The immigrant experience is rarely if ever easy. It is hard to imagine sending a 13-year-old girl from Russia to the United States on her own, but, in 1913, the year that Pearl (“Polly”) Adler came through Ellis Island, “the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society estimated that 13,588 ‘unaccompanied Jewish girls’ came through the port of New York, out of the 101,330 Jews who immigrated from eastern Europe,” writes Debby Applegate in Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age.
The revelations abound in Madam and most do not centre around statistics, though there are some intriguing ones, like the fact that, in 1925, New York’s White Light District, with Times Square at its core, had “more than 2,500 speakeasies and 200 nightclubs, up from 300 saloons before Prohibition, all vying to offer the youngest girls, bawdiest songs, and hottest dance bands.”
Polly Adler was a major part of this scene, having entered the world of prostitution when she was 17. She had managed to avoid the lechers who recruited girls coming off the boats, and even got a couple years of education living with extended family in Springfield, Mass. But, once the minimum amount of schooling required was reached – a fourth-grade level of English – she had to work. And working in a factory wasn’t a way to get oneself out of poverty. So, with a little help from unscrupulous men, she started on a different career, one that would have her become the most well-known madam in New York, with clients that may even have included President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
It was a harsh world, though, filled with gangsters, crime, violence, and it wasn’t even that lucrative because of all the payoffs and the immense levels of corruption at every turn: police, lawyers, judges, politicians. But Adler could literally take the punches, and she was “determined to be the best goddam madam in all America.” She achieved her goal and was successful, if measured by fame and money. However, she never achieved the approval and acceptance she sought, having been cared for as a child but never really loved.
Applegate’s biography of Adler is a page-turner, which is an accomplishment given its comprehensiveness and the amount of detail she covers: there are 33 pages of notes and the bibliography runs 13 pages. Readers will really feel as if they’ve met Adler and walked a few feet in her shoes.
Applegate will talk about Madam in the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival event on Feb. 11, which she shares with Roberta Rich, author of The Jazz Club Spy (see jewishindependent.ca/mysteries-to-be-solved).
Co-creators Eugene Levy, left, and son Daniel Levy were among the Schitt’s Creek panelists at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on Jan. 17. (photos by Rod Morata/Michael Priest Photography)
Fans of Canada’s mega-hit TV show Schitt’s Creek were eagerly eyeing the stage at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on Jan. 17. They had just viewed the first two episodes of the sixth and final season on a big screen and the main cast was about to appear. When the curtain lifted, the audience loudly cheered, as Eugene Levy (Johnny), Daniel Levy (David), Catherine O’Hara (Moira) and Annie Murphy (Alexis) sat smiling.
The moderator, Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson, didn’t waste any time asking why they decided to call it quits.
“We had discussed it and thought six seasons would give us enough time to tell our story,” said Daniel Levy, the show’s co-creator, co-executive producer, writer and Eugene Levy’s real-life son. “Working so closely with the show, it almost spoke to me. I felt we built enough to land the plane, so to speak. From day one, I have been aware of overstaying your welcome. I would rather leave people with a real joyful idea of what the show was and what it meant to them.”
The clever, funny, quirky Schitt’s Creek is a fish-out-of-water sitcom in which the ultrawealthy Rose family – Johnny and Moira and their two adult children, David and Alexis – goes into bankruptcy and loses everything. With no money and nowhere to live, they have little choice but to relocate to Schitt’s Creek, a Podunk town that Johnny once bought David as a joke. Their new home is the town’s no-frills one-storey motel, and the foursome, who had previously been preoccupied with their own extravagant lives, learn to become a real family. “When you get down to it, the stories are about who people are, not what they are,” said Eugene Levy.
Once settled into their new life, the Rose family has to contend with the town’s scruffy mayor, Roland Schitt (Chris Elliott), his wife, high school teacher Jocelyn (Jennifer Robertson), the sarcastic motel receptionist, Stevie Budd (Emily Hampshire), and café waitress Twyla (Eugene Levy’s real-life daughter, Sarah Levy).
Schitt’s Creek, filmed in Ontario, premièred in 2015 on CBC in Canada and Pop TV in America. It’s produced by Not a Real Company Productions Inc. In 2017, the show started airing on Netflix as well, and viewership soared. The series has won numerous awards, including Canadian Screen Awards, and an MTV Movie and TV Award for Daniel Levy.
Initially, Daniel Levy came to his dad with the show’s premise and a script. “In the beginning, it was a way to do something with your son,” recalled Eugene Levy. “We started it as a great project and wanted to make it as far as we could. We ended up getting it on the air in Canada on a real network – and I thought that was great. Cut to five years later and, thanks in a major way to Daniel, who has guided this to a brilliant conclusion, Schitt’s Creek has received so much acclamation and passion from fans.”
Pop TV’s Schitt’s Creek: A Screening and Conversation featured, left to right, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Daniel Levy and Annie Murphy, and was moderated by Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson. (photo by Rod Morata/Michael Priest Photography)
Each season, the writers have been able to advance storylines without crossing the line into absurdity, and the actors have been able to develop their characters’ unique personalities and eccentricities.
“I wanted to make sure the actors were challenged and excited about coming back [each season] to do their parts,” said Daniel Levy. “When you have a cast of this quality, an ensemble as extraordinary as we have, it would be a dishonour not to show up each season with great storylines, given the calibre of work that they do. The actors need to feel challenged and excited to come back to do their part – that’s what keeps them motivated. When things flatline, people check out.”
He continued, “When you create characters the audience loves, you can take them on a lot of terrific story rides. With the growth of the characters, we were able to add in a layer of sentimentality. Without sounding shmaltzy, there was such a collective sense of excitement with our cast and crew, that actors showed up to watch scenes that they weren’t even in.”
The show’s writing has revealed the characters’ different layers. Take Alexis, for example. While she is self-involved, mostly oblivious and enjoys referring to past relationships with Hollywood celebrities, she is still charming. “When we met Alexis on paper, she was not that likeable – she was quite shallow and selfish,” said Murphy about the character she plays. “But, when I got the breakdown for the audition, at the end it said, ‘a young Goldie Hawn,’ who is bubbly and effervescent, but grounded. I wanted to play her as a fully fleshed out human being. The writers did a good job letting her grow as a human. I have so much fun playing her.” (Alexis often exaggerates her hand gestures and is fond of saying, “Ew, David!” to her brother.)
Moira, the family matriarch, has become an iconic figure over the years. Before moving to Schitt’s Creek, she was a socialite, actress and inattentive mother – she didn’t even recall her daughter’s middle name! While she remains eccentric, self-absorbed and theatrical, she, too, is likeable. “Originally, I wanted to come up with a character I would have fun playing and people would love watching,” said O’Hara, who wears a variety of wigs in every episode. “I didn’t know anyone would care. But the writers kept giving me great opportunities.”
Moira accentuates inappropriate syllables when she speaks. How does she choose which syllables to accentuate? “In the moment, it just makes sense,” O’Hara said, laughing, and raising her voice at the word “sense.”
The character of David has a few obsessive-compulsive tendencies, is occasionally hypochondriacal, is into pop culture, has a keen eye for fashion and is often sweetly sarcastic. He opened the store Rose Apothecary and started to date Patrick (played by Noah Reid), his business partner. As the series progressed, the two fell in love and, in the last season, they plan their wedding. When asked if the sexuality addressed in the series caused advertisers to push back, Daniel Levy said he wasn’t aware of any advertiser having done so. “The networks have given us a lot of freedom,” he said, “and, for that, I am so grateful.”
From the beginning, Schitt’s Creek was a low-budget show. “We were just a little Canadian television show,” Daniel Levy admitted, adding that they didn’t exactly have the budget of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. “But not having money helped. We had to maximize our budget and were forced to be creative and put the little money we had on the screen. As the expression goes, diamonds are formed under extreme pressure. Great work happens where you are pushed to the limits.”
The final episode will air April 7. “It’s a beautiful conclusion to the series,” said Eugene Levy.
Daniel Levy wrote the last episode of the show in half a day. “Because we had exceptional writers who helped me make this show what it was, the last episode essentially wrote itself,” he said. “We didn’t want to backload a ton of stories, which can happen in some series finales. I didn’t want to be burdened with expectations of making it any bigger than it is, because it’s a small show. I didn’t want it to feel any bigger than any other episode we had done. I wanted our last episode to be just a great episode of TV.”
Alice Burdick Schweigeris a New York City-based freelance writer who has written for many national magazines, including Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, Woman’s Day and The Grand Magazine. She specializes in writing about Broadway, entertainment, travel and health, and covers Broadway for the Jewish News. She is co-author of the 2004 book Secrets of the Sexually Satisfied Woman, with Jennifer Berman and Laura Berman.
Steven Skybell and Jennifer Babiak in the Yiddish version of Fiddler on the Roof, which is slated to run through January 2020 in New York City. (photo by Matthew Murphy)
It’s no wonder the current Fiddler on the Roof on stage in New York City has been extended several times since it debuted Off-Broadway last summer. The immense draw isn’t just the splendid choreography, the well-known beloved music, the compelling, stellar cast, the emotional dialogue – it’s the authenticity that strikes a chord. Based on a collection of vignettes by Yiddish literary icon Sholem Aleichem, this production of Fiddler is entirely in Yiddish, the guttural tongue that the people on whom the characters are based would have used in real life.
This is the first time in the United States that Fiddler is being staged in Yiddish. Directed by the venerable actor Joel Grey, it opened at the Lower Manhattan’s Museum of Jewish Heritage in July 2018 and transferred to the more commercial Stage 42 near Times Square in February 2019. It’s expected to run through January 2020. It has both English and Russian supertitles.
“When Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish first premièred last summer for a limited eight-week run under Joel’s vision, it was a show that moved people to tears and I knew it had to be seen by as many people as possible,” producer Hal Luftig told the Independent.
Set in 1905 in a Jewish shtetl in the town of Anatevka, on the outskirts of czarist Russia, Fiddler is centred around Tevye (played by Steven Skybell). He’s a poor dairyman with a wife and five daughters. Three of his daughters are of marrying age and the expectations are a matchmaker will find them a husband.
But, despite tradition, the strong-willed girls have their own idea of who they want to marry – and it’s all for love. Their marital choices give Tevye plenty of tsouris (aggravation). Eldest daughter Tsatyl (Rachel Zatcoff) marries a poor tailor in need of a sewing machine. Second daughter Hodl (Stephanie Lynne Mason) falls in love with a penniless Bolshevik revolutionary who winds up in Siberia. And though Tevye convinces his wife, Golde (Jennifer Babiak), that it’s OK to break from the matchmaker tradition, it is too much even for him when his third daughter, Khave (Rosie Jo Neddy), falls in love with a gentile – he banishes her from the family, declaring her dead.
Meanwhile, the political climate is very antisemitic. There are pogroms, and the czar is expelling Jews from the villages. At the end of the musical, the Jews of Anatevka are notified that they have three days to leave the village or they will be forced out by the government.
The original Broadway production opened in 1964 and, in 1965, won nine Tony Awards including best musical, best score, book, direction and choreography. Zero Mostel was the original Tevye. The music was by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick and book by Joseph Stein. The original New York stage production was directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins. In 1971, there was a critically acclaimed film adaptation that garnered three Academy Awards, including best music.
The Yiddish translation was originally performed in Israel in 1965. It was crafted by Shraga Friedman, an Israeli actor who was born in Warsaw, escaped the Nazis in 1941 and settled in Tel Aviv.
In the New York production, the set design, credited to Beowulf Boritt, is simple. The word Torah (in Hebrew) is painted across the main banner and is torn apart and sewn back together as a symbol of what the Jewish people have endured.
From the very start, the audience gets drawn in when the cast forms a circle and sings “Traditsye” (“Tradition”). Another familiar tune – “Shadkhnte Shadkhnte” (“Matchmaker Matchmaker”) has the audience moving in their seats. While most of the music and lyrics are basically the same, there are some changes. “If I Were a Rich Man” becomes “Ven Ikh Bin a Rothshild” (“If I Were a Rothschild”).
While most of the cast is Jewish, some are not, and very few of the actors actually knew Yiddish before the show. Jackie Hoffman, who brilliantly plays Yente the Matchmaker, grew up with some Yiddish in her home but was far from fluent in it.
Jackie Hoffman plays Yente the Matchmaker. (photo by Matthew Murphy)
“I didn’t learn the language for my role, I learned my lines,” admitted Hoffman, who grew up on Long Island, N.Y., in an Orthodox home and attended a yeshivah for nine years. “It was difficult, but when I’m hungry to learn a role, that helps a lot. We have great coaches who are relentless. I did hear Yiddish in the house growing up, my mom and grandmother conversed, and I’m now grateful for every word I’ve learned.”
Hoffman and the cast were taught the language phonetically. Many had seen Fiddler performed in English in various theatrical productions, as well as the film. “It feels bashert this is the first production of Fiddler that I have ever been in and it is clearly the most meaningful,” said Hoffman, who has been in dozens of television shows and films, including Birdman, Garden State and Legally Blonde 2. “It merges the Jewish part of my life with the career part,” she told the Independent.
It is hard to leave the theatre without thinking of the similarities between Tevye’s Anatevka and many parts of the world today, including the United States. Jewish traditions are often challenged and antisemitism is once again on the rise.
“I don’t think that antisemitism ever went away, but it is a very scary time now,” said Hoffman. “It is mind-blowing how current the piece feels in that way.”
At the end of each performance, it’s clear by the enthusiastic applause and the long standing ovations, that the audience feels they have experienced something great. “They seem blown away by it,” said Hoffman. “They are impressed that we’ve pulled off a three-hour musical in Yiddish and they’re staggered by how pure and emotional an experience it is.”
At Stage 42 on 422 West 42nd St. in Manhattan, Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish runs just under three hours with one intermission. For tickets, call 212-239-6200 or visit fiddlernyc.com.
Alice Burdick Schweiger is a New York City-based freelance writer who has written for many national magazines, including Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, Woman’s Day and The Grand Magazine. She specializes in writing about Broadway, entertainment, travel and health, and covers Broadway for the Jewish News. She is co-author of the 2004 book Secrets of the Sexually Satisfied Woman, with Jennifer Berman and Laura Berman.
Zayd Dohrn’s Reborning returns to the New York stage this summer. (photo from Zayd Dohrn)
The play Reborning, written by Zayd Dohrn, is being performed Off-Broadway at the Soho Playhouse in New York City from July 5 through Aug. 3, thanks to Vancouver’s Reality Curve Theatre.
A Canadian nonprofit professional theatre company founded in 2011, Reality Curve reached out to Dohrn to bring this play, which ran in Vancouver last year, to the New York stage. The production is produced by artistic director Paul Piaskowski, Darren Lee Cole and Rebecca McNeil, and is presented by Playbook Hub with support from the Vancouver Film School, the Canada Council for the Arts and Shimon Photo.
Reborning is a dark comedy-drama with elements of horror. In it, people are able to buy life-like infant dolls that look like loved ones who have died. The play centres around Kelly, a woman who lives with her boyfriend in Queens, N.Y., and creates “reborn” baby dolls. She has a client who commissions her to make a replica of her dead baby girl and, as Kelly constructs this doll, it stirs up memories from her own life.
“It’s a relationship between a younger and older woman – a customer and an artist – who are both looking for something and it becomes dangerous,” said Dohrn, who lives in Chicago and is an associate professor at Northwestern University. “There is a whole subculture with these dolls. I wrote the play right after the birth of our first child. My wife was shopping online for baby toys and clothes and she found these life-like dolls. The photos of them are incredible, realistic, detailed and medically accurate. Some even have hospital bracelets. There is something beautiful about them, yet very disturbing.”
Dohrn talked to customers and heard their testimonials. “Many of these people can’t get over the loss of their baby and use the dolls therapeutically.”
The play stars Emily Bett Rickards (CW’s Arrow), Piaskowski (Unspeakable, The Twilight Zone) and Lori Triolo (Riverdale), who is also the director.
The first production of Reborning, which starred Ally Sheedy, was 10 years ago at the Summer Play Festival at the Public Theatre in New York City, when Dohrn was at the Julliard School. It has had more than 20 productions nationally and internationally over the last decade, including in Los Angeles, Brazil, Panama, Florida, San Francisco and, in 2018, Vancouver, where he connected to Reality Curve.
Dohrn’s life and road to literary success could be a fascinating play in itself. His parents, Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn, were leaders in the radical group the Weather Underground (also known as the Weathermen) back in the 1960s and 1970s. There was an accidental explosion in a Greenwich Village townhouse where Weathermen lost their lives, and the couple went underground, using assumed names. Dohrn, who is now 41, spent his early childhood on the run.
“It didn’t seem strange to me to grow up being fugitives, that was just our life,” he said. “We lived in New York City in Harlem, traveled a lot, moved around a lot and lived in communes. Then my parents turned themselves in and we settled in New York. My mom went to jail for almost two years when I was 5, and I have vivid memories of visiting her there. My dad took care of me while she was gone.”
When his mom was released from prison, she became a lawyer. “My dad became a professor and I was raised in a middle-class house, although they still had their notoriety and they were committed to their politics and their cause,” said Dohrn. “Growing up, we would go to a lot of demonstrations and meetings with other activists.”
Dohrn went on to earn an undergraduate degree from Brown University, a master’s in fine arts from New York University, a master of arts from Boston University and a playwriting fellowship from Julliard. He also spent a lot of time in China. Fourteen years ago, he married Rachel DeWoskin, and they have two daughters. DeWoskin, who is from Ann Arbor, Mich., is an author, teaches at the University of Chicago and also spent many years living in China before she and Dohrn met.
Many of Dohrn’s plays draw from his childhood and life experiences. In one of his earlier plays, Haymarket, set in 1886, a bomb explodes in the middle of a peaceful rally of demonstrators in Chicago – at least one of the radicals goes into hiding. His play Sick, about a Manhattan couple who go to extreme measures to protect themselves from pollution, was reminiscent of living in Beijing and witnessing the fear during the SARS epidemic.
When asked about his religion, Dohrn said he considers himself a cultural Jew. “My mom was half-Jewish and my parents were atheists, but, culturally, my mom considers herself Jewish and we were raised as cultural Jews and celebrated Passover and Chanukah,” he explained. “We celebrated in a radical way – we did Passovers in a women’s prison in upstate New York, celebrating the Exodus as a story of freedom and celebrating with female inmates in prison.”
Dohrn noted that he, his wife and kids have traveled a lot, visiting Jewish sites. “My wife considers herself Jewish and we are raising our girls with a lot of Jewish cultural influences,” he said.
Dohrn and DeWoskin spend time each year in China. “Rachel kept her apartment in Beijing for at least 10 years and we would go for a few months every year,” he said. “When our kids started to grow up, we wanted a place where they could be more independent so we got an apartment in Shanghai. We spend three-quarters of the year in Chicago and one-quarter of the year in Shanghai. We both have academic schedules so we are able to spend the summers and winters there. There are still historical monuments and artifacts from the Jewish community in Shanghai and the synagogue is now a museum. Our apartment there is in the building that was the Jewish processing centre for the refugees during World War II.”
Currently, Dohrn is developing a series about radical political movements like the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers for Showtime and a feature film for Netflix. He’s looking forward to Reborning being back on the New York stage. “For me,” he said, “it’s a bookend, to have it back in New York again after all these years.”
Alice Burdick Schweigeris a New York City-based freelance writer who has written for many national magazines, including Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, Woman’s Day and The Grand Magazine. She specializes in writing about Broadway, entertainment, travel and health, and covers Broadway for the Jewish News. She is co-author of the 2004 book Secrets of the Sexually Satisfied Woman, with Jennifer Berman and Laura Berman.
Raised by American parents in Montreal, Adam Gopnik moved, with his Canadian wife Martha, to New York City in the 1980s. There, he began a career as an art critic, editor and writer for such publications as GQ and The New Yorker, and with Knopf publishers. At the Stranger’s Gate: Arrivals in New York (Knopf, 2017) is his chatty memoir of those years.
There are many figures from the art and publishing worlds in this book, appearing in harmlessly gossipy anecdote after name-dropping anecdote. Gopnik is an amusing artist of the character sketch, as shown in his depiction of his wife.
“Someone once called her in print the most innately polite person she had ever met, and the truth is that in each of us natural sociability had been overlaid with Canadian politeness, and hers with a further code of Icelandic courtesy, producing a veneer of politeness so extreme that many took it for disingenuousness – which of course, in another way, it was.”
He can also neatly capture entire generations through their relationships to something inanimate.
“My grandparents had belonged to a check-cashing generation, proud to be engaged in it,” he writes. “To have an institution as large as an American bank in effect endorse their signature on a little bit of paper as equivalent to money meant to be taken seriously as a citizen. My parents, in turn, were credit card cultists – they loved having them, signing them, showing them, using them. For those who came of age in the boom times after the Second World War, the whole notion of credit, of sharing in a limitless improving future – of being trusted to buy now and pay later, since later would be so much richer than now – had some of the same significance that the notion of being trusted with checks had for my grandparents.
“We, in turn, generationally, had regressed, I realized,” he continues, “back into a cash economy – we used checks just to pay the utilities. The [bank] machines were one more instrument of that infantilization; we went to the machines for something that felt, at least, like our allowance.”
As much as the individual characters who inhabit the pages, the protagonists are often the miniscule homes the Gopniks inhabited – and the insects and rodents with whom they cohabited. He credits their first tiny apartment, at least in part, for their marital contentment.
“One reason we didn’t fight was that the studio was so small, so small that you could never get sufficient perspective for the fighting to happen. In order to really have a quarrel, you have to sort of step back three steps and eye the other person darkly. There was just no room for that. We were on top of each other, not in that that sense – well, in that sense, too, at times – but we were also colliding with each other all the time. I don’t have any mental image of Martha from those years, except as a kind of Cubist painting, noses and eyes and ears.”
A later loft apartment seemed too sweet to be true in a New York of radically rising rents, a suspicion that appeared fulfilled when thick, dark liquid began dripping from the ceiling.
“For the next two weeks, the ceiling kept hemorrhaging,” Gopnik writes. “Sometimes, we would wake up and find it dripping slowly, slowly. At other times, it would really be coming down, as though a whole new vein had been opened, or else as though – and this thought struck us both about the same time – a new corpse had just been stowed away under the floorboards upstairs.”
“That’s not blood,” a neighbour told them, “it’s just molasses.”
The building had been a candy factory at the turn-of-the-century and for inexplicable reasons it would sometimes ooze ingredients. Gopnik decided to find this charming: “It was thrilling, like the moment when they opened up the Dead Sea Scrolls and found them pristine. Sugar syrup from a century ago, bubbling out of the walls, and still so sweet.… I felt happy; I was living on the big Rock Candy Mountain.”
The couple were less charmed by another discovery. A pest control officer announces: “You got them, all right. You got the big boys. You got the super-rats.”
“What do you mean, the super-rats?” Gopnik asks.
“‘Well, let’s put it like this,’ He thought for a moment. ‘These rats, if you see one, they look at you like you the problem.”
Leaving the apartment, Gopnik homes in on two of the phenomena of the 1980s that impacted his life in the Big Apple.
“The two great technological gifts of the ’80s were the Walkman and the hyper-developed sneaker, which, together, turned walking into an all-encompassing emotional activity,” he writes. “For a long time in the 1980s, I seemed to do nothing but walk around Manhattan. The modern sneaker, rising from Nike and Adidas, constructed with more architecture inside than most apartments, now allowed even the flat-footed to stride, Hermes-like, on what felt like cushioned air.… And then the Walkman made every block your own movie.”
Eventually, like rats in a too-small apartment, the couple became overwhelmed by the city and they left to raise a family where there are lawns and gardens.
This is a highly sentimental book, which is not a bad thing, especially for a New York-o-phile. Some shortcomings are too-frequent hackneyed phrases (“dense as a hockey puck,” “impossibly beautiful women”), the oddly repetitive use of some esoteric words and a style that sometimes evokes Lake Wobegon, Minn., more than New York, N.Y. In other words, it’s a cute book, which may sound like faint praise, but, given current events, that can be a refreshing break.
Menashe Lustig (Menashe), director Joshua Z. Weinstein and Ruben Niborski (Rieven). (photo by Federica Valabrega courtesy of Mongrel Media)
On a sidewalk crowded with people moving at the pace of a typical New York City day, nobody stands out. Eventually, a man appears in the back of the frame who gradually attracts our attention. There’s nothing extraordinary about him except he’s a bulky man, and he’s labouring more than anyone else in the summer heat. He’s wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, black vest and tzitzit, and our initial impression is of an overgrown child. It’s the perfect introduction to Menashe, and Menashe.
We have the sense that writer-director Joshua Z. Weinstein’s camera could have followed any face in the crowd. That’s an unusual feeling to have in a fiction film, but there are more than eight million stories in the naked city, after all. The effect, though, is to imbue Menashe, from the outset, with the requisite naturalism for a riveting, Yiddish-language character study of a working-class Chassid on the margins of both his religious community and society at large.
The motor of the film is Menashe’s ham-fisted determination to raise his adolescent son, Rieven, by himself in the months following his wife’s premature death. His tenacity is understandable, for the boy and Jewish songs and scripture are Menashe’s only interests.
The religious leader, the ruv, while not unsympathetic, maintains that Rieven be raised in a “proper home” with a father and a mother. Given the unhappiness of his first, arranged marriage, Menashe (beautifully played by Menashe Lustig) is in no hurry to remarry. So, the boy lives with Menashe’s annoyingly self-assured brother-in-law, Eizik (the excellent Yoel Weisshaus), and his family in a nice home instead of at Menashe’s no-frills walk-up apartment. Rieven doesn’t mind, but it’s a continuing affront to Menashe’s self-respect and sense of responsibility.
Menashe is an exception among the many films about Orthodox Jews in that it does not involve a tug-of-war between tradition and the modern world, or the conflict between secularism and faith. The central dynamic in Menashe is class, which gives the viewer an unusual angle from which to view the ultra-Orthodox community. This film scarcely visits a yeshivah and the Chassidim with the long coats like Eizik, which are so familiar to us, are supporting characters – although it is plain that they are at the centre of community life.
Menashe, for his part, can’t get no respect. He works in a grocery market, a job with no status (regardless of how exceedingly moral he is) and low pay. There’s a picaresque scene where he’s enticed into having a 40-ouncer of cheap beer in the back of the store with a couple of Hispanic co-workers. Though the language barrier prevents Menashe from bonding with them past a certain point, he seems more comfortable in his own skin in their company than with the Jews in his circle and their judgments and expectations.
Our sympathies are with Menashe, of course, as they’d be with any single parent struggling to make ends meet and get a little ahead. But he’s far from perfect, and that smart move by Weinstein is what elevates the picture to the level of pathos.
Menashe is short-tempered, stubborn, perpetually late, fond of the occasional drink(s) and always playing catch-up. He’s the last to recognize that his character flaws, along with his circumstances, make him the biggest obstacle to establishing a stable life with Rieven.
Menashe is rife with the small truths of life – every father disappoints his son at some point, and vice versa – and the amusing, unexpected moments that occur every day. It’s a warm, generous film that doesn’t shy from sentimentality but doesn’t insult its audience, either. Ultimately, it introduces us to a memorable character whose resilience is, in its way, inspiring. Menashe is a small film, but it’s a special one.
Menashe opened Aug. 11 at Fifth Avenue in Vancouver. It is rated PG for thematic elements, and is in Yiddish with subtitles.
Michael Foxis a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.
Avant-garde fashion designer Noa Raviv says her award-winning fashions were triggered by her interest in the power of mistakes.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1987, Raviv is currently developing her couture brand in New York City, after achieving global industry recognition for her Hard Copy garments combining hand-sewn, 3D-printed polymer synthetic tulle with laser-cut appliqués.
“Hard Copy was a really long process that came out of my thinking about the concept of originals and copies in our era,” she told Israel21c. “When I started working with 3D software and printing, I was intrigued by the mistakes I made. If you input a command that can’t be executed, you get unexpected results. It was kind of magical to me. I was fascinated by mistakes created by a perfect machine and started exploring how it could be my answer to designing something original – because a mistake is something you can’t replicate.”
Hard Copy features ribbed polymer shapes printed out on a Stratasys Objet Connex multi-material machine and stitched to voluminous pleated tulle, silk and organza.
Named Fashion Designer of the Year 2014 at the 3D Printshow in London, Raviv has exhibited in Carrousel du Louvre, Paris; Old Billingsgate, London; New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, among other venues.
In November 2015, Raviv gave a keynote talk on The Power of Mistakes, at Futurescan 3, a conference organized by FTC (Association of Degree Courses in Fashion and Textile) at Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. She spoke on the same topic at the Museum of Design in Atlanta, Ga.
Raviv was one of four innovative Israeli women honoured at the 10th annual Israel Day at the New York Stock Exchange, Nov. 10, 2016.
Raviv, who appeared on Forbes Israel’s 2016 “30 Under 30” list, said she is “fascinated by the tension between harmony and chaos, tradition and innovation,” and wants to continue experimenting with technology.
Her current collection, Off-Line, was released in spring/summer 2016.
Noa Raviv’s Off-Line collection was released in spring/summer 2016. (photo by Ryan Duffin)
Though it’s not 3D-printed, Off-Line combines elements of complex handwork and machine work, beginning with graphic design software and topped off with Swarovski crystals.
Raviv’s collaboration with Swarovski involves sending design files to Austria, where the company custom-makes molds from which millions of tiny crystals are applied onto a flexible transparent material and sent back to New York for finishing.
“Once every crystal is in the right place, they’re applied by heat to organza,” said Raviv, acknowledging that the more complicated pieces take a few weeks to complete.
“Hard Copy explored computers and digital errors. Off-Line explores the more intimate side of the creation process,” she said.
Most of the pieces in Off-Line are ready to wear and others can be made to order. Prices start at $1,800 US.
“My collections are not meant for the masses,” she admitted. “I’m still establishing my clientele – women who appreciate art, fashion and quality and care a lot about uniqueness.”
Neither is 3D fashion for the masses. In fact, Raviv doesn’t believe it will be available on the retail level anytime soon.
“Maybe in the very far future,” she said. “Fashion is far too complex to make in one machine, technique or material. There are so many nuances and the technology isn’t there yet to create what people want to wear. For now, it’s a romantic idea.”
A 3D dress made by another Israeli designer, Danit Peleg, was worn in a dance performance by U.S. snowboarder Amy Purdy at the opening ceremony of the recent Paralympics in Rio.
An intuitive choice
Always captivated by art and fashion, Raviv wavered between art school and fashion school after two years of army service and another 12-plus months pursuing other interests, including learning to speak Spanish – a very practical skill, as she is married to an Argentine-born startup entrepreneur.
“At the last minute, I intuitively went for fashion,” she said.
Raviv graduated in 2014 from Israel’s Shenkar College of Engineering and Design. Hard Copy was her senior project. Her designs also were included in 2013’s Here Comes the Bride exhibition, which opened at Beit Hatfutsot-Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv and traveled to other countries.
Raviv moved to the New York City borough of Queens a little more than a year ago and is getting used to the more formal work culture in the United States.
“Israel is very small and the fashion scene is small, and it’s hard to manufacture in Israel,” she explained. “It’s important for me to be very close to the development and production of my designs.”
Israel21cis a nonprofit educational foundation with a mission to focus media and public attention on the 21st-century Israel that exists beyond the conflict. For more, or to donate, visit israel21c.org.
Ken Levitt, president of Jewish Seniors Alliance, and Leah Deslauriers, coordinator of JCC Seniors and L’Chaim Adult Day Centre. (photo by Binny Goldman)
On Jan. 25, a treat awaited all who attended the screening at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver of filmmaker Julie Cohen’s The Sturgeon Queens, the story of New York City’s legendary fish store (and restaurant) Russ and Daughters.
The documentary was presented by the Jewish Seniors Alliance of Greater Vancouver in partnership with L’Chaim Adult Day Centre, and was the second session of the 2016/2017 JSA Snider Foundation Empowerment Series. With the theme of Nourishing Tradition: Food, the Doorway to our Culture, this year’s series is being co-hosted with the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia.
JSA president Ken Levitt welcomed the crowd with a groissen dank, todah rabah, big thank you to all involved, which set the tone and taam (taste) for what was to follow. Michael Schwartz, coordinator of programs and development of the JMABC, shared the news that the museum will soon be starting a Supper Club, which will take place at the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture, where the museum resides. He noted the important role that food plays in keeping traditions alive, in passing them on to future generations.
Michael Schwartz, coordinator of programs and development at the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia. (photo by Binny Goldman)
Case in point is Russ and Daughters. Four generations have not only kept the appetizer shop alive – selling smoked fish, lox, herring and sturgeon – but grown it into a restaurant, as well. Stan Goldman introduced the film on behalf of JCC Seniors. He said it was at Russ and Daughters that he tasted smoked fish for the very first time.
According to the film, Cohen first discovered the renowned fish store in 2007. Upon realizing that “the daughters,” sisters Hattie (Russ Gold) and Anne (Russ Federman), were still alive, Cohen flew to Florida to interview them. The Sturgeon Queens is a feel-good documentary about the start of the shop, which Joel Russ founded in 1914. Russ had come to New York at age 21 and, starting in 1907, used a pushcart to sell his herring. He went on to sell the fish using a horse and wagon, before finally opening his store. He enlisted his daughters – who were in their early teens at the time – to help him. The sisters became full-time workers and eventually partners with their father in the business.
Russ’s addition of “and Daughters” to the name of the shop was unusual for those years. Ruth Bader Ginsburg (associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) states in the film that this move made her very happy, seeing this was an enterprise where daughters counted.
The Lower East Side, where Russ and Daughters has always been located, was the area in which immigrants arriving in New York first settled. And fish is what they ate – it was healthy and, more importantly, relatively inexpensive, as they struggled to make their way. Now, it is eaten not only because of its taste, but because it connects many to their ancestors; it is a comfort, or “emotion,” food, whose appeal goes beyond taste. Russ and Daughters customers sense this as they enter the shop, which seems to offer this same feeling.
The documentary was made to celebrate 100 years of Russ and Daughters, which survived many turbulent times, including the 1970s and 1980s, when things were most dire for them economically. The family still strives to maintain the traditions, quality and history of the shop, working to enrich the lives of their customers, who not only come to buy the food, but to linger and chat.
Nicki Russ Federman, who runs the establishment now, along with Josh Russ Tupper, said there was never anything glamourous about the store, that it was just hard work, but that Hattie and Anne had set the stage for their grandchildren to take over. Russ Federman was a health professional and Russ Tupper a lawyer, but they decided, after almost a decade away from the store, to return and make sure that Russ and Daughters continued.
Herman Vargas, who has been with the shop for almost 30 years now, is fluent in Yiddish and feels part of the family. The New Yorkers who frequent the shop also feel part of something, that they are connected to a living piece of the city’s history – some of the film is even narrated by several seniors who were gathered together by Cohen. Molly Picon, Zero Mostel and Morley Safer are just a few of the famous people who have come to the shop according to the documentary.
“It was powerful to watch the expression on my grandmother’s face as she watched the movie – she was watching her life affirmed,” says Nicki Russ Federman in the film. On Jan. 25, as the audience at the JCC watched, we, too, felt just how entwined are food, family, love and tradition.
When the JSA’s Shanie Levin thanked all those who made the screening possible, she asked if the film had been enjoyed and was greeted by a huge round of applause. Over coffee, tea and a nosh, comments overheard were “It warmed my heart!” and “It made me happy to be Jewish.”
The next session of the Empowerment Series takes place March 8, 11:30 a.m., at the Unitarian Centre and will highlight Israeli cuisine. For more information about it or the JSA, call Rita Propp at 604-732-1555, email [email protected] or visit jsalliance.org.
Binny Goldmanis a member of the Jewish Seniors Alliance of Greater Vancouver board.
Harpo Marx and the Bodnes in the Rose Room. The hotel’s list of illustrious guests is almost literally endless. (photo from Algonquin Kid)
Michael Elihu Colby had the unique privilege to be brought up in New York’s legendary Algonquin Hotel. Well, not exactly brought up in it, but his grandparents owned it from 1946 to 1987 and he was there a lot.
Colby’s book, The Algonquin Kid (BearManor Media) is chock-a-block with stories from his experience as a youngster hanging around and also tales handed down through the years.
Grandma Mary and Grandpa Ben Bodne. (photo from Algonquin Kid)
Grandma Mary and Grandpa Ben Bodne loom large in the book, as they did in the hotel and, by extension, cultural life in New York City in the 20th century. The grandparents were from the southern United States and Ben became wealthy through oil during the Second World War and afterward sought to parlay his money into something else. Despite having no hotel experience, the couple threw themselves into the adventure.
The hotel was a dilapidated shadow of its former glory. On top of the million dollars the hotel cost, the family had to sink another $300,000 into making it decent. This renovation was not welcomed by all the guests. The hotel had residents who had lived there for 20 years and who were highly averse to change.
The book is fabulously gossipy and it would have been shorter, maybe, if Colby had listed the celebrities he didn’t run into. Tennessee Williams, Norman Mailer, William Saroyan and John Cheever were among the literary lights.
Although this was well past the hey-day of the famed Algonquin Round Table, some of those names were still hanging on, too.
Show biz figures included Ingrid Bergman, Kitty Carlyle, Tallulah Bankhead and Angela Lansbury, the latter two of whom lived at the hotel. Rosemary Clooney, Irving Berlin, Noel Coward, Ella Fitzgerald … the list is almost literally endless.
The Algonquin was welcoming to actors and artists blacklisted during the McCarthy era and also to African-Americans at a time when this was unusual. Among the bold-faced names in this category: Maya Angelou, Coretta King, Thurgood Marshall and Oscar Peterson.
The hotel staff included its own characters, like a telephone operator who had the skills of the CIA at tracking down anyone anywhere, and a quick-thinking maître D’: “When a guest found a fly in her salad, he popped it in his mouth, swallowed down the evidence, and exclaimed ‘Delicious! A raisin.’”
This is a book of family stories and such stories, especially when the family is filled with characters, can improve with the telling. The author may or may not believe some of his own tales.
“Grandpa Ben claimed he first met a celebrity selling her a paper: he believed that woman, who tipped him generously, was Helen Keller,” writes Colby. Think for a moment about how likely that story is to be true.
How about this story of Grandma Mary welcoming Marilyn Monroe: “After greeting each other, Grandma remarked, ‘Marilyn, that’s the most beautiful mink you have on!’ Marilyn replied, ‘You think that’s something, you should see what’s underneath.’ She pulled open the mink, and wasn’t wearing anything. Not every kid can claim his grandmother was flashed by Marilyn Monroe.” Well, every kid can claim it.
Legendary Broadway librettist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe were working in a ninth-floor hotel room, below the family’s 10th-floor apartment.
“One evening, Grandpa could no longer stand the ivories tinkling in Room 908 – one light below – disturbing his sleep. He phoned the hotel operator to ask Lerner and Loewe to quiet down, complaining, ‘I wouldn’t mind if they were writing something good, but this is just noise.’ It turned out Lerner and Loewe were creating the song ‘I Could Have Danced All Night.’”
Unlike others who visited or lived at the Algonquin, Colby is not among America’s greatest writers, but his stories are well worth the read.
The revelations abound in Madam and most do not centre around statistics, though there are some intriguing ones, like the fact that, in 1925, New York’s White Light District, with Times Square at its core, had “more than 2,500 speakeasies and 200 nightclubs, up from 300 saloons before Prohibition, all vying to offer the youngest girls, bawdiest songs, and hottest dance bands.”
