»You told me this joke. Two Jews are talking. One of them says, ›I'm emigrating. To Australia.‹ Says the other, ›Australia?! That's so far away!‹ Says the first, ›far away from where?‹ Well. I know you told me that as a joke and that you don't answer rhetorical questions, but I do. I know what my far-away-from is. Far away from you is far away.« (Excerpt from Muttersprache Mameloschn)
Lost in Berlin. The present. A family. Grandmother, mother and granddaughter live here, with, without and against each other. They recount and remember, search yet miss, find and hurt each other. Three generations, three Jewish women in Germany rummaging through mountains of stories and history in search of the voids in their lives. They climb mountains, wreck them, fall down, yet consistently with wit, filled with harshness, irony and a great amount of humour. What they seem to be missing is a common language. So they go search for their »Mame-Loschn«, a mother tongue for themselves and others. A language that functions just as Yiddish once did: used, understood and lived by very different people. Lin, the grandmother, »lived« in the GDR as a communist and as an artist, loyal to the party line, and thereby losing her daughter Clara in the process. Clara, driven by fears of loss, hates her Jewishness, which was never really taught to her. Compulsively, she tries to turn her life around, to reinvent herself before it is too late. Rahel, her daughter, is also finding herself and has no clue what this »I«, could be. So for now she flees, away from all this overload of past, away from the »Mishpoche«. Yet how does one actually live and leave a family without ever having found it? How does one leave a past behind that did not seem to be one’s own? And where is Davie, the grandson, lost son and missing brother?
Sasha Marianna Salzmann tells a family story between pain and happiness with great »chutzpah«. And the story of an outstanding disintegration that has the power to bring people closer to each other and themselves.
Director Hakan Savaş Mican has already staged several of the author's texts. This production of Muttersprache Memeloschn sees a special re-encounter, as Ursula Werner returns to the Gorki Theatre after many years for the role of Lin.
