On Turning Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland Into a Hit Broadway Musical in My New Novel

Whenever I’m asked what my new novel, Lake Burntshore, is about, I have an elevator pitch ready to go. It’s set at a Jewish sleepover camp, I usually begin. It’s about Jewish belonging, settler colonialism, relationships to land, Palestine, I often add. Sometimes, I mention the inciting incident: at the beginning of the summer, more than the usual amount of staff get kicked out for smoking pot, so the camp owner’s Zionist son convinces his dad to bring in five Israeli soldiers as staff (a very real phenomenon at some Jewish summer camps). This intrusion pisses off the protagonist, Ruby, who is an antizionist undergrad and activist, and who is terrified the soldiers will ruin her beloved camp.

What I almost always leave out from my description is that the novel is also about a made-up hit Broadway musical. And that that musical is called Tel Aviv!. And that Tel Aviv! is based on Theodor Herzl’s 1902 novel Altneuland, which imagines a thriving, utopic Jewish collective called the New Society in Palestine (the novel’s title in German means “old new land,” and is what gave the city of Tel Aviv its name). Why do I leave out this exciting—to me, at least—detail? It’s not that the musical, listened to throughout the summer of the novel, argued about, and, conjointly with the novel’s climax, performed by the staff at summer’s end (complete with fancy costumes purchased by the camp’s doctor), isn’t important. If anything, it’s that it functions more on the level of background, until eventually bursting into foreground.

Here's a summary of Tel Aviv!, which is, more or less, a summary of Herzl’s original novel. A young, disillusioned Jewish man in Austria named Friedrich, on the verge of suicide, pledges himself to an older Christian misanthrope and millionaire named Kingscourt. They spend twenty blissful years together on a private island before deciding to head back to civilization (aka Europe). On the way, they stop in Ottoman Palestine, only to find the once provincial Arab backwater (Herzl, not me) has been transmogrified into a thriving Jewish society, a Jewish society with no state apparatus, no army, no borders, where the Palestinian population (supposedly) lives in harmony with their new neighbours and bosses. There’s a love triangle. There’s an operatic interlude on the false prophet Shabatai Sevi. There’s a presidential election between a xenophobic rabbi and a more liberal-minded civic leader. There’s both implied and explicit reference to the Holocaust (this is only in the musical). There’s a song about the perfect newspaper syndicate. As Ruby herself admits, though she hates the content of the musical and how it distorts the real history of Zionist colonization of Palestine, the music is undeniably catchy.

Unlike Dr. Farberman, the abovementioned camp doctor, owner of the world’s largest Herzl memorabilia collection, I am not obsessed with Herzl so much as I am obsessed with Altneuland. Not only did I spend an entire chapter in my dissertation—now a book called Leaving Other People: Diaspora, Zionism, and Palestine in Contemporary Jewish Fiction—comparing Herzl’s novel to Leon Uris’ Exodus, but somewhere in the process of writing Lake Burntshore I decided to turn Herzl’s utopic narrative and its attempt to marry what he saw as the best aspects of both socialism and capitalism into a musical. There’s something about the so-called father of political Zionism writing as his last major act a novel that imagines a Jewish future in Palestine that is not only so different than what the Zionists at the time wanted, but so completely at odds with the nation-state of Israel, its history, and its existence today. This is not to say that Altneuland is a blueprint for some sort of justice in Palestine, because it is anything but: the project undertaken in the novel is loudly a colonialist one. (The chief engineer of the New Society, Steineck, proudly boasts that once his Jewish laboratory cures Malaria they’ll be able to open Africa up for colonization and resource extraction.) I think what keeps drawing me to the novel, so much that I fake-adapted it into a musical, is that it captures the power of what fiction, of what stories, can do.

The man himself.

In fact, I tend to invent art, music, and narratives in the worlds of my fiction. In “Chasing the Tonic,” the novella that closes out my first short story collection, four young Toronto women follow a made-up jamband across America. In Rubble Children, my short story collection from last summer, there’s the novel Dark River by the reclusive author Hera Black, as well as the stories by Stephanie Krasner, a recurring character throughout the book; her story “A Handful of Days, a Handful of Worlds” imagines what would have happened if the early Zionists colonized Iceland instead of Palestine. There’s something about doing this, about making a fictional world within a fictional world, that gives my writer brain unending delight.

Tel Aviv! was an undertaking of a whole different register, however, both because it is an adaptation of a novel, and because of who the author of the novel is (and, perhaps most importantly, because I have never written a musical before). Nonetheless, once I saw how the musical would fit into Lake Burntshore’s narrative, I got to work. I made up a play. I wrote the song titles and short descriptions. I fabricated a history of the play’s production, from off-Broadway folk opera to smash hit. I went so far as to sketch out reviews and scholarly work on the musical, some of which is discussed or quoted from in the novel.

When I was writing Tel Aviv! a number of things about the play became clear. It would be, obviously, deeply Zionist, but the kind of diasporic Zionism that doesn’t actually see Israel for what it is. The play would maintain the racial, sexual, and gender strangeness of the novel. It would have excellent music. In celebrating the old new world of the liberalized New Society the play would fundamentally believe in the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. Not so much a cousin to Fiddler on the Roof, then, as a Zionist Hamilton. This is a play that teenagers and theatre kids, Jewish or not, would flock to, be obsessed with, tattoo lines of on their thighs. One thing Lake Burntshore is about—amidst all the sex, drugs, rock and roll—is the power of narrative to shape our worldviews. Tel Aviv! is a fitting vehicle to explore this, making visible the connection between aesthetics and ideology. As Ruby comes to terms with the settler colonial reality of Camp Burntshore, as she attempts to stop the camp owner’s son from buying ten thousand acres of Crown land that by right belongs to the Anishnaabe First Nation who live next door to the camp, the staff rehearse Tel Aviv!, try on their costumes, argue about the play's meaning.

One thing I hope the musical does, then, is to ask the novel’s readers a series of questions about stories and politics. Why do we believe the things we believe? What narratives have we taken into our core, knowingly or not? What fictions do we have to jettison in order to live ethically in this troubled world?

Ruby, in fighting for her vision of what camp, and by extension the wider Jewish collective, could be—diasporic, not tied to any nation-state, whether Israel or Canada (or America), in good relation with the Indigenous stewards of the lands and lakes of Turtle Island—offers her own particular answers to these questions. Just as the play and its sanitized politics captivate the campers and staff of Camp Burntshore, Ruby and her co-conspirators believe in a different Jewish story, one that does not rely on having the ability to bomb, maim, and destroy a captive population at will. If Herzl could imagine a different world coloured by his ideological slant, than so could I. New songs of hope and justice are always just around the corner.

Tel Aviv!

Act I:

“Europe and the Jews”
“Misanthrope Anthem I”
“Misanthrope Anthem II”
“Stopping in Palestine”
“Die, Time!”
“All The Things That Can Happen in Twenty Years”
“Welcome to the New Society”
“David’s Story”
“Meeting People”
“Rashid’s Song”
“Oh, Fatima”
“At the Opera: Shabbatai Zvi”
“Touring the Country”
“The Debate”

Act II:

“The Newspaper System”
“Love in All Its Forms”
“The Hydraulic Engineers”
“Passover Seder”
“Futuro”
“The Best of Both Worlds”
“The Election”
“From Misanthrope to Lover”
“The President Dies”
“Tel Aviv!”