“I wanted to write a play that was a real, intimate family drama,” says Steven Levenson, “An old-fashioned kind of realistic play that could also, somehow, hold a lot of ideas.” The resulting play, If I Forget, boasts a densely packed ideological canvas spanning religion, politics, and history, unpacking how trauma, memory, and identity reverberate through multiple generations of a Jewish family in Washington, DC.
If I Forget was written over five years and originally conceived as the last play in a proposed cycle, an ambitious undertaking echoing August Wilson’s Pittsburgh-set Century Cycle and Dominique Morisseau’s Detroit Project, both geographically specific series about African-American lives at different points in history. Levenson wanted to chronicle the American Jewish experience over the course of the twentieth century, with If I Forget examining the lingering resonance of the Holocaust and the modern complexities of Jewish life. “A lot of the debates that happened around Jewish identity in my parents’ generation—debates about intermarriage, secularism versus religion—felt like they’d been settled, or at least argued to the point of exhaustion,” explains Levenson. “I wanted to talk about the new fault lines, the new conversations that were happening.”
If I Forget opens at the start of the new millennium, straddling the contested presidential election: the first act begins days after the collapse of the Camp David peace talks, the second in the wintery hangover of the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court ruling and Bush’s subsequent inauguration. Levenson, who grew up in Bethesda, was a politically aware teenager during the second intifada and now recognizes the world-shifting impact of those tumultuous few months. “From that point on, the conversation around Israel and what it means to be an American Jew had fundamentally changed,” he says. “We could no longer continue to have blind faith that these issues would work themselves out with enough determination and good faith…. [It] marked the end of a kind of hopefulness and optimism that had been there since the 70s when there seemed to be a way to co-exist, when peace seemed just around the corner. But, from then on, with the election of George W. Bush, there has been a darkness that descended on American Jews and the US in general.”
Levenson explores this looming global sea change through a domestic lens. While the Oslo Accords are falling apart, the Fischer siblings—Holly, Michael, and Sharon, along with their spouses and Holly’s teenage son Joey—are gathering at the family homestead in quiet, tree-lined Tenleytown for their father Lou’s 75th birthday. The siblings’ alliances shift as they clash over the past, present, and uncertain future of their family, culture, and legacy. Their debates range from Michael’s incendiary new book to American Jews and their relationship to Israel to the mounting pressures of Lou’s declining health and decisions surrounding the Fischers’ legacy.
Festering resentments, catastrophic secrets, and intellectual battles abound; the many subplots of If I Forget offer a smorgasbord of upper-middle-class dysfunction, with the fate of the family’s long-held and now lucrative 14th Street real estate property at the center. Holly wants to oust the current tenant—a Guatemalan family-operated bodega—to make room for “Spaces and Places,” her nascent interior design business. Sharon visits the store often, has grown close to the Jimenezes, and furiously opposes evicting them. But after a series of unexpected medical and financial calamities, the building’s rising value forces a family reckoning. Throughout these narrative twists and turns, Levenson renders the humor and anguish of family dynamics authentically. Each member of the Fischer clan clings to their own version of their collective history, no matter how warped by personal baggage.
The most powerful collision of these dueling perspectives—and the play’s overarching rumination about contemporary Jewish identity—occurs between father and son. Michael is about to publish Forgetting the Holocaust, wherein he attacks how Israel and its right-wing allies in the US weaponize the memory of the Holocaust to support their policy agenda in the Middle East, thereby creating a culture of “death worship” for American Jews. When Sharon balks at this controversial stance, he disputes, “The Holocaust is now the centerpiece of Jewish life. The lynchpin that binds us together is suddenly, it’s not culture anymore or food or religion...it’s the six million. And we’ve been manipulated, all of us, our entire lives, to feel constantly victimized, constantly afraid.” Michael asserts that in order to move forward and ensure survival, American Jews need to actively free themselves from the burden of their past by engaging with social justice in the contemporary world.
When Sharon argues that remembrance and the urgent mantra of “never forget” are essential to preventing another Holocaust, Michael counters, “It already has happened again. It happened in Bosnia, it happened in Rwanda. It just didn’t happen to us. We learned all the wrong lessons from the Holocaust. We learned that the world hates Jews, that the world will always hate Jews, instead of what we should have actually learned—that nationalism is a sickness and it is lethal.”
To his father, though, the lessons of the Holocaust are inextricably tied to the victims and survivors. In a quiet moment after a family showdown, Lou, a World War II veteran who liberated a death camp, relays to his son a visceral memory of arriving at Dachau—which the soldiers initially assumed was just a POW camp—and discovering what he still can’t forget: the monstrous aftermath of the Nazi genocide. “For you,” he tells his son, “history is an abstraction. But for us, the ones who survived this century, this long, long century, there are no abstractions anymore.”
Michael is right, of course, that an atrocity like the Holocaust offers lessons in nationalism and the complicity of a society’s silence—during World War II or the 1994 Rwandan genocide. But through the specificity of Lou's memory, and the ways that it still shapes his understanding of political history, Levenson shows the indispensable power and importance of individual memory. How can we prevent the repetition of large-scale failures to act if those events are remembered in generalized, white-washed fragments?
“Michael’s thesis that you can take the traumatic parts of your history and just forget them is a deeply destructive idea,” explains Levenson, “But it’s also very provocative to me, because it points to a pervasive fantasy in our society today that, if we just ignore the painful parts of our history or paper them over somehow, then we don’t have to deal with the consequences.”
Barely two decades into the next century, America finds itself navigating a surging escalation of anti-Semitism uncorked by the 2016 presidential election cycle. Donald Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” was fueled by a destructive temptation to erase the past, to strip America’s history of racism, violence, and discrimination from the cultural memory in favor of a nostalgic glaze of fictional harmony and prosperity. The danger of this nostalgia—to Americans, Jewish and otherwise—is that it denies both the horror of the state-run murder of the six million and the subsequent need for Europeans, Americans, and Jews around the world to grapple with how to find safety, joy, and an identity that engages with contemporary existence and cultural past in the US, Israel, and elsewhere. If I Forget considers how we live with our histories—ancient and modern, individual and collective, personal and political.
—Lauren Halvorsen