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At age 16, Dvora Bartonov performed in Albert Einstein's salon in Berlin. At age 81, she performed in a solo autobiographical show that moved audiences to tears. In the last decade, she triumphantly returned to the stage, and now, at age 90, she has just published a book.

Like a lost queen, Dvora Bartonov stood center-stage, amid all the fuss created on her behalf by Yehoram Gaon. Her students on one side, a dance troupe on the other, and in the middle stood Gaon, who had invited her to his Channel 1 television program, "Shishi Be'Gaon," to dedicate a tribute to her. The program was taped two weeks ago in Karmiel. Bartonov, 90, was quite happy. The long trip back and forth from Holon was worth every moment on stage. The young audience, to whom the name Bartonov was mostly unfamiliar, gave her a long standing ovation. And she, blinded by the lights and overwhelmed by the applause, began curtsying gracefully. Tears of joy welled up in her eyes. "Thank you very much," she murmured. "Thank you very much."

Dvora Bartonov smiles when she thinks about that television appearance. "It was wonderful," she says. "I was very excited, especially when over a thousand people stood up and cheered for me. I also had something to tell them, but he (Gaon) said he would ask me questions and he didn't ask, so I decided to keep quiet." Gaon wanted her to dance. She elegantly rebuffed the suggestion, saying: "I won't dance because I didn't prepare. I didn't do rehearsals, and my father used to say that if you have two performances the same day, you do two rehearsals."

What did she need all this for? Ten minutes of Israeli television glory won't add any thing to her artistic resume, after all. "What do you mean? They invited me," she is surprised by the question and melts with pleasure at the recollection, as if she were an artist just at the beginning of her career. "If I wanted to, I could have danced. I could dance the entire program that I did as part of the Teatronetto festival four years ago, but I won't dance anymore."

Why?

"Because dancing at age 90 is coquetry. People will say: `She's 90 and still dancing. Who does she think she is?' Acting is something else. That's not coquetry. Dancing fades with the years. Acting doesn't. There are old people who act and there are roles for old people, but dancing at age 90 isn't right. It's like making love."

At age 90 it's not possible to make love?

"No. A person can love and fall in love till the end of his days, but making love is another thing."

This week, Bartonov's autobiography, "Me'ahorei Hakela'im shel Hanefesh" ("Backstage of the Soul") was published by Hakibbutz Hameuhad. And two months from now, a festive tribute to her will be held at the Holon Theater. Entitled "Shirat Dvora" ("Song of Dvora"), the evening in celebration of her 90th birthday will include appearances by artists, actors, friends and family.

Bartonov, an Israel Prize Laureate in Dance (1991), dancer, dance teacher and scholar, has spent much of her life in dancing shoes - black shoes with a low heel and a thin strap with a small buckle on the side, like the kind worn by a Flamenco dancer. Who knows when she might be asked to demonstrate a move? "I practice every day," she says in her home in Holon, "every day. Every few hours, I try a move," and she gets up to demonstrate, grasping the back of the chair with both hands and pushing her lower body back. She arches her back towards the floor. For a moment it looks like she's going to do a backbend. But no. She stops halfway, then continues with some other stretching. "This is how I work," she says, with the smile that the wrinkles have sculpted on her face over the years.

"As a dancer," says dance critic Gabi Aldor, "Dvora Bartonov may not have left a big mark, in the sense that she didn't have her own dance troupe and didn't create pieces that became etched in the memory, but her ability as a performer, and the characters she created, are wonderful. She was a very highly regarded teacher and her personality, and her teaching, and the books she wrote about the study of dance, at a time when no one else was writing books like that, and the broadness of her horizons - all made a very important contribution to the development of dance in Israel.

"People think that a dancer just dances well and that's it, but there's always a lot more to it. Dvora has an open and humanistic spirit combined with a tremendous knowledge of music, theater and literature. She's part of our history and her ability to convey this history is very impressive. I think she's a marvelous dancer, even in her old age."

Bartonov is the daughter of actor and Habima Theater founder Yehoshua Bartonov; the sister of actor, announcer and scholar Shlomo Bartonov; the wife of Emanuel Ben-Gurion (the son of writer Micha Josef Berdichevsky), who died 17 years ago; the mother of writer and poet Ido Ben-Gurion, who killed himself at age 35. Bartonov's ghosts surround her at the house on Hannah Szenes Street in Holon. In the mid-'60s, the whole extended family moved into three apartments in the same building: Dvora with her family, her parents and her brother's family. "I think it was Emanuel's dream for everyone to live together," says journalist Eyal Bartonov, Shlomo's son.

In the basement of the building, Dvora set up a dance studio and Emanuel kept his father's books and manuscripts, which he took care of until the day he died. Today the studio, which looks sort of like an old museum of art objects, is called Beit Dvora and Emanuel and is used to house evening acting workshops for the Holon Theater.

People who know her say: Dvora is an amazing woman. It's not hard to see why this tiny woman inspires such admiration. While many of her contemporaries are sitting in wheelchairs in nursing homes, she is running about, stretching muscles, going to visit friends, writing and reading. She is planning to write another book and a script, and maybe to do a little traveling ("I've never been to Japan, China or Mexico"), and maybe to perform in a solo show - definitely the last one she'll do. She lives alone. Twice a week, a woman from the National Insurance Institute comes to tidy the house, do the shopping and cook.

What kind of book do you want to write?

"If I'm able to concentrate, I'll write another book about myself."

Another one?

"I want to expand a little more on my spiritual sustenance. To explain what I got from all kinds of ancient philosophies. How the theater and the stage, which are my whole life, live inside me. I'd like to explain all that a little more."

Bartonov was born in Tblisi, Georgia in 1915. When she was seven years old, her family moved to Moscow, where her father joined the Habima Theater that had been founded five years earlier. When she was eight, she was accepted into the Bolshoi School of Ballet's highly demanding children's program. "Not everyone is cut out for this sort of discipline," says Bartonov, the Russian accent still rolling off her tongue. "Those who couldn't keep up, left. Those who stayed went through hell."

It was hell?

"Yes. Tests every day. If there were four lessons, there were four tests that day."

Despite the difficulty of it, she has fond memories of how she was raised and doesn't seem at all bitter when she relates how her parents used to wake her up in the middle of the night and have her dance, just to test her determination.

"Father and Mother were very different people," she says. "Mama (who was a housewife but had appeared on stage in her youth) was the critic. She would always say: `You can do better.' My father would get all excited over the smallest success."

The constant fear of failure

In 1928, Habima moved to Israel. The Bartonov family settled in Tel Aviv, in housing that was built for the actors. "Wherever we performed, spontaneous parties were thrown in our honor," Bartonov says about the years in which she joined her father on Habima tours. She remembers dancing until dawn on the shore of the Kinneret, the party that Bialik held in honor of Habima and the one at the Ha'Ohel Theater in Tel Aviv that Shlonsky attended. "He saw me dancing and said: `We'll call you - The Little Dancer Dvora Bartonov.' At Bialik's party, my parents said: Dance the `Beggars' Dance,' and Bialik hugged and kissed me and congratulated me."

The "Beggars' Dance," from the play, "The Dybbuk," is one of the dances most closely identified with Bartonov. It's also the thread that connects her with the Moscow Habima. Bartonov appeared in the premiere in Moscow and later adapted the dance and performed it many times. She was 13 when she performed for the first time in Israel. She and her father had prepared a children's program that they performed all over the country.

After a year here, she traveled to Berlin to study dance. She lived with Frau Polotzky, a teacher, who taught her German, Russian literature and so on. She does not remember her going away from home at age 14 as a crisis. "I've been on my own my whole life," she says. "It's the way my parents raised me. It didn't bother me. On the contrary. It gave me the strength to survive, it taught me independence and commitment to hard work and devotion to dance, which was always my spiritual partner."

To pay for her stay with Frau Polotzky, Bartonov performed in the homes of wealthy Berliners. This is how she met Albert Einstein. "The pianist who was accompanying me at performances was one of Einstein's students and one day he said to me: `We're going to perform at the home of the Einstein family.' At the end of the performance, Einstein said: `You're going to be the best pony in your stable.' That may have been the first compliment I ever got."

In 1934, she went to study dance at Dartington Hall, an international school of dance and theater in Totnes in southwest England. One those who shaped her as a dancer was the choreographer Kurt Jooss. Before she left England, Jooss put her in touch with his friend Dame Marie Rambert, who owned a small theater in London and arranged for Bartonov to give a performance before a group of artists and dance students.

It was because of this performance that Bartonov met her husband Emanuel. "When I got back to Israel, a young woman came to visit me and she brought me regards from Dame Rambert. She also said she had a nephew who had seen the program from my show and wanted to meet me. His name was Emanuel Ben-Gurion. I told my father that Berdichevsky's son wanted to visit and he said: `Let him come, gladly.' And one day he came with this girl and when Emanuel gave me his hand, I immediately felt that this man was going to be my husband. I was 22 and he was 12 years older than me. This was in October 1936. We were married in May 1937, at the synagogue in Rehovot. That's what Emanuel wanted."

Berdichevsky was a writer and philosopher, one of the fathers of Zionism and modernism in Hebrew literature who influenced many writers, including Amos Oz, who considers him a spiritual mentor. He left behind a rich archive containing letters, manuscripts, objects and books, and is still kept in Bartonov's studio. Berdichevsky died in Berlin in 1921. After Hitler came to power, Emanuel and his mother Rachel left Germany and immigrated to Palestine with the help of Berl Katznelson, who obtained the necessary certificates for them. Once here, Emanuel worked as a literary critic for the newspaper Davar, wrote books and hundreds of articles and engaged in research. He devoted most of his free time to the preservation of his father's legacy.

"Even before he came here, he was a fairly prominent literary critic," says Professor Avner Holtzman of Tel Aviv University, an expert on Berdichevsky's writings. Ben-Gurion was Berdichevsky's pen name, inspired by the name of a medieval writer. He signed this name to many of his writings, when he didn't want them to be identified with Berdichevsky. It's doubtful if he'd ever heard of the Israeli Ben-Gurion.

In 1938, Bartonov and Ben-Gurion's son Ido was born. Bartonov started teaching dance in the basement studio to girls ages 6-18, and continued performing as well. Her dances and performances featured a wide range of colorful biblical and Jewish characters. They were light and humorous but also contained pathos and a certain toughness. Some said she reminded them of Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp. Then she was compared to the character played by actress Giuliana Messina in the movie "Nights of Cabiria." Her artistic life consisted of a lot of hard work, a never-ending search for the right tone and the right sound, a constant need to be exact and a never-ending fear of failure. "Martha Graham once said that when she lifts one hand, that's an entire performance for her. That's how I feel, too. To attain an accurate dramatization of life on stage, you have to suffer and struggle."

It's not possible to do good work purely out of pleasure?

"If it's just pleasure, then it doesn't work. There has to be a struggle. I enjoyed it, along with the hell that I went through."

In 1948, Bartonov was invited by a major Jewish organization to perform in New York. "It was very hard for me to go, to leave Ido. I remember saying goodbye to him, how he cried and yelled, `Mommy, mommy!'"

And you still went?

"Certainly. I wanted to prove, to myself as well, that I could succeed. I'll never forget how each time they'd accompany me to the airport and the plane would take off, I would get this feeling of strength and say to myself: `I'm going to do it again.'"

Why was that so important to you?

"It was my test. I felt that I was getting something from inside myself that strengthened me."

In the `60s, Bartonov traveled to Ghana twice and stayed for three months each time. She was invited there by UNESCO, to research African dance, and then by the University of Ghana, to teach students in the dance department. A year later, she set off on a similar trip to India.

When she returned to Israel, she became a sought-after lecturer on the phenomenon of trance, the ecstatic state when the spirit separates from the body, which she herself experienced for a few moments in Ghana. "It was an incredible experience," she recalls. "It was during a nighttime gathering of all the tribe with the high priestess who was announcing who would fall ill and who would get well, and suddenly this man who brought me there said: `She wants you to dance.' I said I couldn't but he explained that I couldn't refuse. And then I thought: `Your father and mother taught you to perform whenever necessary, even in the middle of the night, and I got up and danced and went into a trance for a few seconds. I didn't feel that I was moving and then I awoke on my hands next to her."

Ido Bartonov began writing and translating while still an adolescent. At age 17, he published a translation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" in Shlonsky's journal Orlogin (Hourglass). He also translated plays, wrote books and directed plays. In 1956, he enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces and was accepted in the Nahal entertainment troupe, where his fellow soldiers included some of Israel's biggest future stars - Arik Einstein, Uri Zohar and Haim Topol.

He was very popular with the women in Tel Aviv in the late 1950s and later in Paris, where he went to study pantomime. In Paris, he married a woman named Dorian Leigh, a glamorous model who was the city's queen of nightlife at the time, and 20 years his senior. In 1962 he produced a show for his mother there. "One day he came to me and said, `Mom, I'm doing an evening for you at the Theatre de la Nation.' I said to him: `You think this is Afula? Do you know what you're taking on?' And then he said: `I've already talked to the ambassador, Walter Eitan, and it's fine.' It took a year and two months, but I finally performed there. He organized it."

Did you have butterflies in your stomach?

"Not butterflies, leopards. It was very hard. I was scared. The play was called, `1,2,3,4.' I had a monologue of a tough 90-year-old Russian teacher who gives a ballet lesson in all different languages. I gave four performances there, night after night. It was a big success. After the first show, a critic from the Herald Tribune came backstage and said: `Miss Bartonov, you have a terrific lover.' I said: `He's not my lover, he's my son.'"

"Ido was a great person," says his cousin Eyal Bartonov. "Oded Kotler once described him to me as `a bombshell of talent' - meaning also that he was a bombshell that blew up in the end. In retrospect, I see that he apparently was depressed."

Was it demanding to be the son of the Bartonovs?

"Yes, it was certainly very demanding. I think it must have been very, very hard for him. He had his Grandfather Bartonov on one side and Grandfather Berdichevsky on the other, and in the Nahal troupe he met all these incredibly talented people."

Bartonov saw the Nahal troupe as the beginning of the end, as an indication of the limits of his ability. In the early 1960s, he directed the play "Sami Yamut Beshesh" ("Sami Will Die at Six") at the Ha'onot Theater. His uncle Yehoshua was in the cast, too, but that wasn't enough to save the play from the lethal review it received from Haaretz theater critic Haim Gamzu, who wrote: "As far as I'm concerned, he could have died at five." In the Bartonov family, every review is taken seriously, says Eyal Bartonov, and a review like that is taken especially hard.

`He's all cold'

In late November 1972, Ido committed suicide at his parents' home in Holon. He'd returned from Paris seven years before, divorced and emotionally drained, and withdrew into his depressions and the many pills he took. His parents tried to understand, to do something. They took him to doctors and psychiatric experts, but Ido had lost the appetite for life.

The night before his death, he went to sleep and asked his parents not to wake him the next day. "In the afternoon, I went upstairs from the studio and Emanuel and I and my mother sat in the kitchen to eat and my mother said: `I don't understand - It's two in the afternoon now. You can't go in and see what's going on with him?' I said okay and when she went home, I went into his room and said: `Ido, you've slept enough. Get up.'"

Did you know that he was dead?

"Not at first. But when I touched him, I knew, and I yelled: `Emanuel, Ido's not alive! He's all cold!'"

Did you have guilt feelings?

"I didn't need to. He was very sad. He didn't know how to live. He'd been to a lot of doctors and they all said that he wasn't a suicidal type. But he was also a depressive child. He cried a lot. I asked one of the doctors: `Why did he do it?' `He wanted to remain present with you,' was his answer. And he did achieve that. There's not a moment that I don't feel him here." Ido left behind a letter in which he asked his parents to keep on working and living and to view the day of his death as a day of victory and not of mourning.

True to the spirit of his request, Bartonov kept on working. She was afraid to reveal her misery. That very afternoon, says her friend Dorona Ben-Dor, she went downstairs to teach her students who'd arrived for their usual lesson. Bartonov herself isn't sure it was the same day. Maybe a few days later. "I didn't know what to say to the students, so I just taught as usual. And then I heard someone whispering: `What a strong woman.' I think that I was weak, because if I was really strong, I would have allowed myself to break down. But I didn't have the flexibility that strong people have, so I stuck to the routine in the hope that it would save me."

In the years after Ido's death, Bartonov zealously stuck to her teaching and ceased performing. In the mid-1980s, she performed the "Beggars' Dance" at the World Jewish Congress convention. In 1985, when she was 70, she returned to the stage and gave two performances of the "Beggars' Dance" in New York. Emanuel died of heart disease in 1987. Bartonov continued performing even though each time she left he stage, she declared that it was definitely her final performance.

In 1987 she performed for the celebration of Habima's 70th anniversary, and also appeared in the 80th anniversary celebration in 1997. In 1994, she took part in the Curtain Up dance festival at the Suzanne Dellal Center in Tel Aviv, performing dance pieces that she adapted with the director Daniela Michaeli.

"She was 79 then," says Michaeli. "We put together a dance in which an old actor passes the artistic baton to a young man. A young actor named Ido Moseri danced it with her. A year later, for her 80th birthday, we took this dance and other pieces and toured with it in all around the country. Audiences loved it."

In 1996, Bartonov performed for the first time in her life in a solo show that did not include any dance segments - in the Teatronetto Festival in a play directed by Dorona Ben-Dor. "She played an aging dancer whose son has committed suicide, and she bares her soul in three sessions with a psychologist. We did 100 shows over three years, from the north to the south. The people who saw it were overwhelmed. She moved them to tears."

In 2000, when she was 86, Bartonov appeared in a Teatronetto performance entitled "Shalom Labamah" ("Farewell to the Stage"), directed by Michaeli. In the film about her produced by Noit and Dan Geva, which aired on Channel Eight in the summer of 2003, shows the audience going up on stage at the end of the stage, all overcome with tears. "The whole audience was crying from the emotional excitement of it. There wasn't anything pathetic about it. And then, in early 2002, Dvora fell and broke her thigh bone," recounts Michaeli.

After her surgery and rehabilitation, Bartonov quit performing. Her book ends with the wish to die with a smile on her face. "After age 120, of course," she says - not just yet. Because in the meantime, she has other plans. "Generally, I'm optimistic, but now I'm also sad because my talents aren't being adequately used. I don't have any complaints about anyone. Everybody's got their job to do, people are busy and it's hard for them to break from their routine, so I search on my own. I'll call up a studio and say that I want to give a lesson and they happily invite me."

Are you disappointed when people don't remember you?

"I feel like I could still do things, but it's not always possible to call up and say, `I'm here.' It's uncomfortable. But to be honest, I dream of young actors coming to me. I could go to them too if they don't have the time to come to me, but it's important that they have a need to talk about the theater, to learn from me, to search for themselves. I could help them find what they're looking for."

For now, she is considering another performance and planning to write a script about a woman her age who commits suicide without anyone finding her body. "In this script I wanted to say that people also commit suicide out of happiness. I'm sure that Marilyn Monroe killed herself from happiness. Happiness takes energy and the final energy is to commit suicide. I don't know yet how to end the script, but I think that time is also a teacher, so I'm thinking about it, working on it in my head - and waiting."

Are you afraid to die?

"After Ido, no. There's only one thing I'm afraid of - the hospital. I spent two months in the hospital and in rehabilitation afterward. At Wolfson. It's awful."

Do you believe that after death you'll meet Ido?

"No, I know we won't meet, but maybe what happened to him will happen to me. There's some kind of closeness in that, some kind of unity.

Source: © Copyright 2004 Haaretz. All rights reserved

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