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Spring Arts Preview February 2016
The new season in theater, film, music, the visual arts and books.
From Streits To Hannah Arendt
A Bell and Howell 16mm-movie projector, 50 folding chairs, the lease on a loft on the Upper West Side and a suitcase filled with letters to filmmakers...
From Streits To Hannah Arendt:
George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week
Scene from “Streit’s: Matzo and the American Dream,” to screen at Film Forum. Courtesy of Menemsha FilmsA Bell and Howell 16mm-movie projector, 50 folding chairs, the lease on a loft on the Upper West Side and a suitcase filled with letters to filmmakers.
That’s what Karen Cooper was given in 1972 when Peter Feinstein asked her if she’d like to take over the year-old Film Forum. With such bounty on offer, how could she refuse?
“I looked over the correspondence and thought, ‘I was an English major, I can write these letters,’” she said last week in a telephone interview. Almost 45 years later, she still can write them, although she doesn’t really need to. Today, Film Forum has its own home on West Houston Street, with three screens, no folding chairs, several types of projectors in each of its theaters and a well-deserved reputation as a launching pad for innovative and creative films of all kinds. Filmmakers, in short, come here.
For our purposes, Forum is particularly astute in its choice of Jewish-themed films, as the coming season’s schedule vividly attests. In rapid succession, the theater will showcase premieres of “I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman” (March 30-April 5), “Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt” (April 6-19), “Streit’s: Matzo and the American Dream” (April 20-26) and “Eva Hesse” (April 27-May10).
Asked about this unusual concatenation, made all the more enticing by the fact that three of the four films, all documentaries, are profiles of strong Jewish women, Cooper replied, “I don’t go out of my way to show [Jewish films]. It has to be a terrific film. But as a Jew I do feel that we have a fine history of being a just people, involved with the rights of others, and I’m very concerned with issues of culture and history and justice.”
She points to another recent Film Forum premiere, the Oscar-nominated “Son of Saul,” as an example of those concerns.
“There have been so many films about the Holocaust,” she said. “‘Son of Saul’ does something entirely different, and that’s why it’s one of the greatest films ever made about the subject. It’s about being in terror all the time. But as great as it is, it’s had a good, not a great response from our audiences. People just don’t want to go back there.”
The programmers, however, inevitably will. One side benefit of Film Forum’s track record of Jewish-themed cinematic excellence is a sustained relationship with the Joan S. Constantiner Fund for Jewish and Holocaust Film and the Ostrovsky Family Fund. The former has helped make it possible for Cooper and co-program director Mike Maggiore to book numerous Jewish and Holocaust-related works, and the latter foundation is subsidizing a week of free screenings of the Akerman documentary.
Even so, Cooper confessed that the coincidence of the four-film skein surprised her.
The presence of the movie about Streit’s was not unexpected, though.
“We saw the film a year ago and knew we had to hold it for Passover,” she said. “It came to us just a little too late for last year, so we’ve held it for this April. How can you be a New York City theater [programmer] and not fall in love with this film? The great-grandchildren are still making the matzahs!”
Film Forum is located at 209 W. Houston St. For information, call (212) 727-8110 or go to filmforum.org.--------------------
Bollywood And The Jews
While the leading role that Jews played in the formation of Hollywood is renowned, their outsize role in early Bollywood (India's movie industry) is little known...
Bollywood And The Jews
Caroline Lagnado
Special To The Jewish Week
Sulochana (born Ruby Myers) on the set. She was in a controversial kissing scene in the 1930 film “Hamara Hindustan.”While the leading role that Jews played in the formation of Hollywood is renowned, their outsize role in early Bollywood (India’s movie industry) is little known. The American Sephardi Foundation at the Center for Jewish History is celebrating this fairly unknown but exciting aspect of Jewish cultural history.
“Baghdadis and The Bene Israel in Bollywood and Beyond,” which is open through the end of March, is a small show comprised of informative panels, photographs, promotional postcards and posters, and other related ephemera. “Though there was a small amount of Jews living in India, there was a huge Jewish presence in Bollywood,” said curator Elisabeth Stevens during an exhibit walk-through with The Jewish Week.
Jewish actresses were able to expand their film careers taking on a variety of roles in front of the camera because they did not face the same rules as their Hindu and Muslim counterparts. In the early 20th century, it was considered improper for Hindu and Muslim women to appear in films, so in stepped actresses from India’s small Jewish community who weren’t “sequestered this way and tended to be more Western-oriented,” according to Stevens.
Sulochana, who was born Ruby Myers, for instance, was in a kissing scene in the film “Hamara Hindustan” in 1930, one that sent shockwaves through the conservative country. Briefly married to a German Jewish refugee, she was known as the “Queen of Romance,” and her stage name, Sulochana, means “the beautiful-eyed one.” In addition to starring in several movies, Sulochana had her own production company, which she called Rubi Pictures.
Esther Victoria Abraham, who was better known as Pramila, was a beauty queen (she won Miss India in 1947 though she was married and pregnant with her fifth child), an actress, and a film producer through her role as co-owner of Silver Films. She was a Baghdadi Jew from Calcutta who married a Muslim man, but she retained her Jewish identity, according to Stevens’ research.
The Jews of India are mainly comprised of two groups who immigrated at different times. The Baghdadis descend from a line of Iraqi merchants who came to India between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Bene Israel, the majority of India’s Jews, have lived in India much longer. Some say that the Bene Israel are descendants of one of the lost tribes. Many Indian Jews moved to Israel over the past 70 years, and so what were once two large, distinct groups have become two smaller groups that come together fairly often.
Stevens took a feminist lens to the material, highlighting the contributions and successes of women in Bollywood. She does include a section on some influential Jewish men who were actors, writers, and producers, though it is inconveniently and unintelligently located across the next room, past another unrelated exhibit.
In this panel we learn about Jewish men such as RJ Minney, an anglophile Baghdadi Jew who moved to England, changed his name from Reuben Joseph Minney to Rubeigh James Minney and wrote the novel “Clive of India,” which became a Hollywood movie. Joseph David wrote the first Bollywood “talkie,” “Alam Ara” (Light of the World) in 1931; it was so popular that police were needed to control the crowds hoping to see it.
The objects in the show are drawn from the personal collection of Dr. Kenneth X. Robbins, a psychiatrist, who is a collector and independent scholar on South Asian culture. As a child, Robbins collected Indian documents and court papers from places like Hyderabad, Jaipur, and Baroda. As an adult, in 1968 he saw Indian miniature paintings in a New York art dealer’s windows, and his interest was reignited; since then he has spent nearly 50 years collecting Indian objects and has published numerous articles and books about Indian culture and history.
Robbins continues to spend 10-15 hours per week with patients; he feels that “both [collecting and practicing psychiatry] involve recovering and looking at history.”
Robbins is working on a multi-volume history on the Jews of India and is planning an exhibit about them for the Indian government; it will take place in New Delhi in 2017.
Jason Guberman, executive director of the American Sephardi Foundation, noted that “There is tremendous interest in the Jews of Bollywood (and India more broadly), and we have received an outpouring of support from New York’s predominantly non-Jewish Indian community.”
The foundation will be hosting its annual Sephardic Jewish Film Festival this March and will be screening the Bollywood film “Beqassor,” starring Pramila. Upon hearing about the screening, Pramila’s granddaughter Roma reached out to the Foundation and wrote, “This is such a proud moment for her entire family.”
With such a tantalizing topic and so helpful and knowledgeable a collaborator as the ASF had with Dr. Robbins, it is a shame the exhibit is displayed in too small a space to go into enough depth or make clearer connections. Hopefully the success of this exhibit will inspire the ASF to tackle the topic again in the future on a larger scale.
“Baghdadis and The Bene Israel in Bollywood and Beyond” runs through March 31 at The Center for Jewish History - American Sephardi Federation, 15 W. 16th St., cjh.org.---------------------
An Obscenely Relevant Play
An Obscenely Relevant Play
Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week
Adina Verson and Katrina Lenk in “Indecent.” Carol RoseggAside from the threat of physical violence, few prospects have occasioned as much anxiety in American Jews than that of being “a shande far di goyim” — being shamed in front of non-Jews. Imagine the risk, then, that playwright Sholem Asch ran when his melodramatic 1907 play, “God of Vengeance,” about the lesbian relationship between two Jewish women — one the daughter of a brothel owner and the other a prostitute in her father’s employ —opened on Broadway in 1923.
Provoking the ire of both Jewish leaders and municipal authorities, the controversial production didn’t take long to land its producer, along with its 12-member cast, in jail on obscenity charges — charges that led to conviction and to the closing of the play.
Now comes “Indecent,” a new Off-Broadway play with music based on “God of Vengeance” and its aftermath. Written by Paula Vogel (who won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1997 play about sexual abuse, “How I Learned to Drive”), “Indecent” provides an imaginative backstage glimpse into the politics of both the original production of the play and some of its subsequent productions. And even as Jews have become acculturated and homosexuality has become more accepted, that glimpse back shows how the play still resonates almost a century after its Broadway premier Lisa Gutkin and Aaron Halva wrote the klezmer-style music.
“God of Vengeance” has been rediscovered in the last few decades; it features prominently in Alisa Solomon’s first book, “Redressing the Canon” (Routledge, 1997), was retranslated and restaged by Irish actress Caraid O’Brien in 2002 (and staged by her in a multi-mirrored former sex club near Times Square), and was then adapted and republished by playwright Donald Margulies in 2003. It was last produced in New York by the Marvell Rep in 2012.
Rebecca Taichman, who directs “Indecent,” conceived the idea for the play when she was studying at the Yale Drama School and realized that the transcripts of the obscenity trial were housed in the Yale Law Library; moreover, she found Asch’s own manuscripts and memorabilia in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Room. Taichman, who grew up in Brooklyn with a Yiddish-speaking grandfather, told The Jewish Week that the play is a “lens to look at a swath of history” that began with the immigration restrictions of the early 1920s, when Jews were the victims of intense prejudice, and concluded in the 1950s, when Jews were again on the hot seat for their alleged Communist sympathies.
In Taichman’s staging, scenes from “God of Vengeance” are re-enacted from different angles, showing how the play’s most provocative incidents, including a lesbian kiss and the desecration of a Torah scroll (it was actually the latter that most offended the judge in the obscenity case), have different cultural meanings in different eras and locales. Taichman views the original production, at a time when Yiddish plays were first beginning to be translated into English and staged on Broadway, as torpedoing the “real crossover that Yiddish theater could have made” by pushing the envelope too far.
James Bundy, the artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre, where “Indecent” premiered last October, called the play a testament to “people who take risks to tell the most transgressive stories,” those that “cut most sharply against the prevailing social order.” Nowadays, he said, “we see fewer of those kind of plays — there’s a niche for everything.”
Josh Lambert, the academic director of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., and the author of “Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews and American Culture” (NYU Press, 2014), caught the Yale production of “Indecent.” He noted that “God of Vengeance” debuted at a time when concern about Jewish respectability was paramount, and when Jews were widely believed to be involved in prostitution (then called white slavery).
“The people who objected to the play were mostly Jewish,” Lambert pointed out, noting that it was Rabbi Joseph Silverman of Temple Emanu-El who initially lodged a complaint against the play. The rabbi and his congregants were, Lambert said, “worried about how Jews were being represented. How would we feel nowadays about a play that showed Syrian immigrants as criminals?”
Ultimately, though, for Lambert, “Indecent” is a “case study in how theater works.” It shows, he said, the “cumulative power of a particular play over its life span, about the collaborative effort of audiences, performers and theater professionals throughout time and space to create a work of art.”
“Indecent” begins previews on April 27 for a May 17 opening at the Vineyard Theatre, 108 E. 15th St. Exact dates have A CALENDAR HAS? not yet been announced, and the play has not yet been cast. For tickets and information, call the Vineyard’s box office at (212) 353-0303.Read More
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'Trying To Tell Yehudi's Story'
‘Trying To Tell Yehudi’s Story’
George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week
“He embraced music universally, in all genres,” Daniel Hope, above, says of Yehudi Menuhin. Harold HoffmanIt was a fairy tale come true. The beleaguered family that had been shoved across the globe — no money, no belongings, no prospects — was suddenly rescued by a mysterious, grandfatherly benefactor. He swept them away from an uncertain future in London to a magical chalet in Switzerland, and everything changed.
Daniel Hope was 4 years old when his mother received an invitation to work for Yehudi Menuhin as the violinist’s personal secretary. Menuhin brought the entire family to his summer home in Switzerland, the base for his summer music festival and a home-away-from-home for the world-class musicians who performed there.
Today, Hope is himself a violin virtuoso, celebrating the centenary of his mentor’s birth with a new CD, “My Tribute to Yehudi Menuhin” (Deutsche Grammophon) and a concert tour that includes a March 4 performance at Alice Tully Hall.
“He was the friendly grandpa,” Hope said of Menuhin in a telephone interview last week. “He called himself my ‘musical grandfather.’ I called him Houdini for a long time; he was the ultimate escape artist, constantly escaping into his music.”
Hope’s earliest memories of Menuhin (who died in 1999) are of the “beautiful chalet, filled with music, the most beautiful music,” and of the astounding, eclectic chorus of friends who surrounded their host.
“He embraced music universally, in all genres. [Sitar player] Ravi Shankar was there, and [jazz violinist] Stéphane Grappelli,” Hope said. “Of course I had no idea who they were.”
How did this little boy end up in such exalted company?
Both sides of Hope’s family were marked by historical tragedy. His father’s Irish forebears were driven from Ireland by the Great Famine, landing in 19th-century South Africa. His mother’s relatives were prominent Jewish-German industrialists forced to flee their home when the Nazis came to power. In South Africa, his father became a successful writer but, as a staunch opponent of apartheid, became a non-person, ultimately stripped of his citizenship and forced to emigrate to London.
“In the early 1970s it was impossible to find a job there,” Hope recounted. “My mother said she’d take any job she could find. She’d trained as a secretary when she was younger, but we still couldn’t make ends meet. We couldn’t go back to South Africa. She called everyone she knew and finally managed to meet the head of a high-powered employment agency, who had two offers for her. She could serve as secretary to Menuhin or to the Archbishop of Canterbury.”
The then-Archbishop had not distanced himself from the apartheid regime of South Africa, so Hope’s mother dismissed that option instantly, telling the headhunter that she’d go with Menuhin.
The job interview was as improbable as the rest of the story.
Hope explained, “[Menuhin] was practicing, he turned to my mother and said, ‘Do you know the difference between Bach and Beethoven?’ When she said she did, he asked her when she could start. And he told her ‘Pack your things, we’re going to Gstaad. Bring your family; I would never separate a mother and her children.’”
What began as a two-month engagement went on for the next 24 years, with Menuhin guiding young Daniel’s musical career. The two performed together many times.
It was, needless to say, an unparalleled learning experience for the younger violinist.
“The 60 concerts we did together, the hundreds of hours of practicing, he taught me to always look at the score as if it were the first time you were seeing it,” Hope said. “He said, ‘Never get comfortable with the music. These composers are always above you.’ You would think you know [a piece] and he’d throw you a curve. That’s why his interpretations were so different over the years. It kept him young and kept everyone enthralled.”
An appropriate insight from a man who told Hope, “Music is the only language in which you cannot lie.”
In putting together the program for his CD and concert tour, Hope found himself “trying to tell [Menuhin’s] story.”
He explained, “I wanted to focus on the pieces I really connected to him. The Bartok duets are ones I played with him as a kid. The Vivaldi [Concerto in A minor for Two Violins, Strings, and Continuo, Op. 3, No. 8, RV 522] was a piece I trained on with him. I started out with that and went through the musical influences, the diversity of his repertoire.”
The biggest surprise in the program is the prevalence of contemporary works from the likes of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Hans Werner Henze and Shulamit Ran.
“They wrote [pieces] for him, so his voice speaks out through these pieces,” Hope said.
Putting this program together was like a visit with an old, trusted, admired friend and family member, Hope remarked.
“It was incredibly moving; it was like being in touch again,” he said.
Daniel Hope will perform a program in tribute to Yehudi Menuhin at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center (65th Street and Broadway) on Friday, March 4 at 7:30 p.m. For information, go to www.lincolncenter.org.Read More
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