Michael Fox

Jewish take on bomb

Philippe Tlokinski stars in Adventures of a Mathematician. (photo from Samuel Goldwyn Films)

Forgotten your calculus? Simple geometry is more than sufficient to follow the triangular saga of Polish-Jewish brainiac Stanislaw Ulam from the cloistered classrooms of Harvard to Robert Oppenheimer’s atomic-bomb “startup” in dusty New Mexico.

The third point on Ulam’s map is Lvov, Poland, where his parents, sister and niece live in tenuous safety. Until the Nazis blast across the border and blow down the doors of every Jewish home.

Adventures of a Mathematician opens in Cambridge on the eve of the Second World War, where Stan (Philippe Tlokinski) lives with his younger brother Adam. The news trickling out of Poland gets objectively worse, but going back to Europe is out of the question. So Stan Ulam embraces another way of combating the Nazis, proffered by his best friend and fellow emigré scientist, Johnny von Neumann (Fabian Kocieki) – join a bunch of other geniuses on the top-secret Manhattan Project.

Writer-director Thor Klein’s intelligent, efficient script relies on our knowledge of the war and the Holocaust (and countless movies on those subjects) to concisely convey the gravity of the situation and, importantly, avoid the familiar clichés. At the same time, Klein skilfully involves us in Ulam’s personal life – he’s a witty man with an appreciation for gambling odds, who knows a smart woman when he meets her at a party – without trivializing the larger historical events.

Klein’s other great achievement, because of its U.S.-centred subject matter, is making Adventures of a Mathematician, which he shot in Germany and Poland with local crew, European actors and German, Polish and British financing, totally look and feel like an American film. It’s a masterful trick, which requires dedication and skill at every level of the production.

Klein makes his job easier, admittedly, by depicting Ulam as an acclimated, assimilated American rather than a European fish out of water.

Where Adventures of a Mathematician (which takes its title from Ulam’s memoir) veers from traditional Hollywood filmmaking is in the dramatic conflict. It’s not the war, which is always off-screen. Tension enters Ulam’s marriage later in the film, and we care about that relationship, but that’s not the movie’s motor, either.

Instead, Klein has made a film about philosophical and existential dilemmas, internalized in the person of Ulam – a cerebral, introverted man who largely keeps his emotions to himself, even when he is debating technical solutions with his equally stubborn boss, Edward Teller (Joel Basman).

Not many Hollywood executives would back a film whose protagonist is pitched on the horns of another triangle, namely the conflicting pulls of intellectual satisfaction, personal morality and professional ambition. Stanislaw Ulam, action hero, isn’t the easiest sell to North American audiences.

But, once you get hooked by this utterly accessible film and its remarkable central character, you’re in for a rewarding and thought-provoking experience.

A likable character for much of the film, Ulam becomes more solitary as his doubts grow about devising and building a weapon of mass destruction – especially after the Nazis are defeated.

Tlokinski’s performance, which does incorporate a ridiculous (by modern measures) amount of cigarette smoking, is never less than compelling.

Adventures of a Mathematician trusts the audience enough to omit most of the melodramatic conversations and passages endemic to a Second World War-era scenario. I’m thinking specifically of Ulam’s survivor’s guilt, which is palpable without him needing a speech or a scene to convey it.

A 2020 film whose release was delayed by the pandemic and limited to a handful of festival appearances (including the Toronto and New York Jewish film festivals), Adventures of a Mathematician solves for x with nary a misstep. It can be rented via Apple TV, and possibly other platforms.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

A Jewish guide to streaming

Mike Wallace is Here is one of the smartest and best documentaries of 2019. (photo from Cinando)

In the streaming universe, as with all entertainment, there’s the stuff that everyone watches and talks about. But that’s just the tip of a vast catalogue, a lot of it quite good, that doesn’t get the hype and the buzz. Here’s an eclectic list of accessible Jewish-themed movies that received some hosannas on their initial release. The more obscure (and great) Jewish films of recent years will be on a future list, since, alas, it appears we’ll have ample time to watch more after catching up with these.

The Zigzag Kid (j-flix): The Toronto Jewish Film Foundation has launched a free streaming platform, j-flix, with dozens of terrific recent fiction and documentary features and shorts. You could get lost there for weeks. I suggest you start with this irresistible, action-packed, family-friendly adventure about a precocious Dutch boy, adapted in 2011 by a Belgian director from Israeli author David Grossman’s novel.

The Women’s Balcony (Chai Flicks): Menemsha Films, the venerable U.S. distributor of Jewish-themed films from around the world, offers a free 30-day trial of their streaming platform. (A subscription will then run you $5.99 US a month.) Israeli director Emil Ben-Shimon and screenwriter Shlomit Nehama set their warm and wonderful romp in a small Orthodox congregation dislocated by structural damage to the shul.

Tel Aviv on Fire (Amazon Prime): Sameh Zoabi’s clever comedy about a Palestinian soap-opera writer trying to navigate the demands of both his bosses and an Israeli checkpoint commander will lift your spirits without insulting your IQ. Make a batch of hummus first.

1945 (Amazon Prime): This extraordinary black-and-white Hungarian film parlays the postwar arrival of two exhausted Jews at a small village into an exposé of guilt, betrayal, corruption and murder. One of the most acclaimed European films of 2017, 1945 is a gripping and haunting reckoning with dark history.

Mike Wallace is Here (Hulu): One of the smartest and best documentaries of 2019 examines, entirely through archival television footage, the ambitious journalist who made 60 Minutes essential viewing. Not a Jewish film, oddly enough, but a riveting one.

Disobedience (Amazon Prime): Sebastian Lelio’s taut, understated 2017 drama, adapted from Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s novel, is a remarkably nonjudgmental story that follows a volatile, adrift woman’s (Rachel Weisz) return to London after the death of her estranged father, an Orthodox rabbi. Community, identity, responsibility, sexuality – everything is on the table.

Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World of Ben Ferencz (Netflix): The last surviving U.S. attorney from the Nuremberg trials has an impeccable memory, a spotless moral compass and enormous gravitas. If your fortitude is at a low ebb, Ben Ferencz will give you the strength to persevere.

A Serious Man (Netflix): The Coen Brothers’ most personal and most Jewish film, filmed in and around their childhood stomping grounds of Minneapolis-St. Paul, is a painfully hilarious moral fable guaranteed to provoke a cross-generational dinner table conversation. One politically incorrect question that this devious 2009 movie poses: Are Jews our own worst enemies?

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

From baseball player to spy

Moe Berg as a catcher during his time in Major League Baseball. (photo from Irwin Berg)

Near the end of John Ford’s essential 1962 western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a newspaper editor coins the credo, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

The fact, as we all know, is that Americans are all-star myth-makers and myth-lovers. Many American Jewish boys caught the bug via the improbable immigrant saga of Moe Berg, a paradoxically brilliant professional athlete who led a secret second life as a spy for the U.S. government. How much of Berg’s story is true, though, and how much was legend passed among kvelling kids in the schoolyard?

Aviva Kempner, who hit a home run with her 1998 documentary about another Jewish ballplayer, The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, was the obvious, natural and best-equipped filmmaker to take on the mid-20th-century mysteries at the heart of Berg’s minor celebrity.

The Spy Behind Home Plate, which screens at the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival March 8 at the Rothstein Theatre, is a testament to Kempner’s determination and persistence. Chock full of dozens of contemporary and archival interviews, and packed with rare photos and even rarer film footage, The Spy Behind Home Plate is a definitive record of Berg’s achievements.

Although it’s an effective way to impart information, the dogged, dog-eared marriage of talking heads, vintage visuals and period music can’t fully evoke the shadowy stealth and deadly risks of Berg’s wartime activities. Hamstrung by her budget, Kempner wasn’t able to stage reenactments or employ other strategies to illustrate the unfilmed and unrecorded liaisons and conversations that Berg had in Europe in 1944 and 1945. The Spy Behind Home Plate, therefore, is like the steady everyday player who notches the occasional three-hit game but never achieves the transcendent grace and power of a superstar.

Morris (Moe) Berg, international man of mystery, was born in New York in 1902. His father had fled a Ukrainian shtetl for the Lower East Side, where he started a laundry before buying a drugstore in Newark.

The family moved to New Jersey when Moe was a boy, and he grew into an excellent student and a terrific baseball player. After a year at New York University, he transferred to Princeton, where he was a star shortstop (back when the Ivy League was the top, if not the only, sports conference) and graduated Phi Beta Kappa.

While his older brother Sam fulfilled Dad’s wishes and went to medical school, Moe signed a contract to play pro ball. He acceded to his father’s demands up to a point by attending Columbia Law School in the off-seasons, earning his degree and passing the New York bar in 1929.

It was a false bargain: Moe despised the idea of being a lawyer, while Bernard Berg never accepted a baseball career as a legitimate pursuit. In fact, the old man refused to go to the park and see his son play.

From an athletics standpoint, his dad wasn’t missing much. A knee injury early in Moe’s career, compounded by primitive diagnosis and treatment, severely slowed him. Over 15 years as a backup catcher, Berg notched exactly 441 hits in 663 games.

What set Moe apart was his charm, charisma and erudition. He studied Sanskrit at the Sorbonne one off-season, and read multiple newspapers every day. When he went to Japan on a barnstorming tour with Babe Ruth and other Major League stars, he learned Japanese.

Berg carried a camera everywhere on that trip, and made a point of checking out the roof of a tall Tokyo hotel in order to shoot a 360-degree panorama of the city. It’s not altogether clear if he was already working officially (albeit surreptitiously) for the U.S. government, but his film was of significant help when the United States went to war with Japan after Pearl Harbor.

In fact, in early 1942, Berg recorded a radio segment in Japanese that was broadcast in Japan and drew on the goodwill he’d accumulated over two prewar visits.

photo - Moe Berg in a military jeep in California with his brother Sam during the war, July 1942 — Moe Berg in a military jeep in California with his brother Sam during the war, July 1942. *(photo from Irwin Berg)*

Berg had been sent on research missions to South America, but that was too far from the real action. It appears he found a home in 1943 in the newly created Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the intelligence branch that evolved into the Central Intelligence Agency after the war.

His primary and crucial assignment was to ascertain how close the Germans were to having a nuclear weapon, and to sway Italian scientists from the Axis to the Allies. To successfully carry off his cover story, Berg was briefed on the science and strategy of the Manhattan Project.

One biographer recounts, “The OSS had given the Manhattan Project its own spy, in effect, its own field agent to pursue questions of interest wherever he could in Europe. And that was Moe Berg.”

Kempner accords a great deal of screen time to this episode in Berg’s clandestine career as a professional spook. It’s a great story, in which the solidly built former catcher is assigned to attend a conference in Switzerland and determine – from the keynote speech by a visiting German scientist, Werner Heisenberg – if the Nazis are within reach of perfecting the bomb.

Berg carries a pistol to the symposium, with orders to use it on Heisenberg if he deems it necessary. It would be churlish of me to recount the outcome of Berg’s suicide mission except to say that the catcher-turned-spy who spoke seven languages lived unhappily ever after the war.

Kempner leaves us wanting to know more about Berg’s later years. By the weirdest of coincidences, Sam Berg headed a group of doctors sent to Nagasaki to study the effects of radiation poisoning. Incredibly, Moe and Sam never knew about each other’s exploits. This lone fact reveals that there’s still more to know about Moe Berg’s story.

The Vancouver Jewish Film Festival runs until March 8. For tickets and the movie schedule, visit vjff.org.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

Chasing elusive photo

Picture of His Life follows Amos Nachoum to the Canadian Arctic, where he hopes to fulfil his dream of photographing polar bears underwater. (photo from Hey Jude Productions)

The ocean, in its vastness, suits Amos Nachoum perfectly. It’s big enough for him to hide. Not from the great white sharks, orcas, manta rays and other large sea creatures he has obsessively sought out and photographed for four decades. But from his traumatic memories of the Yom Kippur War, and from his father’s impossible expectations.

“Amos has made a decision to put the war behind him, to put violence behind him, and to use the camera to tell a different story, a beautiful story, about men and nature,” Israeli documentary filmmaker Yonatan Nir said in a phone interview while his family frolicked nearby in the kibbutz pool. “I think, in a way, he’s reframing his life with his camera.”

Nachoum’s complicated saga is rendered with gravity and grace in Nir and Dani Menkin’s Picture of His Life, which screens in the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival March 3, 8:45 p.m., at Fifth Avenue Cinemas.

Picture of His Life is structured around Nachoum’s summer 2015 expedition to the Canadian Arctic, more than 3,000 miles from his Pacific Grove, Calif., home, to try and fulfil his ultimate dream of photographing polar bears underwater. (Hence, the second meaning of the film’s title.)

The epic documentary’s executive producer is Nancy Spielberg, a nice bit of irony given that her brother made a flick called Jaws many years ago that spawned a widespread, irrational fear of sharks.

Nir and Menkin originally wanted to make a documentary about Nachoum diving in Tonga a decade ago, but that undertaking proved too expensive. Instead, they made Dolphin Boy, a redemptive portrait of a traumatized young Arab healed by swimming with dolphins in the Red Sea, which earned worldwide acclaim.

As it turned out, the extra years were essential, and not just to raise the funds for four Jews (Nachoum, the directors, and veteran underwater cinematographer Adam Ravetch) and six Inuit to trek to and film at remote Baker Lake. The filmmakers’ taciturn and enigmatic subject had to reach a point where he was willing to confide his deeply hidden feelings and memories.

“He really didn’t talk until we got to the Arctic,” Menkin recalled on the phone from his car in Los Angeles, “and that’s when he started to open up.” Nir added, “Amos needed time to open up and to be able, finally, to let us deep into his soul and to tell it for the first time.”

After the Arctic trip, Nachoum gave surprisingly candid interviews to the Israeli press about both his postwar trauma and his father, who had fought in the War of Independence. His way of dealing with his past continued – and continues – to expand.

There’s no question that the process of making Picture of His Life contributed to Nachoum’s evolution. Nir and Menkin visited his father in the hospital near the end of his life, capturing a raw, powerful moment. They subsequently showed the footage to Nachoum with the understanding that they would include it in the film only if he gave his consent.

Nachoum was touched by the scene and agreed to its inclusion. He even enacted an onscreen form of reciprocation to complete the circle.

“We were able to create this closure between the father and the son, but only through the film,” Nir said. “It never really happened face to face.”

The personal story in Picture of His Life is wrenching, but the environmental component is pretty potent, too. “I see myself as a soldier for Mother Nature,” Nachoum declares in the film, but his desperate, late-career pursuit of the polar bear goes even deeper.

“At the end of the day, Amos was looking for his family,” Menkin said. “His family is the universe. It’s Mother Nature. He found his family and lives with it in harmony, and that’s what he wants us to do.”

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

A soap-opera comedy

Yaniv Biton as Assi, left, and Kais Nashif as Salam in Tel Aviv on Fire, which screens Feb. 28 as part of the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival. (photo from Cohen Media Group)

Palestinian writer-director Sameh Zoabi achieves something altogether remarkable with his second feature film, particularly at this moment in time: he finds humour in the tattered relationship between Israelis and Palestinians.

“The whole idea of Tel Aviv on Fire is that we have more in common than we want to admit,” Zoabi said in an interview before his movie screened in the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival last year. It screens on Feb. 28, 1 p.m., at Fifth Avenue Cinemas, as part of the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival, which runs Feb. 7-March 8.

“We have to break these stereotypes and talk about what’s in common between us and not what divides us,” he said. “Let’s remind people how humanity can prevail in times where the politics of post-Oslo is, ‘Let’s dehumanize the other to be able to survive.’ I want to do the opposite.”

A sharp, insightful and winning comedy that juxtaposes the delicious absurdity of melodrama with the real-life absurdity of the occupation, Tel Aviv on Fire centres on an underachiever, Salam, who works as a gofer on his uncle’s hit Palestinian soap opera. Through a barely plausible combination of chance, chutzpah and desperation, the shlemiel is elevated to writer. Then he runs afoul of the Israeli commander of the checkpoint he crosses every day, whose wife is a loyal fan of the show.

Salam has to use every iota of guile and cleverness to navigate the opposing agendas that he’s caught between – and to win back the heart of a woman he had dumped. (Even while he’s landing political japes, Zoabi cheerfully seizes every opportunity to lampoon the conventions of both soap operas and movies.)

One of nine children, Zoabi grew up in a village outside of Nazareth, where people went to his grandfather’s barbershop for his humorous stories as much as for a haircut.

“In general, my village is very funny,” Zoabi related. “That’s maybe why comedy has become very easy for me, because I grew up in a place where they don’t take anything seriously.”

Zoabi studied at Tel Aviv University and then at Columbia University in New York, where he discovered the need for Palestinian stories. Returning to Israel, he made a short film, Be Quiet, in 2005 and his feature debut, Man Without a Cell Phone, in 2010. Zoabi’s experience of receiving government funding was the genesis of Tel Aviv on Fire (2018).

“You take money from the Israelis, so suddenly you are watched immediately,” he explained. “Israelis are making sure you are not becoming too Palestinian for them. And the Palestinians are watching, ‘He took money, maybe he’s a sellout, he’s doing a comedy.’”

After presenting Tel Aviv on Fire at several international festivals, Zoabi debuted the film in Haifa and in Nazareth. It was equally well received by both audiences, which didn’t surprise him. But he did have an epiphany.

“All the screenings led to this moment,” Zoabi declared. “Finally I understood – people are fed up. People are fed up of the reality that exists, which is managing the occupation.

“[The film] reminds people of the possibility that used to exist, the feeling that we can be normal people and just get along. I think that’s a fantasy that existed among the Israelis, that we can eat hummus together in Damascus one day. But they aren’t able to see the occupation as a major reason for that not to happen.”

It’s a measure of Zoabi’s skill that the current-events commentary in Tel Aviv on Fire goes down easily for viewers across the political spectrum. The means to that success, in large measure, is Salam’s evolution of necessity from hapless underdog to diplomatic savant.

“I’m attracted to people who don’t wake up knowing what they really want,” Zoabi said. “I think they’re more inspirational for me than black-and-white [characters]. Actually, people who know exactly what they want terrify me. You can’t be so certain all the time.”

For his part, Zoabi grew up in a milieu of group interaction and lots of soap operas, because those were the only two channels the family had. He wasn’t exposed to art, theatre and film until his late teens.

“I always say I’m not an artist, really,” he confessed. “I’m probably a barber of a new era in my family.”

Tel Aviv on Fire is in Hebrew and Arabic with English subtitles.

For the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival schedule, visit vjff.com.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

Jewish films span the globe

Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit and Roberta Grossman’s documentary Who Will Write Our History were two standouts in Jewish film last year.

Last year was a busy one, but not a great one, for Jewish-related movies. There was plenty to see, but only a couple films – Jojo Rabbit and Uncut Gems – broke through the clutter to make an impact.

While Jewish characters were front and centre in high-profile TV shows – The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Kominsky Method and Broad City – in movies, they were largely relegated to glorified cameos, such as Al Pacino as old-school agent Marvin Schwars in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Alan Alda as menschy divorce attorney Bert Spitz in Marriage Story.

Jewish artists and celebrities were, as always, exceedingly popular among documentary makers. Sammy Davis, Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me, televised on PBS’s American Masters, and Ask Dr. Ruth led the parade, which included less-widely-seen portraits of singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen (Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love) and actor Anton Yelchin (Love, Antosha).

Picking a Top 10 was a bit of a challenge for 2019. Here are the films that left a mark.

Jojo Rabbit: The most ambitious and audacious film of the year was made by a Maori Jew from New Zealand. Taika Waititi, the director of Marvel’s Thor: Ragnarok, radically adapted Christine Leunens’ novel into a sharp satire of Nazi racism and groupthink that garnered the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle Award for best screenplay.

Who Will Write Our History: My only criticism of Jojo Rabbit is that it didn’t convey the depth of the Holocaust’s horror. Roberta Grossman’s artful documentary about the men and women in the Warsaw Ghetto who secretly amassed an archive of documents and diaries that would survive (if they didn’t) fills in a missing historical chapter for people of all ages. (See jewishindependent.ca/a-different-kind-of-resistance.)

Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World of Ben Ferencz: The last surviving U.S. attorney from the Nuremberg trials has an impeccable memory, a spotless moral compass and enormous gravitas. This terrific doc serves as an inspiring counterpoint to Matt Tyrnauer’s slick biography of another Jewish lawyer from New York, Where’s My Roy Cohn?, who lacked an iota of integrity.

Uncut Gems: What makes Howard run? Jewelry hustler and compulsive gambler Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler, impressively manic) races around New York City to keep his increasingly angry debtors at bay. En route, Benny and Josh Safdie’s nerve-jangling drama rips the Band-Aid off black-Jewish relations.

Mike Wallace is Here: Avi Belkin examines another iconic New York Jewish character, the penetrating TV journalist who made 60 Minutes essential viewing, entirely through archival TV footage. It is one of the smartest and best documentaries of 2019.

Synonyms: Nadav Lapid’s abrasive, semi-autobiographical drama about a self-loathing young Israeli army veteran’s effort to shed his identity in Paris won the Golden Bear for best film at the Berlin International Film Festival. It is painful and revealing, with some flashes of humour.

Tel Aviv on Fire: Sameh Zoabi’s clever comedy about a Palestinian soap opera writer trying to navigate the demands of his bosses and an Israeli checkpoint commander was one of nine (!) films with Jewish themes among the official submissions for the best international film Oscar.

Transit: German director Christian Petzold transposed Jewish novelist Anna Seghers’ 1944 story of refugees trying to flee France to an enigmatic time and place that has echoes of both the past and the present.

To Dust: Shawn Snyder’s debut feature explores the grief process through a Chassidic cantor (Geza Rohrig of Son of Saul) who wrangles a community college science professor (Matthew Broderick) into his obsessive investigation into how his wife’s body will return to dust. Meanwhile, his sons worry that he’s possessed by a dybbuk.

Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles: A crowd-pleasing, by-the-numbers doc about the historical (shtetl life) and literary (Sholem Aleichem) roots, creative development and enduring cross-cultural popularity of the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof. Formulaic, but Jewish through and through.

Some of the best films of the year won’t open in North America until 2020. The Ophir Award-winner Incitement powerfully dramatizes the life of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin, leading up to his irreparable act. Roman Polanski’s well-reviewed portrayal of the Dreyfus affair, An Officer and a Spy, has opened across Europe but awaits a North American distributor (a long shot given the likelihood of protests and boycotts).

Czech director Vaclav Marhoul’s harrowing adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski’s Second World War-set novel The Painted Bird is also on European screens, with a U.S. release likely now that it was shortlisted for best international film. In that eventuality, look for it during its brief run – and on next year’s Top 10 list.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

Dr. Ruth a force of nature

Celebrity sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer started life as Karola Ruth Siegel in Weisenfeld, Germany. (photo from Mongrel Media)

Before she rocketed to 1980s TV fame as sex advisor Dr. Ruth, she was simply Ruth Westheimer. And long before she was Ruth Westheimer, she was Karola Ruth Siegel of Weisenfeld, Germany.

It is those formative early years that provide the most resonant and affecting passages in Ryan White’s solid documentary Ask Dr. Ruth, which is scheduled to open in Vancouver May 10. I’ll go even further: They provide the film with its raison d’etre.

Sure, lots of people were helped in ways big and small by Dr. Ruth’s high-profile acceptance of (almost) every form of sexual behaviour and by her uninhibited, direct language about intimate acts and love relationships. But what lifts Ask Dr. Ruth above a “where are they now” profile of an old-media, pop-culture celebrity is Karola Ruth Siegel’s experiences before, during and immediately after the Second World War.

Most audiences, especially non-Jewish viewers, will come to Ask Dr. Ruth for the sex. The mitzvah of the film, as it were, is that they will get the Holocaust.

To be clear, Dr. Ruth doesn’t see herself as a Holocaust survivor. She is “an orphan of the Holocaust,” which is the most poignant and wrenching phrase you’ll encounter all week.

Born in 1928, Karola Ruth was the sole child of observant Jewish parents. She was too young to fully understand when the Nazis sent her father to a labour camp in the 1930s. And, as bright as she was, she couldn’t fully grasp the long-term implications when her parents put her on a train to Switzerland with a group of Jewish children.

Placed in an orphanage, Karola Ruth and the other Jewish kids were handed housekeeping duties and some responsibilities for caring for the Swiss kids. They received food and shelter, but zero love and little compassion. A natural ringleader – on the train, she’d organized a sing-along to distract the homesick youngsters – Karola Ruth figured out ways to educate and entertain herself.

She discovered boys, of course, and the film accompanies her abroad to a warm reunion with her first boyfriend, Walter Nothmann. It’s pretty chaste stuff, presented by Westheimer with nostalgia and charm, which conveys universal attitudes of adolescence.

At the same time, though, Karola Ruth was devouring and savouring every letter and poem she received from her mother and father – until weeks, and then months, passed without any communication. (She preserved and protected these treasures throughout her travels, and keeps them in plastic sleeves in a notebook.)

The animation style used by filmmaker White to illustrate Karola Ruth’s Swiss period is annoyingly juvenile, unless one presumes that children are one of the intended audiences of Ask Dr. Ruth. Admittedly, those experiences are as accessible and relevant to today’s children as Anne Frank’s, if not more so, but parents and guardians would need to know that the focus of a documentary about a sex therapist isn’t, uh, sex.

At some point after the war, Westheimer accepted that her parents had been killed by the Nazis, but she never sought out the details. All these years later, while visiting Israel during the filming of Ask Dr. Ruth, she goes to Yad Vashem and learns that her father died in 1942 in Auschwitz. The notation for her mother is “disappeared/murdered.”

Ask Dr. Ruth skilfully weaves three threads and three distinct time frames: its subject’s biography from the 1930s to the 1960s, her high-profile heyday in the 1980s and 1990s, and her peripatetic schedule of speaking engagements and family contacts, climaxing with her 90th birthday last June.

The trek to Israel, fascinatingly, includes a visit with a friend from Kibbutz Ramat David, where Ruth Siegel – persuaded that Karola was too German, she dropped it – landed in Palestine at age 17. This remarkable chapter of her life includes ceding her virginity, being trained as a Haganah sniper and, on her 20th birthday during the War of Independence, being injured so badly in a bombing that there was a question whether she’d be able to use her feet again.

The next 70 years of Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s life, spanning Paris, New York, three husbands, two children, a doctorate at age 42, a radio show, household name recognition and four grandchildren, are acutely interesting. But the imprint of coming of age during the war, without her parents but with determination, resourcefulness, intelligence and humour, defined Karola Ruth Siegel and infuses Ask Dr. Ruth with timeless importance.

“From my background, all of the things I’ve survived,” Westheimer declares, “I have an obligation to live large and make a dent in this world.”

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

Things aren’t a person

Camera in model, from 306 Hollywood. (photo from El Tigre Productions)

Annette Ontell, the New Jersey grandmother at the centre of the glorified home movie 306 Hollywood, lived an ordinary middle-class Jewish existence for six decades at that Newark address.

She didn’t come close to the achievements of RBG heroine Ruth Bader Ginsburg, nor the fame (and heartache) of Love, Gilda star Gilda Radner. Nor did Ontell have the tabloid TV highs and lows of the separated brothers in Three Identical Strangers, yet another documentary with Jewish protagonists that made waves at the box office last year.

Of course, one needn’t get her name in the paper or his face on a screen to live a productive, satisfying life. More to the point, plenty of wonderful and profound documentaries have been made about the small-scale triumphs and travails of everyday people. 306 Hollywood, which received a brief theatrical release in 2018 and airs on PBS’s POV series in the coming weeks, is not one of them.

Siblings Elan and Jonathan Bogarin affect an imaginative and stylized “dig” into their dear grandmother’s objects and possessions to the accompaniment of a kinda whimsical, kinda wistful indie-film score. Their strategy yields a parade of eye-catching images and bizarre set pieces that, individually and collectively, provide no insight into this, or any, American life.

The upshot is that 306 Hollywood combines the lacquered sheen and pastel palette of long-form television with the naiveté-masquerading-as-perceptiveness of a film-school project.

photo - The directors’ grandmother’s silhouette, from their film 306 Hollywood — The directors’ grandmother’s silhouette, from their film 306 Hollywood. *(photo from El Tigre Productions)*

To be sure, the filmmakers’ goals, in addition to crafting a work of commercial art, are worthwhile: to uncover and grasp the meaning in a person’s life, and to honour and preserve the memory of a beloved relative whom they visited (with their mother) almost every Sunday for 30 years.

The Bogarins opt to catalogue and focus on the massive detritus – from radios and vacuum cleaners to rubber bands and fashion magazine clippings – that Ontell amassed over the 63 years she resided in the house, most of it spent with her husband. (Her brother lived with them, but he died in his late 40s.)

Ontell had a career as a dress designer and dressmaker, but the creative person she once was doesn’t emerge in the prosaic interviews that her grandchildren filmed with her over the last decade of her life. Instead, to conjure a person (and a personality) from her inanimate objects, the filmmakers enlist a “fashion conservator.” To invoke the metaphysical resonances of time and memory, they turn to physicist and author Alan Lightman.

Perhaps in a nod to Ontell’s artistic impulses, the Bogarins stage a fashion show with her original evening dresses in the yard at 306 Hollywood, and a ballet of young women modeling mid-20th-century lingerie. These sequences are visually impressive but self-indulgent. They aren’t as misguided, however, as the excruciatingly long home-movie scene of the filmmakers’ mother cajoling Ontell (her mother) into disrobing and donning one of her vintage dresses from the 1950s.

The pained presence of an older woman prodded into revisiting the past through her garments does have one benefit: it frees 306 Hollywood from the bonds of hagiography. But none of this gets us any closer to appreciating Ontell, or any emblematic Jewish mother, or to gleaning significance from the connection that human beings have to their possessions. The filmmakers’ choices are so showily ineffective, in fact, that we only rarely reflect on the emotions triggered by the absence and memories of our own forebears.

The most gifted documentary filmmaker I know at transforming the personal into the universal and the banal into the profound is Alan Berliner. The Jewish New Yorker’s masterful family portraits Intimate Stranger (1991) and Nobody’s Business (1996) can be streamed for free through Kanopy, accessible with many public library cards.

306 Hollywood airs March 30, 11 p.m., on KCTS 9 and on WTVS April 4 (check local listings for the time).

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

Accountant in Seattle

Auschwitz survivor Eva Kor forgives former SS officer Oskar Gröning. (photo from TLNT Productions)

The Accountant of Auschwitz is more than the latest documentary to successfully convey the horrors of antisemitic genocide to an audience 75 years removed from those events. It exemplifies the emergence of a coterie of young filmmakers eager to tell the stories of the Holocaust to their peers and to future generations.

For Toronto director Matthew Shoychet and producer Ricki Gurwitz, the trial of nonagenarian SS officer Oskar Gröning in his Lower Saxony hometown in 2015 provided the entry point to explore an ambitious array of historical, legal and moral concerns. The approach they chose for their debut feature documentary, however, was as important as the facts and the message.

“The way we put it together with the editors, we knew we didn’t want to play it chronologically,” the 32-year-old Shoychet explained. “The film opens with fast-paced, happy music with animation, then right into the trial, then back. You’re challenging the audience, but in a fresh, exciting way. You don’t see many Holocaust films that are told that way.”

The Accountant of Auschwitz screened at the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival last fall and is part of the Seattle Jewish Film Festival, which opens March 23.

Shoychet’s path to The Accountant of Auschwitz was unusual in that his family was not directly affected by the Holocaust. He was interested in films about the Holocaust, but he wasn’t instilled with the kind of painful personal history that was (and still is) the catalyst for many filmmakers.

In 2013, Shoychet went on the March of the Living to Poland and Israel, where he received his first close-up exposure to the Final Solution and Holocaust education. A friend he made on that trip went to work for the Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in Toronto, and that contact led to Shoychet directing the short film Anne Frank: 70 Years Later (2015), which screened at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the University of Warsaw.

Shoychet joined that year’s March of the Living as a chaperone, where he met Bill Glied, a Serbian native who’d been deported from Hungary to Auschwitz in 1944. When Glied remarked that he was going to Germany to testify at Gröning’s trial, Shoychet and Gurwitz put a pitch together to the Government of Ontario, the Rogers Documentary Fund, CBC’s Documentary Channel and a couple of private investors.

“It came together fast,” said Shoychet, who arrived on the scene in Lüneburg, Germany, in the midst of the trial.

photo - For Toronto director Matthew Shoychet, the trial of SS officer Oskar Gröning in 2015 provided the entry point to explore an ambitious array of historical, legal and moral concerns — For Toronto director Matthew Shoychet, the trial of SS officer Oskar Gröning in 2015 provided the entry point to explore an ambitious array of historical, legal and moral concerns. *(photo from TLNT Productions)*

Gröning’s job, as The Accountant of Auschwitz makes clear, wasn’t loading Zyklon B into the gas chambers or machine-gunning Jews. Thanks to a change in German law, it is no longer necessary to prove that a Nazi pulled the trigger. His presence at the scene and involvement in crimes is sufficient to decide guilt.

“Oskar was on the ramp [when the trains arrived and where selections occurred], taking suitcases and calming chaos,” Shoychet said. “But it was all part of the mass murder operation.”

Among the issues that The Accountant of Auschwitz takes on is the purpose and value of trying a 94-year-old man for war crimes. The film makes a convincing argument on multiple grounds, beginning with the extent of the cover-up that took place in Germany after the war.

“Ninety-nine percent of the judges in West Germany from 1945 to 1967 were members of the Nazi party,” Shoychet noted. “Hardcore believers. Of the 800,000 SS officers, 100,000 were investigated between 1945 and today, just over 6,000 were brought to trial and 124 received life sentences.”

That paltry number minimizes the scale of the crimes and serves to bury the past. The film asserts that Gröning’s confirmation under oath of his work at Auschwitz was a public and irrefutable rebuttal to Holocaust deniers and other antisemites.

“Even if you say he’s too old – and even the survivors say they don’t care if he goes to prison – for history’s purposes, the fact that a Nazi perpetrator is sitting in a German courtroom with German judges, saying, ‘Yes, these things happened, I was there,’ that makes the trial worthwhile,” Shoychet said.

A loquacious interview subject, even on the phone from Israel, where he had presented The Accountant of Auschwitz at the Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival a few months ago and was presently working on a project of the One Family Fund (he’s a board member), Shoychet confided that the process of making his feature doc debut was one of learning as he went. For example, until he went to Germany, he had never heard of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian who had been convicted of crimes at Sobibor yet consistently denied any involvement. Demjanjuk’s tangled tale, which, among other things, raises the subject of putting an elderly man on trial, ended up being a 20-minute segment in the film.

The Accountant of Auschwitz is rife with revelations and messages, but one gets the sense in talking with Shoychet that his main goal was conveying his own experiences of discovery, discussion, inspiration and outrage – with respect to Nazis and survivors, as well as contemporary justice-seekers and neo-Nazis – to viewers his own age.

“There may not be an ISIS fighter who will be deterred by a 94-year-old Nazi being prosecuted,” Shoychet allowed. “It’s making the connection of the past to the present. Trying to take a younger person and put them in the shoes of the survivors.”

Shoychet’s affinity for provoking questions and debate among the audience bodes well for his next efforts behind the camera.

“I never actually thought I would make a documentary,” he said with a trace of bemusement. “My passion is scripted narratives.”

For tickets to The Accountant of Auschwitz and the film festival schedule, visit seattlejewishfilmfestival.org. For another perspective on the impact of Gröning’s trial, see jewishindependent.ca/witnessing-her-history.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

How RGB got her start in law

Marty Ginsburg (Armie Hammer) and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Felicity Jones) arrive at court in On the Basis of Sex. (photo from Focus Features)

A news flash for members of the tribe who’ve been kvelling over a Jewish woman on the U.S. Supreme Court for fully a quarter of a century: Ruth Bader Ginsburg long ago matriculated beyond a symbol of ethnic achievement.

Last year’s hit documentary, RBG, noted that Justice Ginsburg is an enormously popular role model for women in their teens and 20s, and she has achieved pop culture celebrity to boot. The latest film – released recently in Canada and, as of press time, still playing in Metro Vancouver – is On the Basis of Sex, which applies the Hollywood treatment to Ginsburg’s beginnings as a smart but struggling lawyer and situates her smack in the mainstream. To coin a Lincolnesque testimonial, now she belongs to the masses.

Director Mimi Leder and screenwriter Daniel Stiepleman (who happens to be Ruth and Marty Ginsburg’s nephew) frame On the Basis of Sex as an underdog saga. And, like a lot of underdogs in Hollywood movies, our heroine has a superpower that she only discovers – and masters – on her journey.

The movie is effective, and ultimately inspiring, in a way that doesn’t remotely challenge viewers other than to ask them to follow clever legal strategies.

The film opens with Ginsburg’s first days at Harvard Law School, where her husband Marty is in his second year. Immediately and repeatedly, she (and the viewer) is reminded of her second-class status as a woman in a man’s world.

It takes awhile to reconcile the confident Justice Ginsburg of public record with the somewhat skittish character that British actress Felicity Jones creates. On the one hand, as a wife and a mother who – like every other aspiring woman professional of the time – never wears pants, Ginsburg is plainly a grownup. But she’s patronized by everyone from the law school’s WASPy dean (a villainous Sam Waterston) to her husband (a stalwart Armie Hammer), and she risks being seen as a rabble-rouser (it’s the late 1950s) simply by standing up for herself.

Although the film does not conceal or finesse the Ginsburgs’ Jewishness, it presents casual misogyny and the entrenched old boys’ network, not antisemitism, as the obstacles Ruth needs to navigate. Consequently, she has to devise ways – both direct and elliptical – to raise the consciousness of every ally, including her devoted husband, before she can even challenge potential adversaries. While Marty certainly recognizes his wife’s brilliance, he’s a product of his upbringing and the times.

On the Basis of Sex or, as it’s referred to at your favourite corned beef dispensary, “RBG: The Early Years,” devotes considerable screen time to the couple’s relationship and, for many viewers, that will serve as the emotional heart of the film. Others will derive more pleasure from Ginsburg finding her footing and her voice as a scholarly attorney.

As Stiepleman noted in an interview during a recent visit to San Francisco, “Coming out of law school, [Ginsburg] had three strikes against her: she was a woman, she was a mother and she was a Jew. Any one of those things alone, law firms had taken the risk. It was the three together that made her unhire-able in their eyes.”

Unable to find a job practising law, she takes a teaching position. Through a combination of determination, persistence and luck, she comes across a unique case that addresses the inequities of gender discrimination. The complainant, who looked after his mother but was denied the tax deduction for caregivers, is a man.

Earlier in the film, there’s a crucial chain of events when her husband is diagnosed with cancer. Ginsburg not only took care of him (and their small daughter), but got them both through law school. That experience as a caregiver gives her both the empathy and the understanding to identify with and persuade her would-be client, as well as to research and argue the case.

The lengthy courtroom scene that comprises the film’s last 20 minutes or so is genuinely effective and even emotional, despite the formulaic staging and the fact that we know Ginsburg will prevail. At the pivotal moment, we witness a character coming into her own, grasping her abilities and realizing her destiny. And with that, the underdog becomes a superhero.

On the Basis of Sex is rated PG-13 for some language and suggestive content.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.