Paul, Cecil and Henry Green are three Dublin Jewish medical students. The play opens in 1935 as they draw lots to see who will deliver the fatal morphine dose to their father who is dying of cancer.
After their father’s death, their widowed mother is forced to go to London to find lodgings for them all and to keep their studies alive as young doctors at the London Hospital. However transplantation into England means that Paul is forced to leave behind the love of his life, Eileen Reilly. Her father is an antisemite and will never accept their union. Paul leaves with a heavy heart and a hatred for religious divide.
In London the young men get caught up in the struggle against Mosley’s fascists at the Battle of Cable Street. When war is declared they are all mobilized. The experience of Hitler’s Europe turns them into fervent Zionists and in 1946 they go to Palestine to fight the British. There Paul meets Rina Goldberg, a former Yiddish theatre actor who has been traumatized by her incarceration in a concentration camp. She and he are involved in the bombing of the King David Hotel. Rina and Paul remain in Palestine as the British leave and as it transforms in to a Jewish state.
Does a Jewish nation state fulfil the promise of their dreams or has political violence utterly damaged them? At the end of the play their common experience both unites and separates them and foreshadows a present and future that can never promise peace.
SCENE ONE
DUBLIN
1935. A bedroom in a poorly furnished house. A man is in the bed. He is in his sixties, thin and dying. Three sons are in the bedroom with him.
CECIL
Shema Yisroel Adenoi Elohanu--
PAUL
It won’t help.
CECIL
Adenoi Echod.
PAUL
‘Hear O Israel. The Lord is One ‘ What the hell is Israel of the Lord for da?
CECIL
We can pray.
PAUL
Sure, and I’m going to marry Marlene Dietrich.
HENRY
Now you’re talking.
PAUL
Let’s get it over with. The poor bastard is in agony.
CECIL
We all agree. (Beat.) That’s certain?
HENRY
Agree or not agree, it’s all a lot of bloody nonsense.
PAUL
Like your bloody stupid prayers.
CECIL
What about ma?
PAUL
What about her?
HENRY
Should she be asked?
PAUL
What’s the point?
HENRY
Cecil’s right. We should ask her.
PAUL
Look, you eejits. They give him three weeks at the most. That’s three weeks of vomiting blood and screaming in pain. You want more of that?
CECIL
What’s the hurry?
PAUL
You know what that pain is like? It’s not like one of your bloody migraines, you know.
HENRY
You’re in an awful rush. Sure you haven’t got a pretty nurse to see?
PAUL
And if I have, what’s it to you?
CECIL
Eileen Reilly. You want to get in her knickers, is that it?
PAUL
Jaysus, will you give me a bit of peace? Do we or don’t we?
HENRY
Let’s vote?
PAUL
Sure. We could ask Dev if he wants to count the vote if you like.
CECIL
A vote’s a good idea.
PAUL
Right.
CECIL
Suppose he can hear us?
PAUL
Of course he can bloody hear us. And he’s wishing we’d put him out of his misery now. He can’t eat, his bones are sticking out worse than a Friday night chicken after you lot’ve been picking at it. Is that a life worth living?
HENRY
When there’s life, there’s no hope?
PAUL
Stomach cancer is no hope.
CECIL
But is it allowed? What does the Talmud say?
PAUL
Jaysus, who cares what the bloody Talmud says, do we go ahead or not?
CECIL
We vote.
PAUL
Who’s for putting him out of his misery?
HENRY
Suppose we ask him again?
PAUL
You meschuggah? He’s been begging for out for the past week.
HENRY
He might not be ready.
PAUL
Ready. Ready? Who is his right mind is ever ready? You want me to call a priest for the last rites?
CECIL
He was so proud when we all graduated. Sitting so proud, like a little Litvak. And you remember how he pulled out four cigars from his pocket. We sat there smoking. Saying nothing. Like he was Abraham with three new sons. (Beat.) You know, every night, I dream I am back there taking finals. Sitting, looking at the bloody question, and not knowing the answers. Every morning, I wake up sweating.
HENRY
Me too. Only I am in surgery. The patient is ready. And suddenly my mind is blank. Is it an appendix I have to do, or a hernia?
CECIL
I never wanted to be a doctor.
HENRY
I never knew that.
CECIL
A chazan. Just to sing in the synagogue would have done me fine.
PAUL
A cantor! Jaysus, will you get that head out of the shtetl and into the twentieth century?
HENRY
I didn’t want to be a doctor, either.
PAUL
Jaysus, now it’s confession time?
CECIL
What then?
HENRY
A pilot.
PAUL
Yes, and I wanted to be Johnny Weissmuller in ‘Tarzan.’
CECIL
God help you.
PAUL
Well then, God or no God, do we take this great bloody democratic vote or not?
HENRY
We vote. But if one of us disagrees, then we don’t do it.
CECIL
Done.
PAUL
Gentlemen and gentlemen, we are gathered together tonight to vote on whether we shall allow our beloved father to suffer in agony for several more weeks until the good Lord takes him and turns him into dust, or whether we shall set aside our Hippocratic oath and inject a fatal dose of morphine. All who wish to help our father, soon to be in heaven, raise their right hand.
CECIL
Shema Yisroel adonai elohainu adonai echad. (Beat.) As long as it’s not me that does it.
Henry lifts his hand. Cecil lifts his hand while praying with his eyes closed. Henry looks at Paul.