The new management regime at Fandor, in their wisdom (read: stupidity), zapped their online film magazine and blog Keyframe, and with that, their entire archive of articles. No record of any of the authors' work -- all gone. So I've republished here.
Last year, while producing and editing “kosher media” for a
video production company in Brooklyn, I became friendly with an elder Yiddish
theater actor who often worked with us on assorted commercials and music videos
— a stout, pint-sized man with a stubbly but no less angelic “Yiddishe punim”
(Jewish face) who could effortlessly affect a stereotypical
East-Side-by-way-of-Flatbush “alter kocker” patois that put anyone in the
vicinity in stitches. The right Jewish word to describe him is "heimishe"
(exceedingly friendly, unassuming, welcoming, unpretentious). One night, he
ventured into my editing room from the adjacent studio to visit me while I was
hard at work, as the crew set up for his next shot.
After he recounted starring in a Yiddish-language production
of
Waiting for Godot, we proceeded to talk on the subject of “mama loshen”
(mother tongue), and about the specific richness of Yiddish as it related to
Hebrew.
A quick history lesson: The early Zionist movement in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century hotly debated what the official
language would be, should the Jews eventually achieve statehood. Religious Jews contested the Hebrew
option because of its nature and background as “loshon kodesh” (holy tongue), a
language only to be spoken in religious context rather than in everyday
speech. However, to progressive,
secular Jews, the Yiddish language, a flavorful combination of Hebrew, German,
Russian, and Slavic languages, signified the chains of a difficult past in “old
world” Jewish Europe, with its perceived antiquated values, its stifling
strictures, and its persecution.
In short, to secular progressives, it reaked of what they deemed
backwards provincialism.
Ultimately, newspaper editor and lexicographer Eliezer
Ben-Yehuda revived “loshon kodesh” by becoming the author of the first “modern
Hebrew” dictionary. Today, the
Hebrew/Yiddish schism is no longer the issue it once was; Hebrew as a
conversational language is accepted as a fact of life in Israel, even among the
observant (though Yiddish still thrives in this significant segment of the
demographic). Although most of
today’s American Chassidim are Yiddish monoglots, the language of Yiddish is
rapidly dying off outside these Chassidic enclaves. And it continues to die every day the Jewish elderly pass
into eternity.
So, now back to the Yiddish theater actor, who then saw fit
to extol the virtues of the Yiddish language, although I think he knew he was
preaching to the choir.
My own heart
pines and prances at the utterance of Yiddish, a language to which I listen
fluently but speak haltingly (though my everyday speech is sprinkled with
Yiddish-isms, some overt and foreign, and others commonly adopted into the
English lexicon).
He then said
something that I deemed rather profound: “Yiddish is a thing of beauty because
it’s the language of the pilpul…it’s the language of compromise.”
According to him, modern Hebrew
originally bred and continues to breed a fierce brand of Jewish nationalism and
exceptionalism that worries him (I personally do not subscribe in any way to
this view, but I can, in my own way, understand his basic logic – and this
could indeed easily be the subject of another article, but I will of course
stick to the topic at hand).
Let us rewind for a moment. What is this strange word “pilpul”? No, it’s not like kugel, and is not in
any way edible, although it does originate from the Hebrew word for
“pepper.” However, it is one of
the very few Talmudic vocabulary words to have been appropriated into the
standard English dictionary, though the word still remains obscure relative to
other Jewish-rooted crossover classics like “schlep,” “schtick” and
“kvetch”. Defined by
Merrian-Webster, “pilpul” is “hairsplitting critical analysis.” You could also call it “heavy-duty
exegesis.”
As the old adage goes, “Two Jews: three opinions.” In the course of rabbinic dialectic and
Jewish learning, one is to accept the inherent complexity as it exists in everything
under the sun. And in order for
our all-too-human hearts and minds to reconcile that which seems
irreconcilable, a careful manner of compromise must be applied and weighed in
accordance with all the conceivable factors. Thus, Yiddish as a conflagration
of many languages, is a language of compromise, just as pilpul is based on
putting compromise into action in an effort to make it meaningful.
So, all this extraneous info just to introduce a film? I know, this stuff’s getting dense, but
bear with me. I guarantee that it
all has a point, and I think a valuable one important to cinema as a whole.
Since November 2014, I’ve been working with Oxford
University Press on the first biography on director Joan Micklin Silver, known
for
Crossing Delancey (1988),
Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979),
Between the Lines
(1977), and her breakthrough feature
Hester Street (1975), starring Carol Kane
in one of the earliest independent film performances to be nominated for the
Academy Award.
Most of Silver’s
films find comic discomfort in juxtaposing the “old world” with the modern
world.
Her skill as a director
lies in orchestrating pathos and often unexpected humor that occur when these
worlds collide.
That many of her
films are Jewish-themed is certainly apropos to this, her most burgeoning
theme, but even the ones that do not broker in outwardly Jewish subjects are
steeped in this narrative conflict – of characters with a death-grip on their
memories of a halcyon past, or a way of life, who find themselves at odds with
moving forward in the status quo.
Their death-grip makes them pragmatically and emotionally vulnerable.
The prospect of this particular book project excited me at
my deepest core. As an observant
Jew myself, one who once attended a Chabad-Lubavitch yeshiva with the intention
of entering the rabbinate, I felt especially equipped and ready to tackle the
Jewish subject matter in her films in a way that no other author would or
could.
Usually, in examining films about observant Jews, I find
myself yelling at the screen as a result of a filmmaker’s outright negligence, dumbfounding
errors, and exotification. Sidney
Lumet’s A Stranger Among Us (1992) is a major bête noire for me. Counter to pictures like Lumet’s
disposable, embarrassing depiction of New York Jewish subculture, Hester Street
and Crossing Delancey don’t soft-peddle their Yiddishkeit. On the contrary, they get so much
right, and render the subject matter with palpable respect and great love.
Beyond my great admiration for Joan’s corpus, the book is an
opportunity for me to braid the threads of my unusual double life. And as it so
happens, my dream film project is an epic adaptation of Abraham Cahan’s novel
The Rise of David Levinsky, which you might say is a Jewish Horatio Alger tale,
by way of Dostoevsky.
That much of the film
Hester Street is performed in the
Yiddish language is auspicious, but it engenders another kind of perfection,
especially when one considers what the Yiddish theater actor expressed to me,
about what the beauty of Yiddish really means to him.
The film is, in many ways, about compromise amid complexity,
staged in a language with this heritage of compromise and complexity, and one
that extends beyond just cultural or religious baggage.
Now consider this: Silver made her debut feature in direct
defiance of the standard system of motion picture production -- a system that
saw her simply as a wannabe filmmaker handicapped by shear virtue of her
gender. As I state in the opening
line of the book, “A female first-time director wanted to make a black-and-white
film about immigrant Jews coming to America in the early twentieth
century. This single statement,
though seemingly harmless, was at that time fraught with at least five
potential hazards.”
In choosing to adapt Yiddish Daily Forward founder Abraham
Cahan’s novella Yekl, she automatically committed a form of commercial
suicide. The very first Hollywood
studios, which had been famously founded and owned by Jews eager to chuck this
aspect of their identity, were rooted in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy
regarding questions of Jewishness in their product.
These studio heads, who “went from Poland to polo in less
than one generation,” lived in a world where it paid to be covert – and where
it was kosher, for instance, to bribe the lone non-Jewish studio head, Darryl
Zanuck of Fox, to permanently shelve his drama Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), an
exposé of anti-Semitism. The
bribing party, Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Carl Laemmle and Harry Cohn, set
the stage for a persisting Jewish denial in Hollywood, which in turn cultivated
the belief that outwardly Jewish content ran counter to commercialism. The studio founders’ successors
inherited this sentiment, so one can then understand how the Cahan property was
not accepted as a pedigree for success.
Hester Street and its source Yekl, both set circa 1900, tell
the story of an Americanized Jew who has “shpilkes” (anxiousness) to
assimilate. He has shed the appellation “Yankel” for the more socially
acceptable American name “Jake”.
He also manages to dress like a dandy on his meager earnings as a sewing
machine operator in the garment district.
When he imports his wife Gitl and his five-year-old son Yossele, no
sooner are they off the boat before he goes on a campaign to Americanize them. Gitl, however, refuses to hear of it,
as she stays steadfast to the old ways.
She keeps her sheitl (wig), sprinkles salt in her little boy’s pockets
for luck, and tries to proposition a visiting peddler about obtaining a liebe
trop’n (a love potion) so that her husband will love her anew. "I won’t
look like a goy, even for Yankel,” she exclaims to Mrs. Kavarsky, their
busy-body landlady. All the
while, however, she slowly finds herself going sweet on Jake’s Talmud scholar
roommate Mr. Bernstein.
Near the end of
Hester Street, Carol Kane’s Gitl has stayed
true to herself, but has learned, and quite fast, these new American ways.
The moment when she admonishes the
character of Mrs. Kavarsky for referring to her son “Yossele” rather than the
now-accepted “Joey” defines the cinema of the pilpul.
There is a gentle awareness that this
moment of Americanization is something for which a delicate balance must be
struck. She must now tend to the tall order of conforming the present reality
with her earlier expectation – one now shrivelled into a simple but no less
impassioned dream – of being able to keep the identity-defining traditions of
her rooted past alive.
Hester Street is cinema that is both of and about compromise
– the pilpul, as it can exist on celluloid at its most lively.
When one also considers the lengths to which Silver had to
go, to finance, shoot and then distribute Hester Street, it only enriches the
point. With only $500,000 raised,
Silver had to evoke the early twentieth century on the precious, dangerously
limited funds allotted to undertake such an endeavor. When no distributor evinced an interest in picking up the
film, and in the face of the suggestion that it could “play the synagogue
circuit,” she and her husband Raphael “Ray” Silver self-distributed (with the
help and advice of John Cassavetes and Jeff Lipsky). It was a pure go-for-broke endeavor – what indendent cinema
is really about, or at least should be about. At least it is what I, and my filmmaking friends, think it
is about.
Independent cinema of this variety is so often about finding
the art and beauty in compromise, while at the same time being
uncompromising. It is an
appropriation of the pilpul. Am I
saying making a film is Talmudic?
Yes, in a way, I am. As
Orson Welles once said, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” All of this makes Hester Street an
absolute must-see picture in my book, for Jews, Gentiles, and especially
filmmakers (which I deem as much a religious group as any of them).
At this point in my own personal spiritual journey, I’m
comfortable with attending my local shul (synogogue) regularly here in San
Francisco’s Noe Valley, and then, as a filmmaker, attempting to make
emotionally honest pictures that wouldn’t really qualify as kosher in any
traditional sense of the term. But the act of storytelling is ingrained in
Jewish culture, and stories told leave an indelible mark that Judaism
acknowledges. I search for my own beautiful compromise.
Fandor now premieres Hester Street, one of my favorite
films, brought to you by the great Joan Micklin Silver, a director sorely in
need of further consideration and discussion.
