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The laughter continues as Raz arrives in England where he is grilled by an English customs official and explicitly warned "not to juggle in Covent Garden." After a fantasy sequence in which Raz gets his terrifying revenge on the official - a busker's delight - his first stop is, of course, Covent Garden. There he falls in with the usual crowd of jugglers, giving the audience a satirical review of their performances culminating in a wry reenactment of his own street show, "a busker's nightmare."

Scanning the audience for a suitable volunteer to perform an unrehearsed two-high shoulder stand, one of Raz's trademarks, he picks out Helga, a Mohawk-haired German woman. After demonstrating the desired effect with the help of a cooperative volunteer from his present audience, Raz goes into a hilarious pantomime rendition of Helga's version. This one quickly turns into a kamikaze lesson in balance control which nearly ends in disaster for both. "Is this the way you treat German people?" asks the irate Helga when she is unceremoniously returned to earth.

This ignominious meeting marks a turning point in Raz's wanderings, as we find out later. Balance seems to be the central metaphor of the show - to what extent you can lose your balance and still come back to the real world?

Covent Garden fades into the distance as Raz continues on his journey to Berlin, where he witnesses

the fall of the Berlin Wall first hand. While in Berlin, he auditions for an English director's avant-guard production of Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice."

After a shaky beginning in which the part appears all but lost, Raz rebounds with a more confident reading based on a New York-style character. This unusual rendition so impresses the director that he gives Raz the part and decides to turn the entire play into a pseudo-circus with Shylock as ringmaster.

Faced with the challenge of playing a Jewish Shylock with a Brooklyn accent in the midst of a German circus, Raz seeks out his old friend Helga for advice. The scenes between the two of them are masterfully constructed so that the audience forgets Raz is actually playing both parts himself, not to mention various ghosts from the past which materialize to offer their opinions. Raz hopes that hearing the story of Helga's grandfather, a former Nazi, will shed some light on his current dilemmas. But in return for that information, Helga wants to hear all about Raz's family, particularly his father, who was a photographer with the American occupation forces during World War II but always refused to talk about it before he died in 1965.

The conversation which follows could be entitled "Guilt:: Its Excesses and Absenses," as Raz and Helga relive the past and come to terms with the effect of the war on their respective families. We gradually come to know and care for Raz's father, Barton James Raz, a sensitive and somewhat withdrawn man with glasses who loves his family but cannot share many of his inner feelings with them.

In a poignant recurring image, Raz Senior talks about his life while sitting on a chair. As the conversation becomes increasingly personal and revealing he begins to rock unsteadily until he reaches a dead end and stops abruptly, saying, "Let's not go down that road again." Eventually the subject matter becomes so intense that he loses his balance completely, going over the edge both literally and metaphorically.

In an effort to sort things out Helga leads Raz on a sight-seeing excursion to the remains of the concentration camp at Dachau. Here Raz finds an exhibit of photographs taken during the war, some of which are signed by his father. Raz realizes that his father must have stood outside the gates of the camp taking pictures of the prisoners, powerless to help them in their misery.

While Helga's grandfather is able to rationalize his own gruesome part in the war to the point where he absolves himself of responsibility altogether, Raz's father is so overcome by his failure to free the prisoners that it nearly drives him mad. As Raz explains to Helga, "my father felt the guilt that your grandfather should have felt."

By balancing a chair higher and higher on his body, Raz manages to create the illusion of his father taking pictures with a poised tripod. In order to distract himself from the horrors he witnessed, the photographer became obsessed with his craft, a bastion of neutrality and consistency in the midst of chaos and moral turbulence. Raz seems to exist in a similar state of suspended animation as he juggles three silver balls to Bach's meditative music at strategic intervals throughout the piece.

Like his father's craft, Raz's juggling seems to sustain him throughout the difficult passages in his life, and in that sense it is his most valuable inheritance.

"I was happy with tonight's performance, but I'm sure it will evolve as the run progresses," he commented after the show. The audience clearly found the show vastly entertaining and many stayed for a question - answer session with Raz and his director.

A few weeks later we are with the Pickle Family Circus once again, this time in Cincinnati. Performers are resting backstage between shows and Raz is looking back on his recent collaboration with the Pickles, which began in October. In the show he plays a silent clown who can't resist a few verbal comments now and then. He participates in most of the acts in one way or another, from diving through hoops to lifting Chinese acrobats to catching people on the teeterboard.

Mostly he works in a trio with former Ringling clown Laura Pape and the multi-talented, saxophone wielding Diane Wasnak, aka Pino, a Pickle veteran who does everything and then some. Raz is mulling over schemes for the future, which include another run of "Father-Land" in June.

"You know, today's show had a very magical quality to it, one which only comes with practice, as if everything has finally come together," he said. "You can't buy that sort of thing with money."

"But can you sell it?" I asked, wondering if it had been worth all the effort. Raz put on his favorite Brooklyn accent and tapped his Yiddish kopf. "I can sell anything!" he replied confidently, reaching for his makeup box.

Cindy Marvell is a professional juggler with the Pickle Family Circus and 1990 IJA Seniors Champion.