I.
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS Friday, November 15, 1985
Entertainment
On Weekends
MORT AT THE MOVIES
MORT ZIEVE
Casual Family Dining
Food & Spirits
•
Open
2 DIA Showings Of Powerful 'Kaddish'
7 Days
sweetness, overflowing with love
for his family.
What this film will do for you
is not only to move you, but to
stimulate you to re-examine, as
Yossie does, the question of
what the Holocaust means to us
today, and what it means to be
Jewish in today's world.
Kaddish was reportedly made
for $180,000. Even the lowest-
budget Hollywood feature
spends ten times that. But no
commercial feature, at any
budget, could move you in the
way that this sweeping family
chronicle does.
Don't miss the Saturday night
showings.
Yossie Klein and his father Zoltan in "Kaddish."
The Kaddish prayer, which
Jews recite in memory of the
departed, is not in itself sad or
mournful. It quite naturally
stirs deep emotions because of
the associations and memories it
evokes. But there is no mention
of death in the prayer. The
words are positive, re-affirming
faith and belief in life and God.
The film Kaddish does the
same. It stirs deep emotions, but
it is ultimately positive, re-
affirming the triumph of belief
over doubt.
highly-acclaimed
This
documentary will be shown at
the Detroit Film Theatre at the
Detroit Institute of Arts, this
Saturday only, at 7 and 9:30
p.m. This is a rare opportunity
to see an unusual film.
Kaddish (not rated) takes us
into the Orthodox Jewish com-
munity of Holocaust survivors
in the Boro Park section of
Brooklyn. We become part of the
Klein family. Zoltan, the father,
is a survivor. He escaped to the
United States where he married,
had children, and made a new
life.
Steve Brand, who made this
film, is himself the son of a sur-
vivor. He spent five years with
the Klein family, filming them
in countless situations, Then he
combined this with a wide array
of other materials; the Kleins'
own home movies and photo-
graphs, archival materials, old
newsreels and more.
It is a labor of love. One can
imagine the years that Brand
spent filming, collecting mate-
rials, editing / all the while hav-
ing to search for backing for his
project. All things considered,
the result is amazingly effective.
This film is about the effect of
the Holocaust on the children of
the survivors. It raises many
painful questions. The essence of
the film is the relationship be-
tween Yossie, the son, and his
father, Zoltan. We are taken
through all the stages of that
intense, loving relationship.
At first, Zoltan dominates his
son completely. For bedtime
stories, he tells the boy of how
he hid from the Nazis in a hole
in the ground for six months.
Quite understandably, Yossie is
terrorized. He has nightmares.
With the other children of sur-
vivors in Boro Park, he plans
escape routes through the sew-
ers of Brooklyn in the event the
Holocaust strikes here.
Yossie and his sister,
encouraged by their father, find
other ways to express their
fears, their need to fight back.
They become involved in the
campaign to free Soviet Jews.
They take their protests from
the streets of New York to the
Soviet emigration offices in
Moscow. There they are arrested
and beaten up by Russian
police, threatened with jail and
finally expelled.
Then Yossie begins to ques-
tion his obsessions. He resents
the anxieties his father has put
upon him. There are arguments
at the Sabbath table.
What is so astonishing about
Kaddish is how clearly all this
is projected. You are actually
taken inside the minds and
hearts of Yossie and his family.
You experience the wrenching
emotions, the conflicts. You feel
Yossie's torments, his love and
resentment of his father boiling
within him.
Ultimately, Kaddish is about
the father-son relationship, and
in this way it achieves a univer-
sality that rises above the
specific subject matter.
In a profoundly moving
climactic sequence, Yossie fi-
nally comes to understand, ac-
cept and forgive his father. It is
these closing moments that
compensate for the occasional
slowness and ramblings in some
earlier parts of the film. Every-
thing comes together with
meaning, focus and great poig-
nancy.
Yossie is sensitive, intellec-
tual and passionate. He is able
to open up completely in front of
the camera. It is like on-camera
therapy. And while this tech-
nique produces some talkiness
and repetition, it succeeds in
projecting a dimension of reality
that can be achieved in no other
way.
The father, Zoltan, comes
through in quite another light.
The anger, the fear, the trauma
have apparently receded into
the background. What we see is
a man of charm, a man of great
63
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The Southfield Public Library
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851-2770
Available For Private Parties
5586 Drake Road
North of Maple, West Bluefield
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NOVI
HILTON
1.275 at Eight Mile
661-1920