with the

presents

Israel, Palestine. Conflict, possible peace, peace denied. The dream, the original dream and what's left of it.

What is Israel to an Italian Jew?

For years now Enrico has been performing his first monologue, where a young Riccardo Rotstein searches for his own history, his relationship to tradition and identity, to Judaism. A relationship built on the absence, rather than the persistence, of memory - a memory denied by the Shoah, by the quasi-total annihilation of his family, leaving a foreign surname and little more to avoid oblivion.

Today Riccardo is an older man, and asks himself different questions. What does Israel signify to him? A haven, the place where his family could have been safe? The occupying monster, as portrayed daily by the newspapers? The future, a new way to see oneself as a Jew? A state like any other? Riccardo narrates Israel through his own eyes, and through a dialogue, imaginary but intense, with the friends with whom he has shared the political passion of his youth, pacifism: friends for whom Israel has always been a reason of difference, of distance. Riccardo also narrates with the words of some of Israel's great authors - from  Yehuda Amichai to David Grossman. And with the help of music, with that strange combination of East European tradition and Arab world, of sacred and profane, of Orient and Western world, that is the music of Israel.

Riccardo speaks, narrates, asks questions, sings. And helps us, maybe, to find a new way to look at an old world and at one of our time's great issues.

Away from Freedonia  is a theater monologue with music, that can be performed in theaters as well as non-theatrical spaces.

Enrico is accompanied by a band that can go from the full Homeless Orchestra (9 musicians) to a simple trio, according to necessity.