The Emigration of Adam Kurtzik

Adam Kutzik, the head of the Jewish Council in a ghetto, is presented as a bungling, ineffective figure. In Act I, in 1939, he interacts with three different Nazi bureaucrats, played by the same two actors, causing comic confusion of identity. The second act of the play, set three years later and which begins with an ironic cabaret performance, is a more tragic representation of the ghetto world, with Kurtzik, trying and failing both to warn the inhabitants of their fate and to commit suicide.