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`Pay It Forward'

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Director Mimi Leder helms a film

imbued with the spirit of "tikkun olam.

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NAOMI PFEFFERMAN

Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

Ramblin9 Jack'

A

s a child, Mimi Leder used
to ask about the faded, blue
numbers on her mother's
A film portrait of a Jewish
arm. "It's just a tattoo," her
Etyl, a classical pianist, would
folk legend comes to the DFI: mother,
say. "I was 10 before she told me the
truth, and to be honest, that was not
he Ballad of Ramblin' Jack is
old enough," the director recalls.
Aiyana Elliot's documentary
When Etyl was 16, Mimi learned,
about her father, the American folk
she was forced onto the cattle-car to
music legend, actually a Jewish doc-
Auschwitz. In the camp, guards nearly
tor's son from Brooklyn.
beat her to death for trying to smug-
It's the ultimate assimilation story.
gle potatoes to starving bunkmates. .,
While other Jews of Jack's generation
By the war's end, Etyl was one of a
moved to the suburbs, he ran away to
few skeletal inmates to survive a
join the rodeo at 15, changed his last
wintry, eight-day death march. And
name from Adnopoz to Elliot and
when she arrived back home to
_,. -.-
became apprentice to folk hero
Brussels, Belgium, clutching her
Woody Guthrie. Adopting an Oakie
only possession, an army-issue blan-
accent, he roamed the South, picking
she discovered her immediate
up blues and ballads.
family
was gone.
"He was escaping the middle-class
The story made an indelible impact
Jewish upbringing he found sedentary
on Leder. — I felt a tremendous
and closed off," Aiyana explains. "He
of guilt and pain," says the
weight
became the most American thing he
director, who also discovered that her
could think of the last of the wander-
father, the independent filmmaker
ing cowboy troubadours."
Paul Leder, was a U.S. Army medic
For Aiyana, 31,
who
helped liberate Buchenwald. "I
A contemporary
who now lives in
felt
so
powerless to change anything."
photograph of folk
her dad's home-
It's
small
wonder that when Leder
musk icon
town of Brooklyn,
grew
up
and
became a director, she
Ramblin'Jack
the verite film was
created characters preoccupied with
Elliott and his
a means to get
the Jewish ideal of tikkun olam, or
daughter Aiyana,
closer to the elusive
repairing the world.
as seen in her new
father who was
In her TV episodes of China Beach
documen tary.
rarely around while
and ER, the protagonists save lives
she was growing
under extreme conditions. In The
up. In the film, father and daughter
the heroes frantically
Peacemaker,
travel the United States visiting old
track
down
a
terrorist before he can
friends, including Kris Ktistofferson and
detonate
a
nuclear
device. In Deep
Arlo Guthrie, as Jack imparts his own
individuals sacrifice themselves
Impact,
special blend of wisdom. The master
to avert an asteroid bound for earth.
storyteller's advice to young people?
And now comes Pay It Forward,
"Learn to whittle?"
based
on the best-selling novel by
Winner of a Special Jury Award for
Catherine Ryan Hyde, in which a boy
Artistic Achievement at Sundance
named Trevor ( The Sixth Sense's Haley
2000, the film captures Jack's influ-
Joel Osment) takes on a school project
ence on a host of performers, among
to make the planet a better place. His
them Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger,
bold
plan is simple: Do a good deed
who found the kind of fame and for-
for someone, but don't ask him or her
tune that Elliott never did.
to pay it back. Rather, tell the person
-- Naomi Pfeffirman
to "pay it forward" by doing something

The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack screens
at the Detroit Film Theatre 7 and
9:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and
4 and 7 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 20-22.
$6. (313) 833-3237.

Naomi Pfefferman is entertainment

editor at the Jewish Journal of Greater
Los Angeles.

significant for three other people.
The film, which opens today, stars
Helen Hunt as Trevor's recovering-
alcoholic single mother and Kevin
Spacey as his physically and emotion-
ally scarred teacher.
One could say Leder understands
the psychically wounded characters
because she has intimate knowledge of
how the past can haunt the present.
After suffering nervous breakdowns,
she says, her mother rebuilt her life
with an American-born husband in
New York and Hollywood.

Director Mimi Leder: "Call me foolish,
call me an idiot, but I thought it might
make a slight little impact on how
people deal with one another"

"Despite the horror she endured, my
mother still looks at life in a positive
way," the director says. "But she still
has fears that stem from the
Holocaust. She still buys too much
food for the refrigerator. She still
leaves the lights on at night."
Leder's dream project, a screenplay
titled Sentimental Journey, recounts
how her parents found love after the
Shoah. The film, she hopes, will be a
family affair: Her late father wrote the
script; her brother Reuben, a screen-
writer, revised it; and her sister,
Geraldine, a casting director, will cast
the movie.
Leder, who virtually grew up on her
father's film sets, says she felt corn-