Utter Chaos

Born in Strasburg an der Drewenz, Germany (today Brodnica, Poland), Sammy Gronemann received a traditional Jewish education at home (his father was a rabbi) and attended German schools, where he witnessed and experienced German antisemitism. In 1895, after a year at the Halberstadt yeshiva, Gronemann moved to Berlin, where he studied law, began writing plays for the student organization of the Berlin Hildesheimer seminary, and became a Zionist—he attended every Zionist Congress from 1900 to 1951. He was a major contributor to the Berlin-published satirical magazine Schlemiel. In 1937 Gronemann settled in Tel Aviv, where he continued to work for the Zionist cause internationally. Outside of his Zionist activities and activism, Gronemann is remembered as an author and satirist—most notably for Tohuwabohu (Utter Chaos), a semi-satirical, semi-polemical depiction of a German Jew’s response to antisemitic pogroms and traditional Judaism in Eastern Europe—and often forgotten as a playwright, despite his pioneering musical The King and the Fool (1942), translated into Hebrew by Natan Alterman.