced to Chaya and Chaim, two Jewish-Romanian refugees, who have just arrived in Halifax by boat. Both are standing in a queue waiting for medical assessments that will determine whether they can enter Canada.
On stage, Chaya and Chaim are accompanied by a klezmer band whose songs express the emotional undertones of their unfolding lives. The music moves between the boisterous and solemn. There are tears of laughter and tears of sorrow. And when Chaya and Chaim, played by Mary Fay Coady and Dani Oore, are not centre stage, they step back into the container, pick up their instruments and join the band.
However, the most immense presence on stage is The Wanderer, played by Ben Caplin. He is a storyteller and roaming bard who narrates the lives of Chaya and Chaim. He is witness to their struggles. He sings and dances and prays and gets drunk. He prods the audience with questions and checks in to make sure that we’re ok following the more horrific moments of the performance. The Wanderer draws us into the world of Chaya and Chaim and Ben Caplan’s performance has the audience clapping along to songs on topics ranging from Biblical hermeneutics (‘Truth Doesn’t Live in a Book’) to marriage advice (‘Widow Bride’).
There are universal themes about the migrant experience in Old Stock. The tension between ‘arrival’ and ‘return’ runs throughout the performance. Ironically, as a viewer, I am someone who emigrated from Canada as a teenager and the question of ‘return’, whether temporary or permanent, imagined or real, has followed me throughout my life and played out in my family’s own history. To be an immigrant is to be tangled in relations between multiple places and multiple ‘homes’. Yet Old Stock is not depicting a flattened, universal migrant experience. It’s specifically a story about refugees and as such it speaks directly to our own times. According to the creators, the stage musical was written with the current, global refugee crisis in mind.
At the opening of the play Chaya says that she’ll return to Romania “once things get better” while Chaim simply wants a clean break from the past. This clean break never happens. Everyday moments from their new life in Montreal suddenly open out into vast, dark and traumatic memoryscapes. On stage Chaya and Chaim remain semi-still as The Wanderer recounts grotesque and bloody pogroms and harrowing journeys and lost family members. At one point, in Montreal, Chaim comes across a newspaper headline stating that “Old Stock Canadians” are under threat from the “Semitic hordes” arriving from Eastern Europe. The phrase ‘Old Stock’ is generally taken to denote white, Christian, Anglophone and Francophone Canadians. In 2015, the phrase was used by then Prime Minister Stephen Harper during a Federal Election debate in response to a question about Canada’s refugee policy. Although Harper subsequently denied his comment had racist overtones and that by “Old Stock Canadians” he simply meant Canadians who were “descendants of immigrants for one or more generation”, he was still suspected of engaging in dog whistle politics. With its specific title, Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, fuses two worlds. It’s a story about the opening of the 20th century that addresses the social and political climate of the 21st century. At the close of the performance The Wanderer apologises to the audience for any “barbaric cultural practices” they may have encountered. Like the term ‘Old Stock’ this phrase has a specific political resonance in Canada. In 2015 the ruling Conservative government proposed setting up a hotline to report any “barbaric cultural practices” directly to the police. The pairing of the words “barbaric” and “cultural” tied notions of criminality to entire groups of people. The proposals were widely seen to be a racist targeting of Middle Eastern and Muslim immigrant communities and refugees while shoring up the Conservative party’s voter base. While the use of these specific terms might be lost on non-Canadian audiences, other phrases take on additional meanings for Australian audiences. I watched Old Stock at Arts Centre Melbourne. At the very opening of the performance The Wanderer popped his head out of the shipping container and said, “Hello Melbourne! I arrived by boat! . . . No. I lied. I arrived by plane!”. Although The Wanderer listed the many possible ways he might have travelled, the line “I arrived by boat!” weighed heavy on the audience. Today, in 21st century Australia the stories of Chaya and Chaim would play out very differently. As refugees arriving by boat, they would be subject to mandatory, indefinite detention and off-shore processing. They may even be subject to refoulement. Their lives and opportunities would have been foreclosed before arrival. In the terms of the stage play, the shipping container would not have opened, their story cut short.
The story of Chaya and Chaim is the story of the great-grandparents of the playwright Hannah Moskovitch. Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story is family history become performance and text. As Gogol Bordello sing in ‘Immigraniada (We’re Comin’ Rougher)’, “It’s a book of our true stories / True stories that can’t be denied / It’s more than true, it actually happened / We’re comin’ rougher every time”. While Gogol Bordello are a trans-continental fusion of sounds loosely labelled as ‘gypsy rock’, the music of Ben Caplan in Old Stock is a hybrid of neo-klezmer and folk and rabbinical wisdom traveling from Eastern Europe to Canada. It’s ‘immigrant punk’. At the end of the performance the group of troubadours on stage return to the shipping container. The music ends. They will be moving on to other places to tell the story of Chaya and Chaim. The music will begin again. Their story needs to be told and retold because we still haven’t learned.
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