They say he fell

Portraits of Nir Bareket’s family, one taken before his brother, Yossi, (far left) was murdered, and one taken after, will be featured in the play.

He was eight years old in 1948 when Yos- si, his older brother, his hero, his “every- thing,” was murdered by an Arab mob, a tragedy that hung over him and his family from that day forward.

But it wasn’t until 60 years had passed that Nir Bareket was compelled to put his feelings and memories about his beloved brother on paper. In 2007, while on vaca- tion in Italy, Bareket sat down at a desk and began writing.

“Maybe sitting there, looking at the Medi- terranean, just sitting in the hotel room on the fifth floor… something just came out. I started to write and I had no idea where I was going with it. There was just a need,” recalled Bareket, an Israeli- born photog- rapher who settled in Toronto in 1975.

And now, seven years since he wrote the handwritten essay, his story is being trans- formed into a play called They Say He Fell.

“I became aware that Nir had written this… and [he] was kind enough to let me read it,” said Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, a playwright and director who has had a working relationship with Bareket for more than a decade.

“I’m always interested in the things that people do, other than the thing that you know them for. So he let me read it and then we talked about how his story would make a good play and how we would go about doing it,” she added.

St. Bernard, who wrote the script, said she included excerpts from Bareket’s essay into the script.

Although the play is still in the creation phase, last month the play was work- shopped by Toronto’s Pandemic Theatre, during which it was rehearsed, revised and critiqued.

“The story is very Russian doll. Nir is writing about his brother, and I’m writing

about Nir, speaking about his brother,” she explained.

And the story Bareket tells goes back to his childhood, of the way his brother’s murder hung like a dark cloud over his family in the days that followed.

“I was just about to turn nine and Yossi was two weeks shy of 20. He was with the Palmach [the elite fighting force of the Ha- ganah, Israel’s pre-state army] for a num- ber of years,” Bareket explained.

“They were stationed on a mountain in the upper Galilee called Mount Cana’an. According to what I know, all that I heard from other people, was that they were freezing. And one of the friends there, who I happen to know because I met him later – I call him the third man – he said he knew a place where they could get some straw and make mattresses. So they hopped in a truck and went to get straw.”

Baraket, who can trace his Israeli roots back to the 1850s, explained that the three men approached a checkpoint that had been set up by either the Haganah, or by a nearby kibbutz.

But when they got there, the checkpoint was unmanned – perhaps because whoever was on duty had gone to the washroom or gone to get something to eat, he said.

“He was not there, and he did not think that anyone, any sane person, would just go through there unescorted. So they went through and the Arab village, Tzemach, is just outside of the gate of the Kibbutz Deganya.”

The pick-up truck the three men were riding in was spotted by a group of Arabs coming out of a mosque following Friday night prayers.

“I don’t know how they stopped it, but they stopped it… They managed to take Yossi and Moshe. As for the third man in the back, the way they probably looked at it was that… because he was sitting in the back of the truck, he was less important. He managed to get away and he lived.”

According to Bareket’s essay, which was initially written in Hebrew before being translated into English, the two men were “slaughtered with swords, their bodies burnt and the murderers dancing over the dead bodies.”

St. Bernard said she hopes to tell Bareket’s story through scenes based on recollections and dramatizations.

Although she doesn’t expect the play to be ready for the stage until next year, St. Bernard said that the Mifgash Commun- ity Theatre, the only Hebrew-language theatre in the Greater Toronto Area, has

expressed interest in presenting a Hebrew version of the play.

Despite Bareket’s hesitation about bring- ing his memories to the stage, he said he feels that his story is important to share.

“It’s very hard. It’s demanding on me emotionally, but I’m very pleased to see it this way because I think it is a story that needs to be told,” he said.

“The way I see it, this is not an Israeli play. It is not a Jewish play, but it is a uni- versal play of loss and memories. It’s not just meant for Israelis and Jews. It’s meant for anyone who wants to see it.”