The maternal roles of Hanna Rovina: Familial-national imagination in the Yishuv during WWII

ABSTRACT During the years of WWII, when Hanna Rovina was in her fifties, her cultural image as “the mother of the nation” coalesced in the Yishuv. This article explores this public image, while looking at two of her successful dramatic roles of that time, the title roles in Jacob Gordin’s Mirele Efros, Karel Čapek’s The Mother and an exemplary performance that she gave in Italy for the soldiers of the Jewish Brigade. These performances reveal how Rovina’s maternal image constructed the her as an ephemeral site of both intimate familial and ethnic national memory. The Jewish nation conceived of itself as a big family, with a specific, Eastern European collective biography and a clear center symbolized by the mother.