At the Chutzpah! Festival, Rita Ueda's I Have My Mother’s Eyes channels two families' generational strength
Chamber opera tells story of a Japanese diplomat who aids in the escape of 6,000 Jews from Nazi-occupied Lithuania
I Have My Mother’s Eyes: A Holocaust Memoir Across Generations. Photo by Flick Harrison
Chutzpah! Festival and Powell Street Festival present Rita Ueda’s I Have My Mother’s Eyes: A Holocaust Memoir Across Generations at the Norman & Annette Rothstein Theatre on November 18 and 19 at 8 pm
GIVEN THE OCEANIC subject matter of her 2019 opera Debris—the millions of tons of of radioactive flotsam washed into the Pacific by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami—it’s not surprising that Japanese Canadian composer Rita Ueda should find herself at the Vancouver Maritime Museum, giving an artist’s talk on her creative process. What is uncanny, however, is that she would discover the topic of her next music-theatre creation, I Have My Mother’s Eyes: A Holocaust Memoir Across Generations, at that temple of tempestuous voyages.
In the museum, Ueda reveals in a telephone interview from her home, she noticed an installation about the Bluman family, prominent members of Vancouver’s Jewish community. Also factoring in their story was the Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara, whose bravery allowed the Blumans and another 6,000 Jews to escape from certain death in Nazi-occupied Lithuania.
“That really interested me,” the composer notes, “because I’m always looking for intercultural stories about Canada and Canadians—and positive stories about our multicultural society.”
Few journeys could have been more turbulent than family matriarch Zofia Bluman’s passage out of Lithuania, across the Soviet Union by rail, and eventually on to Canada’s West Coast. And the more that Ueda researched that peregrination, the more she realized that there was a larger and very multifaceted story to tell—but the first step was meeting UBC professor emeritus George Bluman, Zofia’s son.
“George showed me his sister’s book called I Have My Mother’s Eyes,” Ueda says. “It’s their family memoir, and it’s not just a simple story of how his mother escaped from the Holocaust. It talks about the three generations of the Bluman family, and how it took them three generations to really recover from the trauma. And as I was working with the Blumans, they said ‘Well, you know, we’ve kept in touch with the Sugihara family, and theirs is a three-generation story of healing, too. Would you like to meet them?’”
The answer was obvious, and the Hokkaido-born Ueda was soon jetting to meet Chiune Sugihara’s granddaughter, Madoka. In their discussions, she learned that the Sugiharas had also paid a price for Chiune’s courage in issuing 6,000 transit visas to Lithuanian Jews. The consequences, had this been discovered by Hitler’s troops, could easily have been fatal, and on returning to Japan after the Second World War, Chiune was stripped of his diplomatic post with very little explanation, and wound up having to support his family as a labourer.
Rita Ueda. Photo by Alistair Eagle
There’s another parallel, and this feminist angle plays a large part in Ueda’s telling. While most Japanese accounts of the vice-consul’s heroism have focused on Chiune’s actions, his wife Yukiko played an equally important role.
“What I thought was ‘Well, it’s wonderful for a man like Sugihara to be doing all these heroics,’” Ueda comments. “But it occurred to me that if he was there with his wife and three little children, they must have gone through an enormous amount of anxiety—and, sure enough, they had. So I wanted to speak about all the support that the family had given Sugihara so that he could accomplish all these heroics, right? It comes at a cost. I found out that three weeks before that summer she had given birth, and nobody knows about this. She had given birth and she was under a lot of stress, and yet she took the time to help Chiune create all these visas, which were not just stamps. They were hand-written letters—and she wrote 6000 of them!
“Yukiko’s aria,” the composer adds, “is about how she sees the nations in terms of war and victory. And in the second part of her song she says, ‘Why do we still glorify victory and war when you can see all these atrocities around you?’”
In the world premiere of I Have My Mother’s Eyes, both singers will be substantially tested. Soprano Teiya Kasahara will play both Yukiko and Chiune Sugihara, as well as their son Hiroki and granddaughter Madoka. Meanwhile, mezzo-soprano Barbara Ebbeson will portray three generations of Bluman women: Zofia, her daughter Barbara, and granddaughter Danielle. Yukiko and Chiune’s ghosts will also be present, summoned from the spirit world by the Japanese virtuosos Reison Kuroda on shakuhachi and Naomi Sato on shō. Completing the ensemble will be Miyama McQueen-Tokita on koto, pianist Megumi Masaki, violinist Marc Destrubé, and cellist Sungyong Lim, all under the direction of conductor Jennifer Tham.
In a further departure from operatic tradition, most of the music will be improvised. “The vocal parts have been written, but I’ve given the singers the licence to repeat any part, to change any part; they can interrupt their arias to interject their own ad-libs,” Ueda explains. “The instrumental music will be all improvised, but in a structured fashion.”
It’s a brilliant conceit. I Have My Mother’s Eyes is about people living under conditions where all certainty has been lost—even in their day-to-day lives, they are improvising like mad.
It’s also a big risk artistically, as Ueda willingly concedes.
“I hope it works!” she says, cheerfully enough. “With structured-improvisation scores you can’t really tell what it’s going to sound like by looking at the music. You won’t know how it’s going to work until you actually do it. So it would have been a thousand times easier for me to write it in the normal Western fashion, with time signatures and key signatures—but that would have been wrong.”
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