The Death of Klinghoffer -- an analysis of the libretto

Alice Goodman’s libretto for The Death of Klinghoffer reimagines the 1985 hijacking of the tourist liner the Achille Lauro by 14 Palestine Liberation Organization operators on the orders of Yassar Arafat and Abu Abbas (who died in 2004, not to be mistaken with Mahmood Abbas, PLO leader since 2004). All 14 terrorists became heroes in the Arab world. While eight won freedom through a dubious claim to diplomatic immunity, the others won early release on four- to 30-year sentences. Klinghoffer is the elderly American Jew in a wheelchair who was shot dead and thrown into the ocean. 

Since the opera’s 1991 premiere it has proved controversial. This is understandable, especially as the recent Gaza war has further enflamed the region and revived antisemitism throughout Europe and the Americas, in the streets and on the campuses. Clearly the opera ventures into a sensitive area.

In an interview with The Guardian (Jan 29/12) librettist Alice Goodman attributed the controversy to the complexity of her characterization: “Well, because the bad people in it are not entirely bad and the good people are not entirely good.” She contends she has been blamed for making her terrorists human and their victims flawed. She tried to humanize the Palestinians in order to avoid the dehumanizing of the Other that enabled Auschwitz. Her intention to explain the hijackers’ motives was misread as giving them excuses.

In a 2001 New York Times attack Richard Taruskin noted that Goodman gave the Palestinian terrorists the most beautiful poetry and music and the Jews the most plain, even vulgar. To his charge she has romanticized the hijackers she responds: “I actually think the most dangerous thing in the world is romantic nationalism. Not religion, but romantic nationalism. And if it's true, it's also true for Israel. Israel is not exempt from the problem I have with romantic nationalism. If it's an evil, it's an evil all over the world.” Perhaps. But a romantic nationalism that is determined to destroy another nation might be considered more evil than one which does not.

Clearly the work was intensely personal for Goodman. Raised as a Jew by Zionist parents, she recalls that even as a child she could not accept the creation of Israel as “recompense for the murder of European Jewry, recompense not being quite the right word, of course. The word one wants would be more like apotheosis or elevation.” During the writing of the libretto she converted to Anglicanism and is now an Anglican priest in Cambridgeshire.

     My present intention is to examine the libretto as Goodman published it (Boosey & Hawkes, second edition, 2009). Because it’s not easily available and most of us don’t have the chance to see — or to boycott — the current New York Met production, I am citing more detail from the text than I normally would. A shorter argument might leave suspicion I’ve over-emphasized some evidence and ignored contradictory material. For a sense of the choices the Met made for its 2014 production readers should seek out theatre columns and reviews. For example, see Alex Ross's sympathetic review in The New Yorker, November 3/14, pp. 88-90. In my December 2/14 blog I discuss Penny Woolcock’s very inventive -- and more balanced -- 2003 film, which was rejected by the Palestinian Film Festival for being too pro-Israel.

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The problem arises immediately, in the Prologue’s opening choruses. The Exiled Palestinians have a beautiful song about their father’s peaceful, open house which the Israelis razed in 1948, leaving to stand “not a wall In which a bird might nest. Israel laid all to waste.” They thank “the only God” and conclude that their faith will take the stones the supplanter broke “and break his teeth.” In the Palestinians' version the Israelis are the destructive marauders in 1948, not the infant state under immediate siege.

Then the Exiled Jews are introduced — but in the comic stereotype, the petty pecuniary: “When I paid off the taxi I had no money left, and of course no luggage…. My empty hands shall signify this passion, which itself remembers My empty hands.” “Let us, when our lust is exhausted for the day, recount to each other all we endured since we parted.” Using “lust” for the joy of life seems to debase that value. It may also lend support to the Palestinians’ embrace of death, that is raised later. Otherwise, the passage from the Palestinians’ passion to the Jews’ is bathos.

That opening shift in tone signals the libretto’s imbalance toward the Palestinians and Goodman’ reduction of the Jews. Having decided to humanize the former she dehumanized the latter by falling back on the Jewish stereotype. The imbalance is also statistical. As Phyllis Chester points out, the terrorists are given 11 arias, the Klinghoffers two each, but late in the opera when the audience’s emotions have been set. The prologue Choruses make it a 12-5 lead for the terrorists. They are not just given voice but — as in the examples above — loftier voice and significantly more voice. This is not an even-handed approach to a troubled issue.

In I,i four young Palestinians seize the ship after a large group of tourists has left to tour the pyramids. The terrorists shoot a waiter in the leg, stop the engines and transfer the lunching passengers to the more easily guarded Tapestry Room. 

The captain sings of the “comprehensive solitude” that distinguishes life at sea: “Good and evil are not abstract there. One tastes their advent; it is pure, metallic, unripe, and it twists the gut.” Is there no difference between them? “The same skill that steers the ship makes intellect an animal.” The latter anticipates Goodman’s rationalization of the terrorists’ savagery. The captain recalls being unsettled when an Arabic passenger while boarding slipped a small chain into his hands. What may have been an innocent gift, perhaps a prayer for safe journey, becomes foreboding. Only that passenger refers to “Allah.” The terrorists are given to use “God” throughout, which facilitates the audience’s identification with them. Even as Goodman estranges us from the Jews with her stereotypy she thus harmonizes us with the terrorists. Her Palestinians don’t claim a different god.

A Swiss grandmother sings of her sweet two-year-old grandson who preferred staying with her over seeing the pyramids. The First Officer reports the terrorists’ takeover, and that the captain’s hands are tied by his responsibility for the 500 passenger hostages on board. 

Palestinian leader Molqi threatens there is a bomb in the engine room. He calls the hijacking “a demonstration action for liberation” of fifty colleagues held in Israeli jails. While the Swiss granny sings of the screaming passengers — “How horrible To see one’s fellow men become like beasts, diminished by each scream” — Molqi assures them “No-one will be hurt, Check each passport, a little discomfort for a short time. Here is some American money. It will cover any damage.” “We are soldiers fighting a war” — he glosses their terrorist assault on innocent tourists at sea — “We are not criminals and we are not vandals but men of ideals.”  

Despite the disparity between his words and the immediate situation, Molqi’s position seems supported by contrast to the grandmother’s vision of animalistic passengers. Goodman gives her the sense that their humanity is reduced by their fear, not by their unjust and abusive treatment. Though the grandmother admits “We are quite helpless” she regrets having thought “At least we are not Jews.” That character assumes the inferiority of the Jews.

Now Molqi is solicitous, ordering food and blankets for the tourists: “We have killed no one.” Rather cursorily the teenage guard Mamoud introduces the Palestinians’ death culture: “We are sorry for you. We don’t worry as we want to die [emphasis mine]. It is you, it is they, who desire to live.” Goodman does not emphasize or analyze this quintessential issue. The Palestinian campaign has embraced the culture of death against the Jewish L’Chaim. The Palestinians extol their martyrs whether they slaughter Israeli soldiers, Olympians or the three-month-old Jewish girl recently targeted and killed with a car. They name streets after the murderers that provoked the Israelis to build their wall and to deter the import of weapons and tunnel construction material into Gaza. Goodman’s shorthand leaves the Palestinians’ embrace of death mentioned but not examined, an unchallenged ideal. She doesn't admit the deaths of innocents that the terrorists' embrace of death entails. 

As if expressing the battleground, the inter-act Ocean Chorus presents itself as the All-seeing’s landscape of night. “Here is the semblance of the first man, sinewy, thick with life,” both “superficially violent” and “sinewy, translucent inwardly.” “His pulse beats in his ears, entrenched in his side the sacred parasites.” The latter phrase rings perilously close to the Nazi stereotype of the Jews.

Goodman achieves some realistic balance in in II,i. Mamoud sings of the radio stations heard at night, the beloved pop love songs, then remembers his mother “killed with the old men and children in camps at Sabra and Chatila where Almighty God In His mercy showed my decapitated brother to me.” When the captain suggests such conversation between enemies might bring peace Mamoud recoils: “The day that I and my enemy sit peacefully each putting his case and working towards peace, that day our hope dies and I shall die too.”  Even admitting that the Palestinians’ death culture prevents peace with the Jews cannot balance the energy and poetry of his ostensible idealism.

An Austrian woman sings of having stayed locked in her room. “Even if one were going to die one would avoid the company of idiots.” In contrast, a bird that lands on the ship’s railing evokes Mamoud’s generosity (i.e., he projects his own dream): “Those birds flying above us, these landing on the ship’s railing, not migrating, doesn’t the earth belong to them?… favorite creatures, chosen and endowed, whose gratitude shames the holiest of men.” They “travel through each layer of the atmosphere, with no desire or need of war. Ritual song defends their nesting grounds.” Goodman ennobles her death culture proponent with this flight of poetic sensibility but leaves the consequences of his macabre ethic unexamined. 

A night chorus elaborates upon Mamoud’s anxiety about the next day.  “Elijah will return, the Jews believe, the Antichrist condemn, the Messiah judge, the dead, the wicked and the good will be distinguished.” That is interwoven with “I am afraid for myself. No one bothers to look up from his work.”

The Chorus Prologue to Act II cites the Abrahamic source of the fraternity between Arab and Jew. Slave Hagar dreams her son will die as a free man on his own land.

In II, i, with the air and water cleared around them Molqi invokes God to “have mercy on those who guard for the sake of God, who carry His secrets in their hearts unopened,…towards the Jews. None of you knows what the letter contained…. Not even I know fully what we are to do.” In continuing to cite God instead of Allah Molqi seems softened, more aligned with the Western culture, more sympathetic to the opera’s audience. Goodman soft-pedals his religious difference. “We have killed no-one, but soon people will die. Then Syria will show her hand. Every sound that you can hear is a passenger afraid for his life.” The hand of Syria means her support for Israel which Molqi claims provoked their attack. 

Leon Klinghoffer makes his first vocal appearance after young Mamoud sings “Now we will kill you all.” Act II (after a two-chorus prologue yet) is a rather late entry for the one character named in the title. But as we are seeing this opera is not about Klinghoffer, or his people, or his victimization. It’s not his side, his story. The terrorists’ victim is highjacked again by the librettist to make a case for his killers, to win sympathy for the killers we might otherwise condemn. 

Goodman appears to treat Klinghoffer with respect. “I’ve never been a violent man,” he sings, “Ask anyone. I’m a person who’d just as soon avoid trouble, but somebody’s got to tell you the truth. I came here with my wife. We both have tried to live good lives. We give gladly, receive gratefully, love, and take pleasure in small things. Suffer and comfort each other. We’re human. We are the kind of people you like to kill.” He confronts the Palestinians with their murder of children, their anger and hate, their burning of women on a Tel Aviv bus, and denies their idealism: “You don’t give a shit, excuse me, about your grandfather’s hut and sheep and his goat and the land he wore out. You don’t give a shit. You just want to see people die.” Although Goodman gives Klinghoffer a positive voice here, it does not alter the libretto's overall bias. The proportion of sympathy advantages the terrorists.

In response to Klinghoffer, the terrorist Rambo does not reaffirm any ideals. Instead Goodman has him recite the antisemitic stereotype: “You are always complaining of your suffering but wherever poor men are gathered you can find Jews getting fat. You know how to cheat the simple, exploit the virgin, pollute where you have exploited, defame those you you cheated, and break your own law with idolatry. America is one big Jew. What did you say? You are old and ugly. Not for one day will your children miss you.” Supported by background “Yuhs,” Rambo continues: “I hear a belly growl, the voice of your soul.” “Beg me,” he commands, “Kneel. Beg me to permit you something to eat and a chance for a piss.” “Nobody begs? That was your last chance. Just this once you can befoul yourselves. You are all wolves, wolves without teeth.” His non-Arabic name — claiming the valour and principles of the Stallone hero — eases our identification with his all-too familiar antisemitism. This Rambo rails against Western corruption: “Where English is spoken you will find perversion and all kinds of filth not practiced by stealth late at night but on the street during the day. You wink at sodomy. You laugh at blasphemy. You give no charity to the oppressed.” 

“This was to be our happy time together,” Klinghoffer adds, “Damn.” Then Goodman slips him into triviality and a sense of privilege: “We’ll bring home a tan anyway. When I want to lie down and get out of the sun I’ll get a man to wheel me below. One thing less for you to worry about. I should have worn a hat.” After Rambo’s prophetic rage Klinghoffer seems both silly and too arrogant to grasp his situation.

In a variation on his triviality, an English dancing girl recalls the day’s sandwiches and appreciates Omar ”who was extremely nice, kept us in ciggies the whole time.” Then Rambo came and “slapped a few people around a bit, and shouted that he’d send us all to hell, and told us why in rotten English. Actually, men like that aren’t ever up to much.” She forebodes Klinghoffer’s fate: “Now, I’d have bet Omar would do for at least one passenger. An American. How do I put it? They were sure they had their rights, but this was war; something they failed to comprehend. I did though and I shut up.” The silly girl was happily more discreet than the Jew.

Omar resumes the threat: “This perfection was made to be broken. This work must be undone and not by old men who have forgotten both annihilation and the joys of heaven. Let them wait while we fight, we who remember and have come far, none of us more than twenty years old.” “May we be worth the pains of death and not grow old in the world like these Jews.” Goodman elevates a simple murder into spiritual grandiosity: “My soul is all violence. My heart will break if I do not walk in Paradise within two days and abandon my soul and end the exile of my flesh from the earth it struggled with.” Again Goodman poeticizes the terrorists’ death culture. It seems a parody of the Christian concept of martyrdom, with this crucial distinction: Christian martyrs embraced their own death but did not force it upon others. On this point the Palestinians’ death culture proves evil, but that is not explicit in this text.

Confirming that terrorist’s desire, the Desert Chorus celebrates the arid paucity of the earth “contracted by no human speech, as if it had turned itself away from the world to leap like a fountain in the mind of God. The only beauty is the rare “rose of Persia,” yellow with red blotch, which the Iranians strip from their cornfields for fuel.

In II,ii Klinghoffer is shot, off-stage. The captain is informed but he reports to shore that no-one has been killed. 

Uninformed, Marilyn Klinghoffer sings her strictly physical awareness. She is consoled to have been told that Leon was taken to the hospital. “I’ve got the worst pain in my breast, a stabbing pain. And in my groin I don’t know what it is. It’s like arthritis, right up by the pelvis, you know, by the joint.” In her first burst of poetry she's reduced to a -- kvetch. Though modern replacements have let 80-year-olds throw away their walkers, “Paralysis like Leon has is intractable. He’s wonderful. He’s never stopped fighting. I’ve coped as well as anyone but he just goes on, amazing us all.” Especially compared to the Palestinians’ passion, Mrs Klinghoffer rings smug, privileged, petty, especially in the narrow limits of her “Nobody really cares except the sufferers.” And rehabilitation is not in fashion: “What a joke. Cure the headache, ignore the stroke. It makes me sick.” Both passages may point to the afflictions of the world body politic, of which she is unaware. Indulgently she retires: “You’ll forgive me if I close my poor eyes and pretend this never happened. Who could have imagined such a business, such meshugas [craziness]? I should apologize: Why didn’t we meet at the banquet? The buffet, you know, two nights ago. That would have been better. Let me rest now.” Again the victim is trivialized. Marilyn Klinghoffer is denied even the ditzy young dancer’s understanding that they are in a situation of war.

II,iii opens with Moloqi announcing Klinghoffer’s death: “American kaput. Take his passport.” Mamoud declares another victim will be shot every 15 minutes. Klinghoffer’s death is on Syria’s head for the Palestinians’ betrayal “by those with powerful interests in Israel, throughout the Arab world. We have not failed and the shame is not ours.” 

Oddly, the ship’s captain seems to agree. Because the authorities on shore have not met the terrorists’ demands, “now you must go on, another death, another sign that the world will refuse to see.” But he is astute: “I would say you did not fail until you killed. Yesterday the entire world acknowledged the significance” of their mission. He realizes the murder of Klinghoffer undercut the terrorists’ position — and his own. He suggests that they should kill him next, to redeem his honour while advancing their cause. 

     Meanwhile Rambo throws Klinghoffer’s money up in the air for the others to grab. The bills “came from the pants of an old man. They’re not very clean.” Of course, the association of the Jew with dirty money is quintessential antisemitic rhetoric, given dramatic visual life here.

Before the final scene Leon Klinghoffer’s body has a final aria. After what seems a perfunctory “May the Lord God and his creation be magnified,” Goodman sinks him again into the material, the mercantile: “After the war, in this part of town good furniture, exposed to the sun, buckled and warped, malachite and brass were quickly stripped and inlays worked loose. Locked bureau drawers had their locks broken. The souvenirs which would be taken fetched not a cent. As for the papers, no instrument could find the sleepers, whose things these were. None of the damage, water nor fire nor any outrage, reported there came to their notice, as if secure in the Lord’s justice. Empty handed but not hurriedly they were minded to go far away…. not to take action.”

The Day Chorus waxes more elegiac: “Is not the day made to disperse their grief? Light covers the mourners as dirt covers the dead and brings them to themselves. This was a country of inaccessible mountains, of vineyards and pastures where they cultivated the land to the very edge of the river and the river never flooded and was perennial.” The image is of a nature in balance.

Perhaps the Chorus’s subsequent poetry replays that image of the land as allegory: “What became of that woman who stared at us with ash smeared on her temple? The sun which filled her dark veil has divided her body among those who loved her underground. The sun which saw her waiting till dark to eat has put her in the dark and made her verminous. And as she dedicated her life to observance the sun, which enjoyed her ecstasy, made her black clothes green like the neck of a starling. We thought those young men had forgotten one another, but they have lifted that beam. Broken cement and sand slide into the hole from which a voice was heard as if an ant lion had caused them to give way.”

In II,iii the ship docks, the Palestinians disembark, and the Captain finally  informs Mrs Klinghoffer of her husband’s death. “There was no witness,” he claims. “I am told his body was thrown overboard in the wheelchair. I am afraid it is true. It sounds like the truth.” Of course any fiction would sound true. He hopes time will heal her, the Lord assuage her sorrow, “so that this mirage [of her dead husband] will soften into memory and phantom pain into strange joy.” She is inconsolable. “You embraced them!” she charges, “and now you come, the Captain, every vein stiff with adrenaline, the touch of Palestine on your uniform, and offer me your arm. I would spit on you but my mouth is dry. I have no spit and no tears yet.” At last Goodman allows Mrs Klinghoffer some dignity and principle. 

But that is short-lived. When she’d heard the shots she didn’t think what they might mean. Now she blames herself. Her husband, her best friend, Leon Klinghoffer “is killed by a punk while I think of this and that, hearing the shot, discounting it, looking at the sky, chatting idly. Why didn’t I know?” Goodman has Mrs Klinghoffer confess to the idle vacuity and her concern just with her own body — that Goodman attributed to her: “Oh God, with all the pain of hands, of feet, of skin, of the intestines, of liver and spleen, and heart, and brain, of every organ and nerve and bone, of muscle and tendon, of the womb and the spinal column that I have borne, why nothing then of what Leon had endured, what he suffered before they fired? He would resist.” Finally: “They should have killed me. I wanted to die.” Her desire for death sounds like the terrorist's but the parallel is a lie. She has no desire to kill anyone. 

Despite the nobility in Marilyn Klinghoffer’s last words Goodman restricts her to the terms of her simplistic characterization. The problem is not that Goodman gave her good characters flaws but that she presented the real Klinghoffers simply as the antisemite’s stereotype of the Jew. To the terrorists she attributed an idealistic mission and poetic ideals, despite their sordid effect. In humanizing the killers and dehumanizing the Jews she has committed the very insensitivity she claims to have tried to avoid. But that is her personal perspective: her sympathies are with the Palestinians despite their history of not accepting any peace that would let Israel survive. 

In presenting a historical situation — with the intention of illuminating the current political situation, aka crisis — Goodman makes an even more serious omission than the non-stereotype Jew.  Except for Mamoud’s brief refusal to negotiate, she gives no sense of the continuing crux of the issue: the Palestinians’ refusal to make any peace with Israel that would deny the Palestinians’ right of return. That is, flooding Israel with the millions of the 1948 refugees’ descendants, which would end the Jewish character of the state. (Of course, the right of return argument never includes the 750,000 Jews who were forcefully dispossessed and expelled from the Arab countries at the same time.)

Goodman accepts the Palestinian myth of a state violated by the 1948 creation of Israel. In fact, the Jewish homeland in Palestine was first legally recognized at the San Remo Peace Conference in April 1920. The Treaty of Sèvres gave Britain mandatory authority over “Palestine” as “a national home for the Jewish People.” Then, as in 1948, there were Palestinians living on the land but there was no Palestinian state. Yet Goodman’s Rambo blames the English for the Balfour Declaration’s “partition and the dissolution of the Palestinian nation.” In 1922 Britain, unilaterally and unlawfully, gave 78% of that Jewish Palestine — everything east of the Jordan River -- to Abdullah, which in 1949 became “Jordan,” and was closed to Jews. So contrary to the childhood conviction to which Goodman still adheres, Israel’s legal claim to the homeland long preceded the Holocaust. It only gained momentum from the Holocaust’s demonstration of the Jews’ need for a national refuge. Nor does she question the sanctity of the 1967 borders, which were in fact formally left open to settlement by a negotiated peace and which allowed for Israel to extend her borders for physical security. I offer one history here; the Palestinians have another. But the Jewish history has been systematically excluded from — The Death of Klinghoffer. Another highjack.

In retrospect Goodman’s bias can be found as early as her title. The Death of Klinghoffer whitewashes what can only be properly called a murder. This coheres with her humanizing the terrorists and diminishing the Jews and with her focus on the Palestinians’ “history” to the complete exclusion of the Jews’. Even ‘Klinghoffer’ signifies a reduction and impersonality that would have been corrected by the man’s full name.  

Finally, there is another issue: This libretto is for an opera. That means the lyrics will compete for our attention with the music, the acting and the visuals of the staging. The drama will pass quickly, allowing no time for contemplation, analysis, review, structural interpretation. Opera is not the medium for subtlety, nuance, ambiguity and circumspect analysis, which should be de rigeur for the responsible treatment of such a complex and consequential issue. Also, we’re used to enjoying operas in a foreign language, where the connotation doesn't matter that much. But hearing this one in English may well not be much easier. It’s often hard to apprehend the lyrics in song. What one takes away from a performance of this opera may not be the possible undermining of the terrorists’ claims but the grandeur of their pretence, their flash. Even with scrupulous staging and performance the effective meaning of this work’s massage may well lie in its most extravagant effects, like the killers’ vaunting and the familiar tropes of antisemitism, exercised not rejected. Like Rambo throwing up the money “from the pants of an old man. They’re not very clean.” 

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I would not call for censorship of this drama. Governments should not limit what its citizens can see and consider. But a company that mounts it should be aware of its biased nature and its incendiary effect. This is especially important when there is already so much antisemitism in the air, throughout Europe and North America, even on the university campuses where we might expect a sophisticated sense of history and healthier values to preside. Even liberals who ardently promote gay, women’s and religious rights, freedom of speech, a free press, an independent judiciary, diversity in political and religious choices, even they leap to condemn the one state in the Middle East that provides all those — but is Jewish. Nations line up to endorse the new state of Palestine without requiring even the commitment to cease its plan to destroy Israel. 

The recent resurgence of global antisemitism has often been attributed to the 2014 Gaza war. I propose the reverse, that the war was inspired by knowledge of that continuing dark pool of hatred for the Jews. Hamas would not have baited Israel with its daily rocket barrages, its massive invasion by tunnels, and its slaughter of three teenagers, nor would Hamas have used its own civilians as shields and deliberately ramped up its own civilian casualty count — had they not expected the world to blame Israel for whatever followed. Nor could Hamas claim to have won the war. They were proved right not just by the widespread condemnation of Israel during the 50 days of fighting but in the ensuing plans to rebuild Gaza. Israel was excluded from the conference. The loser Hamas set the terms for the meeting, to exclude the obvious victor. There the billions were pledged without any demands for the demilitarization of Gaza necessary for the area’s peace — and for that funding not to be wasted. We live in a world with around 50 Muslim states and over 20 Arab states. Yet the small sliver of land that is the only Jewish state lives under constant existential threat — and for defending herself, world opprobrium. In this climate Goodman’s libretto falls well short of honourable or constructive purpose.