Eva's Threepenny Theatre

The Brothers Kramm Revisited

2011-01-03T13:10:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to say that my story The Brothers Kramm made it into Tightrope Books' The Best Canadian Essays of 2010, an anthology edited by Kamal Al-Solaylee and Alex Boyd. The Brothers Kramm previously appeared in Queen's Quarterly. I wrote it after returning from a trip to Frankfurt in 2005. I hope it will become part of a book and a group of stories and essays about family written from the perspective of my not-German and not-Jewish identity, i.e. my negative capability. I suppose a book of creative non-fiction. "It occurs to me that what pushes people to lie and falsify is precisely the pressure to tell the truth."

Seamlessly Elegant

2010-07-17T04:37:00.000-07:00

Over at Canadian Literature, a Quarterly of Criticism and Review, Lisa Grekul reviews Eva's Threepenny Theatre alongside Ray Smith's Century. The years and years I spent obsessing (not writing) over structure are not lost:

While he develops a rich “cast of characters,” including his grandfather, his father, Eva’s sisters, and Eva’s last partner, Steinmetz is no detached recorder or alienated observer. And yet, the “singular” (to revisit Foran’s language) achievement of Eva’s Threepenny Theatre is that Steinmetz makes no apology for the seamlessly elegant ways in which he plays the “playwright.” Guided by Brecht’s notion that “[a]rt is not a mirror to reflect reality but a hammer with which to shape it,” Steinmetz makes his hammer apparent without bludgeoning readers with it. We don’t need to be told that he can never know the full truth—and yet, we somehow sense that he has come stunningly close.

The Brothers Kramm

2010-01-28T10:19:00.000-08:00

A soldier takes aim on the Eastern Front, and somehow the bullet strikes home again and gain, for generations to come. The Brothers Kramm is a new story which you can find in the 'False Papers: Biography and Real Life' issue of Queen's Quarterly (Winter 2009). The Brothers Kramm, both soldiers, who served in the Third Reich, are Eva's brother's brothers-in-law (sorry, you'll need to do the math in your head). Here's a quote from near the end of my story:

"It occurs to me that what pushes people to lie and falsify is precisely the pressure to tell the truth. This is something I understood implicitly when I insisted all there was to know about my great uncle Hrolf was contained in his glass eye. It was impossible to know with certainty what the solution to his character was. And forcing the discovery of facts, pushing too hard, would deaden the chance for illumination."

Ottawa Book Award Winner

2009-11-03T15:20:00.000-08:00

Eva picked up the Ottawa Book Award - fiction category - in October.

Jury Statement:

“A compelling and unique blend of fiction and memoir, Eva’s Threepenny Theatre explores the life of Steinmetz’s great-aunt Eva through her tumultuous childhood in Germany before the Second World War, to her involvement in Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, to her life in post-war Berlin and her old age in Canada. In an extraordinary feat of form echoing content, the story is told in shards, like glass shattered during Kristellnacht. At times devastating and poignant, at times hilarious, this book is brilliant and profound.”

Finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Award

2009-10-02T13:25:00.000-07:00

Eva’s Threepenny Theatre is a finalist for the 2009 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Established in 1997, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize recognizes Canadian writers of exceptional talent for the year’s best novel or short story collection.

The other finalists are Nicole Brossard for Fences in Breathing, translated by Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood; Douglas Coupland for Generation A; Alice Munro for her short story collection Too Much Happiness; Annabel Lyon for The Golden Mean. For more information about the award, visit The Writers' Trust.

All of the 2009 finalists will read during the International Festival of Authors in Toronto on October 28, 2009. Tickets for the event can be purchased online through the IFOA website.The prize winner will be announced at the Writers' Trust Awards on November 24, 2009 at the Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto.

rob mclennan's 12 or 20 Questions

2009-09-24T11:35:00.000-07:00

rob mclennan has posted 12 or 20 Questions: with Andrew Steinmetz on his blog. Below is an excerpt:

Q9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
A9 - Hold on to the boat.

Q13 - What was your most recent Hallowe'en costume?
A13 - Salman Rushdie.

Q16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
A14 - Play attacking midfield for Arsenal FC alongside Arshavin and Fabregas.

Q18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
A18 - When you write you don’t have to open your mouth.

Had enough? NO, then go here.

Ottawa Book Awards

2009-09-24T11:26:00.000-07:00

Eva is a finalist for the 2009 Ottawa Book Awards. Hurrah!

Montreal Review of Books

2009-06-11T07:33:00.000-07:00

Mary Soderstrom reviews Eva in Montreal Review of Books.

This is a lovely book, with its thick, rich paper, its French flaps, and its bold red and black graphics. The book's physical appearance cries out for the reader to stop and take careful account of what is written in the pages.

Full review here.

Life is what happens when you read, Fiction is what happens when you write

2009-05-19T15:54:00.000-07:00

Alex Good of Good Reports.net calls Eva's Threepenny Theatre 'a highly original reflection on memoir'.

One of the hallmarks of what's come to be known as literary postmodernism is the shift of attention away from texts as something made and onto the conditions of their making, emphasizing process over product. In some ways it's akin to the playwright Bertolt Brecht's goal of alienation, deliberately making the audience aware that what they are watching is something constructed by taking them behind the scenes or in some other way outside of their comfort zone. The goal? "To represent the familiar as unfamiliar." The method? "Estrangement, disharmony, detachment."

Which is one way of introducing Eva's Threepenny Theatre, a "fiction about memoir" wherein Andrew Steinmetz reflects upon the life of his great-aunt Eva and (though he fails to get equal billing in the title) grandfather Hermann Hans. Exactly how much of the story is fiction and how much memoir is impossible to say. Steinmetz inserts himself as a character into the narrative - sitting at a table with Eva and recording her voice on a tape recorder, digging into his own memory vault to bring the family chronicle up to date - but even here he doesn't tip his hand. Indeed as the book progresses it becomes harder to figure out who is supposed to be talking, as though the narrative's proscenium arch - Steinmetz's or "Steinmetz's" own point of view - had quietly dissolved.
Full review here.

The Canadian Jewish News

2009-05-14T07:51:00.000-07:00

Here is an interview about the family as distinct society, Keat's idea of negative capability, and the author's 'crossed out Jewish origins'. Thanks to Nancy Wigston and The Canadian Jewish News.

CJN.: Was the real Eva a wild character?

Steinmetz: She was no WASP, let’s put it that way. Direct, irreverent, packed with real and put-on emotions, her humour came from the extravagant positions she would take. Her theatre training and love of exaggeration made sure she was the focus of attention. I got to know her first when I was 12 and she was in her 60s. She moved into our [Eastern Townships] summer house with at least five dogs. My Swedish grandparents were already living there. They had a whippet – we had two dogs and a cat. On weekends, it was mayhem. I loved that atmosphere.

Eva never stopped telling stories. I picked up on her European sensibility – apparent in her tastes and habits: goose fat, Russian rye, garlic, wine, cigarettes. I didn’t grow up feeling very Canadian. Canadians ate hot dogs, we didn’t. Whatever Eva was,wherever she came from, I liked that place. I felt comfortable dreaming about it.

Full interview here.

Meeting Brecht's Grandaughter: Johanna Schall

2009-04-23T07:30:00.000-07:00

In April, I met Bertolt Brecht’s granddaughter, Johanna Schall in Toronto. I was in town for the warmth of the Pivot Reading Series. That same night, Schall was directing a University of Toronto drama school performance of The Misanthrope at The Drake Hotel. Here we are on Queen Street at 1 AM, after we'd found and shut the next whiskey bar, Oh don’t ask why.

And here is a modern day story: Johanna and I became Facebook friends, first; drinking partners, second. During our real-face-time together, we discovered that Johanna's first acting role in Germany was in a play directed by a member of the Paryla clan (My great aunt Eva's first husband was Karl Paryla). In her youth (she is 51), Schall told me, she avoided reading grandfather Brecht's material. Well, as she is an actor and theatre director, I can only imagine the towering anxiety of influence she must have felt growing up. Today, she said, she is disappointed that much of Brecht's fame rests on his reputation as a communist and on his chilly doctrine of alienation and detachment: that isn't what's important, she insinuated. Perhaps his communist standing is a red herring, after all.

What was important for me was just to meet Johanna Schall! Forget B. Brecht. Johanna answered my Facebook tap on the shoulder promptly. Sure we could meet. She was interested in Eva's life. As a person, Schall was disarming, frank, generous, curious and hip. She'd spent her time in Toronto going to clubs and watching live bands. We talked mostly about Rufus Wainright and the genius of Robert Lepage. We'd both recently seen productions of Lepage's The Blue Dragon. On Canadian theatre in general, Schall had this to say: it's far too earnest, far too polite. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Only just a bit like the cautious middlerangeness of CanLit.

Rambles.NET Review

2009-03-23T08:38:00.000-07:00

Michael Scott Cain's review at Rambles.NET:

In Eva's Threepenny Theatre, Canadian novelist Andrew Steinmetz deliberately blurs the line between memoir and fiction and, unlike American writers who appear on Oprah, admits that the blend of truth and untruth is what he's up to from the start.

Full review here.

National Post - New & Notable Fiction

2009-01-26T04:21:00.000-08:00

MEMORY, THEATRE AND AN EYE FOR DETAIL

Author Steinmetz's great aunt Eva is the best kind of relative for a writer to have: one with a past and a willingness to disclose it. Monique Polak, reviewing in Montreal's Gazette, says this novel (a mix of fact and fiction) is about many things,including memory, the history of theatre, life in pre-and post-war Germany and complicated family dynamics, but the real star of this book is Eva herself, a masterful storyteller with an eye for detail. Steinmetz is the Ottawa-based fiction editor at Montreal's Vehicule Press. Some chapters are narrated by a youngish man, a literary type who sounds a lot like Steinmetz, and who describes himself as a "scavenger of a kind, aspirant family historian with literary ambitions." Some are narrated by that young man's father; and by his grandfather, Eva's older brother Hermann Hans. Other chapters, ones that seem closest to fiction, are told in the third person. But the most compelling voice is Eva's. Polak says of this first novel: "Though it is sometimes difficult to distinguish Steinmetz from his relatives, for the most parthis writing is fresh and alive." Buy it.

Underground Bookclub Review

2009-01-22T06:41:00.000-08:00

Micheal Bryson describes Eva's Threepenny Theatre as a mixture of fiction and memoir - as a "novel" - that 'explores the intersection of history, family, identify and artistic creation.' He is the first reviewer to see a link between Eva's montage of narrators and points of view, and Brecht's collective and collaborative working method. He also says this about its narrative cul-de-arc:

It is conventional, in this Oprah-heightened reading environment, for memoirs to be powered by redemptive themes. James Frey's A Million Little Pieces may be the best known example. A criminal and drug addict, Frey turned his life around and wrote about it, but like Farley Mowat he didn't like the facts interfere with a good story. Or a good commercial theme, more to the point.

Eva's Three Penny Theatre doesn't explore redemption. It is a better book because it avoids this Christian, post-Freudian cliche. Television talk shows may "make good TV" by providing simple solutions ("conflicts wrapped up with a bow in 24 minutes or less!"), but literature serves itself best when it avoids this commercial imperative.

What I do know, is that Steinmetz's exploration of his family's history, and the way he has chosen to frame those stories, reveals a depth of humanity that would have failed to come through if he'd sought the simple theme: all's well that ends well.

Bryson's full blog post can be found here.

Threepenny Eva (1928)

2009-01-19T18:42:00.000-08:00

'Eva and I meet on the high plateau where authorship is shared, where vision is everything and reality nothing. There is nothing to see, neither character arcs nor conflict and resolution -- not even a Joseph Stalin or an Adolf Hitler. The process or method entails mostly waiting, absenteeism from the present tense.'

Rover Arts Review

2009-01-19T09:03:00.000-08:00

There is a review by David Homel in Rover Arts, a chic online 'independent review of the arts' based in Montreal.

ANDREW STEINMETZ GOT HIS HANDS ON A VERY GOOD STORY. It came to him courtesy of his family. We learn in this book, half-memoir, half-fiction, that Steinmetz’s great-aunt Eva performed in the first workshop production of Brecht’s famous Threepenny Opera back in 1928. Eva didn’t have any more than a bit part – apparently she was one of the pack of whores in the play – and she was in the workshop, not the final version that the world saw on stage. But that’s all right. Often the best stories come from the margins of history.

Read the full review here.

Fascinating debut novel...Review in Montreal Gazette

2009-01-16T06:05:00.000-08:00

Monique Polak reviews Eva's Threepenny Theatre in the January 15th, 2009, Montreal Gazette. Dramatic aunt is star of the show. Fascinating debut novel mixes family history and fiction. Here is a taste of Polak's review:

From Eva, we learn, too, what Brecht taught his protégés: The actor is not his character. Brecht rejected naturalism in favour of a more experimental epic theatre. Steinmetz the author explores similar terrain. But though this novel is experimental, and sometimes even unsettling to read – a trait Brecht would have approved of – its strength is the naturalism of Eva’s voice. Despite Brecht’s admonition, this author becomes his character.

Read the full review here.

Leni Parker is Eva at The Ark

2008-12-29T13:00:00.000-08:00

Actress Leni Parker breathed life into Eva's character during a public reading, in Ottawa, on November 29th, 2008. It was all part of The Ark production - a public reading of a selection of scenes from Brecht and songs by Weill - which came at the end of a three-week intensive workshop of the theatre of Brecht, hosted by the National Arts Centre English Theatre (Peter Hinton & Paula Danckert) and the National Theatre School of Canada.

During those weeks, in the basement of the NAC, I was more than delighted to hear selected excerpts of the novel read by the likes of Diane D'Aquila, Lucy Peacock, Tanja Jacobs, and Nadia Ross. Each of them concocted different Evas and broke my heart with their talent. Special thanks to Leni Parker who gave the first public performance as Eva in a brief but memorable reading that took place at the Dominion-Chalmers United Church.

Subject at maisonneuve

2008-12-15T11:40:00.000-08:00

Subject is an entre-genre love story based on Brecht's own FBI file (no. 100-18112) and Ruth Berlau's memoir, Living for Brecht. The story is set to some ideas about plagiarism and the collective method of writing, and asks the question:

Might subject be the missing link between socialism and plagiarism? If ownership is theft, then: intellectual property is breach of copyright? Or is it mind control? Might the collective unconscious be the Marxist ideal – a marvelous cloud which renders intellectual property moot?

Read the full bull here.

The Danforth Review Interview

2008-12-07T16:16:00.000-08:00

The tireless Michael Bryson of The Danforth Review interviews Steinmetz about Brecht and that fiction non-fiction thing. Together they generate some genre consciousness... full interview here.

Literary Review of Canada

2008-12-02T16:48:00.000-08:00

From the LRC, December 2008 issue:

Patrick Dennis had his Auntie Mame, Graham Greene travelled with his Aunt Augusta, and now Andrew Steinmetz joins the ranks of eloquent nephews with his brilliant portrayal of his memorable Aunt Eva. As with Mame and Augusta, Eva breaks the mold and the rules, but in her case, there are darker, richer shadows in a life that begins as a Lutheran in pre-war Breslau and shifts unexpectedly to a Nuremberg-defined Jew escaping to Canada. Before Hitler rewrote her religious status, she defied convention by joining the theatre and performing with the first cast of Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera. Her theatrical skills were life savers, enabling her not only to flee Germany but to get herself and her dog airlifted to safety.

About the literary genetic code of Eva's Threepenny Theatre, Robin Roger of the LRC writes:

Steinmetz calls this work about his Aunt Eva a fiction about memoir, meaning that key aspects of the book are not invented, least of all the character of Eva Steinmetz, but a significant portion is. Although it is disconcerting that they are blended together without distinction, the result is a compelling, evocative work .... Eva is so fascinating a character that it is hard to know why her nephew felt the need to add fancy to fact.

Montreal Launch

2008-11-30T10:31:00.000-08:00

The Montreal launch of Eva's Threepenny Theatre was at Librarie Paragraphe on Thursday, November 27th, 2008. In attendance were family, friends, and a handful of Montreal writers, including Liam Durcan, Clayton Bailey, and B. Glen Rotchin. Photographer is Ryan Hunt.

Amanda Earl on Eva's Threepenny Theatre

2008-11-26T11:06:00.000-08:00

Ottawa writer and blogger Amanda Earl responds to reading Eva's Threepenny Theatre in blog-print, here. Earl describes the structure of the book well:

The author/narrator conducts a series of interviews with Eva and also receives letters and has conversations with other members of the family and those close to her; this means that there are several layers of reporting in the book: Eva’s words as she tells them, her words as he reports them from the tape recorder he is using and the words of others who tell the author/narrator about Eva. There is also the mingling of Steinmetz's own life in the book.

Full-text here.

Review in Quill & Quire

2008-11-11T04:46:00.000-08:00

With so much noise in the media about the ‘truthiness’ of the memoir genre, it is more than a little refreshing to encounter Eva’s Threepenny Theatre. This blend if memoir, fiction, monologue, and poetic musing deliberately blurs genre in order to acknowledge both the slipperiness and the tremendous power of ‘truth’.

Purportedly about the author’s great aunt Eva – who performed in Brecht’s first workshop version of The Threepenny Opera in Breslau, Germany, in 1928 – this exploration of personal and political history quickly becomes (for both the writer and the reader) much more than a remembrance of a piece of renowned theatre.

Basing his re-creation on a series of recorded interviews with his aunt and his father, Steinmetz alternates between his own voice, the first-person voices of his aunt and father, and an imagined third-person voice (also of his aunt). Far from being jarring, the various points of view are pleasingly complimentary.

Eva’s ‘transcribed’ voice is often eloquent and funny, and it is also shot through with gorgeous turns of phrase that capture pivotal moments. Here, a young Eva listens for evidence of her ailing mother’s survival through the night: ‘I lay like a toad under the moon, my forehead glistening. I waited. I never slept until she produced her cough, a concussion through the walls.’

Similarly, Steinmetz’s versions of certain historical events (if they can be referred as such – the book seems to coax us to surrender notions of complete accuracy), despite their narrative distance, resonate with raw honesty, compassion, and the feel of family ties.

The result is that, although the reminiscences Eva shares are jumbled and episodic, Steinmetz’s method of ordering and interpreting these way stations of memory feels evocative, and – dare I say it? – true.

- Quill & Quire (November 2008) by Heather Birrell

The Drawing Board

2008-11-05T11:30:00.000-08:00

Eva's Threepenny Theatre
by Andrew Steinmetz
Gaspereau Press
October 2008

In an unusual fiction about memoir, Andrew Steinmetz tells the story of his great-aunt Eva who performed in the first workshop production of Bertolt Brecht’s masterpiece The Threepenny Opera, in 1928. Steinmetz takes the story back to Eva’s childhood in Germany, with her invalid mother and domineering siblings. Her training as an actress began just after her graduation from high school, and her introduction to the philosophies of Brecht and his contemporaries soon followed. With the pronouncement of the family’s Jewish origins, both Eva and her brother left Germany to escape Nazi rule, Eva eventually settling in Canada.

In their sessions with the tape recorder running, we see Steinmetz’s own life as it intersects with Eva’s, and his changing perspective on her life and work. Tied together with threads of Brecht’s play, Steinmetz presents a life lived as though the world were a stage. A fictional tribute, Eva’s Threepenny Theatre is as much concerned with what happened as what might have or was imagined to have been.

“I’d known Eva since childhood,” says Steinmetz, “and always in the back of my mind was this story I’d heard about her and The Threepenny Opera. I didn’t know much about Bertolt Brecht, initially, but in my early twenties I was a songwriter and one night while I was in the studio recording, I got to talking with the engineer and later he pulled out a record of Lotte Lenya singing ‘Seeräuberjenny’ and ‘Kanonen-Song.’ That was it. Lenya’s kitsch and the killer instinct: Eva talked like that. The droll, aloof, harsh cabaret style is incredibly moving, to me at least, something which seems to work almost despite itself. It was easy to see Eva as a product of Weimar Germany, of that precise period evoked by these songs. So I guess the initial and strongest connection between the novel and Brecht was through the lyrics he wrote for this music. As a socialist playwright, Brecht wouldn’t touch naturalism, seeing it as an endorsement of a bourgeois or genteel world view, and I have to say, as a writer, I could never approach writing a family memoir wearing a straight face. Eva was schooled in Brecht, and so it felt right that the novel’s form would reflect that, and at the same time bring about some genre consciousness. I also wanted some sort of emotional arc despite putting up with ideas of alienation and detachment. If this makes it sound like I’ve been working at cross purposes for the past fifteen years, which is as long as I’ve been at it, then that’s exactly right.”

This book is a smyth-sewn paperback. The text is typeset in Sabon and printed offset on laid-finish paper making (estimated) 256 pages trimmed to 5.3 × 8.5 inches, bound into a paper cover and enfolded in a letterpress-printed jacket.