Brazilian-Lebanese-Jewish playwright explores family's past in Beirut

• Published date: 02 October 2021
• Author: JACOB JUDAH/JTA
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

He was told that the Mediterranean smelled better than the South Atlantic. His father swore that Lebanese nuts were better than the famed Brazilian ones.

Lebanon "didn't feel like a real place to me," Esses said. "It was like folklore."

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Esses' father left Beirut in 1967, as the climate soured against Lebanon's Jewish community, following Arab defeat in the Six-Day War with Israel. By the time his mother's family left in 1975, Lebanon had careened into civil war. Neither parent has ever returned.

Sao Paulo was home to a sizable Lebanese Jewish population. But Esses, then 34, felt compelled to visit Beirut on his own in 2017.

He had also just recently come out as gay to his parents, who had brought him up in a firmly traditional Orthodox Sephardic community — a move that put some distance between them.

That trip and Esses' grappling with the many facets of his identity — Brazilian, Lebanese, Jewish, gay — is the basis of his latest play, "Where to Belong," a one-man show that is playing at different venues in England, his new home country, through Oct. 14.

Set to the melodies of Lebanese divas and Brazilian classics and with a simple stage setup of a cassette player, projector, and laptop, Esses offers a vulnerable portrait of a man trying to find a space to be himself.

He tells a classically Sephardic story of migration, scattered families, and difficult relationships, all overshadowed by a nostalgia for a Lebanon his parents left behind.

As Esses performs, images of his trip to Lebanon flash on the projector. He tells viewers of how he made a Jewish circuit: visiting empty synagogues, the cemeteries, the streets of old family homes. There is a recording of a video call between him, his sister and his mother from her old home.

Yet, something feels empty.

He tells the audience how his partner was stopped in the street by a member of Hezbollah (not for looking Jewish). How he saw antisemitic literature in Beirut bookstores. How the community he had been told of when he was young was no longer there. His parents' world no longer exists.

And for Esses, visiting Beirut was not just about tracing his parents' past. It was also about finding out who he was.

"My body responded in such an emotional way to being in Beirut," he recalled. Even now, when he rehearses, "I would fall into tears just thinking about it and feeling it...