Handing director Gianluca Guidotti a copy of “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s poignant Holocaust memoir, “I said, ‘Why don’t you read this?'” recalled Fleishhacker, the former marketing director for the Internet search engine AltaVista International.
Born and raised in San Francisco, and the great-grandson of area Jewish banking and paper magnate Mortimer Fleishhacker, Marc Fleishhacker has lived in Milan, Italy, since 1989.
After handing over the book, he said, “I was thinking, ‘Well, that’ll be the end of that.’ But six months later, he called and said he wanted to do it.”
One problem remained. Despite numerous requests, Wiesel had adamantly refused to allow his recollection to be transformed into a play or movie. Fleishhacker’s initial phone call to the Nobel laureate resulted in a terse message from his personal assistant: The play would “never happen.”
Fleishhacker was persistent, however, and eventually won Wiesel over with his vision of the production: Instead of a standard play, both he and Guidotti envisioned a series of monologues from a handful of actors, culminating in a multimedia presentation with Wiesel himself reading from his own work.
“Seeing Wiesel is such an incredibly emotional experience; he has such an evocative face and expressions,” said Fleishhacker, who served as the play’s producer. “And he read the original text in French, which is how it was published. He was incredibly generous with his time.”
With Wiesel’s stamp of approval, opening night for “Night” came on Jan. 27 in Trieste, Italy. Both the time and place were insignificant — Trieste housed a Nazi-run concentration camp and Jan. 27 is observed as Holocaust Day across Europe.
The theater was packed, said Fleishhacker, and Italy’s largest newspapers and television stations gave positive reviews. The show’s success earned it a second booking in one of Milan’s best theaters in January 2003, and possible dates in Bologna, Florence and Rome are in the works for next year.
Fleishhacker’s Jewish background — and the fact that his grandmother and mother fled France weeks before the German takeover — played a large part in his desire to stage “Night,” but not the only part.
The 40-year-old father of two thinks Wiesel’s work is especially relevant in Italy, where genocidal campaigns conducted in the Balkans are “less than an hour’s flight from my back door.”
Racist and xenophobic experiences in his adopted homeland have not gone unnoticed by Fleishhacker. He was particularly perturbed by a recent uproar against the proposal of Italian Muslims to erect a mosque in a small town near Milan.
“I was really struck by the protest from one of the right-wing political parties, who said, ‘They don’t let us build churches in Saudia Arabia, so we shouldn’t let them build mosques in Italy,” Fleishhacker recalled. “This important political party is part of the government coalition, and, somewhere along the way, they’ve forgotten what democracy stands for.”
Guidotti’s theatrical troupe, Archivo Zeta, is nonsectarian, which exemplifies the universality of Wiesel’s message, according to Fleishhacker.
While most Italian artistic endeavors are government-funded, Fleishhacker solicited donations from the private community, a fund-raising method that flew in the face of Italian tradition.
Some Bay Area money went into the production, including grants from the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation’s Jewish Community Endowment Fund, and the Fleishhacker Foundation. Without these contributions, Fleishhacker says “Night” would never have made the leap from the page to the stage.
“When you go with government financing for any type of cultural event, inevitably what happens is the government makes sure your point of view fits in with their political views,” he said.
“I wasn’t prepared to go through the right-wing Italian government and ask them to talk about the Holocaust. I didn’t think that would work, somehow.”