Arts & Entertainment
Building Utopia
Documentary traces the history of the United
Workers Cooperative Colony — built in the Bronx
in the 1920s by Jewish garment workers — across
two generations into the 1950s.
Joel Bleifuss
Featurewell.com
A
s the country finds itself in the
most severe economic downturn
since the 1930s, people have been
looking back to the first Great Depression
to learn from FDR's administration and
how it handled the crisis. But it is not only
New Deal politicians who have something
to teach us. In the 1930s, working people
and their movements responded to the
economic turmoil in creative and radical
ways, and none more so than the hundreds
of New Yorkers who lived in the Coops
(rhymes with "loops").
At Home in Utopia, a documentary by
Michal Goldman, tells the story of the
United Workers Cooperative Colony in the
Bronx. When built in 1927, the Coops, with
740 apartments, was the largest coopera-
tive housing project in the United States
— and the only one with hammers and
sickles carved into its limestone lintels.
The documentary debuts nationwide on
most PBS stations on April 28 as part of
PBS's Independent Lens series and will be
broadcast 11:30 p.m. Sunday, May 3, on
Detroit Public Television-Channel 56. The
JCC's Lenore Marwil Jewish Film Festival
will screen the film 2 p.m. Monday, May 4,
in Commerce.
On vacant land, located across from
Bronx Park, recently immigrated Eastern
European Jews, most of them members of
the Communist Party and many of them
garment workers, created a community
where they could put their socialist ideals
into practice.
The Coops wasn't the only Jewish utopian
experiment in the Bronx. The Amalgamated
Clothing and Textile Workers established
the Amalgamated Houses, members of
the Socialist and Communist Parties built
the Sholem Aleichem Cooperative and the
Labor Zionists built the Farband Houses.
In Yiddish-language newspapers, apart-
ments in the Coops were marketed to
potential cooperators with slogans like: "We
want to build a fortress for the working
class against its enemies." Shares in the for-
tress were sold for $250 per room.
In the film, Julius Lugovoy, speaking of
his parents and their comrades, says, "What
they felt here was that they were the owners
of both their apartment and their fate!'
Early cooperators pose on the steps of the Coops, still under construction.
The Coops founders, believing a brand
new world was in birth, saw their commu-
nity as one more step toward the inevitable
revolution. Pete Rosenblum was 2 years old
when his family, who owned a nearby bak-
ery, moved into the Coops. "We were expect-
ed to conquer the world',' he says. "This was
going to be the main headquarters!'
People from all over the world came
to see this workers' paradise. The Coops
library held 20,000 volumes — in English,
Russian and Yiddish. The courtyards were
landscaped into well-tended gardens. Youth
clubs flourished in basements that were the
hive of communal activity.
From the Coops, the residents set out to
live their ideals. No one could be evicted
if they couldn't pay the rent. Consequently,
the Depression put a strain on the Coops'
finances and, in 1933, it headed to bank-
ruptcy, unable to pay its mortgage.
However, responding to popular unrest,
24 states passed laws against mortgage
foreclosures, including New York. It was in
this political climate that the leaders of the
Coops were able to negotiate a stay against
foreclosure and remain the masters of their
castle.
Residents of the neighborhood sur-
rounding the Coops, however, were not so
lucky. So, when families in the neighbor-
hood were faced with eviction, people from
the Coops stepped in.
"The women, my mother included, would
go up into the apartment:' says Yok Ziebel,
whose parents were both union organizers.
At Home In Utopia airs 11:30 p.m.
Sunday, May 3, on Detroit Public
Television-Channel 56. It also will be
shown 2 p.m. Monday, May 4, at the
Commerce 14, as part of the JCC's
Lenore Marwil Jewish Film Festival.
$10. (248) 432-5459 or www.jccdet.
org .
Jews
Nate Bloom
Special to the Jewish News
Film Notes
Opening in theaters on Friday, May 1:
X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a pre-
quel to the previous X-Men films;
most of the action takes place in the
1950s. Hugh Jackman reprises his
role as the mutant Wolverine, a "fierce
fighting machine possessing amaz-
ing healing powers"; Liev Schreiber,
41, co-stars as the
mutant Sabretooth,
Wolverine's evil
archrival and half-
brother. The screen-
play is by David
Benioff, 39, the
husband of actress
David Benioff
Amanda Peet, 37.
Evan Rachel Wood, 21, and Justin
Long voice two alien teens in Battle for
Terra, a sci-fi animated film in which
the teens live on a peaceful planet that
is plunged into chaos when it is inun-
B14
April 30 * 2009
dated with thousands of humans fleeing
civil war on Earth. Comedian David
Cross, 45, has a supporting voice role.
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is a modern
romantic comedy retelling of Charles
Dicken's The Christmas Carol, in which
Connor Mead (Matthew McConaughey),
a playboy who thinks nothing of break-
ing hearts, is visited
by the ghosts of jilted
girlfriends who take
him on a tour of his
failed relationships
past, present and
future. His mentor and
role model is his Uncle
Michael
Wayne, played by
Douglas
Michael Douglas, 64.
TV Notes
New episodes of Law and Order: Criminal
Intent, starring Jeff Goldblum, are finally
airing after a long delay, 9 p.m. Sundays
on the USA cable network. Goldblum
plays the role of Detective Zach Nichols,
who will get a chance to play jazz piano
now and again and thus
highlight Goldblum's
real-life skill as a
pianist. Nichols is the
replacement for actor
Chris Noth's charac-
ter. Episodes starring
Goldblum, 57, will
Jeff Goldblum
alternate with episodes
starring Vincent D'Onoforio.
Fox News journalist Geraldo Rivera,
65, will guest star on the hit NBC sitcom
My Name is Earl 8 p.m. Thursday, April 30.
Dreamers
By now, most of you have seen Susan
Boyle, the Scottish working-class
woman who exemplifies the old adage,
"You can't judge a book by its cover"
Boyle, 48, floored the judges and audi-
ence of Britain's Got Talent with her
stunning rendition of the song "I
Dreamed a Dream" from Les Miserables.
Boyle had never before had a chance
to show her talent to an audience of any
size, and her dream of being a profes-
sional singer had been deferred for most
of her life. Thus, some of the song's lyrics
seem almost autobiographical.
The creators of Les Miserables, too, bare-
ly escaped the destruction of their dreams.
The composer,
Claude-Michel
Schonberg, 65, was
born in France, the son
of Hungarian Jewish
parents who had fled
their native country
and Nazi rule. They
managed
to survive the
Schonberg &
Holocaust
by hiding
Boublil
out in rural Brittany.
The lyricist, Main Boublil, 67, is a
Sephardic Tunisian Jew who, like most
North African Jews, left his homeland as
things got tougher for Jews with the end
of French colonial rule in the 1950s. He
settled in France when he was 18.
The English lyrics of Les Miserables
are by Herbert Kretzmer, 84, a South
African Jewish journalist who settled in
Britain in 1954.