Arts & Entertainment
SZABO'S
TOM TUGEND
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
_
L
ike the characters in his multigenera-
rional saga Sunshine, director Istvan
Szabo is descended from a highly
assimilated Hungarian Jewish family.
"For five generations, my ancestors have been
doctors and lawyers in Budapest," says Szabo,
speaking by phone from the Hungarian capital.
Yet, despite the superficial parallels between
the Sonnenschein — German for "Sunshine" —
and the Szabo families, the three-hour movie
about four generations in the life of a
Hungarian Jewish family is not autobiographi-
cal, insists the director and screenwriter.
Each character in the film, opening today
exclusively at the Maple Art Theatre, represents a
composite of five or six people whose lives or sto-
ries Szabo has encountered during his 62 years.
It might have been fascinating to delve deep-
er into the life of Szabo, recipient of 60 interna-
tional awards for such penetrating movies as
Colonel Redl, Hanussen and Mephisto, for which
he also won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
But Szabo would have none of it. After reluc-
tantly acknowledging that he was hidden by
nuns during the Holocaust, he declares firmly,
"I am not happy talking about myself."
The Collaborator
Renowned American playwright
Israel Horovitz co-authors
"Sunshine" screenplay.
NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
Special to the Jewish News
srael Horovitz isn't the kind of writer who likes
to collaborate. The famed author of more than
50 plays, he has been known to get testy if a
director changes a single word of his work.
So it's surprising that Horovitz, 61, chose to co-
author Istvan Szabo's film Sunshine, about multiple
generations of a Hungarian Jewish family that
encounters antisemitism and the Holocaust. Why
did he agree to play second banana?
The reason has to do with the terror Horovitz
felt while growing up in Wakefield, Mass., when he
lay in bed at night convinced that the Nazis were
coming through his window to kill him. As an
adult, he repeatedly rejected invitations to attend
productions of his plays in Germany.
Naomi Pfefferman is entertainment editor at the
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.
IN
6/23
2000
In "Sunshine,"
Hungarian film director
Istvan Szabo depicts
the Jewish struggle
for acceptance.
Israel Horovitz:
"My first impulse
was to run."
Discussing the film, though, is another matter.
Although Ralph Fiennes, in the triple role of
grandfather, father and grandson, is the obvious
star of the film, the key character, according to
Szabo, is the family matriarch, Valerie.
Played by Jennifer Ehle as a young woman and
by Rosemary Harris as an older one, Valerie lives
through the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Nazi
occupation and Communist rule — and remains
true to herself.
"She is the most courageous person of all, the
only one who remains faithful and never denies
her origins," Szabo notes.
To understand the attitudes and changing
fortunes of the Sonnenschein family, it is
important to know about the role of Jews in
Hungarian history.
"In 1848-49, when
Hungarians revolted against
Istvan Szabo,
the Austrian Hapsburg monar-
left, directs
chy, 20,000 young Jews joined Jennifer Ehle and
the revolution, and many of
Ralph Fiennes
them were imprisoned after the
on the set
Hapsburg victory," Szabo says.
of "Sunshine."
"So the Hungarian Jews were
very nationalistic and felt that
the 'invisible wall,' that for instance separated
German Jews from their gentile neighbors, did not
exist in Hungary."
When his agent pointed out his bias, he wrote a
play, Lebensraum, about contemporary Jews and
Germans. While researching the play, he devoured
books on German-Jewish history and vowed to
learn more about other countries during the Shoah.
He got his chance when Szabo asked him to
help shape Sunshine.
"My first impulse was to run," confides
Horovitz, who was intimidated by the ungainly
600-page screenplay. Then he had an idea about
how to shape the story.
He thought about a theme that runs through a
number of his own plays: the taking back of one's
Jewish identity. In A Rosen by Any Other Name, for
example, a character is so scared by the persecution
of Jews in Nazi Europe that he changes the family
name to "Royal." It is only at the play's end that the
character's son changes his name back to "Rosen."
During 10 trips to Budapest over two years,
Horovitz brought a similar arc to Sunshine. While
the fictional father and grandfather assimilate,
grandson Ivan survives the Holocaust and the
Communists and reclaims his Judaism. A petty
official is puzzled as to why he would change his
name back to "Sonnenschein."
"For the first time in my life," the character
explains, "I walked down the street without feeling
like I was in hiding." ❑
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