The Certificate
The Certificate
Sid Sagar and Henry Goodman star in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s warm-hearted comic romance, about a shtetl Adrian Mole looking for love in jazz age Warsaw.
BBC RADIO 4 • Sun 21 Nov 2021
This warm-hearted comic romance tells the story of hapless teenager David Bendiger, who washes up penniless in 1922 Warsaw.
Out of the blue, he gets the offer of a free Certificate enabling emigration to Palestine - on condition that he marries. It's a controversial British plan to fulfil the recent Balfour Declaration, but it may also be the currency David needs to make a life for himself.
It's just a pity that he's a hopeless fantasist and a clueless virgin who can't shake the voice of his disapproving Rabbi father from his head - a shtetl Adrian Mole who's soon embroiled in the lives of three very different women, but somehow no closer to getting on the boat.
David’s story gives us a crazy tour of the political and cultural turmoil of early 20th Century Jewish life - as the old, old world of the Warsaw ghetto struggled to reinvent itself in newly independent Poland. Isaac Bashevis Singer was the son of a Rabbi, and we know from his autobiographical writings that The Certificate closely mirrors some of his experiences in Warsaw, where he lived as a child and where, like David, he returned as a young man in the early 1920s. There, Singer observed the increasing politicisation of Jewish life outside orthodoxy, and abandoned orthodox dress, but eventually found himself unable to commit to any one ideology. In 1978, Singer received the Nobel Prize for Literature - the only writer in Yiddish to receive the honour.
Cast:
David Bendiger ..... Sid Sagar
Father ..... Henry Goodman
Sonya ..... Debbie Chazen
Minna Ahronson ..... Rhiannon Neads
Edusha ..... Safiyya Ingar
Mr Ahronson/The Fixer/The Black Marketeer ..... Stephen Hogan
Kalmenzohn/The Rabbi/Hertz Lipmann/Mendl ..... Samuel James
Bella/Pharmacist ..... Jane Slavin
Sound Design ..... Jon Nicholls and Jonquil Panting
Producer/Director: ..... Jonquil Panting
A Jonx production for BBC Radio 4