The public is invited to attend three readings of a new play, Anschel, by Michael London, based on the book Anschel’s Story by Renate Frydman.

The Dayton Holocaust Resource Center’s founder and director, Frydman published the book in 2017. It’s her late husband’s story of survival in Nazi-occupied Poland. Told in the first person, it relates how Anschel “Charlie” Frydman stayed alive as a slave laborer and then as a partisan fighter, when he was only a youth, after his parents and two sisters were murdered.

London, a member of the Ohio Playwrights Circle, adapted the book into a one-person play with grants from the Leon Norman and Mildred Miriam Nizny Memorial Fund and the Eleanor and John Kautz Fund of The Dayton Foundation.

The Dayton Holocaust Resource Center is partnering with the Jewish Federation on this project. The readings, directed by Annie Pesch, will be held:

• Monday, Oct. 21, 7 p.m. with Matthew Shanahan as Anschel at the Loft Theatre, 126 N. Main St., Dayton, 937-637-8100. Shanahan also co-recorded the audiobook of Anschel’s Story.

• Monday, Nov. 4, 6 p.m. with Maximillian Santucci as Anschel at the Main Library’s Bassani Theater Off Third, 215 E. Third St., Dayton, 937-463-2665.

• Tuesday, Nov. 12, 3 p.m. with Henry Ballard as Anschel at Sinclair Community College, hosted by the Theatre Department, Building 2, 937-512-4580.

Contact the venues for tickets to the readings.

“After the readings, we plan to do a full production in spring,” Frydman says. “We also hope to bring the play to high schools and colleges in our area as non-profit events. The value of this endeavor, like the book, is to bring to audiences the spirit of resilience that Anschel had, the resilience we can all call upon in our own moments of difficulty and trauma.”

To read the complete October 2024 Dayton Jewish Observer, click here.