THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Friday, April 27, 1984
25
Children of survivors find voice in three new films
BY LEE KRAVITZ
Special to The Jewish News
•
It took more than 30 years
before the survivors of the
Holocaust could speak
openly of their experiences
to a world ready to listen.
Now, quite suddenly it
appears, the children of
these survivors are coming
of age. As they do, they are
speaking out in a voice of
their own. That voice is an
intense, sharp one, which in
several upcoming films,
seeks to articulate how
their parents' experiences
have been passed on to
them.
Over the next two
months, three productions
by talented, young Jewish
film makers whose parents
are survivors will give ex-
pression to their special le-
gacy. Representatives of
what Elie Wiesel once
called "a privileged genera-
tion," the film makers seem
to epitomize those qualities
Wiesel spoke of when he
told a gathering of sur-
vivors' children, "You re-
member things that you
have never lived, but you
remember them so well, so
profoundly, that everyone of
your words, everyone of
your stories, everyone of
your silences comes to bear
on our own. You are our jus-
tification."
The films, all opening in
New York this spring, bear
witness to this calling. One
of them, David Greenwald's
The Well, is a parable about
the pre-Holocaust world of
Eastern European Jewry —
and the first American film
made in Yiddish since 1961.
The other two — Kaddish,
by Steven Brand, and A
Generation Apart, by Jack
and Danny Fisher — are ex-
traordinarily sensitive
documentaries that deal
with the impact of the
Holocaust on children of
survivors.
Until recently, the bur-
den of that legacy was sel-
dom discussed among sur-
vivors and their children.
After the war, the 75,000
Jews who outlived the Nazi
death camps fled to the
United States, Israel, Au-
stralia, Canada and South
America. Hoping to forge
new lives, they frequently
married other survivors and
began raising new families.
Understandably, the
children they produced
were symbols to them of
life's power over death —
and of a Jewish victory over
Hitler. So, almost invari-
ably, the children, who
often were named after
those who had perished,
bore the awesome burden of
compensating through their
own lives for the lost mil-
lions.
What impact did such a
Lee Kravitz, a recent
graduate of Columbia
University's Graduate
School of Journalism, is a
free-lance writer in New
York.
legacy have on these chil-
dren?
That is a subject ofA Gen-
eration Apart, a moving
documentary about guilt,
loss, survival and separa-
tion as seen through the
eyes of several children of
Holocaust survivors and
their parents. The film is di-
rected by Jack Fisher,
whose parents fled to Israel
and then to New York after
the war.
Together with his brother
Danny, who produced the
film, Jack runs a production
company in New York
which makes mostly indus-
trial films and commercials
for clients. -
But, says Danny of the
brothers' independent proj-
ect, "We made this film for a
very personal reason. As
children of survivors, we
wanted to explore our own
relationships to the
Holocaust. We had a deep
need to come to terms with
our feelings about an event
that had affected us tre-
mendously."
In the documentary, the
Fishers question their par-
ents about the concentra-
tion camps. At the same
time, they express anger
about the burden their par-
ents placed on them by
dwelling obsessively on the
Holocaust. Joe, the eldest, is
the angriest of the sons. He
lashes out at his parents for
using the Holocaust to "lay
a guilt trip" on the children.
Then, turning his anger
toward his brothers, he
chastizes them for carrying
the Holocaust over into
their own lives.
To Joe, the time his par-
ents spent in Auschwitz
"happened, and it was terri-
ble." But now, he says, it's
time to draw a line. "They
went through it," he says of
his portents to his brother.
"You did not."
In the film, the Fishers
also interview two Israelis
whose parents survived the
death camps.
"My parents had every-
thing taken away from
them, so there was great
pressure on me to do what
they never achieved," says
Peter, an Australian-born
doctor who echoes the feel-
ings of other survivors' chil-
dren in the film.
Eventually, the task of
becoming happy, healthy
and successful for both him-
self and his parents got the
best of Peter. When hospital
officials caught him
prescribing narcotics for
himself, he lost his license
to practice medicine.
Unlike Peter, Yorum, an
Israeli actor, denies that the
Holocaust had any impact
on his life. Yet, interviewed
as he prepares for a role as
an S.S. officer in an upcom-
ing play, Yorum's
enthusiasm for the part bet-
rays him. Flashing what he
calls the officer's "winning
smile," Yorum admits to
having a strong attraction
to the soldier's "amoral and
David Greenwald's The Well" is a parable about the pre-Holocaust world of Eastern European Jewry and the first
American film made in Yiddish since 1961.
seductive power." Psychol-
ogists have a name for
Yorum's attraction. They
call it "identification with
the aggressor."
Shelly Geifman, a
Holocaust survivor's child
who also appears in the
film, claims this char-
acteristic is more common
among those in the second
generation than many
would like to admit. She
notes that Frank Collin,
who led the 1977 effort by
American Nazis to march in
Skokie, Ill., a town with
many survivors in it, was
himself the son of a Jewish
man who survived Au-
schwitz.
The most poignant mo-
ments in A Generation
Apart come when the
Fishers probe the relation-
ship between Geifman, a
New York artist who is
their friend, and her
mother, a survivor of
Bergen-Belsen.
The elder Geifman shows
few scars from the death
camps; she's handsome, ar-
ticulate and unusually
self-possessed. But, when
Shelly tells her how un-
loved she felt as a child, she
loses her composure. Con-
fessing that when her chil-
dren were young, she was
afraid to show them too
much affection, she says,
"In the camps you learned
that if you loved someone
too much, you were going to
lose them.
"I feel that I owe all my
children an apology," she
says. Then, after a long
pause, she adds, "I don't
know who owes me an apol-
ogy."
•
Where A Generation
Apart deals with the prob-
lem of guilt across genera-
tions through documentary,
David Greenwald's The
Well approaches it through
narrative fiction,
When Greenwald was a
young boy, his mother told
him a story, in Yiddish,
about a gypsy in her shtetl
who once told her that an
all-consuming fire would
come and destroy every-
thing in its wake.
It was a survivor's way of
teaching her child about the
Holocaust, an inferno that
took the lives of his grand-
parents and destroyed his
mother's life in Czechos-
lovakia.
You remember
things that you
never lived, but
remember them so
well, so
profoundly, that
every one of your
words, every one
of your stories,
every one of your
silences comes to
bear on our own.
You are our
justification.
That story, adapted and
changed, became the basis
of The Well, a lyrical tale
about a young boy from
rural Czechoslovakia who
runs away before World
War II to visit his uncle in
America, the goldeneh
medina. The story, set in
pre-war Czechoslovakia in
1942 New York, tells how
the boy gradually discovers
produced Yiddish film in
more than 20 years.
"When I started thinking
about making this film,
everyone told me I was out
of my mind," says Green-
wald, a 28-year-old
filmmaker who grew up on
Long Island. "I got
encouragement from no
the tragic fate of his par-
ents, whom he has left be-
hind.
Made on a shoestring
budget with actors from the
Yiddish Theatre, The Well
is the first professionally-
one. The idea of a young
American making a film in
a foreign language was con-
sidered strange. That the
language was Yiddish made
it even stranger."
But he kept on with the
film — partly because his
parents had survived Au-
schwitz, and partly because
of his need to reaffirm the
heritage of those Jews who
had perished.
"One of my aims in the
film was to recreate the
richness of Jewish life in
Eastern Europe before the
Nazis tried to destroy it," he
says. "And Yiddish was the
language of that life."
•
Technically,
Steven
Brand, the director of Kad-
dish, is not a child of sur-
vivors -- his parents es-
caped from Vienna to New
York in 1939. But growing
up as he did among families
of refugees and survivors,
he says the importance of
the Holocaust was im-
printed on him at an early
age.
Now a news editor at
ABC-TV news, Brand says
of his impulse to make Kad-
dish, I wanted to make a
documentary film about the
Jewish capacity to survive. I
also wanted to make a'film
that would help non-Jews
understand why Jews are so
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