Recognition for the Jewish Refugees from Arab Lands

I´ve become acquainted with the reality of the Jewish refugees from the Arab lands relatively late in my life. Growing up in my European priviledged society, focused on the deep trauma Shoah left in our everyday life none of the people I grew up with displayed any sign of interest towards other Jewish identities. Some did, but in a disrespectful way, a chapter that I will develop maybe on another occasion.

Our maternal grandfather´s Turkish roots did not count as he was French-educated, spoke some Ladino and was anyway fully educated in Europe. 

I´ve approached the stories of the Jews from Arab countries and Iran with a deep humility. They were talking mostly about countries were they could not return. About places where they grew up they would not be able to see again. They were spoken languages that were adding to their daily longing because those neighbours they share the language with, but not the religion, either turned against them or become impossible memories.

I´ve actually learned what means to really miss your old countries from their vivid memories of my friends and acquaintances born in Arab countries. Compared to me, that I was enjoying at least the freedom of a passport that gave me, again, priviledges, they lost everything: their citizenship, their memories, the streets of their childhood, their friends, the graveyards where they relatives were put to rest. I felt sometimes ashamed that my connection with my ´old country´ was so poisoned by resentment and indifference and sometimes haughtimess too. 

From their stories I learned to look at places like Iraq, Syria, Morocco, Lybia, Yemen, Algeria, Tunisia or Egypt with completely different eyes. Those may be countries where once in a while demented rulers decide to attack, force to wander and expel their Jews - as it happened with almost 820,000 people between 1948 and 1972 - but the everyday people may differ. 

Nowadays, this history is part of my little family too and I am proud of my son´s history that myself I am doing my best to learn more about. Hopefully, times will change and he will be able to visit the places where part of his relatives were born before being expelled or forced to leave.

Since 2014, on 30 November in Israel is celebrated the Day to Mark the Departure and Expulsion of Jews from the Arab Countries and Iran. It takes place one day after the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was adopted. For many of those refugees, life in Israel was not easy and they had a lot to fight for, including for their rights to differ, in a country founded by European Jews. There is still a lot to be done in the field of fighting discrimination and the equality of chances but those Jews from Arab lands and Iran do not have anywhere else to go. They are there to stay and make Israel a better place because they don´t have any other country. 

The world should hear their stories and learn the lessons. We should all do...

The Operative. A Better, Different Version of Tehran

When I started to look about how to watch Tehran, it came to my attention that there may be another movie on a relatively similar bigger topic - the spy war between Iran and Israel: The Operative, directed by the Israeli film director Yuval Adler, that also directed the interesting movie Betlehem that I watched a couple of years ago, featuring two actors that will later be distributed in Fauda. 

The 1h54m- movie, which was released in 2019 and presented at the Berlinale, and is available on Amazon Prime, is based on a novel by the Israeli author Yiftach Reicher-Atir, The English Teacher. Reicher-Atir was himself familiar with the intricacies of intelligence work and was part of the Operation Entebbe, the final format of the novel being edited dramatically by the intelligence agencies.

The movie adapted the book with relatively good results. I couldn´t say which version is the best, both in their own right being able to convene a complex story with interesting ethical and human questions. 

Rachel, the main character played by the German-American Diane Kruger, who also had a role in Inglourious Basterds and was among others Helen in Troy. Daughter of a non-Jewish mother that spent some time in the kibbutzim in the 1970s and a Jewish anti-Zionist British professor, she is recruited to work for Mossad in Iran, as English teacher. There, in-between her operations, she falls in love with one of her targets. Then, suddenly disappears while her former lover is stuck in Germany in an attempt of recruitment. 

I personally didn´t like the character, although was good played, but in fact it features a lot of complexities of working under pressure and being not always honestly acknowledged the risks of the work. Rachel was not prepared for the complex situations and practically abandoned to decide on herself when under high pressure to achieve her targets. On the other hand, she acted unprofessionally while falling in love with a local and even getting pregnant with him, a situation that her handler didn´t deal with it properly anyway - by not sharing the situation to his superiors. The price she was supposed to pay was elimination, but things are not always happening as in the intelligence scripts, because feelings may overcome the smart projections.

The Operative is a good movie. both in terms of the subject and the art of the actors. It has a completely different spin as Tehran and definitely a different audience but was equally worth to watch it.

Rating: 4 stars

Max Levy-Dorn, Jewish Medical History in Germany

The role of Jewish doctors in the development of German medicine is still to be told. It is a topic which got lost on the corridors of German hospitals. As a visitor of those institutions lately - not for research reasons, unfortunatelly, I am happy to spend my time googling about Jewish personalities that created the medical science that still makes history nowadays.

A relatively least mentioned but nevertheless relevant character of the medical history from the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th was Max Levy-Dorn. He was a pioneer in the field of the radiation science discovered by Röntgen, a passion that finally killed him as he contracted cancer after being exposed to the irradiation. 

I couldn´t find too much information about his Jewish roots and family, and the medical information are sparse as well. He studied in Leipzig and become a surgeon, but at the end of the 19th century, he was owning his own medical practice and a Röntgen Lab, the first of this kind in Berlin. In 1906 he took over the Radiology Department at Virchow Clinic, where I´ve discovered the mention on the wall close to the main entrance. 

Levy-Dorn authored over 200 academic publications dedicated to the then-new science of radiology and had noteworthy contribution to the development of the radiation techniques and clinical procedeeings, especially in diagnosis of thorax and stomach maladies. 

He died of cancer at the age of 56, the result of high exposure to radiation. 

Israeli Movie Review: Zero Motivation by Talya Lavie

Hopefully, in a year from now, I will remember how in the middle of the second wave of pandemic and facing a confused future of all kinds, I laughed hysterically on my own for two full hours. 

Years of waiting to watch this movie, a spontaneous decision to do it after some bad news and a lot of Corona stress: the Israeli movie Zero Motivation directed by Talya Lavie - that I watched on mubi.com - is a gem of black humor. Exactly what I needed to run out of my petty problems.

Based on the film director´s experience in the IDF, without being autobiographical, it features the crazy adventures of girls soldiers in jobnikiot (noncombat) missions, in a basis in the middle of the desert. In Israel, girls are also under the obligation of conscription with 18, but not necessarily sent to combat. In Zero Motivation, there is no combat, no conflict and no checking-points, just a day and night office work and a lot of juicy characters. A kind of Israeli M.A.S.H. with the kind of direct, hilarious and absurd humor that you can only find there. 

I couldn´t stop laughing more than once, and the laugh come naturally in situations when the everyday military protocols are faced with the equal amount of absurdity by those girls who just happen to have to be there. My favorite is the fight with office stapler machines, a very dangerous weapon when in skillful hands. Elegantly, the movie has also something to say about how frustrating may be for women to be in decision-making positions in a world where men take it all. If women can be prime ministers, why not Army generals?

Zero Motivation was first presented in 2014 at Tribeca Film Festival and to other film festivals around the world. It´s really a gem of contemporary Israeli life.

Rating: 5 stars

Tehran. The Movie

I should keep restraining myself from having too many expectations from cultural productions everyone is talking about over and over again. Books, movies, theatre, music...that are such a hype, especially on social media that I generously serve those days, may not be such a great work of art, but just benefit of both a touch of actuality and a great - i.e. generous - advertising budget.

Take, for instance, Tehran, the 8-episode movie released this September, a production of Apple TV and the Israeli channel KAN. Some love it, some hate it. I´ve read furious tweets against and academic investigations into various messages and turns of the story. Indeed, movies are a great indicator of political positionings and ideological interpretations of current events, an excellent example in this respect being the Bond-series.

And when it comes to the Israeli-Iranian relations you know that nothing is neutral and innocent about it. That´s how it is for now but there is no black and white but a lot of colours in between and people belonging to a shade or another.

The story: Tamar Rabinyan, an Israeli born in Iran, is in a mission in Iran, during her military service (really, at such a green age, only because of her IT skills...) as a hacker (loud laughs...seriously, since when hackers have to travel to their target destination?) on behalf of the Mossad. She is involved in some local incidents and is getting lost - while wearing a hilarious sanitary-pad like nose covering - but find help and emotional/sexual support in the arms of another hacker that she first ´met´ across the Dark Web. There are wild parties with drugs and drinking - like in Tel Aviv - and encounters with the Revolutionary Guards and various Mossad backers on the ground. Although on a mission she contacts a lost aunt married with a Muslim policeman and a daughter actively involved with the Revolutionary Guards. Tamar enters secure institutions in Iran, on whose halls she speaks Hebrew with her bosses in Israel. 

Overall: Some parts of the movie make sense, many not, there are some good actors playing excellent roles like Shaun Toub playing the Revolutionary Guard counterintelligence Faraz Kamali, there are some smart twists of the screenwriting by Moshe Zonder (the creator of Fauda) but Tamar does not make too much sense as a Mossad agent - while the other top Mossad Iranian-born woman Kadosh does, but she is killed. Some episodes are too long, and the love story between Milad and Tamar is clumsy. There are some ideological messages with a drop of truth - the mullahs stole the land, we want to take it back and they help us - and the longing for Iran of many Iranian Jews is so real. A good point is there are some smart nuances outlined between the different centers of power and the everyday Iranian is seen in a human, even sympathetic light. 

Personally, I don´t regret watching Tehran but it´s just an entertainment before and after the war is over.

Rating: 3 stars

Book Review: Mischpoke! Ein Familienroman by Marcia Zuckermann

I feel guilty for not reading too many books by German Jewish authors. I am definitely guilty for being so much focused on Jewish books about life in Israel or America ignoring what it is so close from home. The home, Germany, where I live and try to define my everyday Jewish identity.

Mischpoke! (extended family) by Marcia Zuckermann covers 300-year of Jewish life in Germany (West Prussia), through the story of the Kohanim family. The result of ten years of work and research, the book is sometimes ironic, sometimes dramatic, features that define, among others, the turmoil of Jewish life in German lands.

Some of the episodes and stories are inspired by the author´s own life and family experiences. She grew up in a Jewish communist environment, with family members killed in the Shoah or part of the anti-Nazi resistance. Together with her family, she left the GDR in 1958 for Western Germany where she settled her career as a writer. 

Although the book is important from the historical point of view and as a contribution to the literary history of Jewish topics written by Jewish authors in Germany and in German language - the original language of the book I´ve read - from the literary point of view I was not necessarily happy with the story. The timeline is sometimes confusing and the story is going sometimes in too many directions without always coming back. The characters do have a strong potential that is not always fulfilled through their literary encounters and life stories. The anchor to the reality - the story of the Iranian friend the she-storyteller is trying to save - is also a weak chain of the story in my opinion because it relies on a cliché - tikkun olam (repairing the world through good deeds - which is but also doesn´t make too much sense for the rest of the story. 

However, there is a lot of quality humor in the book, created through well-crafted dialogues, and story encounters, but also many elegant allusions on inter-marriage and assimilation - or integration, German style. 

Mischpoke! is a relevant work for the Jewish voices and histories in Germany. Hopefully will open my literary curiosity for more works signed by local authors (which will help me win more small victories in my everyday encounters with the far-from-perfect German language).

Rating: 3 stars

The Untold Stories of the German Jews who Returned for Retribution

The tragic fate of Jews during WWII remains an important source of historical research and inspiration. Relevant for an exhaustive coverage of the topic are the micro-stories of people that lived during those times and further participated at the historical events in the aftermath of the war.

Sons&Soldiers. The Jews who Escaped the Nazis and Returned for Retribution is an interesting book not only for the unique topic, but also for bringing back from historical facts to reality the life of German Jews that returned from America to help the Allies fight and, once the war was won, to interrogate the defeated and unrepentant Nazi officials. 

Some of those young Jews, born in Germany but forced to leave under various circumstances, left together with their families. Most of them, though, had to leave behind their parents, siblings and relatives whose whereabouts they are looking for upon return. Unfortunatelly, in the vaste majority of cases there is a dramatic reality facing them, represented by the concentration camps.

Bruce Henderson is reconstructing the stories of those German Jews, the so-called ´Richie boys´, after the name of the training camp where they got their military and intelligence education before being send back to Europe. Their big advantage was the knowledge of the language as well as the familiarity with the German culture and history. 

Besides the snapshots of Jewish life in Germany and the different biographies of the participants, new to me were the different ways in which some of the German Jews succeeded to escape. 

The mental landscape of Germany and especially the ´no remorse´ attitude of those who were close to the decision-making centers of the Nazi machinery of war are maybe not new but equally relevant as well for the generation post-war and their everyday life attitude to the responsibility - of rather lack thereof - for the crimes committed against innocent people. The lion´s share of the American isolationism at the beginning of the war is as well a painful topic that costed way too many lives.   

Once returned to America, the ´Richie boys´ preferred to build their lives mostly outside of the political turmoils of the Cold War. Sons&Soldiers does justice to their memory and outlines stories that together with many others creates a canopy full of insights and testimonies about Jewish life in Europe, particularly in Germany.

Personally, I was slightly disappointed that the book put so much weight on the pre- and during the war period of time, as I was rather curious about the period of return and, eventually, how they related to the category of ´retribution´ and the perception of Germany as the former homeland that betrayed them. Maybe will find more about this topic in another books and researches.

I had access to the book in the audio format.

Rating: 3 stars