(Arts & Enter ainment
Love Story
Michael Fox
Jaap became a principal of one of the
schools and had ample time to write letters
to his beloved. So as not to embarrass and
provoke Manja, Ina's sister would secretly
deliver the missives and Ina's replies.
Jaap and Manja, and later Ina, were
among the few lucky ones who were deport-
ed to Bergen-Belsen instead of Auschwitz.
But it was a full-time job staying alive, and
Jaap and Ina lost track of each other until
after the war. Jaap and Manja got divorced
lickety-split after the liberation, and he and
Ina married in 1946 and moved to the U.S.
They mark their 60th anniversary as the
film begins, but they're far from finished.
Jaap and Ina discuss the suffering wrought
by discrimination and each generation's
obligation to build a better world.
Their lives, and their ongoing love affair,
make a perfectly eloquent and optimistic
statement. 0
Special to the Jewish News
M
ichele Ohayon's elegant Steal
a Pencil For Me is, in a sense,
two movies woven into one. For
stretches it plays like a shining love story set
against the dark backdrop of the Holocaust,
while at other times it is a sober Holocaust
documentary accented with a saga of sur-
vival.
The great accomplishment of this beauti-
fully crafted film is that it loses nothing in
the transitions.
Most moviegoers will be captivated by
Jack (Jaap) and Ina Soep Polak's inspir-
ing relationship, and Steal a Pencil For Me
springs its great hook on viewers in the first
minute: Jaap was in the same camp with his
wife and his girlfriend. As he recalls wryly,
that was no easy thing.
Jaap married a girl named Manja in the
late 1930s in Amsterdam, but they soon
agreed they were a bad match. When the
Nazis invaded Holland, however, the couple
decided they'd be better off together and
agreed to stay married until the war was
over.
But Manja was quite the flirt, to hear Jaap
tell it; and left to himself at a party, he found
himself smitten with a fresh face. Ina was 10
years younger, and her father owned one of
the largest diamond-polishing operations,
Jack and Ina Soep Polak's wedding kiss, 1946
Steal a Pencil for Me screens 7:30
which is to say she ran in different circles
than Jaap, an accountant from a poor family.
Their relationship did not pick up
steam until they were interned together in
Westerbork, a camp (Jaap notes ironically)
that the Dutch Jews had built a few years
earlier as housing for fleeing German Jews.
Now it was a way station from which
2,000 people a week were shipped to
Auschwitz although they didn't know the
destination.
So life in Westerbork was far from awful.
Jaap had arranged for Ina's family to be
housed in the same barracks as he and
Manja, which meant they saw each other
every day, often taking evening strolls
together. "He won my heart by sheer persis-
tence Ina recalls.
p.m. Thursday, 9:30 p.m. Friday and
Saturday and 4 p.m. Sunday, March
27-30, at the Detroit Film Theatre
in the DR. See next week's JN for
a story on The Counterfeiters, this
year's Oscar winner for Best Foreign
Language Film, which screens 7 p.m.
Friday-Sunday, March 28-30, at the
DFT.
Mack Comedy
George Robinson
Special to the Jewish News
T
he Jewish community of
Memphis, Tenn., has a long and
colorful history. Filmmaker Ira
Sachs, a native Memphian, is fond of
pointing that out. "My mother's family
came to Memphis in 1854:' he notes, "and
my father's came in 1900:'
Roots, however, are no guarantee of
comfort. As the 42-year-old Sachs has
said in many interviews, growing up gay
and Jewish in Memphis in the 1960s, he
experienced more anti-Semitism than he
did homophobia. Either way, he felt like an
outsider much of the time, and that sense
of non-belonging has fueled all three of
his feature films, including his charming
new comedy, Married Life.
"I went to a preppy all-boys junior high
school 1973-74:' Sachs recalls. "I was called
a like: and kids threw pennies at me
At the same time, he adds, he was active
dlo March 20 2008
at a large Reform congregation, president
of the youth group in Memphis, where
the Jews were "a prominent and powerful
community, both affluent and influential."
The result, he says, is that "you vacillate
between being an outsider and part of a
powerful community"
And that dilemma — that doubled
vision — is at the heart of Sachs' films: The
Delta, 40 Shades of Blue and Married Life.
"For me, being gay and being Jewish
overlap and become one he says. "I have
a strong identification with the outsider.
Class is also very significant in my films.
I come from a privileged background but
also from a place of empathy with those
who don't:'
That empathy, he notes, comes from the
Judaism in which he was raised.
In Married Life, the empathy takes a
peculiar but delightful form. The film is
based on John Bingham's long-forgotten
'40s British crime novel, Five Roundabouts
to Heaven, a noirish tale of unfaithful hus-
bands and wives and incip-
ient murder; but Sachs and
his regular writing partner
Oren Moverman (the Israeli
screenwriter who co-wrote
I'm Not There) have turned
it into a deft, dryly funny
black comedy of manners.
Harry Allen (Chris
Cooper) is a seemingly
Chris Cooper as Harry and Rachel McAdams as Kay
happily married execu-
in the new film Married Life
tive with a loving wife,
Pat (Patricia Clarkson),
and a loving mistress, Kay
he knows the most. Self-knowledge and
(Rachel McAdams). Harry is devastated at
knowledge of others can lead to empathy.
the thought of Pat's suffering if he were to
That kind of understanding seems to me
leave; the only fair way out is to poison her. to be the central tenet of Judaism."
Although the story is told by Harry's
best friend, Richard (Pierce Brosnan),
Sachs and Moverman handle shifts of per-
spective cannily and give real insight into
Married Life is scheduled to open
all four of protagonists, most of all Harry.
Friday, March 21, at the Landmark
As Sachs puts it, "Harry begins know-
Main Art Theatre in Royal Oak. (248)
ing the least, but by the end of the film,
263-2111.