Giles Howe and Katy Lipson who wrote Turkish Delight the Opera are developing a new musical they have written, SOVIET ZION. Further details at www.sovietzion.com and www.astagekindly.com

Giles Howe and Katy Lipson's new musical Soviet Zion is set in an obscure region of the former Soviet Union known as Birobidzhan, an area of Siberia that was set aside in the 1920's as a homeland for Russian Jewry. It was Stalin's response to Hertzl's Zionism (the return of the Jewish Diaspora to the Land of Israel) which the Stalinist govornment at the time found enormously threatening: fearing that the several million Jews in Russia at the time would turn their back on the Motherland in favour of the percieved politically disloyal Zionism,  the Kremlin set about establishing Birobidzhan as an alternative Jewish homeland; a seular Yiddish state, as opposed to the religiously motivated Hebrew state of Zion. This happened many years before the State of Israel was actualised. The story of "Soviet Zion" looks at how the lives of three very different families who settle there intertwine.

Establishing the JAR (Jewish Autonomous Region) and Birobidzhan never was quite the success that many had hoped it would be, nevertheless it still exists today - a forgotten homeland tucked away on the border between Siberia and China. Most of the thousands of people who moved there out of the Ghettos and Stetls in the name of Soviet Yiddish Agriculturalistm in support of the new state ideology moved straight back to whence they came, though some still stayed and battled through the terrible Siberian conditions and the many curious dramas wrought by history.

The musical Soviet Zion looks at the struggle for identity and belonging, the quest for a homeland, and human hope in the face of extreme adversity. 

                     We came here to be peasants