Reviews for Naked Soldiers

The average rating for Naked Soldiers based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-06-14 00:00:00 G F Willmetts This is an adaptation of a play by the Yiddish playwright Sholem Asch. A Jewish family lives above a brothel, which the father owns. He and his wife have a daughter. They want to go respectable and marry her off to a good husband. Meanwhile she falls in love with one of the prostitutes. Asch set his play in the time and place in which he wrote it: 1906 Poland. Donald Margulies, in this adaptation, moves the setting to New York in 1923, which happens to be the time and place when an English translation of the play caused a scandal that resulted in the cast being convicted of obscenity. (That story is at the core of Paula Vogel's recent play, "Indecent.") It's a beautiful story with many themes to chew on. Why is it so hard to reform oneself? Is it force of habit or opposition from powerful forces? There's the individual against society. Both Jack (the father) and Rivkele (the daughter) find themselves at odds with the world. There's the secular-observant dichotomy. Can American Jews have a foot in both worlds? There's filial love and romantic love, and sometimes they conflict. There's the gay-straight dichotomy (though I read an essay that said that Yiddish didn't have a word for "lesbian" in 1906). I'm reading various translations of this play -- this one before seeing "Indcent," the others after. I'm not sure which I'll like best, but in all of them the conflicts Asch identifies can be clearly seen.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-06-26 00:00:00 Rhoderick Patricio I need Rifkele to live a happy life with Manke is all.