If only I could have read this play as an eighth grader at my Modern Orthodox Jewish day school in 1979. I've read a million works of Holocaust literature, and never one that spoke to me as directly as *Etz Hayim* has. Etz Hayim might be the play that would have been produced/born if the tragedy, *Bent,* and the YA novel, *Hey, Dollface*, had had a baby. I love the tree as the poignant third character, and this play altogether!

A beautifully structured one-act that would be very moving to see performed. I love the timelessness and ungroundedness of it, and yet we are firmly situated in the Warsaw ghetto in the center and then Senese-Grossberg lets the play move back to its timelessness, and I could feel how universal the play could be, how it ties us to any 2 girls in love for the first time caught amidst evil forces at work to destroy them, so relevant today.