Jewish Film Review: Ida

 

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Soon before getting her confirmation as a Catholic nun, Anna is sent by the principal to visit her aunt. Wanda - or ´the red Wanda´ as she used to be called - was a communist judge in Poland with a history of ideological ´orthodoxy´. She will let Anna know that she is actually Jewish: Ida Lebenstein, the daughter of Haim Lebenstein and Roza Herc. ´You are also a Jewish nun´, Wanda will add sarcastically but his niece is barely showing any exterior surprise. Together, they embark on a journey through a winter-frozen country searching for their place of burial. 

Ida´s reaction hearing the news about her ancestry and the fate of her parents is numb. Her religious attachment to her Catholic faith is expressed sometimes through mechanical gestures, typical for someone not having anything and anyone left besides Gd. She is the perfect opposite of her aunt, enjoying suicidally any drop of life - and alcohol as well. 

The encounter between the two women and the Polish villagers who were supposed to protect and save their family is one of the film´s most dramatic moments. This dramatic encounter should be an episode putting on trial Ida´s faith. The peasant´s son, while getting a verbal deal from them of showing the place of burial in exchange of giving up any claim to the house he and his family took over, is revealing another tragic truth: He decided to send Ida to the monastery, as she was the less ´Jewish looking´ from her family. Wanda´s son - that she left in the care of her sister to join the partisans - was dark haired and circumcised thus was not left alive and sent to death with an axe. (It is not expected Gd, not the humans, to decide ´who will live, and who will die´?) 

Ida will not had has confirmation actually, not when she was supposed to, and her aunt will be able to carry the weight of the tragic end of her family. But it is only an episode of her life, it seems. 

I haven´t like so much in a while a movie on such a sensitive topic. It is a relatively short movie - less than one hour and a half - filmed completely in black-and-white. The women actresses are excellent in their roles - the naive versus the deeply tormented soul. The musical background - jazz and loud classical music - as well as the infinite nakedness of the Polish winter are the best companion of the long silences between the characters. The film Ida breathes an elaborated simplicity the result of a tremendous work of reframing and reassigning scripts and images. 

It´s the everyday life simplicity of the evil, the human duplicity, the refuse to accept the black-and-white simplifications - except in the construction of the images, which give a dramatic complexity to the visual story in its entirety. Indeed, this film is a masterpiece, and its long list of awards it received - among which Best Foreign Language Film of Academy Awards and a Golden Globe - is well deserved. 

The story is not unique to Poland, where at least 3 million Jews were murdered during the Shoah. I´ve heard so often in the last years about people, including members of the Catholic clergy, discovering their Jewish roots. Some will leave their past behind, some will go on with their life as usual. The ways in which Poland acknowledged their responsibility towards their Jewish citizens and neighbours it´s a very sad story which deserves more than a blog post. 

The film director, Pawel Pawlikowski discovered in his late teens that his paternal grandmother was killed in Auschwitz. Raised Catholic, he is known for his documentary movies.  

Rating: 5 stars

The Story of The Lost Shtetl

 

Try to figure out: a shtetl called Kreskol tucked in the middle of the forest, somewhere in Poland, a ´happy peaceful town´ protected against all the terrible catastrophies and events of the last century. There were no memories of Shoah, and not the post-war anti-Semitism, the ardent communists did not tried to change the sould of its inhabitants and afterwards accuse them for being anti-nationals either. It´s only a absurd occurence which has to do with some unexpected unhappy ending of a marriage that will take the shtetl out of its a-historicity.

Wait, wait, wait....but such an event and therefore  is practically impossible. Let´s say that living without indoor plumbing for such an impressive amount of time it is real, but not connecting with the outside world for so many decades and still surviving it´s a logical unlikelihood. It´s what an academic, later in the story of The Lost Shtetl, the debut of Max Gross, will haughty assess at a scholarly conference, echoing my unbeliver´ mind of someone who tried to kill the story - any fiction story actually - with cold reasonable arguments. This academic echoed my own mind at the very beginning of the book, when I was trying to figure out the pace of the novel and maybe get in sync with its story. After all, they may need to get from somewhere those materials to process thoaw sheep skin for the handwritten notes, isn´t it?

Being Jewish means at a very great extent being a storyteller as telling stories - some of them happy, many sad though - and I am happy to discover lately a couple of good (and very good) Jewish novels that confirm those skills while using the historical format of the old maizes in a modern, secular context. 

I had access to The Lost Shtetl in audio format, narrated by Steven Jay Cohen, which made the literary experience even more interesting as it requested an additional focus and made the dialogues between the many characters even more lively and real in their world created for them by the author. 

It is a woman, Pesha - ´a woman of peculiar appetites´ - that will take over the veil over 100 years of a-history in Kreskol, but in fact every chapter can be read as a story in itself. And how else is history made if not of many disparate stories of people, some but not all of them intertwined. As in the case of any good story, there is love, greed, hope, friendship and a bit of suspense. Kreskol is like a portal to another world which - I am very relieved to inform my readers - is not at all a perfect, idyllic world, a projection of a superficial assumption about how Jewish life used to be in a shtetl, a replication of a simplified anti-historical reality. 

The writing is so fresh and the story is taking so many unexpected, often hilarious turns, that I hardly want it to finish. It´s the magic that a good story can always achieve, including by taking even the more skeptical reader out of his/her average predictable and logically understandable world with a promise of pure adventure. Most probably I can spare some time to listen to the book once again.

As for the ending, is one of the best I´ve read in a very long time...but I will not let my fingers share anything about it.

A short note on the cover which is both ironic and mysterious in its simplicity. 

Something is going on lately in the world of Jewish literature and it looks like there are many good good books out lately with a very intelligent creative touch.

Rating: 5 stars

Natan Sharansky, hero of a graphic novel

Once upon a time, the Jews of the Soviet Union were living under a government at least as oppressive as the Pharaon of Egypt during the Pesach story.

For the very young readers, Natan Sharansky and his fight against the enormous power of the Soviet Union may not mean too much. After all, who does remember the Soviet Union if never lived there or in its vicinity? However, in another reality, this conglomerate of nations, cultures and languages kept Jews captive either by refusing them the right to a passport and to their trip to Israel - or out of the country - or simply imprisoning those who reclaimed their identity.

Sharansky was born in the same year with the state of Israel - 1948 - in the nowadays Ukraine. A passionate chess player, he enroled in the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology - one of the few accepting Jews in the Soviet Union. Belonging to a very secular family, as many other Jews from all over the world, he became inspired by the victory of Israel during the 6-Day War. He reclaimed his identity, by being interested to learn Hebrew and eventually become closer to religious practice. As he was employed by the Institute for Oil and Gas in Moscow, his visa was denied due to his familiarity with ´state secrets´. His wife, Avital, that he married one day before she left for Israel, was waiting for him and soon she will become his voice and supporter. Arrested in March 1977 and brought to Lefortovo KGB Prison he will spent over 400 days touring the Soviet prisons. His liberation was requested at public gatherings all over the world and was finally decided following the 1986 meeting between Gorbatchev and his American counterpart, Ronald Reagan.

In the context of the lockdown stories, Sharansky - now living in Israel and since then holding various official positions, including as the top head of Jewish Agency for Israel - shared how he was able to survive solitary confinment while imagining various chess moves. This helped him to keep his brain sharp. 

The graphic novel featuring all those stories long forgotten, Natan Sharansky. Freedom Fighter for Soviet Jews is the team work of Blake Hoena (text) and Daniele Dickmann (illustrations). The text is dense and includes a lot of useful information. I was not very impressed by the illustrations but it´s a matter of personal taste and expectations. Overall, it is an useful book, aimed to remind about a very dramatic episode in the history of contemporary Jewry. Hopefully, there will be more such works that will keep the memory alive, for a variety of readership.

Rating: 3.5 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Bitter Jewish Memories of Budapest

 

There is a deep sadness of the uprooted souls. Those forced for many reasons - particularly political - to leave their homes they will always have a broken heart for their place of birth, no matter how much they love it. Or they used to love it. The pleasant taste of the childhood memories is bittered by the adulthood accounts of humiliations and frustrations. When/If they are allowed to return, the shock of seeing the idealised place of the memory with the eyes of the (over)critical adult is the source of a redoubled wave of frustration and unhappiness for not properly finding its own place.

André Lorant was born in a middle-class Hungarian Jewish family that did its best to cover its roots as many assimilated Jews in Central and Eastern Europe. They got baptised, mostly within the Catholic Church, no brit mila, no Hebrew names, they tried to respect as seriously as possible the Christian holidays. Then, the far-right come and force them to wear the yellow star and send them to concentration camps. Those who survived and returned, found not only their properties looted but soon they will be labeled as indesirables by the proletarian regimes. This time, they were not forced to wear the yellow star, but they were sent to prisons and reduced - again - to the status of ´second class´ citizens. 

His memoir, Le Perroquet de Budapest is bitter and cynical with a strong Freudian touch. Mostly, against the double-faced compatriots and the vanity of their national intoxication. Then, and now. Lorant, who was forced to leave Hungary following the 1956 events - I dare not to call it a revolution, because despite the expectations it did not change anything, except the murder of the communist leaders who wanted the change and a massive wave of immigration - refugiated to France where he became a specialist in Balzac, the fine observer of the human character. Recently, he also write a bvook about institutional antisemitism in Hungary. The memories of Jewish life are generously spiced with personal encounters and various family betrayals and petiness. It is both a society and family portrait with cartoonish touches. 

The book is an useful reader of Jewish life and encounters in Hungary - with a lot of similarities, at a different scale, with Germany´s. I was not extremely impressed about the style, particularly the bitterness, although I can fully understand it. Looking to the recent political evolutions in Hungary, it seems that there are so many things that stayed the same.