Love Me Tender
Love ME Tender
by atar hAdari
A boy in working class Britain wants to have a Bar Mitzvah, frum-style. Can his mother find 10 Jews, a rabbi and a torah?
“Who doesn’t want the ghost of Elvis to attend their Bar Mitzvah?”
Atar Hadari was born in Israel, raised in England, trained as an actor and writer at the University of East Anglia before winning a scholarship to study poetry and playwrighting with Derek Walcott at Boston University. His plays have won awards from the BBC, Arts Council of England, National Foundation of Jewish Culture (New York), European Association of Jewish Culture (Brussels) and the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he was Young Writer in Residence. Plays have been staged at the Finborough Theatre, Wimbledon Studio Theatre, Chichester Festival Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum (where he was a Mentor Playwright), Nat Horne Studio Theatre (New York) and Valdez, Alaska. His “Songs from Bialik: Selected Poems of H. N. Bialik” (Syracuse University Press) was a finalist for the American Literary Translators’ Association Award and his poems have won the Daniel Varoujan award from New England Poetry Club, the Petra Kenney award, a Paumanok poetry award and many other prizes. His nineteen-page translation of Hanoch Levin's "Lives of the Dead" filled a third of Poetry magazine in 2009.