Arts Entertainment You Don't Have To Go Downtown to Get the Zip! `Strange Fruit' "The best Pizza in Metro Detroit" "Tops on my list... their Filet Mignon" Documentary shows how a little-known Jewish songwriter and an African American icon created a song that changed America. John Tanasychuk, Detroit Free Press, January 8th, 1999 • Pasta Specialties • Pizza • Steaks • Chops • Poultry • Seafood • Cocktails NAOMI PFEFFERMAN Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles OPEN DAILY - LUNCH & DINNER OPEN WEEKDAYS UNTIL 2:00 AM WEEKENDS UNTIL 3:30 AM COMO'S Italian-American Family Restaurant do ou to rtue AN EXQUISITE EUROPEAN DESIGN STUDIO/SHOPPE. Contact UA for our interior cle4ir con,sutation. No matter whorl- the size of your home or your budget you deserve a customized home. Torlue's design services range from a whole-house approach to that of rearranging your existing treasures. Tortue is like a Paris marketplace where you can always find that perfect something for your home. MELISSA GUTZWILER DESIGN ASSOCIATE HOURS MON THRU SFS 10AM TO 5 PM THURS LATE NiGHT TILL 8PM CLOSED SUN ALSO BY APPOLNTMENT (248) 681-6353 • 3187 Orchard Lake Road • Keego Harbor • u - ww.tortuedecor. oat Mon-Thurs, 11:00 am - 9:30 pm Fri, 11:00 am -10:00 pm Sat 12:00 pm - 10:00 pm Sun 12:00 pm - 9:30 pm PARTY TRAYS AVAILABLE 4/ 4 2003 84 L Reg $6.95 Any combination place lunch includes 'egg roll & fried rice Expires 4/30/03 (248) 988-9333 Fax: (248) 988-9381 3951 Telegraph (NE corner of Long Lake Rd.) • Bloomfield Twp. www.szechuangourmet.corn On The Tube n Joel Katz's intriguing new docu- mentary about the anti-lynching ballad "Strange Fruit," an African- American poet says she always assumed the songwriter was black. Katz shared the same misconception before making his film, also titled Strange Fruit, in the late 1990s. After all, the haunting 1938 tune was first performed by jazz diva Billie Holiday and soon became the anthem of the anti-lynching movement. A pioneering infusion of social protest into pop music, the song con- jured such gruesome images that record companies and radio stations promptly shunned it. The poetic but grotesque lyrics include a reference to the smell of magnolias mingling with the scent of burning flesh. While the song's author,_Lewis Allan, was listed in anthologies of black composers, he remained an enigmatic figure for Katz and oth- ers until a fascinating letter to the editor appeared in the New York Times Book Review Katz's film, which at times unfolds like a thriller, merges interviews with the Meeropols and black scholars with pho- tographs of lynching victims and footage of 1930s union strikes. One centerpiece is a gaunt Holiday performing "Strange Fruit" on the BBC in 1959, not long before her death at age 44. The song has since been recorded by artists as diverse as Tori Amos and Sting and is now featured in the David Margolick book Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song (Ecco Press; 2001), as well as in a nationally touring exhibit of lynching photography. Meanwhile, Katz's documentary — funded in part by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture — is appearing at Jewish film festivals (it comes to the JCC Lenore-Marwil Robert Meeropol, Joel Katz, producer/ in 1995. The letter, director of "Strange Fruit" adoptive son of Abel written by Robert and Meeropol, 2001 Michael Meeropol, aimed to clear up ques- Jewish Film Festival on May 6) and tions of authorship raised by a review debuts on PBS stations nationwide 10 of a Holiday biography. It also p.m. Tuesday, April 8 (Detroit Public revealed a bombshell about Lewis Television-Channel 56, however, will Allan: He was actually a Bronx Jewish air it midnight Sunday, April 13). schoolteacher and union activist "This is Strange Fruit's moment," named Abel Meeropol. said the writer-director, 44. Meeropol and his wife had adopted Katz was drawn to the subject Robert and Michael after their birth because of his childhood experience parents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, with the black community. His liberal were executed on spying charges in Jewish father, who had marched for 1953, the letter revealed. open housing on Long Island, accept- "It was a classic case of truth is ed a teaching job at all-black Howard stranger than fiction," Katz said by telephone from his office at New Jersey University in Washington, D.C., in the 1960s. But his idealism soured for _City University, where he is a media a time when he felt what he perceived arts professor. "This letter was only to be reverse discrimination during the three or four paragraphs long, but it Black Power movement, his son said. read like a riveting little film script."