In a world that is increasingly globalised, decentralised, and diasporic, traditional national boundaries are blurred. Post-Soviet immigrants, known in Israeli parlance as ‘Russians’ are a case in point. These immigrants, who often maintain multiple passports, homes, and languages, make us re-think the meaning of homeland and exile: they are part of a traditional Jewish diaspora and of a new Russian diaspora.This mass migration affected both Israeli and Russian cultures. One site where these changes can be clearly identified is cinema: Russian immigrants and their homeland are becoming common in Israeli films and Israel is beginning to appear in Russian cinema. What do these films, made in both Israel and Russia, tell us about the changes in the cultural landscapes in both countries?

Russian-Israeli filmmakers … walk a thin line between asserting the place of the immigrants in Israel and insisting on their cultural distinctiveness.

Recently, Israeli film and TV audiences have come to expect to hear not only Hebrew, but also English, French, Arabic, Amharic and, increasingly, Russian. This multiculturalism is a new phenomenon: early Israeli cinema, especially films of the so-called heroic-nationalist genre, subscribed to the ‘Hebrew only’ policy. The classic They Were Ten (1960, dir. Baruch Dienar) tells a heroic Zionist tale of the early pioneers.The film’s characters are technically Jewish immigrants from Russia, but on screen they are portrayed as ‘new Jews’: they speak only Hebrew and even sing a Russian song in Hebrew (without any trace of an accent, naturally).

Real Russian immigrants appear on Israeli screens only after the first wave of Soviet Jews, refuseniks and dissidents, landed in Israel in the 1970s. Now we see these ‘Russians’ as typical newcomers struggling with a new culture and language, and trying to fit into Israeli society. Unlike heroic pioneers, they are not model Israelis. The first such film was Lena (1980, dir. Eytan Green): the film’s eponymous heroine (Fira Cantor) is young, beautiful and torn: between loyalty to her Russian husband, a Zionist still in a Soviet jail, and love for an Israeli man: metaphorically between maintaining her Russian identity and assimilating in Israel. Lena chooses to leave her Russian husband. In this way, as is common in Israeli films, a female immigrant is inducted and assimilated into Israeli society via romantic-sexual relations with a local male. But Russian male immigrants in the film appear aggressive and irrational, without any chance to develop relationships with Israeli women. In this and other ways, Lena typifies the representation of Russian immigrants on Israeli screens. The casting and use of language in Lena are also typical: Russian immigrant actors play immigrant characters. Their accent and occasional Russian dialogue are authentic, but also foreign-sounding within the ‘Hebrew only’ text of the films.

This over-the-top black comedy signals that the true ‘promised land’ is back in the old country and not in Israel

In the 1990s, Russian characters began to appear more frequently on Israeli screens. They are featured in many films, including Saint Clara (1996, dir. Ari Folman and Ori Sivan), Circus Palestina (1998, dir. Eyal Halfon), The Holy Land (2001, dir. Eytan Gorlin), Made in Israel (2001, dir.Ari Folman), What a Wonderful Place (2005, dir. Eyal Halfon), The Schwartz Dynasty (2005, dir. Amir Hasfari and Shmuel Hasfari), Love & Dance (2006, dir. Eytan Anner), as well as in TV serials A Touch Away (2006, dir. Ron Ninio) and To Love Anna (2008, dir. Tzion Rubin). Many of these films portray immigrants sympathetically, but emphasise their cultural and religious differences.

As in Lena, these films portray female immigrants as beautiful, helpless, sexualised women with distinctly Russian looks (blond hair, blue eyes, round face) who are frequently shown in frontal close-ups, disconnected from their Israeli environments. Their unassimilable foreignness can be overcome only through romantic involvement with an Israeli man. In contrast, Russian male characters are confined largely to their self-contained, homosocial world that precludes assimilation into Israel. Consequently, most of the plots feature romances between female immigrants and local males.

Russian immigrants are represented in all these films from the Israeli perspective—as outsiders

Will these Russian-Israeli couples manage to live happily ever after? Love & Dance hints at some answers. At the centre of this lyrical drama is Khen (Vladimir Volov), a young boy struggling with the cultural conflict between his Russian-born mother and Israeli father. Khen’s identity is caught between his frustrated parents a conflict that is emphasised linguistically as his mother speaks to him in Russian and his father in Hebrew. As Khen is negotiating his Russianness and his Israeliness, his parents fail to reconcile their cultural differences and must part. And yet Love & Dance ends on a positive note: Khen overcomes his own obsession with the dysfunctional Russian beauty, and falls in love with the down-to-earth Israeli girl. In the narrative logic of the film, even the inassimilable hybrid Khen makes the right choice between his Russianness and his Israeliness.

In contrast to bi-cultural Khen, immigrant men almost never become protagonists in Israeli films.The rare relationships between immigrant men and Israeli women usually fail, like the ‘forbidden’ romance between the secular immigrant and the ultra-orthodox young woman in a popular TV series, A Touch Away. Most importantly, whether male or female, stereotypical or nuanced, Russian immigrants are represented in all these films from the Israeli perspective—as outsiders.

This stereotypical portrayal of Russian immigration began to change as immigrant filmmakers themselves started breaking into the Israeli film industry. They introduced the immigrant’s point of view and added their own accented voices to Israeli cinema, creating what has been termed ‘accented cinema’. The ‘accent’ in question is defined not only by the actual languages and accents on the screen, but also by the cultural identities of the filmmakers. Indeed, Russian-Israeli filmmakers affirm and challenge, often simultaneously, the dominant national identity: they walk a thin line between asserting the place of the immigrants in Israel and insisting on their cultural distinctiveness. Unlike the Israeli films, which are preoccupied with assimilation via inter-ethnic relationships, Russian-Israeli films rarely feature Russian-Israeli romance.

The very first Russian-Israeli film, Coffee with Lemon (1994) by Leonid Horowitz, who came to Israel as an established director, is illustrative of these trends. At the centre of the plot is a famous Moscow actor (played by the Russian star, Aleksandr Abdulov) who immigrates to Israel, only to discover that he cannot bridge the cultural gap and is doomed to failure. He returns to Moscow, but is killed there in a street shooting. At the end, the immigrant protagonist fits neither here nor there, a far cry from the typical immigration narrative of an Israeli film.

Israel today is a part of Russia, and Russia is a part of Israel

The more recent The Children of USSR (2005) by a young Israel-educated director, Felix Gerchikov, also features a male protagonist, Slava, a former soccer star in his native town and now an immigrant, suffocating in a remote Israeli town and struggling to support his young family. Slava and his friends populate the margins of Israeli society, which also include violent Mizrahi youth, an Ethiopian immigrant and an oddball Hassidic soccer fan. The ‘model Israeli’ is nowhere to be seen, liberating the film from the reductive logic of assimilation. In fact, even the film’s title indicates the inassimilability of its characters: pronounced yaldey sssr, the title combines a Hebrew word for ‘children’ and a Russian word for ‘USSR’. Idiosyncratic bilingual spelling not only introduces a Russian word into a Hebrew title, but also uses a Cyrillic acronym as a nostalgic icon.The central romantic relationship of the film is Slava’s failing marriage to Sveta, a fellow Russian, who wants him to leave behind his dreams of soccer. But Slava is stubborn, and he succeeds in forming a soccer team. At the end of the film, Slava is reconciled both with his Russian wife and his Israeli surroundings.

Another intra-ethnic romance is at the centre of Paper Snow (2003) by the veteran Russian-Israeli directors Lena and Slava Chaplin. It is a historical drama set in the 1920s to 1930s about the love affair between Hanna Rovina, star of the Habima, an Israeli theatre that originated in Moscow, and Alexander Penn, an Israeli communist poet who was originally from Siberia. Other literary giants, Avraham Shlonsky, Avraham Halfi, and Hayyim Nahman Bialik, all of them hailing from Russia, surround Rovina and Penn. Moreover, all these Israeli historical figures are portrayed speaking to each other in Russian, which is all but unimaginable in the ‘Hebrew only’ national past. Unlike mainstream Israeli movies, Paper Snow pays tribute to their culture of origin, to their Russian literary and theatrical background. In this way, the film focuses on the Russian roots of Israeli culture, emphasising the importance of Russian Jews (past and present) to Israel.

In a more subtle form, the past also appears in the short film, Dark Night (2005), by a successful young Russian- Israeli director, Leonid Prudovsky. The film opens with a scene of an Israeli patrol in the occupied territories. A soldier (Pini Tavger),who comes from a Russian family, is singing a famous Soviet song of the World War II era—‘Dark Night’. Driving the army jeep through the night, he explains to his fellow soldiers the significance of the song, which inspired Soviet troops, including his Jewish grandfather, as they fought against the Nazis. Similar use of the past appears in the brilliant Yana’s Friends (1999) by Arik Kaplun. All these representations emphasise the identification of Russian immigrants with the Israeli-Jewish nation, while concurrently affirming their Russian cultural identity.

And of course, a big role in ‘accented’ movies is played by the language. If mainstream Israeli films, made to appeal to the Hebrew-speaking audience, feature few token words in Russian, Russian-Israeli films move freely between Russian and Hebrew. The recent TV series, Between the Lines (2009, dir. Evgeniy Ruman), goes a step further. This series about a Russian-language newspaper in Israel features a staff of writers and reporters, all of whom are immigrants speaking to each other in Russian (Hebrew subtitles are optional).

Not only Russian immigrants but also their homeland began to appear on Israeli screens. This is unusual, as diasporic homelands are not often depicted in Israeli films, and certainly not positively. But ‘accented’ movies portray Russia neutrally or even nostalgically: in Paper Snow, the heroine experiences a nostalgic flashback to a Russian winter as a beautiful snow-covered landscape. A brilliant recent TV series, Troika (2010), by the above-mentioned Leonid Prudovsky, not only features dialogue that is almost entirely Russian, but is also filmed on location both in Russia and in Israel with characters moving freely between countries, languages and identities.

As Russia began appearing on Israeli screens, Israel began appearing on Russian screens.This was a dramatic change from Soviet times, when the Cold War and continued anti-Zionist campaigns made any mention of Israel impossible. Only in the liberal era of perestroika did questions of Jewish life and interest appear on the Soviet screen. But in contrast to Israeli films, these films presented emigration as a tragedy—a consequence of local violence or injustice. Inter-ethnic romance involved a Russian Jew and a non-Jewish Russian, whose romance, as a rule, was doomed to failure. Love (1991), an influential film by acclaimed director Valery Todorovsky, is the tragic love story of a Russian guy and a Jewish girl who are eventually parted as persecution and anti-Semitism leave her no choice but to go to Israel.

Even in comedies, emigration is a kind of a tragic mistake and something to be fixed. In Georgii Danelia’s Passport (1990), a non-Jewish character finds himself in Israel as an accidental new immigrant due to a case of mistaken identity. He is desperate to return to his native Georgia. Not surprisingly, some Russian movies feature return immigrants. In Daddy (2004, directed by a Russian film star Vladimir Mashkov), set in 1929, a character returns from Palestine, explaining that his return is a homecoming: for him Jerusalem was a place ‘where one can only weep and die, and where people are strangers.’ The message is clear: true home is Russia.

A different kind of return immigrant appears in Pavel Loungine’s Roots (2005), when Baruch, a Russian-Israeli Mafioso travels to Ukraine to rebury his dear mother ‘at home’. Even this over-the-top black comedy signals that the true ‘promised land’ is back in the old country and not in Israel.

More recently, Israel, and Russian immigrants to Israel, have started to appear even in mainstream Russian movies and TV series entirely unrelated to Jewish topics. Padishah, an episode of a hit detective series, National Security Agent-3 (2001), takes Russian detectives to Israel and features scenes filmed on location, including the most alluring tourist destinations—beaches, historical sites, hotels and restaurants. Russian detectives come in contact with a wide range of Israelis—religious and secular, new immigrants and native-born, so that the characters (and audiences) learn about everyday Israeli life. The main character (played by Russian film star Mikhail Porechenkov) even falls for a local colleague, a young, confident Israeli woman. The romance is not expected to last, but it does indicate warming relations between the two cultures. An episode in a more recent Russian detective series, Zhurov (2009), colourfully titled Shabbes Goy, takes place not just in Israel but within a Hassidic sect in Jerusalem. It was filmed on location, in the religious neighbourhood of Mea Shearim. Again, the Russian detective (Andrey Panin) is working on a case together with a local colleague (Russian-Israeli actor Vladimir Friedman) who serves as both his interpreter and cultural mediator, helping him (and the audience) to gain a rare glimpse into the life of an insular religious community.

These Russian films and TV shows appear to have no Jewish theme. So, why Israel? Israel is a historically and culturally rich foreign locale, which makes it an exciting visual setting. But more importantly, the appearance of Israel in the Russian TV series affirms old social ties between Russian-Jewish cultural producers, some of them living in Russia and some in Israel, who still collaborate with each other.The script of Shabbes Goy was written by a Russian Israeli, and an Israeli production company (staffed with Russian Israelis) helped with the local casting.

Some co-productions and collaborations blur national and cultural boundaries, to the point where it is hard to identify whether a film is actually Russian or Israeli. Consider And the Wind Returneth (1991) by Mikhail Kalik. In the 1960s, Kalik was a figurehead of the Soviet poetic cinema along with directors such as Andrey Tarkovsky and Sergey Paradjanov. Following the anti-Semitic censoring of his films, he emigrated to Israel in 1971. There, Kalik made only one film and failed to flourish as a director, but in Russia his oeuvre continued to be revered. And so, on the invitation of the Soviet film authorities, he travelled to Russia and made And the Wind Returneth, his cinematic autobiography. Although set mostly in Soviet Russia, the film opens and ends in Israel, depicting, among other emigrations, Kalik’s own. This was not a co-production: the film was financed by Soviet state funding, and shot mostly in Russia, but, with a director who identifies as a Russian-Jewish Israeli, the film’s Israeli character is inevitable. Kalik’s film is not the only example of such national boundary-crossing. Leonid Horowitz directed a Russian-Jewish film, Ladies’ Tailor, and just a couple of years later, upon his immigration, a number of ‘accented’ films in Israel. However, Horowitz now lives in his native Kiev. Felix Gerchikov, who directed The Children of USSR in Israel, is now making films in Moscow. Are these filmmakers Russian or Israeli?

Because such a large number of Jewish cultural producers immigrated to Israel, the social ties that they maintain with their Russian friends and colleagues create social networks, which, once in place, generate their own momentum, leading to new cultural production and distribution as well as the blurring of national and cultural boundaries. Movies made by these filmmakers, whether Russian or Israeli, circulate through the internet, transna- tional TV channels and Jewish film festivals, and are seen in Russia, Israel, and elsewhere in the Russian diaspora. These cultural crossings and exchanges make the Russian- Israeli cinema an extension of both post-Soviet or, in broader terms, Russian diasporic cinema. Of course, these developments are not limited to cinema—we see the same process at work in literature, art, business and scholarship. As Russian immigrants to Israel transform themselves through migration, they also transform cultures around them, which is why Israel today is a part of Russia, and Russia is a part of Israel.

Olga Gershenson is Associate Professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. To learn more about her work, see www.people.umass.edu/olga/.
A version of this article appeared in the journal Israel Affairs.

In March of 1978, Charlie Chaplin’s body was stolen from his tomb in Switzerland and held for ransom. Two months later it was discovered buried in a farmer’s field and returned to his wife Oona, who remarked, dryly, ‘Charlie would have found this ridiculous.’ According to rumour, the Swiss government suspected that his remains had been stolen by anti-Semitic groups, upset that a Jew should be buried in a Christian cemetery. Chaplin’s Jewishness made him an enemy of the FBI and put him on the Nazi’s list of international targets. He is perhaps one of the most famous Jews in American history hence it is all the more surprising to learn that he was not, in fact, Jewish.

Since his early days as the Little Tramp, a role he assumed in 1914, Jews had believed Chaplin was secretly Jewish. The fact that his name was not Jewish was irrelevant; it was common practice for Jews to change their names when entering show business (Al Jolson was born Asa Yoelson). In the 1948 edition of a Jewish encyclopedia, Chaplin is listed as a Jewish movie star, and the name ‘Israel Thonstein’ is mentioned alongside the claim that he was from an old Eastern European Jewish family. As proof, the encyclopedia cited a 1931 article from the New York Herald Tribune, which commented upon the way Chaplin’s eyes could convey both sadness and joy in a uniquely Jewish fashion, and a Budapest Jewish paper which claimed to trace his Jewish ancestry (as Thonstein) back to Hungary.
More important than birth records and names was the fact he looked, acted and ‘felt’ Jewish. To Jewish eyes, Chaplin told Jewish stories. Famously, one critic recalled watching The Gold Rush (1925) next to a middle-aged Jewish woman: ‘Oy!’ she wailed, as the Tramp tried to escape from his on-screen tormentors, ‘What do they want with him, the goyim?!! What has he done to them?’ The Tramp, small and powerless, was taunted and hounded by authorities who hated him without reason, in what appeared to American Jews as the enactment of the Jewish condition. Hannah Arendt wrote in 1944 that Chaplin symbolised the ‘effrontery of the poor ‘little Yid’ who does not recognise the class order of the world because he sees in it neither order nor justice for himself ’. Meanwhile, in Sholem Aleichem’s 1916 story, ‘Motl in America’, the hero spends his time watching Chaplin films and extolling the virtues of free America in which a Jew like Chaplin can become rich and famous.

For film scholar Patricia Erens, the Tramp is a variation on ‘dos kleine menshele’ or ‘little man’ of Yiddish literature, the poor and long-suffering antihero, the shlemiel (a little man with no luck), and the luftmensch (the ‘man of air’ who lives on dreams). Erens cites the numerous Jewish references in Chaplin’s oeuvre, in particular the prevalence of skullcaps and Yiddish newspapers as props, and a scene in The Vagabond (1916) in which the Tramp finds a Jewish man eating pork at a buffet and helpfully changes the ‘ham’ sign to ‘beef ’.
Many of the characteristics we associate with ‘acting’ Jewish—the nasal voice, the New York accent, and the verbal wit a‘ la Groucho Marx—were unavailable to the makers of silent pictures. Chaplin, however, was a dancer, an acrobat, and a pantomime extraordinaire and able to communicate other, non-verbal cultural indicators to a savvy audience—the comic shrugs, the outdated black coat, the facial pathos combined with frantic body movements, the chaotic presence that mocks the establishment. Above all, Chaplin achieved a subtle gender inversion through the graceful, almost balletic eluding of his macho tormentors. Jewish audiences recognised this physical portrayal from the Yiddish stage and read it as a visual metaphor for the disempowered Jew in a hostile world.
Across the world this misconception raged, gaining him enemies to the left and the right. The German-American Bund helped spread the rumour that Charles Spencer Chaplin was born Israel Thonstein and in the book that accompanied the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew, Thonstein is cited as the maiden name for the mother of ‘The Jew, Chaplin.’ In 1948 the US Navy investigated Chaplin on suspicion of Zionist activity: shipping guns to Palestine, as well as around 36 tanks. But it was the FBI under Hoover that became Chaplin’s greatest political and legal enemy. Chaplin’s FBI file is a comprehensive laboratory for identity construction that began in 1922 and remained open until after his death. The file chronicles Chaplin’s downfall, the suspicion of Communist activities, the Mann Act trial for transporting unmarried women across state lines for deviant purposes, and further rumours and innuendo that led to his expulsion from America in 1952. Chaplin is continually described as ‘of Jewish extraction,’ given the name of ‘Thonstein’ as an alias (though there is no proof that Chaplin ever used this name himself), and assigned attributes such as ‘Jewish accent,’ ‘talks with hands,’ and Russian birth.
Crucially, it was not Jewishness that alarmed Hoover but ambiguity. According to Omer Bartov in his compelling work The Jew in Cinema, Jewish characters are often portrayed as slippery and protean, possessing an insidious ability to obscure their Jewishness and blend in. The emancipation of the Jews from the ghettos of Europe at the turn of the last century had left them free to shave and dress in modern clothing, making them impossible to detect. This new found ambiguity of Jewish identity made them, in many gentile eyes, the most dangerous minority in civilised society. Ambiguity was the dominant paranoia of Cold-War America, which felt itself threatened by the enemy within—the Communists, Jews and homosexuals who were so hard to detect. The insistence on Chaplin’s Jewishness helped reinforce the notion of an ‘authentic American’ by establishing firm conceptual borders through identity construction and categorisation.
Not only did both Jewish and gentile audiences see him as a Jew, but Chaplin himself very nearly became convinced of his own Jewishness. While he did not officially doubt his mother’s version of his parentage, in which her legal husband, Charles Chaplin, Sr., a non-Jewish pop singer, was his biological father, there were times when he clearly wondered if the questions surrounding his lineage were true, and if they were more scandalous than imagined. His step-brother Sydney had a Jewish father and the world’s insistence on Chaplin’s Jewish origins prompted him and many others to wonder whether their birth stories had in fact been reversed.
‘All geniuses,’ Chaplin was heard to remark,‘have some Jewish blood in them.’ Flattered by the widely held misconception about his Jewish identity, his understanding of Jewishness was simplistic and stereotypical: Jews were blessed
with superior intellect and financial acumen than non-Jews. Further, he believed that his physical attributes compounded the myth: he was short with curly black hair, ‘Oriental facial features’, and a prominent nose. In footage taken
of famed British comedian Harry Lauder’s visit to Chaplin Studios, Lauder draws Chaplin on a chalkboard. Chaplin makes great show of stopping him, pantomimes ‘too Jewish,’ and re-draws the nose. Quite how to interpret this is unclear, but Chaplin either believed himself to be Jewish or was making fun of those who did. In the absence of confirmed roots, Chaplin may have sought to align himself with a group that, although outsiders in mainstream society, seemed to him possessed of an ancient and mystical national bond. When the great cantor Yossele Rosenblatt visited Chaplin’s studios, Chaplin told him that he owned all of the cantor’s recordings and that ‘Whenever I feel a little blue, I take them out and play them. They do something to me. They unite me, oh so closely, with my Jewish ancestors.’
Chaplin was an actor, and he played one role after another all his life. He occasionally told people he was Jewish, which sounded better to his director’s ears than ‘poor English gutter trash.’ But sometimes, including in his interviews with the FBI, he denied it, once commenting, ‘I am afraid I do not have that good fortune.’ Of his anti-Nazi picture The Great Dictator (1940) Chaplin said, ‘I made this film to show my unity with all the Jews of the world’. While American politicians and agents worried about the film’s ‘Communist’ message, the American Jewish establishment feared that an anti-Hitler film made by a Jew might make things worse for Jews in Europe. Chaplin’s own response—‘How can they get worse?’—indicates his own fearlessness. For the Jew in America, it was as if, as Stanley Kauffmann put it, ‘a David had arisen—a comic David—to fight Goliath!’

Holly A.Pearse holds a PhD in religion and culture, and specializes in the representation of Jews in art and media. At the moment, her research delves into the portrayals of Jewish-Gentile romance in American film, and she currently teaches at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada.

The Infidel will be released on dvd in August 2010.
Ajami is released on June 18th.

Paul Morrison will be answering questions at a special Jewish Film Festival screening of Solomon and Gaenor at the Tricycle Theatre on June 23 at 8.30pm. Wondrous Oblivion and Little Ashes are available on DVD from the usual outlets, Solomon and Gaenor via assistant@metfilm.co.uk.

Ruthie, in her gold dress, mumbles a line of her speech about Judith and then is silent. Her hands tremble. We see her cue cards. But she’s not reading what’s on them.
Cut to congregation members who are shouting at her: Louder / Can’t hear you / Speak up / What’s wrong with her / Is she a mute?
Finally, cut back to Ruthie. She responds:
You ask me to be louder, when I’m normally told to be quiet
You ask me to smile, eat more but diet
You tell me today I’m special, when I’ve never been before.
I’ll give you louder… (music begins, voice changes, new scene) hear me roar!

When we decided to make a film that reflected a key moment in Jewish women’s experience, the Knish Collective decided to focus on the moment just before delivering the bat mitzvah address on the bimah. This hyper-important moment, emblematic of the transition into adulthood, is a staple scene for all bar mitzvah films; it’s a sign of the trope. The ‘Bimah moment’ might be said to characterize the genre.Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

MB:    Let’s start at the beginning, taking the strands from your early life; your family — Russian-Jewish; your education — prep school, public school, Cambridge; and your Left-ish culture and politics. So let’s take them one at a time, what you think they gave you and how they matter to you.
SP:        My father and his parents came over from Russia in 1924, when he was fourteen. His fourteen years in Russia were the most vivid part of his life, he told stories about them again and again throughout my childhood. And very good stories they were; told quite slowly — maybe that’s where I get my pacing from. They had a flat near Red Square and he literally witnessed the October revolution from his bedroom window. They had rather a dramatic time: near-starvation after the revolution in their rundown Chekhovian dacha after the revolution. And many adventures: they escaped with one diamond hidden in shoe when Stalin came to power. So they were great stories. My mother came from Jewish aristocracy, Viscount Samuel was head of the family — he was head of the Liberals during the General Strike and led the Liberals in the House of Lords. A cousin had been in Asquith’s cabinet. So it was quite a flamboyant background and that was a pivotal thing in my life, I suppose.
MB:    Your father’s stories about Russia, were they stories of regret that he was not still there?
SP:        No. He was fascinated by Russia, loved talking about all things Russian. He was impatient with what he considered any form of banality and I think my straining for originality comes from that. Anything remotely commonplace that you came up with at the dinner table was jumped upon. He had a violent Russian temper, which was very frightening. Russia was a sort of drumbeat behind it all. My Russian grandmother lived at the top of the house until an enormous age and told very romantic stories — about meeting Tolstoy, going to see the first production of The Cherry Orchard. She was very monosyllabic: ‘That was it. I was there’! You couldn’t get anything else out of her!
MB:     So your father brought Russia with him?
SP:        He did, yes.
MB:    Did you feel, therefore, that not only was he in a foreign country but — even though you’d been born here — you were in a foreign country?
SP:        Well, no. He was a great Anglophile, he loved Rolls-Royces and Georgian architecture. My grandfather behaved like a Russian count; he dressed very formally and everything had an ornate Russian gilt to it. My father would kiss peoples’ hands. I grew up feeling that I had nineteenth-century parents.
MB:    That’s the Russian-ness. What about the Jewishness?
SP:        My mother was strongly religious. I mean, she wasn’t very orthodox, we went to the Liberal Synagogue with Rabbi Louis Jacobs. But we always did Friday night, the candles and all that. My father had a fascinating relationship to his Jewishness; he was definitely an atheist but he was fascinated by Jewish stories and culture. So there was an extraordinary schizophrenia, in the sense that he was both distancing himself and obsessed at the same time.
MB:    You say you lit candles on Friday nights; was it in any sense an orthodox family?
SP:        No. Well, we didn’t have seafood or pork. But no. It was fairly hit-and-miss; I’m sure non-kosher things got into the house. My mum would have been appalled at me saying this! But no. We were sort of shambolic.
MB:    What was your father’s occupation?
SP:        They ran a firm which made hearing aids. They did Churchill’s hearing aid and, apparently, MI5 thought — because they were Russians — that they were bugging Churchill’s hearing aid! They were stopped from servicing Churchill’s hearing aid, just in case. They literally had the ear of power! My father was very interested in the idea of power, in seeing it at a glance: as a boy he stayed a night at the Kremlin. He never met Stalin but he remembered an official being called to see Stalin. He loved telling that story — this official scurrying off to Stalin — and I loved hearing it.
MB:    Did the chap who went to meet Stalin come back?
SP:        Ha, yes. That’s why they escaped! The Commissar of Labour who my grandfather had managed to befriend — which was why they’d been allowed to come back to Moscow — was liquidated soon after. They were right in the middle of the revolution. Obviously, it was a very middle-class experience of the revolution but it was extremely vivid.
MB:    You went to a prep school when you were five, and then public school, then Cambridge. You met the English middle classes, upper-middle classes, head on. Were your opinions of them formed then, and if so, what were they?
SP:        My prep school was incredibly old-fashioned, even for the sixties. I was the only Jewish boy there. It was incredibly stereotyped: the headmaster had a wooden leg — straight out of Evelyn Waugh. He was in constant pain and would hit us over the head all the time. I loathed my five years there. We were horrendously badly taught. All the boys were very nice to each other because we were so frightened of the staff. It was like being in a POW camp, there was no bullying at all because we were all suffering these horrible schoolmasters!
Westminster was a more liberal school, and I had a very good time there. Cambridge, interestingly, was the only place I encountered anti-Semitism. It was quite a subtle anti-Semitism: stereotypical assumptions that if you’re Jewish, your parents must be incredibly wealthy furriers or businessmen. Extraordinary in 1972. They weren’t unpleasant to me, they just made these assumptions — their ignorance was quite startling. It may have also been to do with the anti-Semitism of the left: an anti-Semitism based on the assumption that ‘Jewish people are rich’.
MB:    (As a trivial aside, this just proves that Cambridge is far behind Oxford and always has been! I was at Wadham and it was entirely run by people who’ve ever since been my best friends, all of whom were Jews!) Did you leave Cambridge early because it wasn’t giving you what you wanted?
SP:        I took two years off before going up, during which I wrote plays and my academic side somewhat withered. But also the history course at Cambridge, then, was terrible. We had to do the French Revolution in one week! I spent a whole term on it. I wrote a very long essay and my supervisor ran out of the room and vomited! Partly because of excess the night before, but maybe it was also my essay. Anyway, I left.
MB:    You came back to London. It’s said that it was very hard to get on in London at that time if your leanings weren’t to the left. Left politics was driving new ideas in the theatre. Did you fit in with that?
SP:        Yes, I think that’s true. But I was never a didactic writer, I didn’t write agitprop. To my amazement, my leaving Cambridge early earned me a lot of ‘street cred’ on the fringe. Most of us — David Hare, Howard Brenton — were Oxbridge playwrights. And I’d left! The fringe was quite anarchic at that time; there were lots of surrealist plays. It wasn’t all hard-left plays but they were all connected to some sort of agitation about the world: if you’d written about two middle-class people breaking up, you wouldn’t have got the play on. I was writing plays about young people in restless urban settings.
MB:    What inspired you? Your first play was put on when you were fifteen …
SP:        It was only a school play!
MB:    Well, a pretty good school and a pretty good play.
SP:        I was inspired! I loved watching Armchair Theatre, work by Pinter and others. Going to school in Westminster was wonderful. You could walk across the river to the Old Vic and pay three shillings to sit in the gods and watch Olivier. It seems amazing now that the theatre wasn’t always full. Theatre was really exciting.
MB:    But a lot of people have a passion for the theatre. How did that passion transfer into you wanting to write?
SP:        Well, I was in love with the theatre, I wanted to be an actor but I was hopelessly untalented. I realised that I had some talent for writing dialogue. Like many kids, I wrote short stories much of which was in dialogue. Prose didn’t come so easily so I concentrated on what I could do. Then it evolved into plays; that’s really how it started.
I had watched so much television drama and was enchanted by the idea that it touches so many imaginations. Television is incredibly democratic. It reaches across all walks of life, into different geographies, different dwellings. I’ve always found that magical. Even as a child I was aware that, even though I was alone on the carpet watching Pinter and trying to understand it, there were millions of other people all over the country watching it and trying to understand it too.
MB:    Can you talk a little about the distinction between live theatre and television?
SP:        Theatre is like going over the rapids. It’s exciting, nerve-wracking and unique because it varies from night to night. But it can be a struggle to stop the actors coarsening it and playing for laughs. Theatre’s very combustible: there can be magical nights or nights which just don’t work because the audience is very ungiving. It’s also very ephemeral: it used to be said that the reason people — certain people, never you! — didn’t take television seriously as an art form was because it was ephemeral. It just went and how can you take something seriously that’s just gone? With video, and now DVD, it’s become a lasting form. In theatre, very few contemporary plays stay in the repertoire, perhaps one in three thousand. I found that irksome, that my successful  plays were never revived. That was a fate shared by every other playwright. Also, theatre doesn’t allow you to reach many people. And often they’re the same people! I’d look at the audience and think, ‘ah, you’re back again’! Theatre is a very tiny club.
The unique thing about television drama is that it can produce worlds without genres. Most movies, to sell, have to be in genres, a thriller or a romantic comedy. In television, writers can dream different visions: some are social-realist, some are completely abstract, some naturalistic, some — like Potter — were extremely bold. That’s a unique tradition: reaching a lot of people without being governed by the American box office. It has been a hugely important tradition in British cultural life.
MB:    I was criticised for my interest in television, but it was superior to anything I saw on the stage. It’s a wonderful example of the way that technology drives culture: as soon as you have access to posterity, then the idea of television being ephemeral has gone and the idea of television being ‘light’ has gone.
Let’s pick out some of your work, starting with Shooting the Past. It has themes that have pursued you, as much as you’ve pursued them, in all your work. Can you tell us what led you to do that film?
SP:        This is a film about a photographic library threatened with closure. I wanted to  return to long scenes in television. I’m sure we’ve all seen a still image in a documentary and wished it had stayed for longer. And I wondered how that might apply in a drama, where the photos are actually the story. I also wanted to fight the idea that people couldn’t concentrate for long. I was amazed at the audience reaction.
MB:    Taking aside all modesty, why do you think that was? What nerve do you think it struck?
SP:        Without being falsely modest — not something I suffer from — I think that there was a dearth of authored drama at that time and it all tended to be within genres. The BBC had abolished single plays in the late nineties, so people were grateful to see something that was a surprise. People like being taken into worlds they haven’t seen before.
MB:    Something that seemed to come out of left field was The Lost Prince. It was an amazing hit … where did that come from?
SP:        It related back to my previous work, Perfect Strangers, a drama about a Jewish family reunion. One of the mysteries in that piece was a photograph of this boy in a prince costume. Then The Independent ran a piece on Prince John, the hidden prince. I was haunted by this but thought someone else should do the story; the royal family’s not really for me. Years went by, and I thought I should. ‘Faction’ was new for me. I felt that someone would ask me what I had invented — in order to reflect a wider dramatic truth — and what had really happened. But nobody ever did ask that question. When the script was published, I published all my ‘homework’ with it. I don’t know if anyone’s ever read it! Anyway, The Lost Prince was the conjunction between my imagery from Perfect Strangers and a true story. The life of that boy is an extraordinary dramatic arc from the Ruritanian splendour of Edward VII’s court, to the abstemious household of George and Mary at Sandringham, and ending with the First World War. John died the day they sat down to negotiate the Treaty of Versailles. They were related to the Russian royal family as well as the Germans they were fighting! It was an irresistible dramatic arc but extremely hard to write. I just couldn’t write the words ‘Buckingham Palace’! It felt ludicrous! So I ended up writing ‘the big house in London’! It was also hard to animate the family. I didn’t want Mary as a total dragon and George V shouting the whole time. He was a very short man, the head of the Empire. Queen Mary was rather bright and actually quite good-looking before the First World War, which aged her dramatically. So I tried to be historically fresher.
MB:    Did you enjoy this departure into faction?
SP:        Not enormously. It worries me. I prefer to go sideways into history, with fictional characters near things that we know about.
MB:    And the recent trilogy? What was the starting point for that?
SP:        A house, really. I’m very nosy about property, I love locations and thinking about what goes on inside. Imagery from the past, and especially what happened in the thirties, had been filtering into my work from an oblique angle; Shooting the Past and Perfect Strangers are both stories connected with the Holocaust. One thing that I’ve always wanted to dramatise is the people that stood and watched. I had this image of a man troubled with where his father’s money came from. I wanted to get there through a contemporary story about the disjointed sense of urban loneliness. It’s a cliché, but there’s a sense that the further you get away from what happened [the Holocaust], the nearer it seems to come. Now, with distance, we can think about it — possibly — more piercingly. So all those things came together.
We’re all continually troubled and fascinated by the past. Because I had elderly parents — they were born before the First World War and had children late — they shared memories of the whole twentieth century. The first memories my father had were of 1913 and 1914. I suppose that’s why I’m so interested in the past. I spent a lot of my youth writing very contemporary works — because you react against your family — about urban, pop culture, the world of disc jockeys and shopping precincts. As I got older, I was pulled towards a European perspective because I was finally embracing my cultural heritage. I think that’s why I started peering more and more into the past.