Arts & Entertainment
Illuminating
the
Big Scre en
Actor Liev Schreiber's
directorial debut hits home.
Naomi Pfefferman
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles
n 1993, actor Liev Schreiber stood at his grandfather's
bedside in the blue-collar, Lower East Side apartment
where he had spent many happy hours during an other-
wise turbulent childhood.
In his prime, Schreiber's grandfather, Alex Milgram, had
been a tough but cultured proletarian who drove a meat
delivery truck, briefly served as a bodyguard for the
Comrflunist Party, played the cello and painted in oils.
But the 87-year-old Ukrainian Jew had become frail and
shrunken, and Schreiber, then 26, could only watch helpless-
ly as his grandfather succumbed to complications from lung
cancer.
"I didn't know how to begin to mourn him:' said the actor,
who is now 37. "He had been the pivotal figure in my life."
Schreiber considers his film directorial debut, Everything
Is Illuminated, a tribute to Grandfather Milgram. The film is
based on the acclaimed literary novel by Jonathan Safran
Foer. It's also about a search for a Ukrainian grandfather and
for meaning.
The lushly photographed film, like the book, is a kind of
tragicomic, surreal nightmare that works its way to a devas-
tating but ultimately transcendent denouement.
The movie focuses on a fictional young American who is
searching for his grandfather's shtetl (village), as well as for
the woman who had saved him from the Nazis. The charac-
ter collects family artifacts in Ziploc bags during madcap
travels with a malaprop-prone tour guide, Alex; Alex's anti-
Semitic grandfather; and a schizoid dog by the name of
Sammy Davis Junior, Junior.
"It's really about a man who wants to learn about his fam-
ily, which happened to be swept up in disastrous historical
events:' Schreiber said. "He doesn't deal with those events
from a social or political perspective, but from an individual
one. He represents a new generation's processing of history
in a distinctly personal way."
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rector Liev Schreiber
the set of
Illuminating the Big Screen on page 106
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Everything
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September 29 - 2005
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