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.

GAENOR
Why didn’t you tell me?
SOLOMON
What?
GAENOR
This life, your real life!
Were you ashamed of me?

It was a tough shoot, tight for time, and the rain seemed incessant. We waded ankle-deep in mud. But there were magical coincidences which sustained us: we shot the marriage scene on the date of my and my wife’s own anniversary; the partner of one of our lead actors gave birth on the same day as Gaenor. When you are up against it, you look for signs that you have not been forsaken. We felt charmed.
We aimed to make not a pretty film but to find beauty in the bleakness, with a palette of blues and greys for the mining community. Such colour as there was, scarlet and green, was brought with the immigrant Jews from Europe. Musically, we built a score that had overtones of klezmer and of the baptist chapel, as well as borrowing from Arvo Part the repeated rhythmical phrases that drew us inexorably into the tragedy.
The film makes a statement about mixed-faith partnerships, and the prejudice against them. Solomon’s parents are harsh and rejecting of their grand child to be. I wanted to challenge the ingrained stricture to represent Jews only as nice and victims, for fear of ‘lending ammunition’ to anti-Semites. Among more traditionally-minded Jews, these felt at the time like small acts of subversion.
I was under some pressure to soften the ending. I’m glad that I resisted.
Solomon and Gaenor was nominated for an Oscar, which was both a continuation of the charm and utterly confusing. I spent a year travelling back and forth to LA having wonderfully positive meetings discussing projects that never happened and were never truly mine.
When eventually I returned to my own work, it was to a screenplay that I had begun earlier, and which featured the next generation of British Jewish immigrants, the refugees from middle Europe in the thirties. Rooted in a childhood fascination with the paraphernalia of cricket, it re-created the world I had grown up in, during the fifties and early sixties. I remembered my sweet little grandmother’s uncharacteristic anxiety and anger when the first Afro-Caribbean family moved in next door to her in Cricklewood. The cricket; the meeting of the two families over the fence; these were my starting points for what became the comedy drama Wondrous Oblivion.
We are not in charge of our stories. They create their own momentum. In writing Wondrous Oblivion I was obliged to transcend my habitual skepticism and permit my characters to change for the better. The Jewish family in particular: Stanley who ran a shop in the high street, Ruth his timid wife, and his 12-year old son David sent to a posh English prep school, told me that was what they wanted.  As for the Jamaican family, cricket-loving Dennis and church-going Grace and their children who had moved in next door and built a cricket net in the garden, all they wanted was to be able to live their lives — to work, study, pray and play — without harassment.
It became structured as a coming of age movie. David comes up against his own cowardice, in betraying his Jamaican friend Judy to his new prep-school chums. He is challenged to change his priorities and make amends. What’s more, the rest of the Jewish family is required to grow up: Stanley to put his family before his work; Ruth to come out from under and develop a sense of her own worth. Finally, the narrow-minded community around them is shamed by Stanley into opening up, and to accepting the strangers in their midst.
As a result, Wondrous Oblivion gained a joyous ending, to some peoples’ discomfiture. I was able to utilise a bunch of my favourite upbeat ska and calypso tracks. Shot mostly in a studio, we managed to give it a subtly super-real, fairytale quality. I introduced cigarette cards of cricketers who moved. The magic was intrinsic to the movie itself, and not only in the experience of the making.
The coming of age movie is concealed behind what appears to be a traditional sports movie: the underdog courageously overcomes all obstacles to win the tournament for the team. David makes a different choice, and that makes for a different film. It’s a sleight of hand I relished as a writer, though it created some confusion for the film marketers.
At the heart of our diaspora experience, we butt up against the ‘other’, and have to negotiate difference. A skill we come to absorb necessarily as diaspora Jews is the art of empathy, to be able to put ourselves into another’s shoes. I’m proud that  Afro-Caribbean Londoners experience Wondrous Oblivion as their own story, and that many Welsh chapel-goers experience Solomon and Gaenor as theirs.
Set at the cusp of Britain’s first tentative embrace of multi-culturalism, I sought in Wondrous Oblivion to touch on the effects of displacement in families who have been torn apart as refugees or migrants. Dennis’ daughter doesn’t recognise him when the children, who had been left behind in Jamaica, finally come to Britain to join their parents. Ruth, who came to Britain on the Kindertransport and spent her teens without a mother, tells Dennis, ‘No-one taught me to be a woman. I always get it wrong.’
In 2005 I developed this theme by writing and performing in a BBC radio play, Missing Olga, in which I gave myself the chance to meet my grandmother, who had died before I was born. I asked her to explain to me what had been the effect on her husband, my grandfather, of leaving his parents and eleven siblings behind in Russia in 1903, and never seeing them again. Judging from his letters, I don’t think he was ever quite the same person. She agreed with me. There was a quiet sadness in him that never quite left him, and through my father left its mark on me.
By then I was Jewed out. Jewish, schmoo-ish. I’d had Jewish coming out of my ears. I needed a break.
I attached myself to as non-Jewish a movie as I could imagine, a script about the love affair between Federico Garcia Lorca and Salvador Dali, who were students together in the Catholic and conservative Madrid of the twenties. The boulders dropped from my shoulders. Of course, its gay theme made it as hard to get off the ground as any other movie. But I had fun making it, and enjoyed the freedom that came from not having written it, and from it not being my world. It does have a recognisable intensity and poetic quality, and plenty of ambivalence and guilt. Does that make it any way Jewish? I’m not sure it matters. Little Ashes was released in the UK last year.
Now my slate is mixed. There are a couple of contemporary comedies in the pipeline, not explicitly Jewish. There’s a long-cherished film which grew out of my experience in Jewish/Israeli/Palestinian dialogue groups in the 1990s, when I experienced how hard it is to accept one another’s historical narratives, and how much we need to. It’s a thriller set in the mandate period, when British self-interest laid the ground for the ‘ruthless Jews’ within the national liberation struggle to generate the Palestinian tragedy.
I have ready a film I am yearning to shoot about the artist Charlotte Salomon, who painted her way through exile in the South of France during 1941-2. She told her life story growing up under the Nazis in a series of over 1000 incredibly vivid and powerful paintings. The process was a form of self-therapy for her, liberating her from her family history of depression. Having completed her work, which she titled Life? or Theatre, she was freed to fall in love with another refugee.
It’s a powerful story bringing together many themes that are close to me. We have a fine screenplay, and potentially a strong cast. But making movies from the heart, even with an eye to the market, is always an uphill struggle. In the current climate, conventional movie finance sources are more conservative than ever. Should any JQ readers with a passion for Charlotte Salomon have a bright idea about alternative sources, or might think to invest themselves, I’d be glad to put them in touch with my producers.
I don’t need to say that film is a collaborative process. Without dedicated producers, let alone the fine craftspeople and actors who have enhanced and made solid my dreams, none of these works would have seen the light of day.
At nineteen, I wanted to be a novelist. But I worried that the ordinary North-West London suburban Jewish life I had grown up in hadn’t provided me with enough raw material to fit me for the job. My parents were still together. There was food on the table. No divorce. No poverty. Where was the angst that could drive my work?
My concern was misplaced. I was to taste my own portion of life’s joys and tragedies soon enough. I had only to scratch the surface in and around me and there were enough stories to fill a library. I am proud and happy to have had the opportunity to share a few.
I recently had occasion to revisit a film I made as a young man about John Lennon and Yoko Ono in their ‘world peace’ days. I and a film crew had spent the best part of a couple of weeks with them. We achieved a certain intimacy, which the film reflects. Yoko had been much vilified, but I liked her, and them, and I liked their love story.
Looking back, they could have been a Jewish couple; he: mouthy, cruel, funny, self-lacerating, loving and idealistic; she: dreamy and mystical, inclined to abstraction, yet with a quiet practicality. Maybe that’s why they were so at home in New York.
The film was transmitted by the BBC and much of its material recycled in later compilations. I recognise in it some of the qualities that seem to run through my later movies, perhaps all my films: the intensity, the sadness, the joy, the mystery, the soulfulness. Is that Jewish? So help me, I have no idea.

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.
Indeed, there exist a number of films that celebrate bar mitzvahs, made popular most recently by the latest Coen brothers’ offering A Serious Man (2009). Framed by a boy’s bar mitzvah, this layered existentialist movie traces a 1960s middle-American suburban family story, and in particular the Job-like father’s quest for knowledge, certainty, and answers about morality and truth (answer: there are no answers). Produced just a few years earlier, the British-based film Sixty Six (2006), set this time in 1960s London, tells the tale of loner Bernie’s doomed bar mitzvah: he can’t wait to get some family attention, but as it turns out, his bar mitzvah falls on the day of the World Cup Final. As in ‘Serious’, the nebbishe father is also a victim of endless misfortune, causing further damage to Bernie’s chances of ever being noticed; but the bar mitzvah day is saved when he learns what it means to be a man (let go of things you can’t change,  accept your father for the nebech that he is). In a less serious vein, Hollywood’s Keeping Up With the Steins (also 2006) tells the story of Brentwood-based Benjamin’s bar mitzvah, satirising the parental hijacking of the whole event; it, too, is a tale of the father’s development, tracing his relationship with his own father, while Benjamin, who is self-conscious about his weak voice, learns what it means to become a man (be responsible, make decisions, give up trying to prove yourself). One might trace elements of all these films to the 1976 British classic, Bar Mitzvah Boy, by the great and much-missed  Jack Rosenthal. In this clever made-for-TV movie, the action takes place over the 24 hours of Elliott’s bar mitzvah day. He is dismayed by hypocritical ‘Judaism’ around him and by the immaturity of the men in his family, whom he refers to as children and babies. But even he, finally, learns what it means to come of age and grow up (in this case, lie). Praying with Lior (2007), is American film-maker Ilana Trachtman’s poignant documentary about the bar mitzvah of a Jewish boy with Down’s syndrome. Against the backdrop of the mother’s death from cancer, seven years previously, Trachtman unravels the complex emotions of each family member towards the boy and his bar mitzvah. The film explores Lior’s own hopes for his adulthood and celebrates the bar mitzvah as one of the most important events of his adult life.
These films, ranging from Hollywood comedy to independent British to arthouse, share several common themes. Each one explores the ambivalent meaning of manhood, simultaneously seeing the bar mitzvah as a chance to parade family wealth, prove Jewish worth, pull the family together and, somehow, define a family identity. Most of the films converge on the idea that coming of age is not simply a loner event, nor is it one that stops at adolescence. The bar mitzvah, and these movies, concern the intersection between an intimate journey of pubescent growth and its wider context within a father-son relationship, a family, a culture, even a whole Jewish history. It’s a moment where personal growth and public expectation collide and in these films it’s not just an awkward teenager reciting a parsha, it’s a whole family transition.
Almost all of these films and their respective themes culminate in a moment of suspense on the bimah: What will happen? Will private impulse and public expectation coalesce? Will the right tune come out? Will the boy come of age?
In Lior’s tale, the apprehension is overwhelming, chiefly because of his Down’s syndrome. There is a pause. He does it beautifully. In A Serious Man, the son approaches the bimah stoned; he, too, pauses in front of the torah, trying to focus so the letters stop dancing and he can actually see the words. The rabbi starts off his lines, and for a moment we are concerned. But then, cracked voice, marijuana and all, he gets through it and becomes a ‘man’ (evoking a truce moment between his fighting parents as well). In Sixty Six, the bimah drama is not interrupted by congregation voices, but by ‘England’ chants coming in from outside football fans; Bernie, however, ignores them and sings like an angel. In Keeping up with the Steins, there is a long moment of suspense before Benjamin launches into his cacophonous lyrics: his heart beats loudly, he makes strange noises, the congregation chuckles at his awkward first line and whispers encouragement. He remembers his friend’s advice — if you get nervous, grab your balls. This he does and the rest of the parsha and speech goes perfectly. Bar Mitzvah Boy strays from this trope when Elliott — instead of getting up onto the bimah — actually runs out of the synagogue onto the High Street and buys a Mickey Mouse mask. But even the unusual rendition of his parsha — given while standing on his head against a tree — is deemed kosher by the rabbi, and the evening party with 117 kugels goes ahead as planned.
Unlike Benjamin, Ruthie, our heroine, has no testicles to squeeze. And, in our film, the bat mitzvah does not go according to plan. Nor does Ruthie run away — she confronts the crowd straight on. Like her male film counterparts, she pauses at the bimah. Initially this pause is a moment to gather her feelings before attempting her speech, a half-hearted and tokenistic tribute to Judith who saved the Jewish people. But this pause does not evolve into the expected course of things. Instead it constitutes a shift into Ruthie’s thoughts, a shift of scenario which takes the day out of its expected format and into her fantasy. The day goes to her plan, not to the plan of her parents nor the synagogue. At this juncture the film turns into a musical with Ruthie as its star; Ruthie’s bat mitzvah is a celebration of the individual, the antithesis of her assuming her place in a long historical tradition. She defines her womanhood not through an earnest speech about the biblical Judith but by embracing the tradition of other relatable Judiths: Judy Blume, Judy Chicago, Judith Plaskow and Judith Butler.
Female creative collaborations are rare. Some theorists and feminist psychoanalysts argue that this relates to a lack of female initiation rites. It is their participation in initiation rites that enables men to feel part of a community, setting them up for further communities in the future. Working on this film together as Jewish women, we were bat mitzvahed as Jewish artists, scripting and re-scripting, collecting hard-boiled eggs at 5am, unclogging toilets, pulling Japanese knotweed out of the ground in an East London carpark. Managing the many disputes, artistic and practical, was an education in, at times, letting go, and at times, stepping up. I hope that this film opens some doors and some eyes, and encourages us to rethink the bat mitzvah and its potential importance as a ritual.
It seems that bar mitzvahs are in the air. This autumn the UK Jewish Film Festival celebrated its thirteenth year, and screened a slew of bar mitzvah themed films around London, including several of the ones I have mentioned. Aside from Bar Mitzvah Boy, all the films were released after 2006, since when bar mitzvahs have entered the common lexicon and even featured on American TV shows (American Dad, Sex and the City, and Entourage). What is it about this zeitgeist? Perhaps there is a feeling that we are, as a people, living a moment of transition. A pause. Perhaps this common theme says something about contemporary Jewish life and the point we have reached regarding intermarriage and assimilation, the new terrorism and political threats, Israel and religion. Perhaps we are interested in transitions because we are growing up again, maybe a bit more than usual. Maybe we are at the bimah of something new.

The Knish Collective is a London-based group of Jewish female creatives (Judy Batalion, Mekella Broomberg, Claire Berliner and Rachel Mars). Their script for the short musical comedy film I am Ruthie Segal, Hear Me Roar won a UKJFF/Pears Foundation short award and was in this year’s UK Jewish Film Festival. It was directed by Minkie Spiro and produced by The Knish Collective in Association with Third Man Films

A small girl, dressed in blue and white, stands under the Israeli flag in an Israeli Independence Day celebration. This image, a school-day memory, is the starting point for Private Investigation (2003), Ula Tabrai’s documentary which takes her back from her self-imposed exile in Paris to her hometown of Nazareth. In a series of interviews with her parents, teachers and contemporaries she unearths the forging of her own identity as an Israeli-Arab through years of silence, conformity and acceptance of the Israeli-Arab identity.

In many ways, Ula Tabrai typifies the new trends of Palestinian filmmakers in Israel. Unlike their parents’ generation, whose defining experience was the Nakba, these directors are concerned with issues of national identity, gender relations and social structures. They offer a dual scrutiny of both occupying, colonialist Israel and their own community. At their best, they complicate for us the all-too-neat imaginary dichotomy between Western modern Israel and its traditional, developing Palestinian citizens. In many cases these new films are autobiographical or semi-autobiographical journeys, the personal stories of the filmmakers themselves who, as adults, now turn to their own villages, towns and families to understand their stories. For the generation raised in post-1967 Israel, awareness of the Palestinian historical narrative depended heavily on informal channels of education, and the circulation of personal stories within the family. The strictly supervised curriculum of Arab schools in Israel was designed to foster a ‘new’ identity — that of the ‘Israeli-Arab’ — and teach loyalty to the Zionist state. Recent history of the people of Palestine, needless to say, was not taught. These films, then, are a tool for young Palestinians to try to make sense of their national identity and immediate history.

In Ashes (Rima Eissa, 2001, screened at the London Jewish Film Festival showcase at the ICA), the young filmmaker interviews her mother about their family history. The family came from a village called Biram in the Galilee, whose inhabitants were forced out in 1948. Today, Kibbutz Baram and the Baram National Park, a beautiful nature reserve with relics of two ancient synagogues to demonstrate the Jewish historical claim on the place, lie where the village once stood. Eissa, like many other filmmakers of her generation, does not fall into the trap of romanticizing the Arab village or collective narratives of victimhood. Rather she exposes the mechanism by which the state of Israel ‘erased’ the Palestinians from the physical and cultural landscape of Israel and questions the response of her parents’s generation in 1948. Like others, Eissa struggles to understand why her parents did not fight back: why did they fear and collaborate with the Israeli authorities? She confronts her mother about her actions in 1948 and after, about her willingness to define herself as Israeli and about her father’s collaboration with the Israeli police force. What unfolds in the film is an intimate, loving, conflicted mother-daughter discussion, familiar to anyone scarred by the effects of war and dislocation.

Paradise Lost (Ebtisam Ma’rana, 2002) similarly dares to tackle the sensitive issue of collaboration. The filmmaker sets out to break the silence surrounding the history of her village, Furidies, one of the only villages that remained on the coastal plain after the 1948 war. It is often claimed by the villagers that the reason the village was left intact is that the Jews needed a labour force for the affluent neighbouring Moshav, Zichron Yaakov. Other versions talk about long-term collaboration of the villagers with the Israeli authorities. But none of this is outspoken. In Furidies, as Ma’rana’s film shows, politics is ‘nobody’s business’. Those who dared to side with the Palestinian struggle in the past, like one of the film’s protagonist’s Suad George, have been effectively cast out of the village. Ma’rana uses her camera to confront her family, neighbours and friends with the unspoken issues of political participation and collaboration. Ultimately, she questions her own position within her family and her village, vis-à-vis Palestinian national activism and her friends in Tel-Aviv.

Conflict with the older generation is a prominent theme. Abu-Wael’s 2005 debut feature Atash (Thirst) is an exceptional film. With minimal dialogue and immense visual poetry the film tells the story of the Abu-Shukri family, who live in a deserted valley, in a bare concrete construction, totally isolated from society. This banishment has been inflicted upon them by their tyrannical father, fleeing from a scandal involving the oldest daughter. Incensed by his father’s despotic rule, the son eventually rebels and kills him. Yet the father’s death does not mean freedom, as the son assumes the father’s role, perpetuating the same oppressive regime. The film is universal; its style and narrative reference draw on archetypes and myths shared by many cultures. At the same time it is absolutely local and close to the director’s hometown — Umm el-Phahem in the heart of Wadi Ara. This is the first ‘Phahemean’ film, according to Abu-Wael. The film’s location is part of his childhood landscape and the cast are all non-professional actors from Umm el-Phahem.

The production and reception of Atash outline a common problem for many Palestinian films  produced inside Israel. The film, financed primarily by the Israeli Rabinowitz Foundation, was received warmly in Israel and won prizes in festivals around the world. Many critics and academics chose to see it as a political allegory, despite the director’s intentions. But when trying to distribute the film internationally, Abu-Wael encountered problems. ‘Distributors in Europe are not engaging with the film itself but with the politics around it,’ he says. ‘I am expected to make very particular films. If I’m Palestinian, I’m supposed to make films about the conflict. I was asked, “Where are the soldiers? How can one tell it’s Israel?” At times, I felt they were angry with me for making a film that criticizes Arab society.’ Abu-Wael believes it is important to make  Palestinian films inside Israel despite the difficulties. He resists the dictations of both Zionist and Palestinian national discourses, or for that matter of the Islamic movement, which has a strong base in the place.

Ebtisam Ma’rana, who directed four documentaries in the last few years, all within Israel, faces a similar challenge: her films deal primarily with gender relations in the Arab society.  In Israel they are welcomed as they steer away from dealing with the occupation. But by making films that deal with male oppression in Arab society, she is accused of playing into the hands of the modernist Zionist discourse and reinforcing stereotypes about Arab culture. ‘The reality of Palestinian society in Israel is an outcome of the occupation,’ she says, ‘but I cannot continue blaming it all on politics or the operation of the security services (shabak). I have something to say to my own society as well, specifically about the social codes regarding women. We have an open wound that requires treatment and it is about time we start. Exposing things is part of the treatment.’

The fiction film, A Sense of Need (Chady Srur, 2003), and the award-winning short, Be Quiet (Sameh Zoabi, 2005), engage with questions of national identity and feelings of belonging, marking a space of ‘in-betweenness’. Be Quiet takes place on the road between Jenin and Nazareth, as young Ibrahim and his father are returning from the funeral of Ibrahim’s uncle. Along the short journey, instead of keeping quiet and allowing his father to negotiate with Palestinian snipers and Israeli soldiers at checkpoints, Ibrahim insists on asking questions. He demands to know what was really the cause of his uncle’s death in Jenin, not satisfied with his father’s dismissive answer of ‘heart problems’. He asks, ‘Why do we have different coloured car plates than our relatives in Jenin?’ and when his father replies that it is so ‘people can tell the difference’, he insists on understanding who those people are and exactly which difference. The physical journey and the seemingly naive questions of Ibrahim, can be understood metaphorically as a journey of self-assertion. Zoabi’s Palestinian-Israeli child, like many members of his generation, is no longer willing to keep quiet and accept things as they are. A Sense of Need tells the story of Yussuf/Joseph, a Palestinian-Israeli who grapples with his identity while studying in the US. As in Be Quiet, Joseph is positioned physically and metaphorically ‘in-between’ Israel and Palestine. The 1967 border actually goes through his room in Jerusalem. His ‘in–betweenness’ is also manifested in recurring fantasies in which Joseph imagines himself to be Jewish: images of him wearing a yarmulke appear thoughout the narrative, he narrates that he was mistakenly swapped with a Jewish baby at birth and he is even mistaken for a Jew. In the US, introducing himself as coming from Jerusalem, he is embraced by representatives of both Jewish and Palestinian diasporic communities, each assuming immediately that he ‘belongs’ to them.

Joseph’s ‘in-betweenness’, however, assists him when he is confronted with the brutality of the occupation. One poignant scene depicts a military night search in his home in East Jerusalem. Resonating with similar scenes from other films about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the scene starts with the Israeli soldiers breaking into the house, intruding on an intimate moment between Joseph and a Palestinian girl. Initially, the soldiers are depicted as senseless, automaton-like figures — a depiction which seems to borrow from Elia Slieman’s films — but later the scene shifts to show a more complex and multi-layered ‘negotiation’ between the parties. As the scene unfolds it is Joseph’s command of the four languages spoken in the room (Arabic, Hebrew, English and Russian) and his exclusive ability to oscillate between all the points of view in the room (an Israeli solider, a Russian-Israeli soldier and his Palestinian girlfriend), that manages to dissolve the potentially explosive situation.

In the past, making Palestinian films in Israel was virtually impossible. Recently, despite the lack of infrastructure, minimal cinematic culture and political restrictions, the production of Palestinian films has increased. In the last four years, not just the number of films produced but the number of students studying film has increased. Anan Barakat has established the Arab Cinema School in Nazareth, which he runs almost single-handedly. In the town of Taybe, the Almanar College offers cinema and television studies for Arab students, particularly girls, and in Jaffa, Scandar Kufti started local cinema workshops that aim to engage with the city’s past and present. These initiatives — all led by pioneering individuals — aim to foster local cultural production, free to express itself and tackle issues relevant to the Palestinian society in Israel.

Funding for these films is a tremendous problem. From 1995 until today, different Israeli film funds have financed around eight Palestinian fiction films and thirty documentaries. Broadcasting is a source of funding, and a small number of documentaries were commissioned by different broadcasters. The Second Authority for Television and Radio is committed to produce a certain amount of public service programmes and between 1999 and 2003 it produced 178 documentaries. Only three of these 178 were made by Palestinian directors, hardly a number that corresponds to the ratio of Palestinian citizens in the Israeli population (almost twenty per cent to date). The part played by the public service television of IBA (Israel Broadcast Authority) in financing Palestinian films is negligible, despite its obligation to produce and broadcast in Arabic.

Only a small number of independent Palestinian production companies are currently in business, but most of them manage to survive financially through production of news items rather than films. The lack of infrastructure for cinema exhibition or education is an additional problem. There are no cinema halls in the Arab towns in Israel. The only cinematheque in operation is the El Sana cinematheque in Nazareth, which is funded by private donations rather than public funding. Sapha Dabur, one of the managers, says ‘Our application for funding is rejected repeatedly because we do not meet the minimum number of screenings of Israeli films. But our audience is not interested in Hebrew-speaking films. The whole point of the cinemateque in Nazareth is that it will meet the demand of the Palestinian public to see films in their own language: Arabic’.

Making a Palestinian film inside Israel, with Israeli funding, is not only financially difficult but ideologically fraught. Those who desire the end of Israeli occupation find it hard to work with the the Occupier. Those who try to work from ‘within’ often come up against prejudice from international distributors. In the contemporary Western film markets, commissioners and distributors are largely interested in the militant conflict that takes place in Gaza and the West Bank. Audiences are accustomed to seeing Israelis and Palestinians in their by-now iconic representation of ‘soldiers’, ‘resistance fighters’ or ‘civilians at checkpoints’. Films that deal with the complex realities of Palestinians in Israel are thought to be too complicated and obscure.

All in all, the voice of Palestinian filmmakers in Israel is one that is hardly heard in the cacophony that the conflict produces, but it is one worth listening to. Viewed together, these films hold up a mirror to Israeli society and tell us about the social and political dynamics that are currently in operation in Israel/Palestine, if not about the discourse of the conflict in general.

Yael Friedman is a film scholar completing a PhD. about Palestinian filmmaking at the University of Westminster.

‘Hey, I may loathe myself, but it has nothing to do with the fact that I’m Jewish.’ (Larry David)

The late Lenny Bruce famously defined ‘Jewish’ as anything edgy, ethnic, urban and subversive, despite its origins. Dylan Thomas: Jewish. Ray Charles: Jewish. ‘Goyish’ was, by contrast, anything conservative, safe and associated with the sterility of the suburbs. This devotion to the subversive goes back to some of the most sacred roots of Judaism since Abraham broke his father’s idols and has long been a source of pride but also division between Jews and their neighbours. It is a division more felt than seen, but one which lies at the heart of Jewish comedy in North America. Through his ground-breaking work in first Seinfeld and then Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David appears to have achieved the impossible and made the Jewish ‘Jewish’.

Folklore scholars distinguish ‘esoteric’ knowledge (that which a group knows among themselves) from the ‘exoteric’. Jews, a nation of wanderers who have often needed to ‘depend on the kindness of strangers’, are masters at balancing the esoteric and exoteric. When the authorities banned the teaching of Hebrew, the ancient Jews used the dreidl as a covert way to teach it to their children in the form of a harmless game. Thousands of years on, Jews continue this practice, creating harmless entertainments that come loaded with esoteric cultural transmissions, beyond the sights of those kind, yet unsettling, strangers.

Jewish audiences have been ‘reading’ Jewish since the first wave of Jewish comics entered the mainstream entertainment industry at the end of the twentieth-century. Ethnic Jewish comedy prior to this drew on the Jewish experience, creating situations in which the vulnerable, oppressed immigrant became the victor — or the patsy. Eager to catch this wave of Jewish talent and make it accessible to everyone from Baltimore to Iowa producers tried to whitewash the ethnic elements from these acts. Jewish stage comedians, such as the Marx Brothers and Jack Benny, contrived ways to be funny which did not use their heritage in an overt way. However, no matter how these comics (and their business agents) tried to play down the Jewish difference in their work, Jews in the audience still read the hidden Jewishness of these acts. During the Golden Age of television, this double consciousness of viewers continued — Jewish audiences read Jewish comedians with a layer of cultural understanding unnecessary for the average non-Jewish viewer in Kansas.

It was not until recently that the hidden Jewishness of today’s comedians came out into the open, and this openness is due, in part, to the work of Larry David, which continues to express many deeper truths about the Jewish male in America today. For nearly the past twenty years — two decades of Larry David worming his way into the public consciousness — we have witnessed the flip side of the ‘Americanization of the Jews’: David seems intent on ‘Judaizing America’. His philosophy is apparently, ‘Be yourself, and let the others catch up.’ And he has done this with remarkable success, blurring the lines between the ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’, and making room for a more fluid, open Jewishness in American culture.

Larry David’s shuffle into the public eye began with Seinfeld (1990-98), the hit sitcom he created with fellow comedian and friend, Jerry Seinfeld. Featuring Jerry Seinfeld, supposedly as he really was, this show followed the antics of Jerry and his three best friends, George, Elaine and Kramer. It was, truly, a show about nothing — about trying to make money by selling old vintage clothes purloined from a parent’s attic; about losing your car in a parking garage; about waiting for a table; about the hassles that come from trying to do a good deed. It was a show exploring the universal minutiae of modern life, and it became an enduring classic. However, for those familiar with Jewish culture, Seinfeld was nothing short of Talmudic. The show was a rabbinic kibbitz on the meaning of proper social interaction — what a mensch would do in various modern circumstances. Yet, for gentile audiences the humour appeared to be universal.

This universal appeal shows us that perhaps Jewish humour is universal, especially in light of other Jewish actors, such as Woody Allen, who have made the modern Jewish male the Every Man of contemporary life. Certainly, many aspects of Jewish alienation and obsessive analysis resonate with the wider post-millenial angst of Western cultures. But Seinfeld is also a masterpiece of sustained, coded Jewishness which is ‘activated’ through the decoding of Jewish audiences. While very few episodes actually dwell on Jerry’s Jewish background, many of the jokes have a further depth if looked at with an understanding of the Jewishness at work in the sitcom. When Jerry spends a showing of Schindler’s List, for instance, making out with his girlfriend, it is left to audiences to fathom his parents’ horror.

Seinfeld also took Jewishness on TV to new levels of visibility. Starting out, in the pilot episode ‘The Seinfeld Chronicles’ (1989), David and Seinfeld stepped forth with a bland, un-ethnic plot in keeping with NBC’s whitewashed policy. Naturally, the tenor and the dialogue of the sitcom were Jewish from the beginning, but only insofar as it was based in New York, the classic location of Jewish culture in America. (The one possible exception to this was the transgressive Woody Allen impersonation put forth by Jason Alexander, as George.) However, as the show became more successful, the writers’ chutzpah grew, and Seinfeld’s Jewish world snuck further and further out of its network closet.

While Jerry himself was clearly not a practising Jew, his Jewishness became key to understanding his social milieu. No more the token Jew within a hegemonic WASP cohort, Seinfeld showed a society in which Jewishness was the norm and the gentile the outsider. New York, it asserts, is a shtetl, where everyone is Jewish. So absolute is the Jewish milieu that great comedy is wrung from the discovery of two token gentiles hidden in the mix. Elaine, played by the Jewish Julia Louis-Dreyfus, glories in her ‘shicksappeal’ and the wild Kramer (who rings as a Jewish character) is inexplicably non-Jewish.This is certainly the first time anyone has been surprised to find a gentile in American television.

While much attention has been given to the Jewishness of Jerry Seinfeld himself, there is one character that deserves more attention — George Costanza. George exemplifies the fact that Jewishness is a matter of performance and reading in American pop-culture, rather than one of professed religion, self-identification or even surname. The name Costanza was adopted from an old college friend of the real-life Seinfeld and is assumedly Italian. Jason Alexander, the Jewish actor who played George so brilliantly for nine years, admits that his early performance was essentially a Woody Allen impersonation, enough to make Jewish audiences, and most American audiences, read George as Jewish. However, the most compelling reason one might read George as a Jewish character is the fact that he was based on Larry David himself. Once this fact was discovered by Alexander, the character of George became, instead of Woody Allen, a Larry David impersonation. The transition was absolute. Everything is present — from Larry David’s baldness and defensive personality to a couple of remarkable real-life events (such as quitting a job on Friday, thinking the better of it over the weekend, and then returning to work on Monday and trying to pretend it was a joke). His shady ethics and weasel-like survival skills are a modern reworking of the old Vaudevillian re-appropriation of anti-Semitic slights. His physical presence — his voice, short stature and effeminate hands — resonates with the perception of the Diaspora Jewish male as weak and unhealthy. His argumentative obsession with ethics and etiquette separates him from mainstream WASP America. George is chutzpah personified.

Seinfeld carried a brand of secular, New York based and non-political Jewishness into American homes every week. In this way the Jewish male, albeit in a sanitized and standardized form, was brought ‘out of the closet’ in the American media, paving the way for a new, overt performance of Jewishness which brought the same Larry David global success with Curb Your Enthusiasm. The format of CYE is the same as Seinfeld: a show about the fictitious ‘real life’ of the protagonist, this time the successful producer of Seinfeld, Larry David, played by himself. However, CYE breaks out of the network sound stage and takes comedy to the streets — the camera work and settings make it look more like a documentary or reality show than a conventional sitcom, and its partially scripted, improvised dialogue lends an air of reality to it that might be misleading. The multiple layers of representation play with reality, along with the show’s self-conscious construction of Jewishness.

In this knowing and solipsistic way, Larry David raises core questions of what it means to be Jewish in contemporary America. Despite living the American dream and achieving success in American showbusiness, Larry David still represents himself as an outsider: the classic schnook, a man thwarted at every stage. Vain, insensitive and obnoxious, he is certainly no hero by mainstream American standards; in fact, he is George Costanza amplified to an even less likeable degree, but neither does he really deserve the unreasonable punishments and torments he receives at every turn. He is cheated by neighbours and victimized by freak tribulations that build upon one another to ruin his plans. To live as a Jew, he appears to say, is to suffer. To suffer, at least as a Jew on TV, is to kvetch in a comedic way.

The overt Jewishness of the Larry David anti-hero is made more explicit by setting the sitcom in LA. If New York is a byword for Jewish ethnicity, it would appear that you can take the Jew out of New York, but you can’t take New York out of the Jew. Operating in a California estate, Larry’s character is one forged in a Brooklyn apartment building, growing up in a corridor inhabited by several units of the same family, all in each other’s business and faces. His interactions are loud, familiar and confrontational. He is the reminder of European grime in a world of American Formica. Tired of the WASPs among whose coded niceties he feels so alien, he begs his non-Jewish wife to invite ‘some Goldbergs, a few Schwartzes, anything in that family’ to their next supper party. It was a stroke of genius to give Larry a non-Jewish wife. His childless relationship with Cheryl and their constant miscommunication is a microcosm of Larry’s relationship to gentile society, perhaps emblematic of the relationship of the Jew to America. Initially Larry has no qualms about intermarriage, but all manner of social angst arises from this union. Cheryl insists at one stage upon joining the country club, oblivious to its history of anti-Semitism and her husband’s horror.

In Season Five, in particular, Curb Your Enthusiasm tackles Jewish rituals and tradition head on. In ‘The Christ Nail’, Cheryl’s parents fetishize, much to Larry’s amusement, a prop nail from the film The Passion.The reference to the crucifixion as well as Mel Gibson’s off-screen antics is a double dose of anti-Semitism and, amusingly, also plays on the dual religions of Christianity and Hollywood. Meanwhile, Larry’s elderly, observant father is coming to visit and Larry realises their house has no mezuzah. Trying to hang one in a panic, he finds the Christ Nail and without compunction uses the prop of the Hollywood crucifix to pin one of the most ancient and sacred of Jewish objects to his modern home. Jewishness is a matter of obligation, tradition and family.

In both ‘The Ski Lift’ and ‘The Baptism’, however, David doesn’t just explore his discomfort with gentile society, but his own discomfort with Jewish society. In ‘The Ski Lift’, David attempts to befriend the Orthodox head of a group that assigns donated kidneys on behalf of his friend Richard Lewis. In order to do this, he plays Orthodox with no real knowledge of Orthodoxy, stumbling over the finer points of kashrut and halacha, caricaturing Jewish cadences and speech rhythms and inventing guttural, Yiddish-sounding words. In ‘The Baptism,’ he inadvertently disrupts the baptism of Cheryl’s sister’s Jewish fiancé, about to convert to Christianity. At this moment of interruption, the would-be convert has an epiphany and realises he had been about to give away a priceless legacy. He thanks Larry for saving him.The two families, Jewish and Christian, immediately polarize and the ancient hatred between the groups erupts. Larry, horrified at the furore he has inspired, attempts to smoothe ruffled feathers on the Christian side of the room, claiming that the fiancé’s Jewishness means nothing to him. However, on the Jewish side of the room, he soaks up their thanks, encouraging them to see his accidental disruption as a heroic act of Jewish defiance. Ironically, Season Five ends with the revelation that David’s character was born to gentile parents, and only adopted by Jews (whom his birth parents describe in the crudest stereotypes: ‘the guy was nervous’ and ‘the woman was loud,’). Before David’s Jewish identity is questioned, the soundtrack is colourful and almost klezmatic — after he discovers his gentile roots, it becomes ‘all-American’ and folkish. The tank-top clad, gentile Larry David becomes calm, socially smooth and bland, at peace with the world. His serenity is short-lived as the adoption story turns out to be a case of mistaken identity.The trauma of realising he is Jewish after all provokes an extended flashback of the insults and confrontations of the past five seasons. It culminates in a blow-up that shatters his vision of the perfect, non-denominational Heaven.

But what makes such a wide audience watch this essentially Jewish discourse? To what can the phenomenal popularity of Curb Your Enthusiasm be ascribed? It is at the forefront of the American HBO’s new genre of independent ‘cringe’ comedy shows — with situations that are not only excruciatingly funny, but are often plain excruciating. This discomfort and friction resonate, perhaps, as a universal experience. However, I would argue that part of CYE’s popularity is due to the ground laid by Larry David’s work for NBC. He has processed and delivered Jewishness to the new generations of television viewers, no matter their origins, who seek a new, cosmopolitan understanding of modern life. Though operating under the constraints of NBC’s ‘notes’, he managed to train American audiences not only to tolerate but to embrace Jewishness as a form of comic, urban chic — making Jewishness, in the words of Lenny Bruce, ‘Jewish’.

As for the Jewish audience, there is still joy in watching Larry David work. Certainly there is great comedy in the outed Jewish male struggling to negotiate WASP culture. But there is also a strong Jewish desire to read oneself into the Larry David character which cannot be understood in terms of Jewish self-hatred. Rather it reveals a need to express Jewish ‘difference’. Through ‘reading Jewish’ — understanding the subtle musical cues and material culture accompanying the more overt Jewish plot points and dialogue — a Jewish audience can rehearse its own Jewishness and participate in an imagined Jewish community.

In recent years, a nouveau anti-Semitism has cropped up in cultural studies, aligning Jews with the white, wealthy, capitalist oppressor, as opposed to the oppressed minority. This alignment has placed Jews beyond the interest of post-colonial investigations into race relations and out of the discussion of multiculturalism. In the face of this nouveau anti-Semitism, Larry David’s work reminds us that rumours of the Jewish cultural assimilation in America may be greatly exaggerated. While some scholars are quick to align Jews with the white power base, David’s comedy reflects a time of Jewish oppression, and reminds us that while the glass ceiling might be shattered for Jews in official life, there are still bumps, socially, in America — where a Jewface like him cannot be ‘gentiley’ enough to get into the country club.

With both Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David’s work illustrates a Jewish will to survive, mixed with an enduring pessimism which is the legacy of oppression. While the male protagonists in both sitcoms have achieved success in terms of the American dream, both are stuck in worlds riddled with mysteries, ‘no exit’ signs and offensive behaviour. The humour underscores the Jewish struggle to understand a world in which he has only his wits and tenacity to survive. At this level of reading, Larry David becomes more than a curmudgeon — he becomes a type of Tevye the dairy man for the American entertainment industry.

Holly A. Pearse was a winner of a 2008 Hadassah-Brandeis Institute fellowship for research in the arts and has published in the area of Jewishness and American pop-culture. She is currently working on her dissertation, ‘Where Will They Build Their Nest? Jewish-Gentile Romances in North American Cinema and the Construction of Jewish Identity’.

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.