“Libromendel” — A Modern Day Retelling of Stefan Zweig

[Scroll to the bottom of this post to listen to “Libromendel,” which was officially released today.]

The Making of Libromendel

When Donald Trump was elected President for a second time, like many left-leaning Americans who believe in the more salubrious possibilities of our great democratic experiment, I entered a one week period of heavy depression. Our nation was finished. Trump was going to destroy most of the essential framework that had previously been considered sacrosanct. And he proceeded to do so not long after his chainsaw-happy billionaire handmaiden gave a Nazi salute at his inauguration. The terra firma beneath us had permanently shifted for the worse.

At some point in late November, I defiantly slapped myself out of my melancholic stupor. I concluded that it was far more important to live as a bold and fearless artist rather than “obeying in advance” (to use Timothy Snyder’s term of art). This need to fight back with all the creative ordnance I had in the depot became even more apparent after ABC’s egregious surrender to Trump and Paramount’s equally cowardly folding with the 60 Minutes settlement. Why was everyone caving? Outside of the South Park Season 27 premiere depicting Trump in coitus with Satan, why weren’t America’s truth tellers rising to the occasion? Were they too shellshocked? Too set on sustaining the Faustian bargain of a career in corporate media? (One prerelease listener of significant literary influence told me that, while he loved and admired “Libromendel,” he feared that publicly mentioning it would result in professional repercussions. The stolid climate of fear extends even to ostensibly “liberal-minded” thinkers. But I’m not sorry at all. We still have a duty to resist.)

I’ve always felt that one of art’s foremost duties is to stick up for the outliers and the underdogs. And the thirty radio plays I have written and produced so far certainly attest to this tenet. For these are the people who really hold American life together. Simply depicting the complexity of human lives, with all of the attendant quirks and messiness, generally does the trick in eluding any charges of didacticism.

In May, I was finishing up a 900 page multipart script. But the unsettling torrent of soul-destroying headlines presenting us with the end of American democracy in real time beckoned a great need to create something immediate. I was haunted and horrified by the disturbing images of innocent and hard-working brown-skinned people being plucked from American life, denied habeas corpus, and sent to El Salvador without a hearing. I have a few friends and ex-lovers who are Dreamers and green card holders. When the ICE raids started to become indistinguishable from the early tactics of the Gestapo, I took it upon myself to stay in touch with them, pledging to extend any time and resources that they needed. I feared that the people whom I adored with all my heart would be permanently lost to me because of the racist and dehumanizing cruelties of the current administration.

One of these friends reminded me that I was an audio dramatist and planted a seed. She told me that I had the obligation and the creative cojones to “do something” with my art. Protesting at No Kings rallies simply wasn’t enough. “Ed,” she said, “you have this great knack for revealing the hard truths of how people live in ways that are strangely entertaining. Even if you whipped up something half-assed, it would probably be amazing.”

Well, I never produce any audio drama that is “half-assed.” My friend knew exactly what she was doing. And I am exceedingly grateful to her.

That’s when I realized that Stefan Zweig’s great short story, “Buchmendel,” had entered the public domain back in January and was thus fair game for adaptation.

I’ve long been a Zweig fan — so much so that I once devoted two hour podcast to Zweig scholar George Prochnik and Zweig’s best translator, Anthea Bell. (Bell sadly passed away in 2018. But thankfully she was incredibly lively and happy to stump for Zweig on air.) “Buchmendel,” which deals with a Russian-Jewish immigrant falsely accused of being a traitor to Austria and ignobly sent to a concentration camp, where Mendel’s eccentric spirit is crushed by the false imprisonment and he perishes as a result.

With the detestable deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia hanging in the air, that’s when I asked myself the question, “What if Mendel was Venuezuelan? And what if his name was Jaime Abrego Mendel?”

That’s when I emailed my friend Jack Ward and asked him if there was an open slot in his annual Summerstock Playhouse series. He said that there was and excitedly asked me if I had something in the works.

“Give me two months,” I replied, “and I will.”

With two people kicking my ass in the best possible way, I knew what I had to do, even if I didn’t know entirely how to go about doing it.

The Writing and the Casting

I wrote the script in one week. It spilled out of me with an intense passion and need that I could not have anticipated. The humanist in me could not stop thinking about this story. I approached the Zweig story with a twofold approach. Yes, I would use as many of the existing elements and characters as I could. But this also a production that needed to reflect 2025 American life. Many of the supporting characters from “Buchmendel” — Florian Gunther, Sporschill, the narrator (switched to a young woman), and Standhartner — all made their way into the script. I did give Sporschill more agency and a more satisfying ending. (Zweig had written this story in 1929. And one of the story’s few flaws is the regrettably regressive depiction of women.) I made Standhartner a woman as well. The “adaptation process” involved reading the story twice and taking notes and then completely discarding the source material, never looking back as I allowed my imagination to run rampant. (The careful listener will spot callouts to other Zweig works such as The Royal Game and The World of Yesterday.)

I wanted to include as many of my regular actors as I could. So the story itself became extremely large. I needed to cast two dozen actors for this. And fast.

Much to my surprise, everyone I asked (with the exception of one actor who had retired from doing other projects) said yes. When the great Melissa Medina said yes to the character of ICE Officer Ramirez, I rewrote an intense six minute scene specifically for her sui generis talents. (I had originally imagined Ramirez as a Lt. Castillo-style character played by a young Edward James Olmos. But when Melissa expressed interest, I changed the role to a woman.)

The other major influence on the script was Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. Just before writing the script, I saw a 4K restoration of this masterpiece at Film Forum and was extremely surprised when I found myself leaving the theatre in tears. I had seen the movie a good dozen times before, but it had never looked and felt as great as it did that afternoon. I printed out a picture of writers I.A.L. Diamond and Billy Wilder and taped it to my wall, adding the caption, “We’re watching your ass, Ed!” My feeling was that, if I could come even half as close to The Apartment‘s impeccable narrative structure, then I’d get someplace solid.

The Music

When it comes to my creative work, I am not someone who does anything by halves. But I also feel that it’s important to keep growing and reaching as an artist. This time around, I somehow developed the chutzpah to think that I could score all the music for this particular play.

I have always been a secret musician. I love music. I have played in bands. I have busked the subways and, about a year ago, once earned a little under two hundred dollars in three hours performing a few of my silly songs. There is a secret bar I regularly go to in which I am karaoke royalty and find myself hit with free drinks and unanticipated attention from eyelash-batting beauties. I have composed a few podcast themes and a few other audio drama projects. But I had never fully scored any audio drama. And the time had come to level up.

I realized that it was logistically impossible for me to score all the jazz and rockabilly tracks playing in Cafe Gluck. So I licensed all those tracks. But that still left me with about fifteen music cues to score.

The full soundtrack poured out of me in a week and a half. I composed the last three music cues in a feverish sixteen hour period in which I forgot to eat. On the music front, I am extremely indebted to my buddy Russ Marshalek, who patiently listened to all the music cues (even the rejects) and knew exactly when to give me shit and when to encourage me. (I often find that my work becomes better when I have extremely tough customers willing to fillet and pillory me at the drafting phase.)


The Sound Design

For every audio drama I produce, I try to record as many original sound effects as I can. The considerable summer rains here in New York, which involved me sticking my boom mic out of my window and wandering around during any downpour to record anything that sounded interesting, gave me several hours of rain and splashing sounds to pull from. (Sadly, I was never able to get any decent thunder sound. So I had to resort to an FX library.)

Since Cafe Gluck is a particularly dominant part of the story, I went out of my way to create the thickest and densest and most realistic soundscape that I could. (“Libromendel” had 332 tracks, a new record for me.) The good folks at Penny House Cafe were kind enough to turn the radio and TV off and let me stick around for about twenty minutes recording various beverage sounds and thumps and grinds from coffeemakers. These sounds represented the close layer of the mix. (I always imagine the microphone as a kind of “camera for the ear” and “positioned” it close to the counter.) There was an additional background layer that was assembled from recordings I made at other cafes.

Putting It Together

I have long been frustrated by current sound mixing on film and television. In the quest to be “as loud as possible,” many sound mixers simply allow the music and the explosions to blow out the dialogue. And you cannot hear what the actors are saying. For “Libromendel,” I tried out a new aggressive top-down dialogue approach. I leveled the dialogue (preserving as much dynamic range as possible), placed it at the high points of the mix, and then use any open spectrum that was remaining for sound design and music. I was also far more meticulous about testing and tweaking the mix in as many monitoring environments as I could. The final day of mixing involved yours truly listening to the mix on three separate pairs of shitty earbuds and tweaking levels accordingly. And because the performances were far more sophisticated and layered this time around, the sound design essentially involved me serving as a bagman for what the actors brought. I also took greater liberties with the script than I had before, introducing two Tucker & Friends segments that were not in the script to provide a more seamless transition between scenes. I also listened far more carefully to my actors than I usually did. There is one seductive sound design move involving an analog telephone that was also not in the script, but that came because I discovered that Mendel and Standhartner were flirting with each other during the scene. (I had no idea that this was the case until we recorded!)

While the experience of making “Libromendel” exhausted me, I had a great deal of fun putting this together. And I am grateful beyond words to the thirty-five people (some of whom wish to remain anonymous) who were deeply instrumental to making this show happen.

“Libromendel” is the only production to my knowledge that has offered a direct response to the last six months of authoritarian terror. It is my great hope that it won’t be the last. You can listen to the show below.

The Show

Synopsis: During an unspecified “government transition” in the near future, the young scholar Alejandra Cortez (no relation to AOC) returns home from Rhinebeck on an extremely rainy night and stumbles into a West Village café where she was once a regular during the Second Trump Administration.  But aside from the rowdy RPG players, what happened to all the colorful eccentrics?  Why does nobody remember the history of Café Gluck aside from an overworked barista named Sporschill?  Who is the strange new owner claiming to be a “crypto king”?  And why doesn’t anybody remember the charming and eccentric old bookseller Jaime Abrego Mendel who set up shop in the adjacent card room every day?  This full-cast 332 track standalone epic examines the true human cost of removing vital figures from American life. (Running time: 54 minutes)

Written, produced, and directed by Edward Champion

Adapted from the short story “Buchmendel” by Stefan Zweig

Original music soundtrack by Edward Champion
(You can listen to the soundtrack on YouTube.  Subscribe to @finnegansache.)

CAST:

Alejandra:  Belgys Felix
Mendel: Wolf Reigns
Florian: Zack Glassman
Standhartner: Sally Maitland
Sporschill:  Julie Chapin
Ramirez:  Melissa Medina
Dirks: Luvelle Pierre
Tallis: Jack Ward
Becky: Emily Carding
ICE Officer: Will Billingsley
ICE Officer #2:  Frank Romeo
Felicia/The Radio: Samantha Jo
Clueless Customer: Glenn Kenny
The New Yorkers: Heath Martin and Pauly Sinatra
Boris: Pete Lutz
DM:  Dr. Implausible
The Staffers: Ella Gans and Jay Silver
Victim:  Zoraya Christian
Exuberant Customer: Lokia Rockwell
Café Patron: Laura Spear
and Edward Champion as The Assassin.

This is a co-production of The Sonic Society and The Gray Area.

Café songs licensed through Epidemic Audio

Editing, sound design, mixing, foley recording, engineering, and mastering courtesy of an eccentric bald man in Brooklyn who buys and reads far too many books

Special thanks to Jack Ward, Russ Marshalek, Laura Spear, Spacebar Recording, and Penny House Café for their incredible generosity and support during the making of this production.

This production is dedicated to the many innocent and hardworking immigrants in the United States who are presently facing some of the most disturbing authoritarianism in this nation’s history, as well as the late beloved bookseller Michael Seidenberg.

Libromendel (Download MP3)

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Journal: A Nation Without Accountability

One of the truly unsettling paradigm shifts here in America is anticipating a diabolical world in which redress will be responded to with retaliation. Can you call the police if you know that your name will be added to a list if you aren’t white, male, and fascist? Can you settle a dispute with your neighbor if there is even the slightest possibility that the neighbor in question will rat you out to the New Gestapo? Can you legitimately defend yourself in court if all notions of jurisprudence have been permanently corrupted from the top down? If you are being exploited at your job, can you really do anything other than say yes to all overtime, throw all notions of an ideal work-life balance out the window, and not complain when you don’t get your annual raise? And if the fascists fritter away our social security or possibly seize our dutiful payments over the years to serve their own selfish ends, do you have a nest egg or a prodigious 401k to offset the robbery? (78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, according to a 2023 study. National credit card debt hit $1.14 trillion back in August. The obvious answer to this question is a heartbreaking no.)

The new way will involve looking the other way — even when horrors we cannot possibly imagine right now will happen just outside our doors. Screams in the street without a community coming together to help the victim. Based on what I have observed so far, I think the majority of Americans are going to suffer through this in silence and allow the vile tendrils of unfettered authoritarianism to wrap scaly ringlets around every facet of American life. I do hope that I’m wrong. Before all this, I often joked with friends about what it would take for Americans to drag the plutocrats out into the streets. The answer, of course, is nothing. Americans are ultimately quite conformist. They do not remember the Wobblies, Shays’ Rebellion, or even the Boston Tea Party. It started with the book bans, but the fascists truly want the American public to be stupid, illiterate, and not possess a basic understanding of history. We are essentially malleable livestock to them. And they are eager for women to pump out babies, whether they like it or not. The hell of it is that it’s all going to be a primitive mimicry of all that has happened before. Recall the Mother’s Cross that Hitler established on December 16, 1938 to encourage “pure” German women to reproduce. Remember that Hitler established Muttertag as a national holiday not long after he became Chancellor in 1933. We will see a similar motherhood cult here. And there will be no accountability.

The spirit of rebellion practiced by our ancestors has been whacked out of us over generations and replaced with a dutiful commitment to corrupt leaders in power. And, as we saw from the 53% of Gen Xers and the 57% of white women college graduates who voted for Trump, there are many obdurate authoritarians around us. Not only do we now live in a nation without checks and balances, but it is clear that the people would rather bob their heads up and down and accept the most callous policies of this new status quo, even as everything — particularly accountability — is taken away from them.

Our spirit of resistance has been crushed and I see no immediate signs that it will be revived. It is as if the great labor movements of the last few years — the longshoremen, UPS, the train workers, SAG-AFTRA, et al. — never happened. There really should be rebellion in every city over what is going on, but nothing has really been organized, save for the good people behind the Women’s March planning several events. (I note that they haven’t planned anything after January 20th. Possibly because nobody knows if Trump will weaponize the National Guard and other military branches to retaliate with mass arrests and bullets against those who peacefully protest — a legitimately horrifying possibility.)

Trump and his fascists won’t just go after the more vulnerable members of our society. They are actively working right now to make all of us more vulnerable. Some truly monstrous people are being considered for his new Cabinet, including Susan Wiles as his Chief of Staff, John Paulson and Larry Kudlow as Treasury Secretary, and Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. The common quality of all of these proposed candidates is that they are sycophants who will always say yes. They have all been quite nimble about retaliating against perceived enemies without saying anything publicly. They don’t need to say anything publicly. Because they have their MAGA Cult doing everything they can to flood our feeds with deranged counterfactuals and insane conspiracy theories. Just three days after the election results, there have been crude and unsettling efforts on TikTok by the fascists to paint me as an unhinged maniac.

Even those teetering within some precarious middle-class tax bracket are going to see their purchasing power erode and their options for any shred of upward mobility dry up. I have to laugh over vital battles for a living wage and affordable housing becoming nullified overnight. It strikes me as absurd that vital efforts to improve everyone’s lot in life will no longer be in play. It’s as if these discussions never happened. And as we regroup and try to fight another day for some shred of accountability, the question now is what topics will be allowed into the national dialogue within the next year. We are going to see a vast and burgeoning underclass and all this could very well outdo the suffering we experienced during the Great Depression. As climate change spawns more disasters, we could very well be living under a federal government that offers nothing to help its people. One of Trump’s ideological innovations was to falsely align FEMA aid with xenophobia. And the cowardly jackals who voted for him absolutely believe this.

And I see that Netanyahu has gleefully leaned into more genocidal efforts, knowing very well that he will continue to collect his paycheck from the States for more arms to massacre Palestinians and knowing that he can manipulate Trump with ease. No difference between the two candidates, my ass.

We really should have paid greater attention to the September polls showing us that the majority of Americans support mass deportation — including 25% of professed Democrats. Goddamn, that was a huge mistake. But, hey, there was a whole lot going on. (And what’s the Venn diagram like between this xenophobic bunch and the 16 million registered Democrats who stayed home on Tuesday? Christ, I know Republicans who voted for Kamala because they understood the dire threat better than these pusillanimous weasels.). Instead of actively organizing to fight the ruling class, most Americans are looking for a scapegoat and they are quite happy to buy into illusions. They would prefer to be victims rather than fighters and thinkers and decent people. They voted to obliterate this nation and take away security and possibility from everyone.

Senator Bernie Sanders was right to observe that the Democratic Party abandoned working class Americans, that “the American people are angry and want change.” And while it’s unsettling that a vote from an uneducated nihilistic chowderhead without empathy or commiseration was on the same level as anyone considering the long game, it cannot be gainsaid that the working-class was so angry and so impatient that they were willing to destroy accountability. The ruling class won this week. They pitted us all against each other and now there is no way back.

We have ten weeks to figure this out. Ten weeks before the Orange Menace becomes the 47th President. Ten weeks to figure out a strategy. Ten weeks to figure out who we can trust and how we can outwit the vast majority of Americans who smile at us in the hall just before they inform on us to the new authoritarians. I am starting to see neoliberals blame progressives for what went down on Tuesday, but honestly it’s these sanctimonious Karens I worry about the most. They will prove just as zealous in casually ruining lives as the MAGA Cult. Sure, “Susie from Accounting” smiles at you, asks how your day was, and comes into the office with a homemade fruitcake to share with everyone. But Susie from Accounting is also going to be the one reporting anyone who is “disloyal” or who sticks out. And Susie from Accounting will love this new power she has to rat anyone who she perceives as distasteful. Accountability, predicated on a fair and neutral weighing of the grievances, has been replaced by a new evil accounting culture that will outdo McCarthyism and the Christian zealots who accused women of being witches in 17th century Salem.

The fascists are already well ahead of us. We are going to have to act and think fast. Hopefully my William Shrirer-inspired “journal” here can be of some solace to those who are on the good side. Any ideas are welcome. Thank you for reading.