Amos Mokadi In the Making

Original works by Amos Mokadi

The Cave  A novel

A novel about a group of educators, peace activists
from all over the world, who get entrapped by terrorists
in a cave, called "Pann's Cave", on the slope of the Parnassus, Greece. It's a tale of revelation of trust and treachery' all on the background of primeval creatures hewn in the rock.

The Progesteron  a comedy for the stage

A gentle-natured man, a close-to-combat officer in the Israeli army reserves, becomes pregnant, following a surprising, passionate spate with his rather masculine wife. His abdomen starts to protrude and so does his chest and he whiles the time knitting happily something pink and tiny, counting "stitches". (This preoccupation goes on unperturbed nearly to the end of the play.) The drama ends with a hard shove the pregnant father receives from his secretary's boyfriend, who has rushed down all the way from Lebanon to save his sweetheart form the wiles in which she's got entrapped in her boss's home. The young fighter is now full of remorse having pushed his one-time admired officer, now pregnant, but it all turns out to have been only an imaginary pregnancy and it all ends happily,
as comedies should.

Only Because there's a War on  a television play

According to the news, the war raging in the north goes on gloriously, with no casualties to our side. Sakharov, a reserve lieutenant general, having found out that he has only two months to live because of his Cancer of the pancreas, is adamant on joining the battle, first, to be close to his son and, second, in order to die a hero's death. Tal, his son's girlfriend, arrives with other news: she's pregnant. She fumes at Sakharov for wishing to talk to her only because there's a war."What will happen when it's Over?" she asks, "shall we become strangers again?" She lets out about her state to the grandfather to be. Martha Skharov arrives. There's a phone from the front. Oded tells Tal – there's not time to speak to the others – that the most important thing for him is to know that they are all together now. Tal's poignant question, what will happen when the war ends? remains unanswered.

Yossi the Arab  a play

A famili rift that is mended by the daughter of the house with Yossi the Arab, who is actually a Jew who ran away to live among the Bedouins. Yossi is a close friend of the man in the hose, and with him they work on ambitious plan to revive the desert. The play employs large projections of the Dead Sea, when dried and when covered by unstoppable floods. It also involves international plots, including big finance.

Wedding by Gunlight  a play

A sister and a brother love each other. They confess their forbidden love an hour before the die. This dialogue takes place on a steep desert cliff-side. Because of the war which rages around them, they cannot go down to water, neither can they return to their home. They "marry" to the light of the approaching gunfire.

The Death-Strong Love  A Play with Music

Mokadi's adaptation of The Dybbuk comes to reduce the flagrant mystical elements of the original and replace some of them with realistic elements. It should make staging the story in other parts of the world and in languages other
than Hebrew.

Better than War  A full-length documentary scenario
(background – from opening section of the script)

The objective of the scheme is to dig a 22-mile-long tunnel thorough a mountain, on both sides of which there's a glen (narrow valley) and a loch (lake) of different altitudes. Once the tunnel is complete, a turbine will be installed to intercept the water which will flow through it and create electricity for the benefit of the Scottish industry and the Scottish people (…) Many workers live in the camps for years, some never return to their homes – for in the Hydro-Electric Scheme there's an average of one dead per mile. There are no union rules in the tunnels and hardly any at the camp construction. Working hours are 11 1/2 in camp construction and 12 in the tunnel itself. The last 3 1/2 hours of a shift are the longest and the coldest (...)

The Way  A full-length film scenario
On the background of the military rule over Israeli Arabs and the Sinai Operation in 1956. (p. 36)

SODOM  A science fiction in 2 acts
Planned production in "Kol Isarel" was cancelled,
due to Hanna ben Ari's untimely death.

 


Translations by Amos Mokadi

Mokadi translated mostly from plays and poetry
of the past, some of which he performed.
They include:

From poetry of prominence, some of Shakepeare's sonnets and Wilfred Owen's para-rhyming poetry, as well as plays
by Shakespeare, Shaw and Huxley:

Shakespeare's sonnets. Nos. 8. and 57
Yeat's Leda and the Swan
Heine's Lorelei
Wilfred Owen's Strange Meeting
Aldous Huxley, The Gioconda Smile (the play)
A.E.Hausman
Horrible English by Davis McCay
Ramuz/Sravinsky's A Soldier's Tale
Schikaneder/Mozart's The Birds' Catcher
from The Magic Flute
Abekrd's hymn., O quanta Qualia

Julie   A play based on Ida Tzurit's novel
by the same name

To the request of the writer-performer Adi Etzion-Zak, Mokadi has recently translated into English her highly-revealing and moving story of Theodor Herzl's wife, Julie. The play is now considered for production in England.


Additionally  in 65 years, Mokadi has created a large corpus of short stories, ona-act plays and dozens of poems.

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