ABSTRACT EXHIBITION

November 11 - January 22

Works By Over 60 Artists Including:

JOSEPH ALBERS
STANLEY BOXER
ROBERT BRADY
JOHN CHAMBERLAIN
FRIEDEL DZUBAS
BEVERLY FISHMAN
CAIO FONSECA
SAM FRANCIS
HELEN FRANKENTHALER
SAM GILLIAM
PETER GOOCH
JAMES HAVARD
CHARLES HINMAN
HANS HOFMANN
ROBERT MOTHERWELL
JULES OLITSKI
KIKUO SAITO
JOHN TORREANO

Holocaust Fable

In Radu Mihaileanu's "Train of
Life," opening Nov. 24, an entire
shtetl tries to flee the Nazis by
faking its own deportation.

SERENA DONADONI

Special to the Jewish News

T

rain of Life is an entic-
ing fable of deliverance
set in an Eastern
European shtetl in
1941. The village's holy fool,
Shlomo, has a vision of the Nazis
approaching but also an inspired
idea for saving his community. The
members of the shtetl will work
together and make their own
deportation train, whose destina-
tion is freedom instead of a con-
centration camp.
This is the second film from
Radu Mihaileanu, following 1993's
Trahir ("Betrayal"), a brutal tale of
dissident life in Nicholae
Ceausescu's Romania.
That repression is familiar to the
41-year-old Jewish filmmaker. A
playwright, director and actor with
his own underground theater
troupe in Romania, Mihaileanu
made his living by performing with
the Bucharest Yiddish Theater.
After immigrating in 1980 to
France via Israel (where most of his
family now lives), he began looking
for a place to study theatrical direct-
rig in Paris. When he couldn't find
one, he enrolled in film school.
Throwing himself into this new
medium with an immigrant's deter-
mination to succeed, he ended up
falling in love with making movies.
Train of Life, winner of the
1999 Sundance Film Festival
Audience Award, was filmed in
post-revolution Romania and was
inspired by a tradition of Jewish
storytelling as well as Ernst
Lubitsch's To Be Or Not To Be
(1942).

Radu Mihaileanu spoke with
the Jewish News via telephone from
Los Angeles.

JN: 'What was it like for you to
grow up Jewish in Romania?
RM: It was not simple because my
parents were Jewish and commu-
My
nist during, [World War
father was put in a labor camp and
he escaped. That was the time he
changed his name from Mordechai
Buchman to Ion
Mih.aileanu; the Communist Party
made him a fake ID.
After the war, he was still com-
munist, but anti-Stalinist, and the
Stalinists took power. He was again
in danger as anti-Stalinist, and
Jewish again. So it wasn't so easy to
be Jewish in Romania. Not because
the Romanian people [were] anti-
Semitic because they weren't, but
the government always was anti-
Semitic even if the diplomacy was
ambiguous.
Romania was the only [Eastern
Bloc] country that kept diplomatic
relations with Israel, but that was
because Ceausescu's mad dream
was to [win the Nobel Peace Prize].
He was very close to Yasser Arafat,
having — even in Romania —
training camps for terrorists.

JN: Between your parents' beliefs
and the political environment,
how did you learn about tradi-
tional Jewish life?
RM: When I was 5 years old, my
grandmother moved in our house
and she was very religious. So we
could see the kitchen [that] was
split in two, the kosher part and
our part, and we — my brother
HOLOCAUST FABLE on page 80

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11/19
1999

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