’No More Raisins No More Almonds’ about heritage and history

The music she heard there gave her the strength to stay alive and influenced her to write a play for the Yiddish Theatre about young Jews who were able to persevere in the face of brutal racism and oppression. “When I retired this is what I wanted to study was the songs and poetry written in the ghettoes during this time,” she said. “It’s amazing to me how many songs were actually written.”

A first-time playwright, Bettman wanted to tell the story of children by children, so she worked with Bryna Wasserman, the artistic director at the Segal Centre, and ‘No More Raisins No More Almonds’ was brought to the stage by YAYA-Young Actors for Young Audiences. “The importance of having young actors is because the story is about young people. The importance of having young audiences is critical because this is whom they’re talking to,” Bettman said. “When teens talk to teens, they listen, it’s not like somebody getting up and giving them a lecture or teaching them the history.”

The Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre in Montreal established YAYA and has since trained young actors in theatre, heritage, history, leadership and the Yiddish language. YAYA’s goals are to combat racism and promote tolerance through engaging and thought-provoking theatre. “It started with Dora many years ago,” Bryna Wasserman said. “We were able to involve about 60 young students from the community who weren’t necessarily actors. Some of them knew about the Holocaust but they didn’t really understand it. Once they started to perform. They began to live the part.”

Bettman was close to Dora, the late founder of Yiddish Theatre in Montreal, and is now very close with Bryna, who continues to carry on her mother’s work. Together both Bettman and Wasserman were able to create something unique on stage by using this play to identify with young people. “YAYA is really a reincarnation of Dora’s children’s group, because she believed you had to work with youth,” Bettman said. “The students that are the actors, they become the ambassadors and the defenders of human rights because they say what you just saw happening should not be happening to other children.”

The name of the play ‘No More Raisins No More Almonds’ comes from the Yiddish repertoire. It’s based on a lullaby sang to Jewish children by their mothers called ‘Raisins and Almonds’ and it was to make kids think their fathers, taken away from them by the Nazis, would return from a business trip with all kinds of goodies. “I wanted it to convey a message that something is not quite right with the situation,” she said. “It’s about prejudice and racism and being found guilty on the basis of who you are rather than what you did.”

Even though the play revolves around life in the Jewish ghetto, not one enemy is ever shown on the stage, just the children who had to struggle to survive and wait to be liberated. “For me it’s an educational vehicle, I know that’s not very artsy to say. Theatre is a place to learn things, you come to be entertained but you walk away having learned a lot,” Bettman said.

Although songs are in Yiddish throughout the performance, the dialogue is in English with French supertitles. The play has been staged in Ottawa, Toronto, Quebec City, the United States and is now in Montreal for the 50th anniversary of the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre. “That’s the idea behind showing ‘No More Raisins No More Almonds’ at this International Yiddish Theatre Festival,” Wasserman said. “To actually have 10-18 year-olds on stage is a miracle. It’s a testament to survival. And I think they see the importance of what they’re doing.”