Tommywood

THE IMMORTAL MR. GOLD

2008-08-17T19:04:33Z

August 12, 2008

Herb Gold, elder statesman of the Beat Generation, writes on

"Still Alive! (A Temporary Condition)" by Herbert Gold (Arcade, $25).

Herbert Gold, who at 84 is among the elder statesmen of the Beat Generation, has a new book out, his 28th, a memoir titled "Still Alive! (A Temporary Condition)."

It is not an autobiography so much as a series of recollections of encounters with people who have been part of his life

-- neighbors, friends, family, lovers.

"I didn't really want to write my history." Gold said recently. "What impelled this book -- what I wanted to do -- was a meditation on age and the changes that happen and memories that happened."

What I found striking about "Still Alive" is that Gold often writes about people whom it is clear he didn't like much.

"People who have an impact on your life are often people you don't like," Gold told me when I mentioned this.

Fair enough. So we proceeded to talk about Gold's life and some of the people he has known along the way, as well as the books he has written.

Gold was born in 1924 in Cleveland, Ohio, a city he often calls, "The Paris of Northeastern Ohio," and he was raised in Lakewood, a suburb where his next-door neighbor gave him his first taste of anti-Semitism. Not that the observance of Judaism interested him. Although Gold went to synagogue, he didn't like the rabbi and never became a bar mitzvah. After graduating high school, he spent a year hitchhiking around the country, taking odd jobs, writing poems. His parents wanted him to stay in Cleveland and attend college there and then go on to medical school. Instead, he was accepted at Columbia College in New York, where he went with the ambition of being a writer.

It was at college that he first met Allen Ginsberg.

"He was 17. He was a bit crazy, and he was more eccentric than I was," Gold said.

They became friends, and Ginsberg soon surrounded himself with what would become known as The Beat Generation. Gold disagreed with Ginsberg about two things: one was Ginsberg's conviction that Gold should become a homosexual ("Ginsberg was a proselytizer," Gold said), and the other was Jack Kerouac, who was a football player then -- not a writer. Gold did not like him.

"I crossed the street to avoid him," Gold said.

He also said that he knew even then that Kerouac was an anti-Semite (as Kerouac revealed himself to be in his last days), and he cites Ginsberg's affection for Kerouac as an example of Ginsberg's ability "to forgive people's sins."

A Fulbright Fellowship sent Gold to Paris, where he finished his first novel, launched his literary career and became friends with Saul Bellow.

In "Still Alive!" Gold draws an amusing and insightful portrait of the pleasures and difficulty of friendship with Bellow, young and old.

When Gold's first marriage, to Edith Zubrin, ended in divorce, he found himself in tough economic straits, he recalled. In our conversation, Gold said that although his first wife "was not a good person," he still felt terribly bereft when he recently learned that she had died.

To pay child support (they had two daughters, Ann and Judith), he became "the writing factory."

Gold wrote for Playboy and its imitators, publications with names such as Dude, Gent, Nugget and Coronet -- not always using his real name. As he recalled, Playboy paid well -- "with a feature inside the magazine, you could buy a VW, and with a lead feature you could buy a VW convertible."

He moved around the country, spending the winter in Florida -- "you could rent an apartment in South Beach on Collins for $2 a week; $2.50 with air conditioning." He spent time in South Carolina, in New York, even back in Cleveland, where he edited a listings publication titled "What, Where, When." He took odd jobs; he taught at colleges and universities. Eventually, he said, "I was able to dig myself out of that hole."

Gold settled in San Francisco just in time for a front-porch view of the '60s.

"I had a wonderful time," Gold recalled of the era. "There was a loosening of the barrier between the sexes, which has endured. Popular music became more interesting. There was a lot of fun being had. And fun is not to be derogated."

Gold explained that part of why hippie culture flourished "was economic. People could really make out without much."

But in "Still Alive!" Gold casts a jaundiced eye at some of what he calls "the nutty" aspects of the times, such as "the idiot radicals, those who thought the Cultural Revolution in China was a great thing."

In the book, Gold speaks of one friend explaining that it couldn't be bad, given that "it's Culture and it's a Revolution."

One of the reasons that Gold has tremendous affection for the '60s is because that was when he met his second wife, Melissa Dilworth, just around the time "Fathers," his most successful novel, was published ("Fathers" finally afforded Gold some measure of financial security).

Gold writes very movingly of Melissa, the mother of his children Nina, Ari and Ethan. She is very present in "Still Alive" and his love for her still feels keen.

In the book, however, Gold describes how one couple kept encouraging Melissa to leave him to forge her own identity. Gold describes how all the marriages around them came apart, with the women running off, until their own marriage, like the last in a series of dominoes, fell.

"The idea that friends of ours could propagandize for our divorce" still rankles Gold.

Yet in our conversation, Gold also spoke of his wife's "restlessness" as being the chief cause of their marriage's dissolution.

Whatever the reason, he remained close with her and had made plans for them to have lunch for her birthday in 1991, when he learned that she had died in a helicopter crash with the man she was going to marry, concert promoter Bill Graham, whose foundation she had run.

The other great love of Gold's life has been Haiti, which he has traveled to on and off over the last five decades -- a heartbreaking story that Gold told me "just gets worse and worse."

Strangely enough it was in Haiti that an Israeli, Shimon Tal, made it a Jewish place for him.

Gold's Jewish adventures in Haiti are described in his book "My Last Two Thousand Years," which I also read in preparation for meeting Gold. It is a wonderful, moving book that describes the journey by which he embraced his Jewish identity, a book he told me he wanted to call "Being and Becoming." Gold speaks movingly about the anti-Semitism he encountered as a child in Lakewood and in his early professional life; about the way people danced on the streets of the Upper West Side the night Israel became a State (although he and his first wife, being "internationalists," didn't see the point of creating new countries), and how he changed his mind and embraced the Jewish state in visits to Israel in 1958, on the occasion of its 10th anniversary, and shortly after the Six-Day War in 1967.

Gold has been a prolific writer of novels, short stories and nonfiction. In addition to "Fathers," his novels include "Salt," "She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me," "The Man Who Was Not With It" and, one of my favorites, "A Girl of Forty," which I recently re-read.

"A Girl of Forty" holds up, but like many a novel one returns to, I found reading it now a different experience. Originally I was entranced by the portrait of Suki, the free-spirited woman at the center of the novel. Today, I read the novel more as a cautionary tale of the checks that became due after the '60s, and about coming to peace with the casualties caused.

Gold's reportage has included books on Biafra ("Biafra Goodbye"); his book on Haiti ("Best Nightmare on Earth"); and that republic of the soul, Bohemia and its earthly manifestations as chronicled by Gold ("Bohemia: Where Art, Angst, Love and Strong Coffee Meet").

Over the years, as "writer in residue," as Gold calls it, at several colleges he has known or befriended many other writers of note. At Cornell he taught and knew Richard Farina and Thomas Pynchon. At SUNY Binghamton he was a teaching colleague of a young Richard Price. Although he is no name-dropper, the list of writers Gold has known is as wide as it is varied. During our conversation, there were few names that came up that Gold did not have an anecdote about (and usually a good one).

Gold is fit, spry and looks younger than his 84 years; he spoke with me at his son Ari's apartment. Gold may be an "old guy" (his term) but he remains as much a bohemian and a beatnik as he was when those terms were batted around more regularly.

As our time together ran out, I reminded Gold that "Fathers" told the story of an 80-year-old father visiting his son, a father who declares that he's "still alive" -- and here was Gold, at 84, at the home of one of his sons, having written a memoir by the same name. What perspective did he now enjoy that he didn't then?

He said that back then, he regarded his father as old, in a way that his children didn't with him, in part because of his good health, but also because he had stuck to a bohemian way of dress and life. Also his father wasn't so supportive of Gold's artistic ambitions, while he fully supports the aspirations of his children, mentioning that his sons, Ari and Ethan, are both artists. (Ari and Ethan are in a band, The Honey Brothers, which also features Entourage star Adrian Grenier on drums; and Ari is the producer, director and star of the independent feature, "The Adventures of Power," which, based on its trailer, appears to be a "Napoleon Dynamite"-ish tale of an air-drumming competition).

In the afterword to "Still Alive!" Gold writes, "these pages are about love and memory, about why both are blessings and sorrows and a form of immortality."

At the start of our conversation, Gold had said to me that the concept of an afterlife "is very weak among Jews. We must make our heaven on our earth."

Immortality, Gold said, comes in the form of our children and our children's children. And for writers, in wanting their books to last. By all those standards, Herbert Gold is not only "Still Alive!" -- he's immortal.

Tom Teicholz is a film producer in Los Angeles. Everywhere else, he's an author and journalist who has written for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. His column appears every other week.

Waxing Roth

2008-07-24T17:27:42Z

The movie, "Elegy," which opens Aug. 8 and stars Ben Kingsley as David Kepesh and Penelope Cruz as the object of his desire, is the latest film to be adapted from the writings of Philip Roth. This one is based on his novella, "The Dying Animal."

Despite Roth's long, successful career in American letters, his track record on film has been far spottier. Yet "Elegy," directed by Isabel Coixet, who is Spanish, has created a certain buzz: Could it be that a woman, a European -- albeit working in English -- is what it takes to successfully translate Roth's work to film?

Let me get back to you on that. First, to set "Elegy" in context, I decided to watch every film adapted from Roth's work.

My mission started simply enough: a quick search on imdb.com turned up a succinct list of eight works on film and TV, stretching back to the 1950s.

Some had never been released on video, some are only in VHS, some were available at the local video store, some had to be tracked down in specialty shops or in university or museum archives. My quest led me across Los Angeles and afforded me the pleasure of visiting some of the city's most beautiful libraries and research facilities, as well as some of its best-stocked video stores.

In 1960, Roger Corman produced "The Battle of Blood Island," which was adapted from a 1958 short story that ran in Esquire titled, "Expect the Vandals." Shot in black and white and only 64 minutes long, "Blood Island" is part of a trilogy of films Corman made in Puerto Rico.

Netflix carries this film as a DVD double feature, paired with a non-Roth film called, "Shell Shock" (that has nothing to do with Roth). Locally, "Blood Island" can't be found at Blockbuster, the Santa Monica or Los Angeles public libraries or such local rare video sources as CineFile or Vidiots.

So, I turned to my video store of last resort, Eddie Brandt's Saturday Matinee on Tujunga Avenue in North Hollywood, a shop whose eccentric and extensive film collection rarely disappoints.

It was there that I found one lonely DVD of the film. The story is set on an island in the South Pacific, where two American soldiers, Moe and Ken, are the only survivors of an attack on Japanese forces and are forced to hide out and get along. Moe is a 35-year-old Jewish accountant, with a wife and kids back home, who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddish expressions. Ken, who was injured in the attack and whom Moe must take care of (but resents doing so) is a younger, more naive, all-American kid. Moe is not very likeable, but we understand his predicament. At one point, Ken, pushed to the end of his rope, makes an anti-Semitic jab at Moe. We know Ken didn't really mean it, but Moe feels Ken's comment justifies his worldview.

In the end, the two are rescued -- just before the island is to be used as a nuclear test site. The film is more a character study than anything else, and our feelings about Moe are left unresolved. Nonetheless, Moe represents an early proto-Roth protagonist, one who has not yet moved beyond ethnic identity, but remains plenty angry.

Roth's next adaptation to film appeared in October 1960, when "The Contest for Aaron Gold," originally published in 1955 as a short story in EPOCH, appeared as an episode of the television series, "Alfred Hitchcock Presents."

I first turned to the Paley Center for Media's library, but they did not have a copy. They directed me to the UCLA Film & Television Archive, which had a copy that I was allowed to screen only in the media lab of UCLA's Powell Library. The special treat here was Powell Library, which stands across from Royce Hall on the UCLA campus and is worth visiting just for the beauty of its main reading room. "The Contest for Aaron Gold" is noteworthy because its Philip Roth-esque lead is played by the recently deceased Sydney Pollack, who turns in a credible performance as a sculptor who has taken a job as the ceramics instructor at a summer camp. In the film, all the characters have Jewish last names, but there is no mention of the place being a Jewish summer camp, or of the campers or the counselors being Jewish. But there is some tension here between the lead character trying to stand up for his artistic beliefs and not cave in to the pressures of the man running the place -- some of the issues around money and career that arise later in "Goodbye, Columbus." "The Contest" ends with a twist suitable for Alfred Hitchcock. As a one-hour episodic TV drama, albeit a slightly obvious and gimmicky one, I found it satisfying and enjoyable.

Almost a decade passed before the next Roth work turned up on the screen. By the time it did, Roth had become celebrated, and somewhat notorious, for both his first collection of short stories, "Goodbye, Columbus," which came out in 1959, and for "Portnoy's Complaint," published in 1968. Both were made into films, and both star Richard Benjamin.

"Goodbye, Columbus," released in 1969, launched the careers of both Benjamin and Ali McGraw. This film was easy to find; a copy was readily available at the Santa Monica Public library.

Watching "Goodbye, Columbus" at half a century's remove from the short story's original publication is a strange experience. I found myself as ambivalent about Benjamin's Neil Klugman as he was about the Patimkin family. To me, the Klugmans and the Patimkins each seemed to be playing out their own strategy for rising above their immigrant backgrounds: One sought insulation from the evils of the world in books, the others in business and material goods. I found it hard to be judgmental, because I found them so much more alike than different.

McGraw's Brenda Patimkin was a far more sympathetic character than I recalled. Klugman, by contrast, never really seemed to care for Brenda beyond his desire for her (a trait common to Roth characters that would be examined in greater detail in "Portnoy"). In the original reviews, the film was praised for its naturalism and its humor, but from the 21st century perspective, I found it a less than satisfying experience.

"Portnoy's Complaint" was published in 1968 to huge acclaim. The 1972 film, written, produced and directed by Ernest Lehman, was considered a huge failure. Lehman was the screenwriter of such classics as "North by Northwest," "Sweet Smell of Success," "West Side Story," "The Sound of Music," "Sabrina" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" -- "Portnoy" is the only film he ever directed.

Watching the movie today, it struck me as yes, failed, but better than its reputation. Lehman chose to take what was in essence a comic monologue and set it as both a story of a love affair and of one man's attempt to heal himself via analysis of that relationship and his prior ones. At the same time, Lehman attempted to show the freedom that the sexual revolution inspired and the consequences of that freedom. Karen Black gives a very strong performance as "the monkey," and Richard Benjamin delivers a more nuanced performance than he gave in "Goodbye, Columbus."

Another 12 years passed before PBS offered up a version of Roth's "The Ghost Writer" as part of its American Masters series in 1984. As far as I can tell, this is the only production for which Roth is credited with collaborating on the script. That may have something to do with the fact that Claire Bloom, whom Roth was then involved with, plays a role in the production.

I had imagined that a copy of this would be at UCLA or available on DVD or VHS, or even offered at Eddie Brandt. But it wasn't. Luckily, it was in the collection of the Paley Center, and I was able to screen it in their library.

Mark Linn-Baker, best known as Benjy Stone in "My Favorite Year" (and who would later gain a measure of cultural currency on the sitcom, "Perfect Strangers") plays the young Nathan Zuckerman, a writer at the start of his career visiting Lonoff, a famous older writer, at Lonoff's country home on the very occasion when Lonoff's wife (Claire Bloom) leaves, and a much younger woman, his former student, urges Lonoff to run off with her. Zuckerman, whose parents and rabbi have rebuked him for the way he portrays Jews in his work, imagines the young woman to be Anne Frank, an Anne who survived the war and is now going to marry him.

Although tension-filled, "The Ghost Writer" unfolds at a somewhat leisurely pace, making the film perhaps not the most exciting adaptation of Roth's work, though certainly one of the most successful, conveying a measure of his writing's literary texture.

Twenty years passed after the PBS version of "The Ghost Writer" before another Roth novel made it to the screen. In the interim, Roth experienced a second wind as a novelist unparalleled in American letters, during which he won almost every major prize and award available to him, including the National Book Critics Award, the Pulitzer Prize and the Pen Faulkner award, among many others. If he were an athlete, you would have him checked for steroids. In this new era, almost everything he wrote was optioned, including "The Human Stain."

"The Human Stain" (2003), which stars Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman, was the easiest of Roth's films I sought out -- Blockbuster had many copies -- but it is probably the least successful adaptation of his work.

I will offer here that I once tried to option "The Human Stain" myself, but was outbid. My thought was to treat it as a murder mystery in which the detective uncovers a secret he had not bargained for. The hoped-for casting was Paul Newman (his agent when approached said, "Bring me an offer") and Ellen Barkin. So perhaps I am biased, but I believe that "The Human Stain" is a miss -- whether you blame it on the casting or for being too faithful to the novel's exposition, the story just doesn't work on screen. The most poignant moments of the novel do not resonate.

Still, watching "The Human Stain" the other night, I was struck by how Roth weaved elements of the personal dramas of Anatole Broyard, who like Roth's hero, reached great heights while leaving his African American heritage behind, and R. B. Kitaj, who blamed his wife's death on those who attacked him -- all the while setting this against the backdrop of the Monica Lewinski affair and the Clinton impeachment investigation.

Which brings us up to "Elegy." David Kepesh, played by Ben Kingsley, is a teacher, a public intellectual. The movie opens with his appearance on Charlie Rose, and he is set up as a man beyond romantic love, an intellectual's Hef, who finds his romance in promiscuity. So, naturally, he is caught off-guard when he falls in love with one of his students, Consuela, a woman 30 years his junior. And when he does, he becomes so obsessively convinced that he will lose her, sooner or later, that he sabotages the relationship. There is also a further irony, an inside joke, almost, for those who know Roth's work, because Kepesh, who venerates Consuela's breasts, is also the protagonist of an earlier Roth work, "The Breast."

Cruz is shot so lovingly in this film, it is hard to believe that she would not entrance anyone. Her work in the films of Pedro Almodóvar have demonstrated her incredible range and talents as an actress, but Coixet provides Cruz her greatest acting opportunity thus far in an English-language film (at least, that is, until Woody Allen's "Vicky Cristina Barcelona").

Coixet also manages to soften the hard edge of Kepesh's narcissism, that same edge that one feels in other films made from Roth's work, such as "Portnoy." Here, we understand how a man of a certain position, of a certain age, manages his private life with both a woman with whom he has had a long affair (played by Patricia Clarkson) and a younger woman.

I will not reveal the twist in the plot, and the denouement of the relationship, but intellectually it is powerful. Unfortunately, it is not as powerful on screen.

In the end, "Elegy" likely will not stand as the best adaptation of Roth's work. Roth's work continues to appeal because of the restless desire of his protagonists and the way he sets their stories against the backdrops of a given time and a given moment in his protagonist's life, as well as the way his character's sex drive acts as his life force. Roth continues to ask: If none of us get out alive, how do we go forward? And when we do, what do we make of this life and our loves?

As I write this, several of Roth's other works remain under option, including "American Pastoral," as well as his forthcoming novel, "Indignation," to be published in September by Houghton Mifflin. Perhaps one of them will transcend its provenance, to be remembered as a great film. But for that, we must still wait -- and watch.

Tom Teicholz is a film producer in Los Angeles. Everywhere else, he's an author and journalist who has written for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. His column appears every other week.

Bela & The Benz

2008-07-07T04:52:38Z

Hatschek Bela.

The very sound of my great-grandfather's name brings a smile to my face.

In Hungarian, last names go first, so although Bela was his first name, he has always been Hatschek Bela to me -- all one name -- a legendary figure in our family, a celebrated forebear about whom my mother and grandmother told stories.

He was famous for being the first man in Hungary to own a car, and my grandmother kept a clipping from the Royal Hungarian Automobile Society with a picture of him seated at the controls of his Benz with a little girl on the rear rumble seat. Beneath the photo was the caption in Hungarian, German and French, proclaiming "Hatsek Bela le premier automobiliste Hongrois sur son voiture Benz en 1895."

The picture always fascinated me. My great-grandfather sits at the control of his open-air Benz looking, with his dark beard and mustache, like Sigmund Freud, smoking a cigar and wearing his homburg tilted at a rakish angle, as well as a suit -- perfectly tailored to show his starched white cuffs. I also loved looking at the little girl sitting at the rear of the vehicle, gazing at the camera like a little doll in her pinafore and large hat -- that was my grandmother, Adrienne, whom I only knew as an old woman.

Hatschek Bela had a Benz before Mercedes did. That was way cool.

My grandmother and mother used to tell stories about Hatschek Bela. From their stories, I took him to be debonair, slightly eccentric, with a healthy sense of humor.

Regarding the famous Benz, the story told in our family is that, one day, Hatschek Bela left on a trip. He disappeared for a few weeks, without anyone really knowing why or where he was going. When he returned, he did so with the vehicle -- transported on a train in its own car. But wait -- there's more: Hatschek did not return alone. He brought back a mechanic from Germany, as well, to care for it.

The car was a curiosity in Budapest. The most famous apocryphal story about Hatschek Bela and the car involves no less grand a personage than Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph. As the story goes, the emperor was visiting Budapest. He was standing on a balcony reviewing a parade when he heard a loud explosion -- he hit the deck, fearing it was an assassination attempt. But someone said, "Don't worry, that's just Hatschek Bela in his car."

I once tried to research this story. All that I could confirm was that the Emperor Franz Joseph did visit Budapest as part of the 1896 celebration of 1,000 years of Hungary's nationhood. However, it does seem possible that the emperor would be reviewing crowds, and that there would be a parade, and that the car would be shown off in some fashion.

Apocryphal or not, Hatschek and the emperor remain a good story, and who knows, it might even be true.

Hatschek Bela died when my mother was just a child. But she remembered him as handsome, always well dressed. And he was vain. He was interested in new inventions. He was fond of having family portraits taken -- there is a story that he gave one to my grandmother. Inscribed on the back, it said: Who are these people?

My grandmother, Adrienne Hatschek Saar Morvai Bogner (she married several times), was the family archivist. She kept a leather portfolio filled with yellowing documents that held the birth, marriage and death records of her family. When she died, it passed to my mother, who really wasn't all that interested. But I was. So the portfolio came into my possession.

Here's where my research began. One day, several years ago, I sat down to sort through the documents that charted our family tree. >From the crumbling yellow pages with handwritten entries, the story of my family emerged.

I learned that Hatschek Bela was born Oct. 25, 1858, in Budapest, the son of Max (Miksa) Hatschek and Julia Boscovitz Hatschek. His father, Max, was a medical doctor, an optician. They lived at 13, Palatinus, in Pest -- an address in the center of the city.

On July 4, 1886, a 28-year-old Hatschek, who by then had become an optician like his father, was married to Gizella Back. She was just 17, according the marriage certificate, the daughter of Fulop Back and Jeannette Reitzer Back. They were married at the Dohány Temple in Budapest (Budapest's largest temple, akin to Temple Emmanuel in New York, or Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles).

My mother always claimed that her great-grandfather, Fulop Back, had been rashe kol (head of the Jewish community in Budapest), and that he was a great rabbi. However, when I visited the Jewish Community Center in 2003, a list of Budapest's rashim kol does not include a Fulop Back. Furthermore, on Hatschek Bela's wedding certificate Fulop Back is listed as a merchant.

I found two possible explanations: The list of rashim kol in Budapest's Jewish Community Center does list a Jozef Boscovitz, who was president of the Jewish community between 1851 and 1858. As Hatschek Bela's mother's maiden name was Boscovitz, perhaps her father was rashe kol and my mother got the sides of the family wrong.

Another is that Fulop was related to Joseph Bach (1784-1866), an important Talmud teacher from Old Buda. He was the first preacher of the Jewish community of Pest, and the first to preach sermons in German rather than Yiddish.

In any event, this was the marriage of two members of Budapest's rising Jewish middle class. The evidence is that Dr. Mayer Kayserling married them at the Dohány Temple.

"Jewish Budapest: Monuments, Rites, History" (Central European University Press, 1999), explains that the Dohány Temple, which had been consecrated in 1859, a year after Hatschek's birth, was symbolic of the rise and self-importance of Pest's Jewish community and their intention to be fully integrated members of the Hungarian nation. The Dohány is a magnificent Moorish-style edifice that can hold 3,000 visitors, where Budapest's version of Reform Judaism, called Neolog, was observed. Although the Dohány had a rabbi, Samuel Kohn, who delivered sermons in Hungarian, they also had Kayserling, who joined the temple in 1879 and was a German Jewish scholar. As subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the majority of the congregation still preferred their sermons in German. Kayserling remained with the Dohány until his death in 1905 -- long enough to see Hatschek Bela in his automobile.

The documents reveal that both Bela and his father, Max, were opticians, a fact that intrigued me. Turning again to "Jewish Budapest," I learned that one of the important early prominent figures in Budapest's Jewish history is Ignac Hirschler (1823-1891), a famous ophthalmologist. He was elected president of the Hungarian Jewish Congress in 1868-1869, was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, as well as a member of Hungary's Upper House of Government and president of the Jewish community.

What direct or indirect influence Hirschler had on the Hatschek family is not known. But I wonder if it is just a coincidence that Max and Bela were opticians, too? Could they be related? Could Hatschek be a Hungarian (Magyarized) version of Hirschler? These are all questions I hope to further research one day.

Regardless, Hatschek Bela was not an eye doctor as much as a businessman. His stationery, a copy of which was sent to me by Hungarian journalist Pal Negyesi, indicates that he owned the "first Hungarian glass eye factory."

Although this may sound a bit odd today, eye injuries and lost eyes were much more common in the age of the sword fight, particularly before eye surgery and repair became more sophisticated. It was also an enterprise in which artistry was valued.

My mother recalled being taken to her grandfather's factory, which her Uncle Hugo ran. A sign with a giant eye hung outside, and my mother recalls finding it frightening -- and memorable.

I also discovered that Hatschek Bela, or at least his factory, also made ocular equipment, such as binoculars. About three years ago, I received an e-mail out of the blue from a man who had purchased a pair on eBay. Upon Googling "Hatschek Bela" he had come across an article I had written and e-mailed me to ask for further details.

While writing this article, I decided to e-mail the man, and ask if he would consider selling me the binoculars. I can report that I am now the proud owner of a pair of World War I-era binoculars. They work, and they came with leather case lined with red silk. Stamped on the case's cover in bold gold letters is "Hatschek Bela," along with the address of his company store, located at 2 Vaci Utca (Budapest's most elegant shopping street -- akin to Rodeo Drive or Fifth Avenue).

Hatschek Bela died on Oct. 23, 1922 (his wife, Gizella Hatschek, died five years later). He had two children, Adrienne (my grandmother), born in 1892, and Hugo, born in 1895. He lived long enough to see Adrienne appear on stage, see her marry and to see his grandchild, Eva (my mother). He lived long enough to see Hugo become an optician and to know that his son would carry on his business. Adrienne lived in the family home and factory at 4 Munkas St. until her own marriage in 1915; Hugo continued to live there until it was taken over by the German SS in 1944.

In 2003, when I visited Budapest, I discovered that -- in the records of the Jewish Community Center at 12 Sip Utca -- Hatschek Bela and Gizella are listed as having been buried at the Kozma Street Jewish cemetery. However, when I visited the cemetery, I could not find their graves. Someone suggested that perhaps someone else had been buried above them. That, too, is a mystery I hope to solve one day (I did find Hugo's grave in the Kozma Street cemetery).

At the same time, I also discovered that my great-great-grandmother, Jeannette Reitzer, Hatschek's mother-in-law, was born in 1849 in Altofen (Old Buda) and died in 1891 in Budapest. Like Dr. Kayserling and other members of the 19th century Budapest bourgeoisie, she is buried in the Salgótarjáni Utca Cemetery. When I visited the cemetery in 2003, I found her grave marker -- a striking black obelisk.

To be able to trace my family's roots in Budapest back to 1849 was very meaningful. To imagine where their lives played out across centuries, to walk down those streets, to see buildings and synagogues and to be able to say my family walked these streets, my family members lived here, they were married in this place and buried here, it gives one a feeling that is larger than one's self -- a connection between present and past, a feeling of history.

As for Hatschek Bela owning Hungary's first automobile, Pal Negyesi, a Hungarian freelance journalist who writes about automobile history, published an article in 2007 that tried to find a definitive answer to who had the first car in history. He could not confirm anything.

As part of my own research, I e-mailed the picture of my great-grandfather in the Benz to Mercedes' own historians in Germany. They confirmed that it was a 1894 "Velo."

According to their records, in 1894 Benz launched the Velociped model -- nicknamed Velo -- a light vehicle that takes its place in history as the first small car and the first series-automobile in the world. The Velo had an engine that produced 1.5 horsepower at 450 revolutions per minute (according to their records, the engine's performance could be improved to 3.5 horsepower at 800 revolutions per minute). The Velo cost 2,000 marks in 1894.

However, Mercedes had no records of Hatschek Bela purchasing a Velo. Their records do indicate that in 1896, a year after the picture was taken, a Benz No. 375 was delivered to Hungary. No recipient is listed.

However, as our family lore has it, Hatschek traveled out of the country and returned with the car. Negyesi in his research turns up newspaper accounts from 1921 and 1967 anointing Hatschek as the first Hungarian automobilist, stating that "Hatschek learnt to drive a bit in Mannheim, Germany and Benz dispatched a ' driver' to Budapest, in order to help Hatschek learn how to properly drive and maintain his car."

This sounds very close to what I heard as a child and also leaves open the possibility that Hatschek purchased his car abroad from a dealer or a private party and then brought it home.

One can certainly question who had the first car, but there is no doubt that Hatschek owned a Benz Velo, and that alone was a pretty remarkable occurrence at that time for anyone -- but certainly for a Jewish citizen of Hungary (although who knows, he may have been dismissed by some as just another of the "nouveau riche" Jewish merchants corrupting Hungary with new ideas).

For me, I look at the picture of Hatschek Bela sitting in his Benz, his calm authority, his debonair charm, his comfort in being modern, his style, and imagine all that as part of my DNA.

Then, as if by magic, it happens again: I start to smile.

Tom Teicholz is a film producer in Los Angeles. Everywhere else, he's an author and journalist who has written for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. His column appears every other week.

Making Book on LA

2008-06-17T18:10:30Z

BookExpo, the annual convention of booksellers and book publishers that took place in Los Angeles one recent weekend, is the book industry's annual get-together, alternating among the publishing hub of New York and various other cities, such as Miami, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.

Perhaps it's the state of the book industry, the economy or just the cost of gas, but this year's convention was not as well attended as in past years. The last time BookExpo was in Los Angeles, the convention floor was constantly, overwhelmingly crowded, with so many booths that the author autographing section had to be relegated to a basement hall.

This time, many editors did not even make the trip, and some publishers or imprints decided not to pay for a stand. For example, I was surprised that Bloomsbury USA didn't have one, given that they represent several Los Angeles authors with just-published or forthcoming books, including Seth Greenland ("Shining City"), Rachel Resnick ("Love Junkie") and Mark Sarvas ("Harry, Revised"). Still, the smaller turnout really didn't put a damper on the excitement, the conviviality and the parties, which seemed to take over Los Angeles from downtown to West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Bel Air and Santa Monica.

At BookExpo, publishers were not only showcasing current titles, they also were trying to create excitement for books that will come out this summer and fall. Translation: Free books were given out.

Among the those I sought while trolling the aisles were the highly anticipated Salman Rushdie novel, "The Enchantress of Florence" (which is already receiving decidedly mixed reviews), Oscar Hijuelos's "Dark Dude" (Atheneum) and Andre Dubus III's "The Garden of Last Days," which is shaping up to be a novel of major importance.

Among the stacks of desired new books were John LeCarre's "A Most Wanted Man" (Knopf), Dennis Lehane's "The Given Day" (Morrow), Michael Connolly's "The Brass Verdict" (Hachette) and Wally Lamb's "The Hour I First Believed" (HarperCollins). Harper is also pushing Alafair Burke's "Angel's Tip" -- if the name seems familiar, it's because Burke's father, James Lee Burke, writes the Dave Robicheaux series.

Just as from small acorns grow large oak trees, small presses sometimes deliver great novels. Steerforth Press, which published Karoly Pap's "Azarel," an undiscovered gem of a novel of pre-war Hungary, was at the convention with Benjamin Taylor's "The Book of Getting Even," which Philip Roth has already hailed as: "Among the most original novels I have read in recent years."

This September, Algonquin books will publish Ariel Sabar's "My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for his Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq." Sabar is a political reporter for the Christian Science Monitor covering this year's presidential campaign. His father, Yona Sabar, is a UCLA professor. The book tells of their father-and-son journey to today's postwar Iraq to visit Yona's birthplace and to reconcile past and present.

Speaking of fathers and sons, Adam Nimoy, son of you-can-guess-who, has written "My Incredibly Wonderful, Miserable Life," which Simon and Schuster has dubbed a "hilarious anti-memoir" about facing life "as a newly divorced father, a fortysomething in the L.A. dating scene, a recovering user and a former lawyer turned director turned substitute teacher ... in search of his true self."

Among the grand dames signing books were Jackie Collins (I passed) and Barbara Walters (I waited in a long line to get a signed copy of "Audition" [Knopf]).

No one likes the expression "chick lit," but what should we call light reads targeted at the "Sex and the City" audience? Female-driven entertainment? Part of the problem is that this grab-bag term encompasses quasi-literary fiction ("Bridget Jones"), commercial fiction ("The Starter Wife") and a sort of gossipy insider's revenge book ("The Devil Wears Prada").

Call them what you like, but buy them you will. Some female-friendly titles you may spot this summer or in early fall include former E! hostess Jules Asner's "Whacked" (Weinstein Books), Julie Buxbaum's "The Opposite of Love" (Dial Press), Claire Lazebnik's "The Smart One and The Pretty One" (5 Spot), subtitled: "A Novel about Sisters" -- (I happen to know one of the sisters, Nell Scovell, but I'm not saying which one I think she is) -- and Jodi Wing's "The Art of Social War" (HarperCollins), which has already been sold to the movies.

Speaking of politics -- and who isn't these days? -- Public Affairs, a division of Perseus Group, is the publisher of Scott McLellan's book, and it has had no problems getting publicity for the book. It also has a book forthcoming about censorship that should generate some debate called, "Obscene in the Extreme," an account of the burning and banning of John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath." It's by Rick Wartzman, a senior Irvine Fellow of the New America Foundation and a former Los Angeles Times Magazine editor.

Public Affairs was launched in 1997 by Peter Osnos, my former editor at Times Books, and I was very happy to run into him, looking dapper as ever, at the Hotel Bel Air, where he was hosting a BookExpo party.

That same night, the New York Review of Books also hosted a party at the Bel Air, and it's worth commending it not only for its party-giving skills, but for its publishing program. Recently, the NYRB Classics have brought back into print editions of Vassily Grossman's masterpiece, "Life and Fate," and the Yiddish classic, "The Family Mashber" by Der Nister.

Most recently, it published new editions of Stefan Zweig's final novel, "Chess Game," and his earlier novella, "The Post Office Girl." Zweig, who committed suicide in 1940, was one of the most-published authors of the first half of the 20th century. The NYRB editions are getting rave reviews and returning Zweig to the popular consciousness.

One of the most interesting and companiable hours I spent at the BookExpo was speaking to Nicolas Neumann, a Paris-based art house publisher. Our meeting occurred because, as I was wandering past his booth, I heard him speaking French.

When I looked up to see the name of his booth, Somogyi, I had to stop.

Eva Somogyi was my mother's stage name in Budapest, so I turned to Neumann and asked point blank: Hungarian or French? The answer, not surprisingly, was both -- the original founder, Somogyi, was of Hungarian parentage, but the publishing house is French. Somogyi turns out to be one of the largest publishers of museum exhibition catalogs in France.

Upon learning that my column appears in The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, Neumann immediately directed my attention to two of his English-language books. One of them is "Human Expressionism: The Human Figure and the Jewish Experience," the companion book to an exhibition this spring at the Musee Tavet-Delacour in Pontoise, a suburb of Paris. The book illustrates a fantastic and very thought-provoking exhibition featuring works by Soutine, Modigliani, Pissaro, Mane-Katz, Lasar Segall, Kitaj and Serge Strosberg, with a wonderful essay by Eliane Strosberg.

Neumann also showed me a book of the death camp drawings of Shelomo Selinger -- really remarkable, haunting work that deserves an American exhibition (Skirball people, are you listening?).

Speaking of art, but on a definitely lighter note, I was happy to run into the folks from BukAmerica -- Gary Kornblau and Lisa Lyons, whose Hollywood-based publishing house creates $1.49 pamphlets that run the gamut from reprints to original works, from a translation of Baudelaire, to the U.S. Constitution, from Ruth Reichl's "The Queen of Mold" to Richard Grossman's "Glossary of Every Humorous Word in the English Language." (Example: "agnify: to dress up as a sheep.")

Also from the local scene was Ammo, an L.A.-based publisher started by Steve Crist, who does very hip books like "Gonzo," about Hunter Thompson, and a series of books by the designer Todd Oldham, including one about John Waters with an essay by Cindy Sherman.

And if you like local, there's Angel City Press, where Paddy Calisto continues to publish fine volumes on Los Angeles' history and culture. I even met Gidget herself, Kathy Zuckerman, at the Santa Monica Press booth, where she and Dominic Priore were signing posters for "Pop Surf Culture: Music, Design, Film and Fashion from the Bohemian Surf Boom," available in September.

Children's books occupied a fair amount of real estate at BookExpo. One title that particularly appealed to me was "My Name is Gabito (Me Llamo Gabito") an English- and Spanish-language children's book about the life of Gabriel Garcia Marquez by Monica Brown, who asked me, "And how many Latina Jews do you know?" (More than you think, mi amiga).

And as long as we are taking a walk on the Semitic side of the street, I was pleased to stumble on Lerner Publishing Group. It recently acquired Kar-Ben Publishing, "a growing Jewish library for children," which includes everything from Yale Strom's first children's book, "The Wedding That Saved a Town," to biographies, books about Israel, books about Jewish holidays and books about families and friends that encompass many religions.

Meanwhile, over at Matzoh Ball Books (that is their name!), Anne-Marie Baila Asner has just published "Klutzy Boy" (prior titles include "Kvetchy Boy," "Schmutzy Girl," "Noshy Boy" and "Schluffy Girl"). Let the imagination run wild.

Now, if having your child learn a foreign language grabs you, Slangman Publishing has a series for ages 3 and up, where familiar fairy tales, such as "Cinderella," are retold with foreign words to build up a child's vocabulary in a foreign language (there's an audio CD included, as well). Languages include Chinese, French, Spanish, Hebrew, Italian and Japanese.

Perhaps this is a good time to talk about "Mo's Nose." My daughter's homework folder has recently been covered with stickers about a dog named Mo. I now know why.

Turns out one of my daughter's classmates is the son of Margaret Hyde, the author of children's books such as "Dreadilocks and the Three Slugs" and the "Great Art for Kids" series ("Picasso for Kids," "Matisse for Kids"). Hyde has now launched "Mo's Nose," a series of books for children about a dog named Mo and how although he doesn't see in color, he can smell colors. The books, illustrated by Amanda Giacomini, have an innovative, safe, nontoxic scratch-and-sniff feature.

"Mo Smells Red," the first book in the series, has Mo smelling strawberries, roses and love itself. Cute in the extreme. A portion of the proceeds from the books go to help rescue animals find homes. Mo is going to be a star. Be ready for the appearance of Mo T-shirts in your children's lives.

Graphic novels were another big trend at BookExpo. As I learned, graphic novels are often neither graphic nor novel -- they are adult versions of what we used to call comic books. NBM books was at the convention, along with local author David Seidman, who told me that Los Angeles has become fertile ground for the graphic novel, thanks to the abundance of animators and writers raised on comic books.

These days, comics range from humorous work to art of fantasy and the imagination, from children's comics to illustrated renderings of Proust and Kafka, from political cartooning to subversive alternative lit, from goth to Japanese manga.

Some of the most interesting books these days are being published by university presses, such as the university presses of Indiana, Nebraska, Michigan, Mississippi, Chicago, MIT, Harvard, Princeton and Yale, which publish everything from the hyperlocal, to the serious academic, to the just plain fun from all over the country. As just one example, Yale University is doing a series called American icons with titles such as Joseph Epstein writing about Fred Astaire.

BookExpo, however, was not just about free books. There were also speeches and panels (about books). The New York Times' Thomas Friedman spoke about how "green is the new red, white and blue," which not coincidentally is the title of Friedman's next book. There were author breakfasts with Philippa Gregory, Alec Baldwin, Chris Buckley and Magic Johnson.

There were also panels about film rights, bookselling and climate change, about Google and digital rights and digital editions, social networking, graphic novels, libraries, censorship, the Chinese market and the Chinese audience, the Latino audience and the panel I attended about -- no surprise here -- the Jewish audience.

A panel about the reading habits of Jewish Americans featured Stuart Matlins of Jewish Lights publishing house, Daisy Maryles of Publisher's Weekly and Ruth Ellenson of the best-selling anthology, "The Modern Jewish Girls' Guide to Guilt."

Panelists spoke of the importance of the Jewish Book Council run by Carolyn Starman Hessel, book clubs and synagogue book clubs. Matlins suggested that in his guesstimation, 70 percent of readers and more than 70 percent of book club attendees are women.

Ellenson, who has written for The Jewish Journal and whose book features an essay by Jewish Journal Religion Editor Amy Klein, told many humorous anecdotes about the pressures she faced to make her book less "Jewish." However, what Ellenson discovered was that what perhaps threatened to keep her from a mainstream audience helped her find a very loyal niche audience, Jewish readers who have supported her book in steady numbers since its publication.

No one who was in the room will ever forget when Ellenson told us the more "edgy title" one editor suggested for her book: "Burning Bushes."

At one point, Carla Cohen, owner of Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., bemoaned the fact that there is not a contemporary version of "The Jewish Catalogue." Several audience members then volunteered that they were the authors of soon-to-be-published books hoping to fill the gap, among them "Cool Jew" by Lisa Alcalay Klug (Andrews McNeil).

There was some question of if, and why, Jews buy a disproportionate number of books. Is it just a matter of education?

In some sense, this begged a question that nagged at the whole BookExpo: Whither books?

Is the book industry going the way of the music industry? Or the newspaper industry? Is digital the future? What percentage of the population will read books on their Kindle or other electronic devices or even on their Blackberry? If most nonfiction titles sell only 6,000 copies, how can such small sales support writers, editors, publishing companies?

The answer is, of course, no one knows, but stay tuned -- or more to the point, keep reading.

Matlins had the best precis of the current marketplace: "The people who buy books," he opined, "are the people who buy books."

Tom Teicholz is a film producer in Los Angeles. Everywhere else, he's an author and journalist who has written for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. His column appears every other week.

The pariah loophole

2008-06-14T16:05:11Z

The following opinion article appeared yesterday on the Op-Ed page of the Los Angeles Times:

John Demjanjuk's last appeal to avoid deportation was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court on May 19. The 88-year-old accused Nazi concentration camp guard was stripped of his citizenship and ordered sent to Ukraine, his birthplace; Poland, the locus of the crimes; or Germany, the heir to the Nazi regime under which he served.

Yet, as it now stands, he is still in the United States. Why? He can't be exiled unless another country agrees to accept him. For the time being, he remains free.

In this, Demjanjuk is not alone. There are five other former Nazi criminals against whom the U.S. Justice Department successfully completed deportation proceedings but whom no country has been willing to accept. Romanian-born Johann Leprich, a guard at Mauthausen camp in Austria, is one; his deportation was finalized in 2006. Another is Jakiw Palij, born in a region of Poland that is now in Ukraine. He was a guard at the Trawniki labor camp in Poland (where in a single day in 1943, 6,000 prisoners were murdered), and his deportation was finalized in January 2006. Mykola Wasylyk, another Trawniki guard also found to be at the Budzyn camp, had his final appeal denied in 2004.

Theodor Szehinskyj, also born in a part of Ukraine that used to be Poland, was in the SS unit called the Death's Head Brigade and was a guard at the Gross-Rosen, Sachsenhausen and the Warsaw concentration camps. His deportation litigation was completed in March 2006.

Finally, there is Anton Tittjung. Tittjung was born in what was then Yugoslavia and is now Croatia. He was a Waffen SS member and a guard at Mauthausen.

Should any of these criminals worry that deportation is imminent, they might take comfort from the fact that the Supreme Court declined to hear Tittjung's final appeal way back in 2000. He still remains free in the United States. In addition, in recent years, four of their denaturalized Nazi peers died before they were ever deported.

In all of these cases, the countries of their birth, such as Ukraine, Romania, Poland or Croatia, and the countries where their crimes were committed, such as Austria or Poland as well as Germany, were contacted by the Justice Department, and none expressed interest in receiving these now "stateless" persons.

There is no law, domestic or international, that requires foreign countries to accept or extradite these former Nazis -- or to give a reason why they don't. However, their reasons are easy to divine and include not wanting to burden the state with these aged citizens, no desire for an expensive investigation and trial, and fear that nationalist or neo-Nazi elements might be aroused by reopening Nazi-era wounds.

But that does not lift their moral responsibility to accept and/or prosecute the criminals of the Nazi era. In what society do murderers go free? What nation can forget the crimes of the Nazi era? Given that the victims of the Holocaust cannot cry out for justice, who will?

Poland, Ukraine and Romania might make the argument that they were under Nazi rule at that time. Germany has no such excuse. And although Germany has prosecuted many native-born Germans for their World War II-era crimes, they have been less eager to do so as time goes by. Germany has had even less interest in prosecuting those non-Germans, like Demjanjuk, who served the Nazis in the countries they conquered -- as though Germany could draw a border around the Holocaust crimes it is responsible for.

Regardless of any moral impetus countries might have to extradite Nazi criminals, until now there has been no legal one. That may change. On May 12, Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) introduced the World War II War Crimes Accountability Act of 2008, which would require the U.S. to evaluate foreign countries' cooperation in extraditing or prosecuting Nazi criminals the U.S. wants deported. Assistance or lack thereof would affect a nation's visa-waiver status for business travelers and tourists.

More than 50 years after the end of World War II, it is fair to ask: Why do we care? What's the point of expending our time, effort and money -- and that of other countries -- on these old men? Why not move on? What of forgiveness?

Forgiveness or mitigation as a legal, or even a moral, concept should only be available to those who are willing to fully confess their participation in the crimes of the Nazi era and express remorse. But to date, there have been no complete confessions by the guilty and no remorse. Demjanjuk, for example, continues to deny any Nazi involvement whatsoever, even in the face of incontrovertible documentary evidence unearthed after the collapse of the Soviet Union that confirmed his presence at numerous concentration camps.

Still, time is passing. In the case of these criminals, there is some irony in the fact that they have lived long enough to be exposed for who they were and what they did.

If no country accepts them before they die, at least they won't pass from this Earth as innocents. It may not be final justice, but it is some comfort.

Sandler and the Zohan

2008-06-12T23:20:46Z

As everyone knows by now, Adam Sandler's "You Don't Mess With the Zohan" dives in where few comedies have gone before: The Middle East conflict between Arabs and Jews. Hollywood has a long tradition of preferring onscreen Jews to be Semitic-lite (or even better, portrayed by non-Jews such as Gregory Peck in "Gentleman's Agreement").

Sandler, however, pulls no such punches in "Zohan" -- Israel is Israel and Zohan's nemesis is a Palestinian terrorist -- there is no attempt to create fake countries or nationalities. For that alone, Sandler and Sony, the studio that financed the film, should be commended.

As to whether "Zohan" will advance the cause of peace in the Middle East and increase regard for Israel and Israelis in the world at large, even as Israel itself celebrates its 60th anniversary, that's hard to say. But face it: Given the results of peace negotiations thus far over the last several decades under American, Israeli and Arab regimes of the right, left and center, "Zohan" stands as good a chance as any.

One thing's for sure. If the film's opening sequence on the beaches of Tel Aviv, featuring one fetching, toned, tanned hedonistic beach beauty after another (many of them tattooed), doesn't boost tourism to Israel, I don't know what will. At the very least, it will raise the bar on Israeli beauty (and when I say "bar," I mean Bar Rafaeli).

Mostly, watching "Zohan," you will laugh. At times, you will be ashamed for doing so, given the crudeness or the simplicity of the joke, but you will laugh all the same (who knew hummus had so many uses and could be so funny?).

Sandler's Zohan, as you may know from the many ads and trailers, is Israel's greatest counterterrorism agent. Writing in The New York Times, A.O. Scott compared him to "a less anguished version of Eric Bana's character in 'Munich'" -- that may be so. (Although I was no fan of "Munich" -- I just didn't find the movie that funny -- I only laughed like twice.)

Zohan is unstoppable, undefeatable, a master of martial arts, able to catch a bullet with his fingers, punch through a wall, swim faster than a Jet Ski -- you get the idea.

But he is tired of war, tired of the fighting, tired of being Israel's go-to guy for missions against terrorists. What he wants is to pursue his dream: to style hair to make men and women look "silky smooth." While on a mission to capture the notorious terrorist, "The Phantom" (John Turturro), he fakes his death.

Zohan then travels to New York, where he is no longer famous and is ridiculed for his '80s-style clothes, hairstyle and love of disco. A fellow Israeli recognizes him (Iddo Mosseri, an Israeli actor), and at his lowest moment, Zohan is tempted to join him working in an electronics store. But his friend warns him away, saying the lure of electronic sales is too strong; it kills dreams.

Zohan gets a job instead at a salon run by Dalia, a Palestinian, played by Emmanuelle Chriqui (of "Entourage" fame), on a Brooklyn street where one side is Arab, the other Israeli and everyone, although distrusting the other, gets along.

Zohan boosts Dalia's struggling business by showering his attentions on her elderly clientele, using a technique pioneered by Zero Mostel in "The Producers." Disgusting and very funny.

All is good until Zohan is recognized by an Arab cab driver played by Rob Schneider, who rounds up his fellow Arab cab drivers. After first calling the Hezbollah hotline, which is out of service until negotiations break down again, they call the Phantom, now a successful fast-food operator in the Middle East, and tell him where Zohan works.

Along the way, "Zohan" is riddled with cameo performances and appearances by Shelley Berman, Lainie Kazan, Michael Buffer, Kevin James, Kevin Nealon, John McEnroe, Mariah Carey and even Los Angeles local luminaries, such as entertainment manager Guy Oseary, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Sid Ganis and Roni from Roni's Diner.

In the end, it turns out the bad guys are not the Israelis or Arabs but a Donald Trump-like developer who is pitting the Brooklyn Israeli and Arab residents against each other so that he can build a mall.

When the Phantom finally confronts Zohan in America, he confesses that he, too, has a dream: He wants to sell shoes, and Zohan encourages him, telling him that in the United States, Arabs and Israelis put aside their differences to live their dreams and get on with their lives.

A couple of weeks ago, at the press conference for "Zohan," Mosseri and Schneider talked about how the Israeli and Arab actors at first were suspicious of each other but eventually came to have lunch together at what they dubbed "The Peace Table," where they had long, personal and occasionally heated discussions on the Middle East, even as they developed friendships that culminated in a trip to Las Vegas. Only in America! (Perhaps the sequel should have Zohan pressed back into service to save Las Vegas during his bachelor party.)

The Zohan peace plan of living as Israelis and Arabs do in America has been dubbed by that well-known critic of Middle East policy, Daily Variety, as "simplistic." Maybe, but it is also very Sandler.

First and foremost, Sandler is an instinctual comedian. He looks to the nuggets from his own experience or belief system to fuel his comedies.

Born in 1966, Sandler is of a generation that has known Israel only as a superpower. As Sandler recounted at the "Zohan" press conference, as a kid, his impression was that Israel was this country that everyone wanted to destroy, but no one could -- they kicked ass.

So there was a generational difference in perspectives: His parents worried about Israel's survival; Sandler thought Israel's ability to triumph was cool. That schism is presented in the movie, and I'm not sure I've ever seen it on the screen before.

To write a think piece about Sandler may sound, at first, like a contradiction in terms -- not unlike "jumbo shrimp" or "military intelligence" -- but understanding who Sandler is and where he comes from goes a long way toward explaining his success.

Sandler was born in Brooklyn to Judy, a nursery school teacher, and Stanley, an electrical engineer, according to IMDb.com. At age 5, the family moved to Manchester, N.H.

Being Jewish in Manchester must have been a special experience, since it inspired the comic mind not only of Sandler but also fellow Manchester resident Sarah Silverman. It also seems to be have inspired Sandler's 2002 landmark venture into animation, "Eight Crazy Nights" (the first-ever feature animated Chanukah movie).

Sandler began performing stand-up comedy while at New York University. He also nabbed a recurring role on "The Cosby Show" in 1987 as Theo's friend, Smitty. Once on the comedy circuit, he moved to Los Angeles, where he roomed with Judd Apatow.

Dennis Miller recommended Sandler to Lorne Michaels, who hired him for "Saturday Night Live" in 1990. It was on "SNL" that Sandler first met both Schneider and Robert Smigel. And as Smigel revealed to my colleague, Jay Firestone, in these pages, Sandler's first "SNL" sketch was a spoof of Israeli hard sell, called "The Sabra Shopping Network." It was written by Smigel, whom Sandler would tap to write "Zohan" with him and Apatow.

Sandler left "SNL" in 1995 to pursue a film career. "Billy Madison" and "Happy Gilmore," for which he shared writing credit, followed soon thereafter, establishing Sandler's popularity. The 1998 film, "The Waterboy," was Sandler's first to pass the $100 million mark, establishing him as a bankable comedy superstar.

Over the last decade, Sandler has produced or starred in more than a dozen films and shared writing credit on a handful. Yet if you ask most people, they hark back to the movies early in his career, such as "Happy Gilmore" or "The Wedding Singer," as having cemented his image as a sweet, emotional, vulnerable cretin savant.

Yet many people I know between the ages of 15 to 30 don't seem particularly interested in Sandler or in this movie. They tell me they used to like his movies -- now they're not sure. His humor, they say, seems too old-fashioned (I think the word they are looking for is schmaltzy).

The humor they like is more deadpan, like "The Office" or "Flight of the Conchords." They like Apatow's movies, and although Apatow has a writing credit on this one, they perceive this movie as different.

I'm not worried for Sandler. As Sony is well aware, since "The Waterboy," almost all the movies that Sandler produces and stars in perform reliably in the $120 million to $135 million range, according to Box Office Mojo, and often better, and that includes movies you might not think of as successful, such as "The Longest Yard" ($158 million), "I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry" ($120 million), "Click" ($137 million) and "Anger Management" ($135 million).

The only exception is "Little Nicky" ($39 million). In its first weekend, "Zohan" came in second in the box-office race, earning an estimated $40 million, behind only an animated panda.

That being said, it is important to point out some differences between the Apatow and Sandler oeuvres.

Apatow's movies are grounded in reality, fueled by embarrassing or awkward moments that have happened or could happen in real life. Many of the films associated with Apatow, such as his "Knocked Up" or Seth Rogen's "Superbad" or Jason Segal's "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" (co-produced by Apatow), feature nice Jewish boys who are ambition-challenged, pot-smoking and untoned (what's the opposite of "buff"?) but who get the girl -- usually a far more beautiful girl than anyone would ever imagine they could win.

"Zohan" subverts this paradigm. Sandler's Zohan is a man's man -- hairy, comfortable grilling fish in the nude (Apatow has made a crusade of male nudity, and this may be part of his contribution to "Zohan"). That being said, Zohan is no nebbish. He is used to being the best at everything and to being irresistible and so comfortable with himself that sex is just another physical prowess about which he is nonchalant (until he falls in love).

Dalia, the girl he falls in love with, is not unreachable, she's just not Jewish, and a Palestinian to boot. But given that she, too, is tired of the fighting -- and even drinks Israeli soda -- they fall in love, and in keeping with Hollywood traditions from "The Jazz Singer" on, his parents approve.

Speaking of parents, Sandler confessed that his own parents seem pleased with him. As Sandler made clear at the "Zohan" press conference, he was raised in a Jewish home. His wife is Jewish, his child is Jewish (at his wedding, Sandler's dog walked down the aisle wearing a kippah, so perhaps his dog is Jewish, as well).

Sandler's stance toward his Judaism seems much like Popeye's credo, "I am what I am." It is an attitude that has served him well.

Sandler's instinct that comedy was to be found in mocking Israeli stereotypes and the conflict between Arabs and Jews may not earn him an Oscar or the Nobel Peace Prize. But "Zohan" brings these topics to the mainstream in a way that will have many, many people laughing.

In this way, Sandler is hewing to a long Jewish tradition that has always chosen laughter over tears in the face of seemingly insolvable adversity. Funny, that.

Tom Teicholz is a film producer in Los Angeles. Everywhere else, he's an author and journalist who has written for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. His column appears every other week.

MADE IN NEW ORLEANS

2008-05-30T04:09:22Z

It's 2 a.m., and there's a crowd on St. Peter's Street in New Orleans' French Quarter; people are waiting to see the Stanton Moore Trio play Preservation Hall.

Midnight and early morning shows during Jazzfest are part of a new tradition initiated by Benjamin Jaffe, Preservation Hall's creative director, the man charged with safeguarding New Orleans' musical traditions, managing the Preservation Hall Jazz band and preserving Preservation Hall itself. The weekend I was there, the hall featured midnight performances by Tab Benoit, John Hammond Jr. and the Rebirth Brass Band.

Rebirth is the right word for New Orleans jazz.

Jaffe, who's in his late 30s and sports a serious Jewfro, is New Orleans born and raised. He comes to Preservation Hall both as a tuba and bass player who has toured with the band, and by birthright, as his parents, Allan and Sandra, launched what we've all come to know as Preservation Hall in 1961.

Allan Jaffe was born in Pottsville, Penn. (home of Yuengling beer), and graduated with a business degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he met his wife. His military service took him on his first trip to Louisiana and, after he finished serving, he and Sandra found themselves back in New Orleans as part of an extended honeymoon -- and they decided to stay.

In New Orleans, the Jaffes became part of a group interested in preserving and promoting traditional New Orleans music. At 726 St. Peter St., also in the French Quarter, Larry Borenstein, an art dealer, devoted part of his gallery, The Associated Art Studios, to performances by these musicians. There was a not-for-profit Society for the Preservation of Traditional Jazz that had operated without much success. The Society dissolved and, as was noted in a memo in the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University, "beginning September 13, 1961, the work will be continued on a for profit (or loss) basis, by Allan Jaffe and his wife Sandy." Thus, the current Preservation Hall was born.

As Ben Jaffe explained when we talked in the courtyard of Preservation Hall a few weeks ago, his parents were interested in the music, in preserving a tradition and a culture that they were shocked to learn was in danger of disappearing, but they also got involved out of a commitment to the Civil Rights movement.

"To put things in perspective," Jaffe said, it was 1961, and "The civil rights laws were not passed until 1964."

In 1961, some white New Orleans musicians, such as Pete Fountain and Al Hirt, were finding popularity nationwide, thanks to television programs such as the "Lawrence Welk Show." However, the African American New Orleans artists, many of whom were elderly, not only weren't getting on TV, their music wasn't getting attention on radio, on records or in New Orleans, for that matter.

Preservation Hall was a godsend for them. New Orleans musicians were eager for the gig -- to play at Preservation Hall, Jaffe called upon such legendary figures as trumpeters Kid Thomas Valentine, Kid Punch Miller, Kid Howard, De De Pierce, Percy Humphrey; clarinetist Willie Humphrey; and pianists such as Billie Pierce and Sweet Emma Barrett.

Given the pervasive segregation of the South at that time, white performers did not play with African American bands or tour with them -- but Allan Jaffe did. He played tuba with the band and, as I learned from a publication of the Louisiana Historical society, he was said to be "the son of a mandolinist and music teacher and the grandson of a French horn player in a Russian Imperial band."

Preservation Hall's formula was simple and is followed to this day: No reservations, no food, just music in a small room. Shows began at 8 p.m. Each set lasted around 35 minutes, and tickets were priced low (they're now $10 a show, Wednesday through Sunday).

Part of Jaffe's plan to popularize New Orleans traditional music was to take the Preservation Hall Jazz Band on the road. In 1963, he took the band to Japan. Eventually it would play between 150 and 200 dates a year. Over the years, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band has played at such esteemed venues as New York's Lincoln Center, Symphony Hall in Boston and Royal Festival Hall in London, and has toured Israel and South America.

The band in its touring incarnation became the public face of traditional New Orleans jazz, but Preservation Hall itself became the soul.

The Jaffes became the custodians of an African American culture that they themselves became immersed in, as much as they became part of the city -- and as much as they became part of the rich history of New Orleans' Jewish community.

Ben Jaffe told me that New Orleans was "a great city to grow up and be Jewish in." This was in part, he explained, "because we have so much respect for history and for culture and tradition, whether it's our own New Orleans traditions and cultures, whether it's African American, whether it's French or Spanish or our own Jewish traditions."

The Jewish community in New Orleans, Jaffe said, is "fairly tight-knit." He explained that he knew many of the families who formed the core of New Orleans' Jewish merchant class.

"The Rubenstein boys and I went to school together," he said, referencing the family whose department store, Rubenstein Brothers, is a New Orleans institution. "Their parents knew my parents from shul."

"When I think of New Orleans," Jaffe said, "I think of a city that embraces tradition and who we are, and celebrates it in a ways completely unknown to the rest of the United States."

What is important to note about New Orleans, Jaffe said, is that "The Jewish community here has had a long and very healthy relationship with the African American community. It was the Jewish community that was the first to open its doors to the African American community, and open its store doors -- clothing stores, furniture stores, appliance stores. There are a lot of African Americans that still only purchase from those furniture stores that originally sold only to African Americans.

"Rosenberg's on Tulane Avenue was the first furniture store that opened in an African American neighborhood, and to this day African Americans are loyal to that furniture store. Overwhelmingly," Jaffee said.

Allan Jaffe died in 1987, at the age of 51, of cancer. Ben was 16 at the time. Sandra continued to run the Hall with her sister Risa, who took over the day-to-day operations.

Ben Jaffe's own involvement in Preservation Hall was not planned; it just evolved. He grew up in the Quarter, living a few blocks away from the hall. As a boy, he watched jazz funeral parades and Mardi Gras marches, and he hung out at Preservation Hall, where he heard many of New Orleans' greatest performers. Without any conscious effort, he absorbed it all. But he was more interested at that the time in reggae and rock 'n' roll. New Orleans jazz -- that was his parents' music.

Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, Jaffe now says of hanging out at Preservation Hall: "That was my school."

He went to Oberlin College, known for its music program, and the day after Jaffe graduated in 1993, he flew to Paris and joined the Preservation Hall Jazz Band as its regular bass player. I asked Jaffe if he had to audition. He laughed, saying that it was a coincidence that the bass player had recently taken ill and stopped touring.

"The timing could not have been better," he said.

However, for him, "stepping into the band was a natural progression."

Jaffe played some 200 dates a year with the band and eventually took on managing the band and Preservation Hall, as well.

"At the time I simply felt motivated to keep Preservation Hall open and running," he said. "I never really had a mission statement or a business plan."

No plan could have prepared anyone for Hurricane Katrina in 2005, or its aftermath. Knowing that Preservation Hall, being in the French Quarter, was on high ground and that he could go there if needed, Jaffe remained in New Orleans. "We weathered the storm," he said, helping musicians get out of town -- among them banjo and string bass virtuoso Narvin Kimball, then 95, whom Jaffe helped evacuate to Baton Rouge and whose banjos and photographs he helped remove from his home -- luckily, because that's all that survived the storm. (Kimball died in South Carolina in 2006.)

"As everyone saw on television, it was a national embarrassment what took place here," Jaffe said.

He said the financial hardship was great and continues: "Our lives were shaken around like a snow globe."

Five out of seven members in the band lost their homes. They all suffered tremendous financial losses.

It's hard to appreciate, Jaffe explained, but people who had school-age children could not come back to New Orleans for at least a year -- there were no schools and hospitals -- and those with special-needs children could not get the services they needed. And once you've been living in another place for two years, it's hard to come back -- who wants to be uprooted again?

"There are a million stories," Jaffe said, one for each of the evacuees, and each is different and filled with its own pain and difficult choices. "That's the hard part to understand."

That being said, Jaffe feels that the post-Katrina City of New Orleans has made an even greater commitment to New Orleans Jazz. The Hurricane Emergency Fund, which Jaffe co-founded, has evolved into "Renew Our Music," a grassroots community development organization. Jaffe released the box set "Made in New Orleans: The Hurricane Sessions," which is a treasure trove and, in some ways, a collaboration between his late father and himself, incorporating early recordings and sessions interrupted by the Hurricane.

Preservation Hall has launched several education and outreach programs for schools and children. Jaffe has also been able to work on several projects with The Jazz and Heritage Foundation and the State of Louisiana, including launching SYNC UP, cutting-edge online technology that allows music supervisors to search for New Orleans musicians and music to use or license for film and television.

More than 45 years after his parents established Preservation Hall, Jaffe feels New Orleans' music is rich in history and well stocked with new generations of artists filled with a love of traditional New Orleans Jazz (which is refreshed and reinvented each time it's played).

Jaffe also has established a fairly exhaustive database of New Orleans musicians: "I can't tell you the last time I went to a show [in New Orleans] and saw a musician and didn't know who they were."

He cites jazz trumpeter Mark Braud, grandson of trumpeter John "Pickett" Brunious Sr., and nephew of Preservation Hall's John Brunious Jr., as being a fourth-generation jazz artist.

"Find me a fourth-generation anything, anywhere," Jaffe said.

So, next time you head down to New Orleans, stop in at Preservation Hall. Chances are you'll find Ben Jaffe there, a fourth-generation musician who's the second generation to run the hall.

Tell him Tommywood sent you. That and $10 will get you a seat to hear America's indigenous art form, a living tradition that is the heart and soul of a city, the music that made New Orleans.

Post-Zionism in a diaspora world

2008-05-15T17:58:33Z

What does it mean to be a Jew in a Post-Zionist world?

For centuries, for Jews, the notion of living free in Zion was a dream. In Theodor Herzl's famous essay, "The Jewish State," the journalist and playwright transformed the dream of living in a Jewish state into a goal.

"Next year in Jerusalem," the words we say at the end of every seder, was in those days a true aspiration for nationhood. Today, it is often treated as the lead-in to a joke whose punch line is, "And if we're lucky, next year at ... (fill in the blank for someone's home or any luxurious destination)."

The notion that all Jews should one day live in Israel was very much part of my own childhood Hebrew school education, and I recall many elders talking about their dreams of retiring to Israel or being buried in Israel.

As I was growing up, it seemed that Jewish immigration to Israel, making aliyah, was the silver lining to be found in every contemporary Jewish Diaspora calamity: Soviet Jewry is suffering? Then let them go ... to Israel. Ethiopian Jews in trouble? Airlift them ... to Israel. More recently, after calamities in Argentina and anti-Semitic attacks in France, incentives were offered to families to move to Israel. Yet I imagine these campaigns were less successful than those of my youth. In part this has to do with the global community we live in now.

Here in Diaspora Los Angeles 2008, Israeli culture is woven into my daily fabric: On any given day, I can find myself watching an Apple Computer commercial featuring "New Soul" by French-born Israeli singer Yael Naïm, or watching HBO's "In Treatment," which is based on an Israeli show. A recent L.A. Weekly issue carried a profile of short story writer and filmmaker Etgar Keret written by film critic Ella Taylor, who once lived in Israel herself.

Israelis seem to be everywhere -- at the mall, all the kiosks are manned by Israelis; the most popular vendor in the food court sells shwarma; and Krav Maga, an Israeli martial art, is taught just down the street. Santa Monica might be home to more British citizens, but I just seem to notice the Israelis.

Once upon a time, Israelis living here would have been viewed as disloyal -- dropouts. Today, they are just another ethnic community placing a stake in Los Angeles.

This is post-Zionism.

As Israel celebrates its 60th anniversary, it seems that we have entered an age where living in Israel is no longer the goal of all, or even most Jews in the Diaspora -- even for some born there. This begs the question, what then is Israel in the hearts and minds of today's Jews? What should it be?

Israel was founded as something of an agrarian socialist utopian society -- its form of government inspired by the Mensheviks. The kibbutz was the soul of the country. But that hasn't been the case for several decades. What is the soul of the country today? Its high-tech industry? Its army?

Perhaps it is Israel's diversity.

In a recent interview in Germany's weekly Die Welt, author Amos Oz said, "When I look at the German or other European media and see that image of Israel it creates, I learn that Israel supposedly consists of 80 percent religious fanatics, 10 percent settlers in West Jordan, 9 percent brutal soldiers and 1 percent intellectuals who criticize the government and who are wonderful writers. This is of course a distortion of reality."

The reality is that Israel is a country that prides itself on having at least one of everything (from ski mountain to Dead Sea, from tofu factory to star fruit farm); what doesn't Israel produce, manufacture and what can't you do there? Israel has produced world-class literature and has a vigorous free press that voices every opinion on every side of every issue and uncovers every scandal, and it has a Supreme Court that has come to be the moral conscience of the country.

Nonetheless, one can argue that the main impact of post-Zionism has been to make Israel less self-absorbed and the Diaspora more so.

In Israel itself, 60 years of existential peril have created a sense of living in the moment -- currently there is a surprising sense of well-being among certain strata of the Israeli population that comes from focusing on family, on work and on materialistic concerns divorced from national and political concerns. When you live in the moment, you can live anywhere: This, in part, explains the lessened stigma of being an Israeli who chooses not to live in Israel.

By contrast, for Jews in the Diaspora, while Israel remains a touchstone in their hearts and minds, and the life-changing trip to Israel is a de rigueur experience, there is nevertheless a growing malaise about Israel and its policies, whether you are on the far left, or the far right. This is true even among people like me, who consider themselves centrists, but who are too left for the right and too right for the left.

I am reminded of the Israelites in Exodus who, when delivered from Egypt, began to complain, and continued to complain at each turn -- about being in the wilderness, about the food, about their thirst and on and on. In a similar vein, it strikes me that the age of post-Zionism is also the age of complaining. There may even be a reason for it.

In the mid-1980s, Israeli archives adopted a liberal policy of declassifying official documents, giving historians and journalists access to troves of official papers related to Israel's founding and early years. Many historians, most notably Tom Segev and Benny Morris, began to search out the truth of those early years. In time, they and others, collectively referred to as "the New Historians," wrote a series of books about the mandate era, the war for independence, and the 1967 Six-Day War -- revisiting the pillars of Israel's national story -- the most recent of which is Morris' just-published "1948 -- A History of the First Arab-Israeli War" (Yale University Press). As these accounts have been published, journalists, historians and readers alike have had to confront some difficult facts.

Contrary to the national narrative of manifest destiny that Jews in Israel and the Diaspora had come to accept as gospel, the history of Israel turns out to be far more complex. The historical record reveals what had been hidden or glossed over in the service of nationalism: That in birthing a nation, the Israelis did not all have clean hands -- Arabs were expelled, their villages destroyed, massacres and rapes occurred. These are anguishing events, and we are too close in time to not feel their blot on the collective self-image. They are fresh enough to color and contribute to a sense of existential crisis about Israel on its 60th anniversary.

In each country's annals, including those of the United States, we must accept those facts we can't ignore, the dark actions that stain our history. Individuals may argue their significance, sometimes for generations to come. But we need only accept them as our past -- we are not compelled to imbue them with any greater power in the present beyond accepting them and saying: How shall we go forward?

There will always be those, Jewish and not, who can only focus on Israel's wrongs as an indictment of all Israelis and Israel's right to exist. At the same time, there will always be those, Jewish and not, who will cite a double standard applied to Israel as a way to avoid confronting those wrongs in Israel's past and its present.

As each group gets more vocal, empowered by the Internet, blogs and a polarization that preaches opinion to its own fervent choir, it becomes increasingly difficult to stand up to the clatter and to voice a simple truth: That a true democracy thrives, regardless of the bad and regrettable actions of individuals in one regime's government (as is evidenced by what's going on right now in this country). That is the point of a democracy. A post-Zionist will continue to believe in Israel's dream of an open society, with truly democratic institutions and a democratic rule of law.

Herzl wrote his essay, "The Jewish State," in reaction to witnessing France's Dreyfus trial. Herzl felt that the only answer to the anti-Semitism he saw in Europe was to found a Jewish state. Today, we hear that anti-Semitism exists in Europe and elsewhere because of actions of the Jewish state (plus ça change.....).

By some accounts, there are now more Jews living in Israel than in any single country in the world, yet anti-Semitism continues to flare up even in countries with little or no Jewish population

How in this age of post-Zionism do we distinguish between criticism of Israel and its supporters (both Israeli and American), and criticism informed or motivated by anti-Semitism?

>From my experience (and I have met quite a few Holocaust revisionists), more than anything, the issue boils down to the Gestalt, not the simple fact of criticism but the pattern, the language, the generalizations, the tone. Although that doesn't sound very precise (and I'm afraid it is not), let me refer you to someone who has done some serious research on the subject:

April Rosenblum, a Philadelphia-based progressive activist was troubled enough by her leftist friends not standing up to anti-Semitism that she produced a 32-page pamphlet, "The Past Didn't Go Anywhere." While critical of American and Israeli policies, the pamphlet explains in the language of the struggle how anti-Semitism weakens the cause of those committed to social action.

Rosenblum's is one response. But the point is that, for those imbued with the Gestalt of supporting and defending Israel, post-Zionism means finding a way to speak truth to Israel's faults as well as to those with anti-Semitic agendas.

As Israel turns 60, post-Zionism is a love of Israel without borders, unafraid to accept truth and confident that a democratic Jewish state, despite its imperfections and failings, will continue to nourish our souls, and will one day fulfill its promise; and that as part of our covenant, we will continue to dream and work and support Israel, so that promise may come true in our lifetimes.

These words, which for years I've mumbled in Hebrew, without paying them any attention, seem strangely appropriate. They were written by Naftali Herz Imber in Zolochiv, Ukraine, in 1878. You may know them as the words to the Israeli national anthem, "Hatikvah":

As long as in the heart, within,
A soul of a Jew is yearning,
And to the edges of the East, forward,
An eye gazes toward Zion
Our hope is not yet lost,
The hope of two thousand years,
To be a free nation in our land,
The land of Zion and Jerusalem.

William Shatner gets a place at the Seder

2008-04-18T22:51:25Z

William Shatner is God. And Pharaoh. And Moses, too.

Just in time for Passover, the Jewish Music Group (a division of Shout Factory) has released "Exodus: An Oratorio in Three Parts," performed by the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra. It is conducted by David Itkin, who created and composed the Oratorio, sung by baritone Paul Rowe and includes dramatic readings from the Bible and from the haggadah, spoken by none other than Shatner.

"It's perfect seder entertainment," Shatner said recently, but more than that, "it speaks to people of all religions. It's something that should be in repertory."

"Exodus: An Oratorio" is divided into three parts: "Moses and Pharaoh," "The Ten Plagues" and "Redemption." The music mixes symphonic and sacred, modulating strings, choral voices and baritone solos to provide both uplift and ballast to the biblical material -- as well as gentle musical transitions between some of Shatner's narrative performances. While Shatner has been parodied for his ability to bring a level of bombast to almost any material, here he gives a varied and nuanced performance -- his voice varies from sounding like a pulpit rabbi to the muted and conversational tones of a line reading. And then there are the special effects that are his signature -- when he makes his words pop with emphasis: (i.e., I.....AM.....THE.....LORD!)

"Exodus" was recorded live on April 9 and 10, 2005, at the Robinson Center Music Hall in Little Rock, Ark., where the Arkansas Symphony was joined by a choir of 350.

Click here for a short excerpt of Shatner's performance. MP3. 700K.

"It was quite a happening," Shatner recalled in a recent telephone interview.

The work is just one of a number of new projects for the actor, who turned 76 on March 22. In the next few weeks, his autobiography, "Up Till Now," will be released, as well as a DVD of "William Shatner's Gonzo Ballet," which is a feature-length documentary about a ballet based on Shatner songs from his Ben Folds-produced album "Has Been." And, on April 26, he will host his annual event, Hollywood Charity Horse Show to raise money for a therapeutic equestrian program for handicapped kids.

To listen to Shatner tell the story of Moses, Aaron and Pharaoh, to hear him read of the ten plagues and the story of the parting of the Red Sea, mixed in with choral and solo performances in English and Hebrew, is to realize how much of an icon he has become and what an amazingly diverse career he has had.

Shatner was born in Montreal, Canada, to Jewish parents and grew up in a kosher home. As a teenager, he was a counselor at a B'nai Brith camp in the Laurentian mountains in southern Quebec, according to various Web sites. He attended McGill University, earning a bachelor's in commerce. However, by the time he was 20 he had already landed a small role in a Canadian TV series. Over the next decade, Shatner would perform Shakespeare and appear on the Broadway stage in Christopher Marlowe's "Tamburlaine The Great," as well as the Richard Mason play "The World of Suzie Wong," and the Harold Clurman-directed "A Shot in the Dark," alongside Julie Harris and Walter Matthau.

During the 1950s, Shatner appeared in several of the "golden age of television" dramas, such as "Omnibus, ""Studio One" and "The Kraft Television Hour," including "A Town Has Turned to Dust" directed by John Frankenheimer and written by Rod Sterling. Shatner also had roles in such now-classic films as "The Brothers Karamazov" (with Yul Brynner and Claire Bloom) and "Judgment at Nuremberg."

A list of Shatner's credits from the early '60s includes almost every famous series, including "The Twilight Zone," "77 Sunset Strip," "Route 66," "The Outer Limits," "The Defenders," "Dr. Kildare," and "Gunsmoke."

In 1966, he assumed command of the Starship Enterprise, as Captain James T. Kirk. Although only 79 original episodes ran between 1966 and 1969, the "Star Trek" series cemented Shatner in the popular consciousness.

Nonetheless, after the series was cancelled, and following a divorce, Shatner was forced to live out of his truck, performing summer stock. During this period, concerned that he had been typecast as Kirk, Shatner wandered in the wilderness, taking whatever roles he could.

He returned to the helm of the Enterprise for the six Star Trek movies (directing the fifth). And he also returned to TV as the star of the police drama "T.J. Hooker," and then to host the reality series "Rescue 911."

At the same time, Shatner began to display a sense of humor about his long tenure as Captain Kirk, and the legions of obsessed Trekkie fans, in such films as "Airplane II" and "National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon" and in skits on "Saturday Night Live." He gained further notoriety as a pitchman for Priceline.com.

More recently, Shatner hit gold again, portraying attorney Denny Crane on "Boston Legal," a role he originated on the series "The Practice." He is one of the few actors to receive consecutive Emmy awards for playing the same character on two different series.

Shatner's life has also had its share of tragedy: his third wife, Nerine, drowned after mixing valium and alcohol. Shatner recently told Details magazine that he didn't "understand closure ... we grieve forever."

As for his recording career, it began with his much-derided 1968 album, "Transformed Man" and with his over-the-top spoken word interpretations of songs such as Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man." In 2004, Ben Folds produced "Has Been," a collection of songs, many of which he co-wrote with Shatner, including featured guest performances by Joe Jackson and Aimee Mann. It was well received and became a commercial success.

Which brings us back to "Exodus" and its composer David Itkin.

Itkin grew up in a conservative Jewish home, began writing music at 14 and conducting at 16. A graduate of the University of The Pacific Conservatory, he has been music director of the Arkansas Symphony since 1993, while also conducting and serving as music director for the Abilene Philharmonic Orchestra. It has just been announced that he will leave The Arkansas Symphony after the 2008-2009 season to become director of orchestral studies at the University of North Texas at Denton.

At a seder in 2003, Itkin said he was stuck by the dramatic possibilities of the Passover story. He developed the composition while on sabbatical in Florence, Italy, the following summer and fall.

When Itkin secured a 2005 date for the "Exodus Oratorio" he still needed a narrator. "We kicked around lots of names," he said, and always considered but was not wedded to using famous Jewish actors. "We kept winnowing and winnowing the list" he said, "and Shatner's name kept coming up. And it wouldn't go away."

Itkin contacted Shatner, and it turned out that not only was he interested, he was available on the needed dates.

"It was intriguing," Shatner recalled.

So with little preparation, other than years of reading the haggadah at seders, Shatner arrived in Little Rock the night before the first performance.

"He was great fun to be around," Itkin recalled.

There were two rehearsals and two performances -- one on Friday and one on Saturday night. Itkin was impressed by how Shatner was able to deliver his narrative within the very proscribed places and vary each character, much like different "takes," affording choices for editing the eventual produced work.

"On Saturday," Shatner said, "everything fell into place." He reveled in the experience of being on stage with 350 choral members and a 72-piece orchestra, he said.

"There's no magic like a live audience," Shatner says in the recording's liner notes. "The performer sends out the words, the music, the love, and he gets back the energy of the audience in waves."

In the final section, "Redemption," he intones the words of the priestly blessing: "May the Lord Bless you and keep you; may he be gracious to you; may the Lord make the light of his countenance to shine upon you; and may he grant you peace."

"The words were like a benediction over the whole audience." Shatner recalled.

At the seders I attend, I am not above some moments of audio-visual enhancement. I recall one spectacular seder where, at the strategic moment, the late Charlton Heston burst onto a screen to part the Red Sea. In recent years, the immediate post-seder entertainment has been funny Passovers songs (like "There's No Seder Like Our Seder" to tune of "There's No Business Like Show Business"). This year may well find our seder going forth with Shatner and the "Exodus Oratorio."

And let us all together say: Amen.

Tom Teicholz is a film producer in Los Angeles. Everywhere else, he's an author and journalist who has written for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. His column appears every other week.

Audio courtesy JTA