Documentary delves into Isaac Bashevis Singer’s love of women and their work as his translators
THE MUSES OF BASHEVIS SINGER (Asaf Galay & Shaul Betser, 2014)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Wednesday, January 14, 4:00 & 8:45
Festival runs January 14-29
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com
www.the-muses-of-bashevis-singer.com
Who ever thought that little old Yiddish mensch Isaac Bashevis Singer was such a horndog? Asaf Galay and Shaul Betser begin The Muses of Bashevis Singer, their light and playful documentary, with the following quote from the Nobel Prize-winning author: “In my younger days I used to dream about a harem full of women. Lately I’m dreaming of a harem full of translators. If those translators could be women in addition, this would be paradise on earth.” Well, it seems that Singer, who was born in Poland in 1902, emigrated to the United States in 1935, and died in Florida in 1991 at the age of eighty-eight, found that paradise, as Galay and Betser meet with a series of women who were among many hand-picked by Singer, the man who nearly singlehandedly preserved Yiddish literature in the twentieth century, to serve as his translators, and not necessarily because of their language skills. “There were certain women who were more than just translators to him. It happened quite often,” says his Swedish publisher, Dorothea Bromberg, who also talks about Alma, Singer’s wife of more than fifty years. “He loved her, I’m sure, in his own way,” she adds. “She was very jealous of him, and she was completely right.” Galay and Betser meet with translators Eve Fridman, Evelyn Torton Beck, Dvorah Telushkin, Marie-Pierre Bay, Duba Leibell, and Dr. Bilha Rubenstein as well as Singer biographers Florence Noiville and Janet Hadda, his granddaughters Hazel Karr and Merav Chen-Zamir, Yentl the Yeshiva Boy playwright Leah Napolin, and his longtime secretary and proofreader, Doba Gerber, who share intimate, surprising tales about the author of such books as The Family Moskat, The Magician of Lublin, Shosha, and Enemies, a Love Story and such short stories as “Gimpel the Fool,” “A Friend of Kafka,” and “Zlateh the Goat.”
The seventy-two-minute film, lifted by a bouncy, airy soundtrack by Jonathan Bar-Giora, also includes footage of Singer making speeches, appearing on interview programs, going to a Jewish deli, walking on the Coney Island boardwalk, and writing with pen on paper and on a typewriter with Yiddish characters. But as the title implies, The Muses of Bashevis Singer doesn’t depict him as a callow cad but as a determined writer — and father and husband — who just loved women, loved being surrounded by women, using them as inspiration for his marvelous stories that mixed fiction with reality. “Isaac was a very frisky old man,” says Leibell, who worked with Singer in his later years after he moved to Florida with Alma. “That’s to put it very mildly.” The Muses of Bashevis Singer will have its U.S. premiere as the opening-night selection of the New York Jewish Film Festival on January 14 with screenings at 4:00 and 8:45 at the Walter Reade Theater, both followed by Q&As with the directors. The twenty-fourth annual festival continues through January 29 with screenings and special events at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum.
Named Best Documentary at the 2013 Haifa International Film Festival, Yael Reuveny’s Farewell, Herr Schwarz offers a unique look at the Holocaust and its continuing effects on her and her family through three generations. “We were raised to reject the Diaspora,” the Israeli-born, Berlin-based writer and director says near the beginning of her first feature-length film. “I was supposed to be ‘the new Jew’ but somehow I ended up living in Germany, in the land I wasn’t allowed to set foot in. I wasn’t allowed to be here because of my grandmother’s story. But still, her story, which haunted my childhood, eventually made me build my home here.” And a haunting story it is, filled with intrigue, mystery, and powerful emotions. Sensitively shot by cinematographer Andreas Kohler and featuring an elegiac score by Volker “Hauschka” Bertelmann, the film explores what happened between Reuveny’s grandmother, Michla Schwarz, and Michla’s beloved brother, Feiv’ke. During the war, Feiv’ke was sent to the Schleiben concentration camp in Germany, where Michla thought he perished. Yet Reuveny discovers that her great-uncle actually survived the Holocaust but remained in the same town he had been held in, changing his first name to Peter, marrying a non-Jewish German woman whose brother was a Nazi, and starting a family.
Film Forum is ringing in 2015 with the greatest American movie ever made, the epic Citizen Kane, kicking off a massive centennial celebration of the birth of its creator, the rather iconoclastic writer, director, producer, actor, and wine spokesman Orson Welles. In 1941, a young, brash, determined Welles shocked Hollywood with a masterpiece unlike anything seen before or since — a beautifully woven complex narrative with a stunning visual style (compliments of director of photography Gregg Toland) and a fabulous cast of veterans from his Mercury radio days, including Everett Sloane, Joseph Cotten, Ray Collins, Paul Stewart, and Agnes Moorehead. Each moment in the film is unforgettable, not a word or shot out of place as Welles details the rise and fall of a self-obsessed media mogul. The film is prophetic in many ways; at one point Kane utters, “The news goes on for twenty-four hours a day,” foreseeing today’s 24/7 news overload. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve never seen it and you know what Rosebud refers to; the film is about a whole lot more than just that minor mystery. Like every film the Wisconsin-born Welles made, Citizen Kane was fraught with controversy, not the least of which was a very unhappy William Randolph Hearst seeking to destroy the negative of a film he thought ridiculed him. Kane won only one Oscar, for writing — which also resulted in controversy when Herman J. Mankiewicz claimed that he was the primary scribe, not Welles. The film lost the Academy Award for Best Picture to John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, but it has topped nearly every greatest-films-of-all-time list ever since.
