FRIDAY, 14 February 2014
Dear Reader,
Happy Valentine's Day, and President's Day and Shabbat Shalom!
We've got two recipes perfect for these holidays. One transforms that saccharine candy box classic, the cherry cordial, into rich brownie bites. Another that's an homage to Honest Abe in its use of an old-fashioned sweetener that he used to love. Of course, since they're both delights, they're ideal for Shabbat, too.
Reimagining The Cherry Cordial
Spiff up the candy box classic with these little brownie bites.
Jewish Week Online Columnist
Cherries and chocolate are the perfect combination. Amy Spiro
Have you ever had a cherry cordial? Chances are, if you've ever gotten a box of chocolates as a gift (say, for Valentine's Day?), you have. It's a chocolate shell filled with a candied cherry and syrup. They're not my favorites in the box - more of the one I'll take a bite of and put back - mostly because they have a very artificial cherry flavor. Whatever may once have been a cherry is obscured by the sugary-sweet syrup.
But these little brownie bites recreate the ideal chocolate-cherry combination, with a much better result. The dried cherries pack plenty of natural cherry flavor, without the dampness from fresh ones. The brownie is rich and chewy and the flecks of cherries bring them to a whole new level. I like to make these in mini muffin pans, but a whole sheet cut into squares is just as tasty.
Ingredients:
11 ounces dark chocolate, chopped
1 cup (2 sticks) butter or margarine
1 tsp instant espresso powder or instant coffee powder
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 cup light brown sugar
5 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 1/4 cups flour
1 tsp salt
2 tbsps dark unsweetened cocoa powder
2/3 cup dried cherries, roughly chopped
Recipe Steps:
In a (very) large bowl, melt the chocolate, butter and espresso powder and mix together until smooth. Whisk in the sugars until completely combined.
Add 3 of the eggs and whisk until combined, then add the remaining 2, plus the vanilla, and beat until well mixed.
Sprinkle the flour, cocoa powder, salt and dried cherries on top of the chocolate mixture. Using a spatula, fold the mixture in until just a few streaks of white remain.
Pour the batter into a greased 9x13" metal or glass pan, or divide among greased mini cups. Bake at 350 F for 30 minutes for a large pan, or 10-15 (with regular checking) for mini ones. Do not overbake!
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Gluten-free sorghum might be getting trendy today, but it has been on American tables since Abraham Lincoln's time.
Jewish Week Online Columnist 
Chewy ginger-sorghum cookies were a favorite of President Lincoln's. Ronnie Fein/JW
Who knew that gluten-free would become so trendy? True, gluten is a real concern for people with Celiac disease. But many of us without a diagnosis have also discovered that we also feel better after cutting down on bread, pasta and other products made with wheat, rye and other grains.
Which brings us to sorghum, a gluten-free grain that’s about to get very big—but has actually been around for a while. It comes in the form of a delightful syrup that’s buttery, pleasurable on the palate and—bonus—a rich source of iron, potassium, calcium and antioxidants. I use the Golden Barrel brand, supervised by the Orthodox Union, instead of maple syrup on my morning oatmeal. It gives a rich flavor to homemade baked beans and barbecue sauce. Swap it one-for-one if you’re using honey, maple or molasses in baked goods like quick breads and cookies. (Sorghum syrup can inhibit the rising action of baking powder, so don't use it in your recipes that call for baking powder.)
For all its “newfound” popularity, sorghum was beloved in this country for centuries, especially in the South and Midwest where it is grown, but was knocked off the map in the mid-19th century when refined white sugar became much cheaper and widely available. President Abraham Lincoln loved it. Indeed, the sorghum-laced ginger cookies his stepmother baked were immortalized when Lincoln mentioned them during one of his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas. Here’s a President's Day recipe that will make cookies similar to the ones that came up in the debate.
Ingredients:
3/4 cup vegetable shortening
1/4 cup coconut oil
1 cup plus 1/4 cup sugar, divided
1 egg
1/4 cup sorghum syrup
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3/4 teaspoon ground ginger
3/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/8 teaspoon grated nutmeg
Recipe Steps:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease a cookie sheet. Combine the shortening, coconut oil and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer and beat at medium speed until well combined (about 2 minutes). Add the egg and sorghum syrup and beat until well blended. Add the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, ginger, cloves and nutmeg and beat until the dough is well blended, smooth and uniform in color.
Roll dough into small balls about one inch in diameter, then roll dough balls in the remaining sugar to coat the surface. Place the balls on the prepared cookie sheet, spacing one inch apart. Bake cookies for about 12 minutes or until the cookies have spread and are flat and crispy, with lines on the surface. Makes about 6 dozen cookies.
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And to spice things up a bit a mid all this sweetness, regular columnist Paul Golin wishes a Happy Valentine's Day to Yair Netanyahu, who seems to be dating a woman who is not Jewish. Whatever happened, Golin asks, to welcoming the stranger? Have we forgotten the Biblical Ruth, a convert who is the ancestress of the Messiah?
Happy Valentine's Day, Yair Netanyahu
It may be risky to publicly admit that I’m thinking of someone this Valentine’s Day in addition to my lovely wife. But I am, and his name is Yair Netanyahu.
Happy Valentine’s Day, Yair. If the son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has indeed found love, as reported, that’s a blessing, something to be celebrated, particularly on a holiday about celebrating love. So let me be the first -- and based on everything I’ve read, the only -- voice from the Jewish community to wish Yair and his girlfriend mazel tov, if it gets serious.
Not only does it not matter to me that the young woman in question is not Jewish, I think this footnote to Jewish history represents a lovely learning opportunity. And while I’m sorry for Yair that his love life has become our teachable moment, I imagine there are also some perks to being the Prime Minister’s son. He’ll just have to take the bad with the good.
It matters how we welcome people, and there are no do-overs when it comes to first impressions. If the Jews are a “large extended family,” as we sometimes claim we are, our family just failed spectacularly at the commandment to “welcome the stranger,” or in emulating Naomi, the embracing mother-in-law of the Biblical Ruth, ancestress of the Messiah. Yair Netanyahu did not flee his people to live in Norway.
Sandra Leikanger, a 25-year-old Norwegian woman, came to Israel to study and, according to at least one account, is from a pro-Israel evangelical family with an older sister who lives in Israel and converted to Judaism. The first impression for Sandra should have been, “Welcome! You came here for a reason, we want to help you explore what’s so great about the Jewish state and being connected to the Jewish people.”
Instead, she’s mostly been met with xenophobic vitriol from the right and indifference or bemusement from the left. An Israeli anti-intermarriage organization wrote, “Bibi's son has found a gentile! His father is proud of him and gives legitimacy to the assimilation and destruction of the Jewish people.”
Every day here in the US, Jewish parents meet their non-Jewish future sons- and daughters-in-law for the first time, and their initial reaction will color the relationship for years to come. The best reaction is the simplest, to open your heart and home. “Welcome! If my son or daughter loves you, I will try to see what they see in you.” Period. As time goes on, and trust builds, the sharing of Jewish traditions may ensue. But I’ve met too many Jewish grandparents who are madly in love with their grandkids, have come to love their non-Jewish sons- or daughters-in-law and yet still haven’t fully recovered the trust they lost that first day when they tried to explain how this marriage is “finishing Hitler’s job.”
Parents can’t prevent interfaith relationships. Nobody can. For decades now, a small cottage industry within the organized Jewish community has assured us that if non-Orthodox parents just follow a few simple steps -- Jewish day school, summer camps, Israel trips -- our kids will marry other Jews. This is despite the regular occurrence of parents with one child who in-marries and one who intermarries. What did the same parents do so right with one kid and so wrong with the other? Such split-sibling scenarios have played out even in households where one parent is a rabbi. How much more Jewish could a household be than having a parent who’s a rabbi? Oh wait, I know! How about a parent who’s the Prime Minister of Israel!
Folks with in-married kids: Don’t be smug; it wasn’t you who caused that. And folks with intermarried kids: Don’t feel ashamed; it wasn’t you either. There are dozens of major societal forces at work, almost none of which are controlled by anyone in the organized Jewish community (which is why our sociologists and demographers don’t bother studying them). What we must focus on today is not prevention or retention but inclusion and expansion.
Maybe besides taking the opportunity on Valentine’s Day to thank those we already love, we can also ask ourselves who else in our midst might appreciate more love from the community.
Paul Golin is co-author of "How to Raise Jewish Children…Even When You’re Not Jewish Yourself" and the Associate Executive Director of the Jewish Outreach Institute. Follow him on Twitter @paulgolin
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We have two thought-provoking Torah commentaries for you, too. On our New Normal Blog, Rabbi Michael Levy looks at revelation through the lens of disability. And Ora Horn Prouser offers a meditation on the relationship between brothers when she looks at Moses' reaction to the Golden Calf that Aaron built.
Ki Tissa: Awareness Is Necessary, Not Sufficient
God’s initial revelation to the Israelites at Mount Sinai, when He uttered the Ten Commandments, was accompanied by lightning, thunder and shofar blasts that inspired the soul. The inspiration lasted just forty days.
As described in this week's Torah portion, the Israelites, fearing that Moses had perished on Mount Sinai, turned to a golden calf to sustain them.
When Moses finally returned, he persuaded God not to destroy the Israelites. Then, after intense supplication, he obtained God’s forgiveness.
As God accepted the Israelites’ repentance, he revealed Himself again, telling Moses,
"The Lord, the Lord, is a compassionate and Gracious Deity, slow to anger and abundant in kindness and truth. He awards kindness unto thousands of generations, forgiving iniquity, willful sin and error, and cleansing."
God didn’t speak of his omnipotence, omniscience, or miraculous deeds. Rather, He drew attention to His forbearance, kindness and compassion, the attributes which ever since have enabled us to seek His Presence and forgiveness.
How should we who have disabilities "reveal ourselves" to the Jewish community?
Too often, the question never arises, because non-disabled individuals talk on our behalf without any input from us.
Many organizations now offer "disability awareness" sessions to schools, camps, synagogues and community agencies. These sessions tend to convey some unhelpful messages:
1. Is it not strange that often, non-disabled individuals speak to other non-disabled individuals about what it is like to be disabled? The situation is comparable to male health professionals speaking to other men about a woman's experience of giving birth. At best, perhaps a few people with disabilities speak briefly at such presentations, unintentionally becoming a stereotype which the audience generalizes to all who are disabled.
2. "Disability awareness" makes it seem that our central characteristic is our disability. Since 2006, Yad Hachazakah—The Jewish Disability Empowerment Center ( www.yadempowers.org), has conveyed a more accurate message to individuals, families, community leaders, educators, clergy and the media: Each of us with a disability, like our non-disabled counterparts, possesses a unique combination of interests, strengths, limitations and aspirations.
3. "Awareness" may convey to the audience the idea that knowledge about disability and certain actions connected to "sensitivity" can solve our problems. The sessions leave audiences unenlightened about systemic transportation, architectural, communications and attitudinal barriers which prevent our full participation in Jewish life.
We who have disabilities must become much more involved in educating our communities about ourselves. Let's call our presentations "Jews with Disabilities Accommodations Workshops."
Our very involvement in organizing and conducting workshops clearly conveys that our attributes, not our disability, define who we are. From personal experience, we can enlighten our audiences regarding short-term and long-term approaches to removing barriers in the community.
Audiences will begin to realize that we are more similar to them than we are different. They can join us in the ongoing task of removing barriers.
Disability-driven inspiration, like the fanfare that accompanied the Ten Commandments, often is temporary and may not lead to positive changes. On the other hand, effective ongoing education can forge relationships and bring positive changes that last a lifetime.
A native of Bradley Beach, New Jersey, Rabbi Michael Levy attributes his achievements to God’s beneficence and to his courageous parents. His parents supported him as he explored his small home town, visited Israel and later studied at Hebrew University, journeyed towards more observant Judaism, received rabbinic ordination, obtained a master’s degree in social work from Columbia University and lectured on Torah and disability-related topics.
As a founding member of Yad Hachazakah, the Jewish Disability Empowerment Center (www.yadempowers.org), Rabbi Levy strives to make the Jewish experience and Jewish texts accessible to Jews with disabilities. In lectures at Jewish camps, synagogues and educational institutions, he cites Nachshon, who according to tradition boldly took the plunge into the Red Sea even before it miraculously parted. Rabbi Levy elaborates, “We who have disabilities should be Nachshons --boldly taking the plunge into the Jewish experience, supported by laws and lore that mandate our participation.” Rabbi Levy is currently director of Travel Training at MTA New York City Transit. He is an active member of Congregation Aish Kodesh in Woodmere, NY. He invites anyone who has disability-related questions to e-mail him at info@yadempowers.org
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Candlelighting, Readings:
Shabbat candles: 5:11 p.m.
Torah: Ex. 30:11-34:35
Haftarah: I Kings 18:1-39
Havdalah: 6:11 p.m.
The characterization of Aaron and his relationship with Moses is established early in Shemot (Exodus). Aaron is Moses’ older brother, his supporter and helper. Aaron is the one who makes it possible for Moses to “speak” to the Israelites and to Pharaoh. Moses is described as a “God” to Aaron, while Aaron is described as Moses’ prophet [Exodus 7:1]. The hierarchy is clear, but the interdependence is emphasized as well. Aaron is in a leadership position, as Kohen Gadol (High Priest), and as a fellow participant in approaching God at Sinai. Leading up to the Golden Calf episode, we would have expected Aaron to be a worthy and reliable surrogate leader in Moses’ absence.
That is why it is particularly jolting and disheartening to see Aaron so quickly follow the people’s lead, creating for them a Golden Calf. If we feel disillusioned and disappointed, we can only begin to imagine Moses’ confusion and dismay at seeing not only that the Israelites had erred, but that Aaron had led them in this idolatrous behavior. Yet, Moses’ response to Aaron is equally astonishing. “What did this people do to you that you brought upon them a great sin?” [Ex. 32:21]. Moses says this after smashing the Tablets, and destroying the calf. Moses’ fury is not in question, and his desire to blame and to punish is evident. Despite all of that, his question assumes that Aaron would only have acted in this way if the people had done something terrible to him, forcing his hand.
Is Moses being righteous, judging others favorably, and thus only thinking positively of Aaron? He doesn’t have that same approach toward the Israelites. He does pray on their behalf, pleading for their lives, but he does not assume that they are innocent, or are to be judged kindly for their actions. He saves that only for Aaron, imagining that the Israelites must have done terrible things to Aaron to cause him to have erred so greatly.
Moses is unwilling to accuse his brother directly, or to assume the worst. Moses calls on the Levites who stood with him to kill their brothers, their neighbors, their kinsmen [Ex. 32:27]. Following that massacre of 3,000 people (so inconsonant with the usual spiritual role of the Levites), Moses calls on them to renew their distinctive devotion to God [Ex. 32:29].
How do we understand Moses’ reaction? What was it that didn’t let Moses lose faith in his brother? Perhaps it was the interdependent nature of their relationship, or that Moses spent so much of his life not knowing where he belonged in terms of family that he needed not to lose faith in his one brother. Of course, we can only imagine, then, the extra pain that he felt later when Aaron and Miriam turned on him [Numbers 12], speaking ill of Moses and his wife. Moses did not respond outwardly to his siblings’ accusations. Significantly, when God rebuked them on Moses’ behalf, God explained that there was no one more faithful than Moses [Num. 12:7]. One usually reads this as Moses being most faithful to God. Perhaps, though, God is emphasizing that Moses has shown only intense faithfulness to his siblings as well, and therefore is all the more deserving of their loyalty and devotion.
When reading this text within the arc of biblical narrative themes, the relationship of Moses, Aaron and Miriam is seen as the first truly successful sibling relationship. Each generation of siblings in Genesis engages in destructive rivalry, banishment or murder, beginning with Cain and Abel, through Joseph and his brothers (until their belated reconciliation and concern for Benjamin). In Exodus, however, it is refreshing to see siblings who, from the beginning, protect one another [Ex. 2:4], who are happy to see each other [Ex. 4:14] and who cooperate to perform God’s will. Those qualities in and of themselves exhibit a new type of sibling paradigm.
Perhaps the highest level, however, the level that Moses brings us to is his generous characterization of his brother Aaron, even under the most difficult of circumstances. When Moses asks Aaron what the people could have possibly done to him to cause him to commit this grievous sin, Moses, as in almost everything else he does, is modeling a level of behavior higher than what have yet seen in the Bible.
In our daily encounters with others, brothers and sisters all, may we embrace the high and principled standards of love and understanding, faith and trust, which Moses set in relating to his siblings.
Ora Horn Prouser is executive vice president and academic dean at The Academy for Jewish Religion, a pluralistic rabbinical and cantorial school in Yonkers, N.Y.
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Best,
Helen Chernikoff
Web Editor
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| The Arts |
 Yiddish Theater's Latest Fusion
Target Margin's Winter Lab series draws from some unusual sources for its experimental fare.
Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week
Born in Eastern Europe and raised to its full height on the Lower East Side, the Yiddish theater was always a mongrel art, based on the recycling of serious European dramas, jaunty operettas, helter-skelter variety shows and other high- and lowbrow entertainment. Now, wrapping up a two-year odyssey into Yiddish theater, the Target Margin Theater Company presents a series of new theatrical works that are based on unusual sources ranging from the sweatshop poetry of Celia Dropkin to the comedy of Lenny Bruce. The cutting-edge series, called the Winter Lab, kicks off this week on the Lower East Side.
Directed by David Herskovits, Target Margin has always played with the boundaries of theater, and its current focus on Yiddish drama is no exception. Over the course of its Yiddish theater project, called Beyond the Pale, the company has breathed new life into almost two dozen Yiddish classic dramas by presenting them in irreverent, avant-garde, English language productions with multicultural casts. The new Winter Lab, by contrast, mainly uses other forms of Yiddish literature — with a dose of American pop culture — as a springboard for artistic experimentation in a Yiddish vein.
First up is a double bill of “The Secret of Life” and “Three Gifts for Lenny Bruce.” The former, based on a play of the same name by Yiddish dramatist Leon Kobrin, dispenses with the dialogue and turns the story into a hip-hop, ballet piece. The latter, an adaptation of Y.L. Peretz’s short story, “The Three Gifts,” imagines the controversial Jewish comedian of the title in a kind of purgatory where he is obliged to revisit aspects of his past, including the pasties of his stripper ex-wife and his own obscenity trial, in order to acquire wisdom. Next, Mendele Mocher Sforim’s novella, “The Travels of Benjamin III,” inspires “The Lost Tribe,” which is about a dinner party that goes awry.
A final double bill consists of “At the Rich Relatives: An Anachronistic Operetta After Celia Dropkin” and “Good Night, World.” The first is based on Dropkin’s poetry, and the second is a play about a group of adventurous young poets in Jazz Age New York. The series concludes with a free evening of dialogues from Sholem Asch’s bestselling 1946 novel, “East River,” which is about a romance between a Jewish boy and a Catholic girl on East 48th Street.
In an interview, Herskovits told The Jewish Week that in addition to allowing the company to “shine a light on other Yiddish literature, especially poetry and novels,” the new series is very much in the boundary-busting spirit of Yiddish theater. “Yiddish companies reconstructed — or pirated, or cannibalized — all kinds of material. It was like in Elizabethan England, where there was no system of copyright and it was a kind of free for all — a situation of exuberant artistic competition. That’s how Yiddish theater got its muscularity.”
Andrew Simon is the lead artist for “The Secret of Life.” In an interview, Simon noted that Kobrin was dubbed the “Yiddish Zola” for his socialist realist dramas that recalled the work of the pioneering French journalist, Émile Zola (who famously reported on the Dreyfus Affair). But, Simon said, Kobrin set a very different tone with “The Secret of Life,” one that Simon calls “pastoral, mythological and stylized.”
Simon was enraptured by the Kobrin play about a poet who is confronted with two different visions of reality, one symbolized by an old man (who focuses on practicality) and the other by a young woman (whose spirit is infused by passion and art). He presents a purely movement-based exploration of Kobrin’s themes, using the “klezmer-funk” music of clarinetist David Krakauer.
Simon, who is Jewish but not observant, views the Target Margin series as creating a new fusion, “combining a piece from a type of drama that is almost extinct to something contemporary and alive.”
Susan Hyon, who is Korean-American, has acted in a number of Target Margin’s productions. As the lead artist on “Three Gifts for Lenny Bruce,” Hyon began by asking playwright Jim Knable to write what she called a “dry, police report” account of Peretz’s short story, a fable in which a spirit tries to win entry to heaven by offering bribes to the saints — the gifts, all of which are bloody, are taken from Jewish martyrs; the saints frown on the gifts as beautiful but useless.
The satirical tale, Hyon recalled, reminded Knable of Lenny Bruce’s “snarky, edgy” quality, and she and Knable decided to center the play around the comedian and the lessons that he might have learned if he had been obliged to think back on the pivotal events of his life. The resulting work, Hyon explained, is “not really Yiddish theater, although it’s inspired by a work of Yiddish literature.” But the playwright, she said, was “on to something in picking Bruce, who had the same over-the-top, extremely emotional, posturing spirit of the whole Yiddish theatrical tradition.”
Target Margin’s dramaturg, Debra Caplan, first met Herskovits when she was finishing her graduate work in Yiddish at Harvard. Caplan’s role with the project, she told The Jewish Week, is to work with actors, most of whom are not Jewish, and help them to embody the rich tradition of Yiddish culture. But Caplan also sees her role as educating the audience. The company aims to “subvert expectations,” she said, by doing, for example, “an erotic love scene that has none of the comedy and schmaltz that people have come to expect from Yiddish theater.”
The avant-garde, experimental vibe of Target Margin’s work, Caplan, said, appeals to an audience that “skews young and diverse. It’s pretty exciting to see someone in her eighties who speaks Yiddish from her home sitting next to a young Brooklyn hipster.” Unlike the Folksbiene, which typically presents classic Yiddish plays in the original language, Target Margin is, according to Caplan, “not so much about preserving Yiddish theater as incorporating it into the American theater at large. It’s a whole new stage in Yiddish theater.”
Target Margin Theater’s Winter Lab runs from Wednesday, Feb. 12 to Saturday, Feb. 22 at the Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand St. For a complete schedule and tickets, $15, call OvationTix at (212) 352-3101 or visit www.TargetMargin.org.
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 Films Shine Light On Jewish-Polish Relationship
Best of the movies in two series touch
on the tangled ties.
George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week
By an amusing coincidence, Polish seems to be the movie flavor of the month in February. With Lincoln Center hosting a program of “Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema” and BAMCinematek offering “Kino Polska: New Polish Cinema” anyone with even an interest in one of the most important national cinemas of the last 75 years should be satisfied.
Of course, for Jewish filmgoers, the relationship to Polish film is fraught with historical tragedies, and the best of the films on display in these two series are rife with the tangled relationship between Jews and Poles.
It is hardly necessary to remind readers of this newspaper of the blood-soaked history of the Jews in Poland, victims of countless pogroms, culminating in the Shoah and punctuated by more pogroms in the post-war period. However, there is among Jews a tendency, I think, to underestimate how brutal and tragic the history of the Polish people has been. Poland has been overrun by countless ruthless dictators, partitioned repeatedly, its people murdered and tormented.
Nowhere is this message brought home more forcefully than in the works of the four major filmmakers who emerged in the aftermath of the Soviet occupation of Poland in the late 1940s: Andrzej Wajda, Tadeusz Konwicki, Andrzej Munk and Jerzy Kawalerowicz. All four are represented in the Lincoln Center series, which includes five films by Wajda, four by Kawalerowicz, two by Konwicki and one by Munk. In addition, the BAM series includes Wajda latest film, his valedictory biographical work “Walesa: Man of Hope,” as well as “Ida,” Pawel Pawlikowski’s magnificent meditation on the long-term aftermath of the Shoah in Poland.
It is impossible to separate post-WWII Polish cinema from the events of the war. The wholesale slaughter of Poles, both Jewish and not, by the German occupiers inevitably is reflected in almost all of the movies on display in both these series. This is nowhere more apparent than in the films of Kawelerowicz, who is surely among the most totally philo-Semitic artists in the history of Polish culture, a filmmaker whose work includes highly sympathetic, nuanced and affectionate portrayals of Jewish characters in almost every one of his films.
Kawalerowicz has said that he grew up in a small town in Ukraine, Gwozdziec, where “60 percent of the people were Jewish, 30 percent were Ukrainian and 10 percent Polish. It was a typical Galician town, which was totally destroyed by the Holocaust. But because I lived with many people who died in the Holocaust, I remember everything about them.”
It is a world he portrays with great warmth in his 1983 film “Austeria/The Inn,” based on a novel by Julian Stryjkowksi (born Pesach Stern, and another fascinating figure in his own right). “Austeria” was a life-long dream project for Kawalerowicz, a tragic recounting of the first day of World War I as experienced by people trapped in a Jewish-run inn on the edge of the Polish-Russian border. He immediately and deftly sets up a contrast between the verdant, seemingly peaceful countryside and the almost unending thunder of artillery shells in the distance. Kawalerowicz’s vision of the countryside, however, is anything but idyllic. In “Austeria,” it is a quietly chaotic and empty place, reflective of a Hobbesian world in which the forces of destruction are seldom far away. As one of the Jews says, “I’ve fled before ... to escape a pogrom.”
At the same time, the different elements of the Jewish community — chasids, maskilim, a troupe of itinerant actors, local farmers — are depicted with wry, warm humor. Kawalerowicz, who describes himself as an Armenian with no attachment to the Armenian Orthodox Church, takes particular delight in the chasids, fleeing with their all-but-mute tzaddik, bursting into powerful song and dance at the drop of a suggestion of deliverance. They are endowed with a spirituality that most of Kawalerowicz’s protagonists are denied.
Perhaps the most surprisingly unspiritual of these is the priest-exorcist at the center of his best-known film, “Mother Joan of the Angels” (1961). Retelling a true incident of alleged demonic possession in a convent, the story was the inspiration for Aldous Huxley’s “The Devils of Loudon” and Ken Russell’s “The Devils.” An austere, almost forbidding film, “Mother Joan” anticipates the work of Andrei Tarkovsky but, unlike Tarkovsky, Kawalerowicz seems to deny his tormented anti-hero grace and transcendence. Here, there is only self-abnegation and self-destruction. The priest’s alter ego, a rabbi (both of them played by the extraordinary Mieczslaw Voit) warns him that he hovers at the lip of the abyss, but the alarm goes unheeded.
Tadeusz Konwicki spent his war in the forests. Only 13 when World War II broke out, he would eventually join the Polish partisans, fighting first against the Nazis and then against the Russians as his homeland, at once both Lithuanian and Polish, was occupied by its bullying neighbors in rapid succession. How could he not have been marked by that experience?
With books like “A Minor Apocalypse” and “The Polish Complex” to his credit, Konwicki is a true rara avis, a novelist who is also a distinguished and distinctive filmmaker. Not surprisingly, Konwicki’s writing and films are haunted by his time in the underground army.
You can see it in the opening lines of his very first film, the cryptic, haunting “Last Day of Summer” (1958). While the camera pans across a starkly beautiful seemingly deserted beach, we hear a female voice say, “I flinch from a human gesture, when someone raises their hand to touch me.” When we finally meet the speaker, she is a handsome young woman of about 30 and it is inevitable that we wonder what she was doing as a teenager between 1939 and 1945. Significantly, the first object we see in the film is a length of stone and plaster wall, pockmarked with bullet holes.
By contrast, “Jump” (1965), the other Konwicki film in the progam, is a disconnected, elliptical and very funny farrago in which a mysterious stranger (Zbigniew Cybulski at his most mercurial) returns to a nearly deserted town where everyone seems to have a secret, a girlfriend or both. One of the central figures is an equally mysterious townsman (Wlodzimierz Borunski) who may be the deceased Jewish actor Blumenfeld or merely a reminder of the disappearance of the town’s Jews during the war. The film is a bit of a mess, but it’s worth seeing for the extended musical number towards the end, a goofy anticipation of Bela Tarr.
Wojciech Has would best be characterized as an amiable journeyman, were it not for two films. “The Saragossa Manuscript” (1965) is his masterpiece, a deft and delirious adaptation of the Jan Potocki classic, a veritable Chinese-box puzzle of a movie, with Cybulski swept from one fantastic encounter to another during the Napoleonic Wars. Eight years later, Has returned to the cunningly fragmented structure of that film for an adaptation of “The Hourglass Sanatorium,” from the hypnotically strange stories of the great Jewish-Polish writer Bruno Schulz.
“Sanatorium” ostensibly recounts what befalls Josef (Jan Nowicki) when he goes to the eponymous establishment to see his dying father. However, like “Manuscript,” the film is really a series of mysteriously interconnecting anecdotes taking place on a strange plane where farce and hysterical fear intersect and there is little discernible difference between a wildly energetic dance and a frenzied seizure. In the midst of a world of decay and an Alice-in-Wonderland-meets-Kafka logic, the only source of human feeling is the interaction of Josef and his father with the Jewish community to which they belong.
“Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema” will be presented by Milestone Films and the Film Society of Lincoln Center Feb. 5-16 at the Walter Reade Theater (165 W. 65th St.). For information, call (212) 875-5601or go to www.filmlinc.com.
“Kino Polska: New Polish Cinema,” presented by the Polish Film Institute and the Polish Cultural Institute New York, will play at BAMCinematek Feb. 19-23 at the BAM Rose Cinemas (30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn). For information, call (718) 636-4100 or go to www.BAM.org.
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POLITICAL INSIDER
Short Notes From A Reporter's Notebook
A King's Bicoastal Meetings
Douglas Bloomfield
A King's Bicoastal Meetings
King Abdullah II of Jordan was in Washington Wednesday and had breakfast with Vice President Joe Biden at the Naval Observatory, but he'll have to wait until Friday and fly to California to meet with President Obama. They'll be getting together at Rancho Mirage, far from the snow that has shut down the Washington area. The Veep and the king discussed "the growing threat of violent extremism fueled by the Syrian conflict," the humanitarian disaster and the refugee crisis, according to the White House. Jordan has been overwhelmed by the influx of Syrian refugees as well as those from Iraq, which is becoming increasingly unstable.
Obama Warns Sanctions Violators: Stop Or Else.
That's Barack Obama's warning for companies rushing to do business with Iran in violation of sanctions. Try it and the United States will come down on you "like a ton of bricks," the President said during a press conference with French President Francois Hollande.
The Obama Administration is upset with French businesses exploring business opportunities with Iran since the nuclear talks began and some sanctions were eased. More than 100 French executives visited Tehran last week, reported the Associated Press. Secretary of State John Kerry called the trip "not helpful."
Germany & Syrian Poison Gas
How times have changed. Some of Syria's stockpile of poison gas, which Bashar Assad admitted was intended to use against Israel to kill massive numbers of Jews, may be shipped -- including sarin and mustard gas -- to Germany for destruction.
The German Foreign Office has offered to destroy Assad's chemical weapons on German soil at the state-owned company in Munster, Lower Saxony. In addition, the Bundeswehr is considering participating in the planned destruction of Syrian poison gas aboard a U.S. ship in the Mediterranean by providing security to the operation.
A U.N. mandate requires Assad to destroy all chemical warfare agents by June 2014, but it is behind schedule. The government has missed two deadlines, which it blames on security problems related to the ongoing war.
WELL VERSED
Think photos of the Lower East Side and you might well conjure up Jacob Riis’ grainy black and white images, Hebrew signs hanging from stoop steps, pushcarts lining crowded streets. Or perhaps you’re remembering more recent images ‒ burnt-out buildings, gangs and cigarette butts hanging from slack mouths during the ’70s. Maybe for you, the Lower East Side is all about discount Sunday shopping in the ‘80s. But it’s not the old neighborhood anymore, as Sally Davies’ “Photographs of the Lower East Side” -- now on view on 57th Street -- at the Bernarducci Meisel Gallery make clear.
Some icons remain and Davies captures those images, as well: Yonah Shimmel’s Knish Bakery is still there but striding in front is a brightly clad hipster. The old church on 8th street, fresh from a cleaning, is open, but only Charlie, the photographer’s dog, attends and waits.
Davies’ photographs attest to the many histories that line these pockmarked streets and the new stories that are now unfolding. Signs in Hebrew, Chinese and graffiti are reflective blackboards of the varying migrations while the New York skyline continues to beckon its downtown denizens. Young people lay claim to the streets during the day and the clubs at night, but the century-old tenements bear witness to an earlier provenance, a wheelchair atop one snow-covered roof. A young Muslim woman, clad in abaya, hijab, sneakers and knapsack , talks on her cell as she walks past ad hoc graffiti of the Statue of Liberty. In a Hopper-esque photograph, a lone blonde scans the street, on the lookout for something or someone. Hell’s Angels maintain their NY headquarters; tattoo parlors and Chinese laundries still exist but trendy businesses are taking over.
Davies, who’s been living in the area since the early ‘80s says, “Everything changes so fast. I’ll see something one day and the next day it’s gone." Lining the buildings, cars tell the story of the changing neighborhood: in one frame, the expected jalopy, in another, a snazzy white Cadillac, gleamingly renovated, spends the night, and finally, the ultimate status symbol ‒ a vintage roadster stands proudly parked outside expensive new housing.
“Sally Davies: Photographs of the Lower East Side” is on view through March 1, 2014 at the Bernarducci Meisel Gallery at 37 West 57th Street.
Gloria Kestenbaum is a corporate communications consultant and freelance writer.
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| Rabbi David Wolpe's Musings |
Rabbi Tarfon was very rich. One day, Rabbi Akiva met him and said, “My master, shall I purchase for you a town or two?” “Yes,” said Rabbi Tarfon, and immediately gave Rabbi Akiva 4,000 gold dinars. Akiva distributed the money to poor scholars.
Later, Tarfon met him and said, “Where are the towns you bought for me?” Akiva showed him to the house of study where a small child was reciting the psalms. The child came to Psalm 112, verse 9: “He gives freely to the poor, his goodness lasts forever.” Akiva said, “This is the town.” Tarfon kissed him and said, “Akiva, you are my master in wisdom, and leader in the ways of the world,” and gave him more money to spend (Massechet Kala 2).
Educating ourselves to giving is not always easy. There is a natural cupidity; even when it is not rapacious (think, “Wolf of Wall Street”), we find it hard to give away what is ours. But R. Akiva, one of our greatest sages, reminds us that wealth is a loan, and one never regrets tzedakah as it both enables and inspires others to live better. If Rabbi Tarfon could learn from Akiva’s teaching, so can we.
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe.
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