The recent news that Mel Gibson is no longer a client of William Morris Endeavor should come as no surprise. Many news and entertainment programs, including NBC’s “Today Show,” pegged the delisting to Gibson’s recent domestic assault allegations and tabloid leak of surreptitious tapes of racist rants he allegedly made, all arising from his custody dispute with his baby-mama Oksana Grigorieva.

But Gibson was already on borrowed time at the agency. In 2006, following his Malibu arrest and anti-Semitic rant, Ari Emanuel, then at Endeavor, writing in the Huffington Post, called on all Hollywood to shun Gibson. Gibson’s great defender was his longtime agent Ed Limato, then at ICM, who famously threw a drink in the face of Page Six’s Richard Johnson for comments about Gibson at a Vanity Fair Oscar party. Subsequently, Limato moved his operations from ICM to William Morris, and when William Morris and Endeavor merged last year, Emanuel and Limato found themselves having to make a cold peace.

A few weeks ago, Limato died. Then the other shoe dropped. Regarding Gibson, no one could call Emanuel a hypocrite. For his part, Gibson’s self-destructive self-immolation has cost him his marriage, much of his fortune, his standing in Hollywood and – depending on what happens next – could lead to criminal prosecution for domestic violence.

Which begs the question: Are the travails of Mel Gibson a fitting comeuppance, a vindication of those who saw something noxious in Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” a Shakespearean tragedy where character is destiny, or, perhaps in and of itself, proof that God exists? Or some combination of the above?

Rewinding through Gibson’s oeuvre and focusing on “Braveheart,” “The Man Without a Face” and then “The Passion,” the consistent theme appears to be that violence and harsh confrontation beget redemption.

Gibson entered the fray with his “The Passion of the Christ.” I would argue that each generation gets the version of Christ it deserves. So, if “The Greatest Story Ever Told” was made for the post-World War II “Greatest Generation,” “Godspell” for the ’60s flower children, and “Jesus Christ Superstar” for the “me” decade 1970s, then “The Passion of the Christ” embodies a rift in American culture, a moment when war and existential threats seemed everyday experiences. When Gibson told us he was being true to the Gospels in making his movie, he was not wrong. But it was his specific choices from among the versions that reflected Gibson’s own soul and character.

The enormous success of the film is history now, but it’s almost hard to remember the time when Jews questioning Gibson’s “Passion” were made to seem as if they were asking for a revisionist Jewish version of the New Testament.  Indeed, even Gibson’s Jewish publicist, Alan Nierob, defended him.

At one point, Gibson claimed he was going to make a film about the Maccabees,  which some took as a form of atonement, but which, to me, carried an implied threat – of exposing an ugly side to Jewish heroism. For most children, the Maccabees are the heroes of the Chanukah saga, but in a Gibson world of violence and martyrdom, the Judean fighters might seem closer to the Taliban, fighting against the corrupting Hellenism of their time by murdering fellow Jews.

Then, in 2006, after being arrested for driving while intoxicated, Gibson made his comments about the Jews causing all the world’s wars. Privately, it seemed a confirmation of Gibson’s darkest thoughts, but publicly many excused Gibson’s rant as a drunkard’s heat-seeking attempt to provoke with the most offensive comment possible.  Gibson slipped back under the radar.

What has complicated the discussion about Gibson was that most American Jews of recent vintage spend a good deal of time hearing about anti-Semitism (and donating money to fight it), but few actually have experienced it.

I have met several Holocaust deniers and, strangely enough, I met most of them in Jerusalem – during the course of covering the Demjanjuk war crimes trial. They were always ruddy, Middle America types or English academic types. All very friendly. What they had in common was that they saw themselves as men (and they were all men) of principle committed to finding the truth. Their quibbles were obsessive: If one fact was wrong, then that proved that all the facts of the Holocaust had been false or exaggerated.

Gibson, too, seems to alternate between Mel the Gregarious and Mel the Scary, a man seeking things his way and a man out of control – with anger and self-righteousness fueling a bigotry he won’t acknowledge.

For several years, Gibson seemed a time bomb waiting to explode. There was the church he funded in Malibu that didn’t accept Vatican II, and then the rumors that he had a girlfriend, followed by denials, then his wife filing for divorce, and the announcement that not only did Gibson have a girlfriend, but she was pregnant with what would be Gibson’s eighth child.

Did Gibson think being famous, being wealthy, put him in control? I’m sure he was warned. But an affair and a child with a much younger woman? What did he think would happen?

Which brings me back to my original question: What can we say about Gibson? There is no question that he alone is the engine of his current problems. It is also clear that his bigotry and sexism are part of his vile arsenal, and he can no longer deny the taint on his character. In the days and weeks to come, we may hear explanations for Gibson’s behavior or promises of treatment of one kind or another. He may go on to make other movies, self-financed or even studio distributed (and they could even be good), but no one will ever look at him the same way again. Gibson may pray for things to work out or for forgiveness from family, friends and colleagues; and others may pray for him. But I won’t be one of them.

Violinist Joshua Bell. Photo by Timothy White

Recently I sat down with violinist Joshua Bell to talk about being a classical music performer in the 21st century and a star in the age of iPods and auto-tuned performances. Bell, who will perform July 15 at the Hollywood Bowl, talked about how technology can enhance the concert experience, what makes for a great performer and his deepening connection to Israel.

Now 42, Bell has been playing violin since he was 5. He first performed in public at 7, made his debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra at 14 and first appeared at the Bowl at 17, performing Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto. He has appeared at the Bowl since then, by his own reckoning, “maybe 15 times.”

“There’s nothing like it anywhere,” Bell said of the Bowl. “There’s something thrilling about playing for 15,000 people.” The acoustics have improved since the recent renovation, he added, and the giant video screens “make people feel like they’re closer to the action.”

Bell will perform Max Bruch’s “Scottish Fantasy,” completed in 1880, a work that is not as popular today as the composer’s violin concerto but that in its day was, as Bell put it, a “warhorse” that Bell listened to as a child. Bell’s hero, the violinist Jascha Heifetz, chose the work for his final concert, and Bell characterized the music as “a very emotional, very melodic piece,” with “orchestra colors unusual for a violin concerto.” Being half-Scottish, on his father’s side, and Jewish on his mother’s, Bell joked that the work “brings everything together.”

Although not raised in a religious household, Bell explained that he has a strong connection to Israel. First of all, the violin he plays, a 1713 Stradivarius, is called the Huberman violin, because it was once owned by Bronislaw Huberman, founder of the Israel Philharmonic. That alone garners Bell respect in Israel.

Bell also recently discovered a deeper family connection to the Jewish state. Researchers working on a documentary about Huberman discovered that Bell’s great-grandfather, Shlomo Avigdor (1866-1917), who came to Palestine on the first aliyah in 1891, was buried in Israel, and in May, when Bell performed in Israel, he went for the first time to visit the grave. He was struck by the fact that Avigdor was one of the first pioneers and settlers of the city of Hadera — a piece of Bell’s family history that even his mother was not familiar with, as his great-grandfather had died young. Bell was also moved by seeing inscriptions on the grave that indicated that Avigdor was a cantor.

I asked Bell, who prior to acquiring the Huberman played another Strad, what makes this one so desirable. He compared the feeling for his instrument to the way a person falls in love with his or her mate instead of someone else.

“I fell in love with my violin,” he said, and “within minutes [of playing it], I knew I had to have it. The very same night I tried it, I played at Royal Albert Hall for 8,000 people on the new violin, which is unusual, because it usually takes months to feel comfortable [with a new instrument]. I felt that I didn’t want to play on anything else.”

Bell confessed he has had his ups and downs with his violin — as one does in any relationship — explaining that there are times when he feels he has explored all he can with the instrument, and then others when he falls in love again.

“It’s an ongoing discovery with an instrument like that,” Bell said. “No question that I’m still finding ways of playing and ways of getting colors and sound that I didn’t realize I could do — it’s still happening.”

I asked Bell if he’s had his eye on any other Stradivariuses. He smiled, saying that he’d had his eye on one, and that if it ever became available …

As for what makes a great performer, Bell said: “The emotion in the music is everything. I don’t think a performer who’s just technically proficient is going to go very far, unless they’re 8 years old, and then they can get away with it just because it’s amazing to see. Even Paganini, who was known for his technical prowess, also made women faint and people cry. … There are just some people that have this personality that somehow connects with people. I really can’t explain why some people can get up in front of [an audience and] make you want to watch — and you’re riveted.”

As he spoke, I felt he might almost have been talking about his own popularity. But, for the rest of us, it is his willingness to access his emotions on stage and let them speak through his violin — to be both conduit and performer, to stand in the present and in league with the past — that makes his appeal so tangible.

Find out for yourself July 15 at the Hollywood Bowl.

TOMMYWOOD

NOMINATED

FOR TWO

LA PRESS CLUB

AWARDS!

For Entertainment Reviews/ Criticism Column — For an essay on “Holocaust Movies: Winners & Losers”

http://tommywood.com/2009/02/holocaust-movies-winners-losers.html

and

For Entertainment News or Feature for my profile on Ricky Jay,
“Extraordinary Oddities” http://www.jewishjournal.com/holiday_preview/article/ricky_jay_offers_a_rogues_gallery_of_eccentric_entertainers_in_new_show_200/

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

ARSHILE GORKY,

A KINDRED SPIRIT

“Self-Portrait,” 1937, oil on canvas, 55 x 23 7/8 in.
Private Collection, on long-term loan to the
National Gallery of Art, Washington. Image courtesy of
the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C.

Not long ago, someone brought up the painter Arshile Gorky (1904-1948) and I realized I’d always assumed he was Jewish. I was wrong; he was an Armenian Christian. But my mistake piqued my curiosity: Why did I think so? What element of his life and work spoke to me so deeply that I felt such a kinship?

I have been thinking about Gorky now because this summer, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) at Grand Avenue will present a retrospective of the artist’s work. The show, which opens June 6 and continues through Sept. 20, will consider the artist’s full life’s work. It was curated by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and was recently at the Tate Modern in London.

Here are some details of Gorky’s life that may have led me astray:

1. He was a witness to genocide.

Gorky was born Vosdanig Adoian around 1904 (there is some confusion about the actual date) in the village Khorkom, near Lake Van in Turkey. In 1915, Turkish troops began a pogrom of murder and forced deportations of Armenians in the community, an act of systematic and thorough ethnic cleansing that became known as “The Great Crime” – for which the term genocide was coined. Turkey still refuses to acknowledge the genocide, and the issue continues to fester. Gorky and his family were among thousands who fled to the border, and, during the winter, his mother died of starvation. In 1920, Gorky and his sister immigrated to the United States.

2. He arrived in the United States at Ellis Island, changed his name and eventually settled in New York City.

In choosing the name Arshile Gorky, he claimed to be related to the Russian author Maxim Gorky. After spending some time in Massachusetts, he settled in New York.

3. He was largely self-taught and self-invented.

Much like the Jewish pioneers of the entertainment business, Gorky taught himself to be an artist. He did so by intensive study of the works of Cezanne, Picasso, Léger and Miro. During the 1930s, he worked for the WPA and painted large-scale murals for the administration building at the Newark, N.J., airport.

4. He hung out with other refugee artists.

Gorky’s friends included many of the European artists that fled the Nazis for New York, including the Surrealists André Breton and Roberto Matta, but also the young Willem de Kooning, a future Abstract Expressionist.

5. He was Mark Rothko’s teacher.

Gorky taught at the Grand Central School of Art in New York, where Rothko (who was indeed Jewish) was one of his students.

6. One of his paintings is called “Agony.” Need I say more?

The above may seem a somewhat glib rendering of Gorky’s biography, but it reveals a certain intangible element of dislocation and longing that infuses much of Gorky’s best-loved work, and that is a familiar character among Diaspora Jews.

The Gorky retrospective includes paintings, drawings and prints, and delivers a far-reaching and detailed survey of Gorky’s work. As MOCA Chief Curator Paul Schimmel noted in the exhibition’s press release,
“Gorky courageously reshaped European Modernism into the foundations of abstract expressionism. He inspired a generation of artists that the act of painting alone was enough to be both poetically charged and powerfully tragic.”

The show allows us to witness the full evolution of Gorky’s work, as well as his emotional currents. It is easy to see the influence of his masters, Picasso and Léger, and even his contemporaries, such as Stuart Davis, as Gorky develops his own vocabulary.

Many stunning canvases and drawings are included, from an early iconic self-portrait with the artist’s mother, to a later work on paper, a study for perhaps his best-known work, “The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb” (a work in the Surrealist style, with a Surrealist title, if ever there was one).

Gorky’s exposure to the Surrealists pushed him to explore his subconscious. Even his quasi-abstract works speak to us in a language that, albeit foreign, we can understand instinctually. These works include “Betrothal I” (1947) (from MOCA’s collection), in which anthropomorphic forms seem to dance before us, and “Dark Green Painting” (Philadelphia Museum of Art), one of his last works, which seems to express enormous psychic pain and foreshadows his eventual suicide in 1948.

Throughout the run of the exhibition, many programs will offer opportunities to get to know Gorky better, including Michael Taylor, exhibition curator from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, speaking about Gorky’s relation to Abstract Expressionism (June 6); Richard Hovannisian, professor of Armenian and Near Eastern History at UCLA, who will speak about Gorky’s Armenian heritage (June 20); and filmmaker Atom Egoyan, who will screen his film “Ararat,” in which Gorky appears as a character, at the Pacific Design Center (June 27).

Yes, Gorky was an Armenian Christian. Yet because his work speaks so clearly of dislocation, invention and reinvention, as well as of assimilating the ways of others in order to find one’s own new identity, his story is our story. If Gorky seems like one of us, it is because he was. He just wasn’t Jewish.

If  USC professor Josh Kun had his way, the Jewish people might not be known as “the People of the Book” but rather “the People of the Record.”

“Bagels and Bongos,” Irving Fields Trio, Decca, 1959 Courtesy of Josh Kun and Roger Bennett

“Jews on Vinyl,” curated by Kun and Roger Bennett, of the Charles and Andrea Bronfman Foundation, is the new exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center, where you can seat yourself on a midcentury-modern couch and tap your feet to Irving Fields’ 1959 recording “Bagels and Bongos”;  grin while listening to a wide spectrum of albums – from Herbie Mann’s “Push Push” to Barbra Streisand’s “Superman”; comedy albums by Sophie Tucker, Myron Cohen and Lenny Bruce; Leo Fuchs’ “Shalom Pardner”; or even the Barry Sisters singing their Yiddish rendition of “My Way.”

The exhibition, which ran in San Francisco for almost a year, is based on Kun and Bennett’s 2008 book “And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl” (Crown Publishing).

“When most people think of Jewish music in America, there are some very specific things they think about,” said Kun, a founding member of the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation, alluding to cantorial and klezmer music, which he deemed hugely important. “But, that is a small slice of the Jewish musical story in the United States,” he added.

In curating “Vinyl” and the upcoming Idelsohn release “Black Sabbath,” an anthology of black artists singing songs that are explicitly Jewish, and which attempts to “understand Jewish music as a resource for blackness,” or a planned collection of “Hava Nagila” covers, Kun, 38, is pursuing his passion – investigating music at the intersection of race, identity and popular culture.

“Our conversations [at Idelsohn] do not revolve around irony and kitsch value,” Kun said recently. “They revolve 100 percent [around] love and a deep, manic, hungry curiosity for more knowledge about what we don’t know.”

Kun grew up in West Los Angeles in what he describes as “a very music-loving household – not music playing but music listening.” His father was a big fan of folk music, particularly of The Weavers (featuring Pete Seeger). From The Weavers, Kun learned that “music was always internationalist, came in all sorts of different languages. It was inherently political, and it was about history and community, and it was about a way of thinking about life and society.”

As a high school student at the private Harvard School (prior to its merger with Westlake), Kun started writing a music column – and has pretty much been doing so ever since.

“Music was always the way I experienced things. [It is] the first thing I go to, to figure things out, to figure myself out, to figure out the world, to interact with history.”

Kun went to Duke University as an undergraduate, and then to University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his doctorate in ethnic studies. He was inspired by the writings of Greil Marcus (“Mystery Train,” “Lipstick Traces”) to “look really hard at the relationship between American identity and music and questions of race and ethic identity.”

In his thesis, which became his first book, “Audiotopia” (University of California Press), Kun took up, as he put it, “Walt Whitman’s call of ‘I hear America singing’ to ask, ‘What is America singing?’ and ‘Who’s listening?’ and ‘What are the voices being heard and talked about?’ ”

One night, while watching “The Tonight Show,” host Jay Leno introduced the African American jazz artist Don Byron, who played music by Mickey Katz. Afterward, Leno referred to Katz’s music, Kun recalls, as “bar mitzvah music,” but Byron insisted it was “radical ethnic music.” That Byron knew this music and saw it as radical, and Kun did not, started Kun on a journey of exploration.

Kun eventually got to know Katz’s widow and sons, Ronald Katz and Joel Grey (yes, the actor). He was responsible for republishing Katz’s autobiography and began to give lectures on Katz and his music. It was Kun’s gateway into Jewish music.

At the same time, Kun’s thesis adviser, Waldo Martin, pushed him to “take seriously the role of Jews in the drama of American race and music” and to include Katz in his dissertation, which, until then, had been primarily devoted to black and Latino issues.  More importantly, Martin also urged Kun to consider his own “positionality as a white Jew writing about this stuff.”

He discovered artists such as The Barton Brothers (vaudevillians who mixed Yiddish comedy and edgy klezmer), Menashe Skolnick (once called the great-grandfather of all Catskills comics) and “godfadduh” of Jewish parody Allan Sherman. He haunted the record bins, looking in “the dreaded Judaica” sections. He helped the Magnes Museum in Berkeley organize and digitize its large collection of Jewish music.

Right: “Shalom,” The Barry Sisters, Roulette, 1962 Courtesy of Josh Kun and Roger Bennett

As Kun dug deeper into Jewish recordings, he was surprised to find “all this Latin music.” He started collecting Latin Jewish recordings, primarily but not exclusively New York-based Jewish-Latin exchanges from the 1930s through the 1960s. “That became my hunt.”

How did Latin and Jewish music cross-pollinate? There are several theories. One has to do with Sephardic heritage, Latin by definition. Another has to do with what musician Steve Bernstein has called “the Gulf Coast theory,” concerning the Jewish retirement disapora and the similarities of the rhythmic signatures between the horah and Latin music.

Kun, for his part, believes that “it’s really about population contact and culture.” Or, as he put it, “We have to look at the ways that Jews and Latinos were bumping up against each other, both speaking English and non-English languages, and both making music inspired by the mainstream and outside of it.” For this you would have to look to East Harlem, both Spanish Harlem and Jewish Harlem and, of course, to the Catskills, where mambo mania took hold – refusing to put Jewish music – or Baby – in a corner!

“One of the stories,” Kun said, “is that the guys who would buy the liquor [for the Catskills Jewish resorts] would go to Cuba and Puerto Rico, and they would hear all this [Latin] music and say, ‘We’ve got to bring this back.'”

Kun was not alone in his enthusiasm for these hybrid music discoveries. “I met three wonderful guys: Roger Bennett, David Katznelson [of Birdman Records, among many other music labels and projects], and Courtney Holt [president of MySpace Music]. “When we met, we bonded over our love of music and our interest in rethinking Jewish American music.”

The Rosetta Stone was the discovery of Fields’ “Bagels and Bongos,” a collection of mambo tunes based on Yiddish classics – or, as Bennett and Kun call it, “The White Album of the Jewish Latin Craze.”

In 2005, they formed Reboot Stereophonic, a record label to reissue records they thought were important, many of which were forgotten or had never been released on CD. Over the last few years, they issued several genre-expanding recordings, from “Jewface,” an anthology of transgressive vaudeville songs about Jews, to Gershon Kingsley’s “God Is a Moog,” a collection of Jewish liturgical Moog experiments, to Fred Katz’s Buddhist/kabbalist “Folk Songs for Far Out Folk.”

However, as the music industry began to change over the last few years, they decided they didn’t want to be a record label. They decided to re-form as the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation (named for Abraham Zevi Idelsohn, the legendary musicologist and writer of “Hava Nagila”). Which means that they will still put out records but will also be “a digital site that can function as the hub for Jewish archival musical thinking,” as well as a place for archives to find new audiences; a revamped Web site is planned to launch later this year.

The publication of “And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl” can be seen as a manifesto for the breadth of Jewish music that Kun and the Idelsohn Society are trying to preserve: cantorial albums; Yiddish songs; comedy albums in English, Yiddish and Yinglish; Mickey Katz; records about the Holocaust, the struggle to free Soviet Jews; even Israeli disco fever. It is a declaration of all the ways in which Jews contributed to and sought to become part of the American melting pot – a conversation about the places where cultures clashed and melded. It is also plea to mail in your own cherished, eccentric and “lost” albums to be rediscovered and reclaimed. As the Idelsohn Society is wont to proclaim, “History sounds different when you listen to it.”

Last summer, Idelsohn staged a live Latin Jewish music event outdoors at Lincoln Center in New York that attracted a large and diverse crowd – the old and the young, Jew and non-Jew, a veritable cross section of ages, ethnic backgrounds and sensibilities.

In the same vein, this summer, the Skirball Cultural Center, along with the Idelsohn Society, will stage a “Jews on Vinyl” live event Aug. 19.

Until then, you can go to the Skirball and enjoy a freilach cha-cha. And if you see Kun or Bennett, quote Juan Calle and His Latin Lantzmen: “Mazel Tov, Mis Amigos.”

Tom Teicholz is a film producer in Los Angeles. Everywhere else, he’s an author and journalist who has written for Newsweek.com, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward.

JewishJournal.com exclusive audio:
Interview with Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks sings
Mel Brooks is on a hot streak: He was just a Kennedy Center Honoree (along with Dave Brubeck, Robert De Niro, Grace Bumbry and Bruce Springsteen); 20th Century Fox just released “The Mel Brooks Collection” in Blu-ray – a nine-DVD set that includes “Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein” and “Spaceballs,” among other classics; and Shout! Factory has released “The 2000 Year Old Man: The Complete History,” a three-CD, one-DVD set that collects the various incarnations in which Carl Reiner, the world’s greatest straight man, interviews a visitor who’s survived since ancient times and who speaks in a thick Jewish accent to hilarious effect.

Brooks discussed all this, and a bit more, recently in a phone interview from the offices of his production company. I am glad that I taped our conversation, because I was so excited to talk to him that I stopped taking notes after the first few questions. This is an edited version of our conversation.

Tom Teicholz: You were honored recently at the Kennedy Center in Washington, and on TV it looked like you and Bruce Springsteen were kibitzing during the whole show –
Mel Brooks: Oh yeah, well, you know I’m a big fan, and I’ve got all his – we used to call them records – [and] we were talking about how wonderful the evening was and how honored we felt sitting next to the president.

TT: When the President originally announced your award you sort of interrupted him, too.
MB: I kind of did. … You know, I’m Jewish and irrepressible.

TT: Were you always interrupting people, even as a child?
MB:The minute I could talk, I interrupted people. Because I needed things.

TT: You needed things?
MB: I always needed things. I needed a bagel with cream cheese. I needed things, and I kept asking for them from the minute I could speak.

TT: Carl Reiner, in an interview that’s included in ‘The 2000 Year Old Man’ box set, says you were the same way in the room on ‘Your Show of Shows,’ you were the tummler.
MB: Yes, I used to do that in the Borscht Belt in the mountains. I kept the Jewish guests happy around the pool. I amused them with bad jokes, like, ‘You can’t keep Jews in jail. They eat lox.’ Or ‘[I was dating] a girl who was so thin the waiter said, “Can I check your umbrella?”‘ Just bad, bad Borscht Belt humor, but, you know, it was a pleasure.

TT: There were a lot of funny guys in that famous writers’ room on ‘Your Show of Shows.’ Who, in your opinion, was funniest? Who made you laugh?
MB: They were some of the funniest guys in the world. There was Mel Tolkin, our head writer, [who] had a slight Russian Jewish comedian accent – he was very funny.

TT: I’ve heard that Mel Tolkin is the underrated comedy genius of that group.
MB: He used to break me up a lot. He was kind of my mentor, too. He helped me, showed me the ropes in comedy writing.

TT: There’s also that story about how he recommended a psychiatrist for you.
MB: I went to a psychiatrist, and the guy wouldn’t take me. He said, ‘I’ll find someone else for you, you’re too nervous for me.’

TT: Who were some of the other writers who made you laugh?
MB: In the room there were people besides Mel, like Larry Gelbart, very funny and very quick; and Carl Reiner, himself – he used to hang around the writers’ room, he was really funny. For a short while, there was Woody Allen. Woody was brilliant: dry wit, you had to listen closely. And then there was Neil Simon, who you never heard. ‘Doc’ Simon used to whisper in Carl’s ear, and Carl would say, ‘Neil has the joke,’ and then he would say the joke because Neil was too shy to say the joke.

TT: One of the other comments Reiner makes about ‘The 2000 Year Old Man’ that I found fascinating was that after World War II, after the Holocaust, Jewish humor – sounding like an old Jew -  was off limits.
MB: Yes, it was not politically correct. It was not in any way correct. We only did the [‘2,000 Year Old Man’ routine] for friends, mostly Jews. So we thought we were on safe ground with the Jewish accent. It was the nature of the questions and answers – Steve Allen said, ‘You’ve got to put it on record.’

TT: It’s interesting that a lot of your humor is at the same time outrageous and in some ways old-fashioned.
MB:Yes. Old-fashioned, I always felt, is good. We can go back to Maimonides. Old-fashioned is good. The New Testament, to my mind, is OK, but not quite as hip and brilliant as the Old Testament. So, old-fashioned … is good.

TT: There was a period when your movie work seemed to taper off, before the Broadway version of ‘The Producers.’ Did you think, ‘That’s it, it’s over?’
MB: It’s true. When you’re first discovered, they make a fuss over you. Four, five movies later, instead of ‘It’s a Mel Brooks movie!’ [you get] ‘It’s another Mel Brooks movie.’ You’ve got to live with that. But then 10 years go by, and it becomes a classic … 20th Century Fox is issuing nine Mel Brooks movies with a whole book about my life and pictures from each movie. It’s quite good. It’s the Blu-ray edition, it’s not the hologram edition; you’ll have to wait for the hologram edition – that hasn’t come out yet. I’m kidding. … It’s amazing that there’s an ebb and flow, and there [are] tides in your life. Suddenly, I’m very hot, with the Kennedy Honors, ‘The 2000 Year Old Man’ and now the Blu-ray edition.

TT: You had this amazing second wind with ‘The Producers.’
MB: That got the most Tonys ever given to a Broadway show. It’s amazing: I just wanted to open the door; I didn’t want to break it down.

TT: Seeing the Kennedy Center Honors honoring your work, it turns out you are a song-and-dance man, as much as a comedian.
MB: Turns out that there’s a lot of George M. Cohan [in me]. In my neighborhood, we called him Cohen. When I was a kid, we took him as our own. George M. Cohan wrote a lot of Broadway musicals and did what I later followed in his footsteps [doing]. I did the book [for ‘The Producers’] together with Tom Meehan. I would write the music and the lyrics.

TT: You could probably put on a revue, ‘The Songs of Mel Brooks.’
MB: I probably couldn’t. I could get on a stage, get a moderate-sized audience and [sing] songs. … Like [breaks into song] :

‘Here I am…
I’m Melvin Brooks
I’ve come to stop the show
Just a ham who’s minus looks
But in your hearts I’ll grow!
I tell you gags, I’ll sing you songs
Happy little snappy tunes that roll along
I’m out of my mind
Won’t you be kind?
And, please love
Melvin Brooks.’

That’s my first song that I did in the mountains. It would be greeted with a little applause, a little of [he groans], a lot of you’d hear ‘English! English!’ … because a lot of Jews, when they found out they were in for a night of English, they were very unhappy. I had only a few Yiddish jokes, and my Yiddish to this day is rather limited.
My grandmother spoke Yiddish. Her English wasn’t so terrific. She knew a few English words, like ‘subway.’ She didn’t even know fenster for window. She knew ‘vindow.’ But my mother, who came here when she was 3, her name was Brookman, she actually had an Irish accent. You say, ‘Why? Why did Mel Brooks’ mother have an Irish accent? That’s crazy! Why?’

TT: Why?
MB: She was 3 years old, and when she went to school all the teachers were Irish, and she thought that’s the way you speak English. You know [how] we say in the Brooklyn accent ‘Thirty-third and Third’? That’s all from Ireland.

TT: That’s funny.
MB: It’s true. I’m half-Irish, without knowing it.

TT: When you originally did ‘The 2000 Year Old Man,’ you were in fact quite young – now you are closer, at least in comedy years, to being 2,000.
MB: That’s very funny …. [laughs] I’m approaching that 2,000-year-old guy for real!

TT: Does the advice [from] ‘The 2000 Year Old Man’ still work?
MB: The good jokes still work, even if they are [outdated]. Even if the things are not there anymore. I don’t know if the products that I mentioned are still [there].

TT: Nectarines are still a good fruit.
MB: Nectarines are still good.

TT: No fried foods is still good advice.
MB: Yes.

TT: But there are a few better products since then than wax paper.
MB: We mention that! Carl says, ‘What about the heart-lung machine?’ I said, I believe, on the record: ‘That was good. That was good. Hard to get into the medicine cabinet, but that was good.’
Some things are really dated, but we never did anything political. We always did [material about] the human condition. Human behavior. [Carl would say:] ‘What were the means of transportation a thousand years ago?’ I’d say: ‘Fear. A lion would come behind you, you’d move.’
A lot of the jokes from the early record still work. On the first album there are four or five characters … that people don’t know about. [The German Psychiatrist, The Third Best Poet, The Astronaut, etc.]

TT: At the Kennedy Center Honors, Carl Reiner said he wanted to get you back in the studio to record again.
MB: We might. But I said to Carl, ‘If we do it, let’s do it like the first record: Don’t tell me what you’re going to ask, I don’t even want to know the subject. We’ll just ad-lib it like we did the first two records.’

TT: Carl Reiner has written several books and several volumes of autobiography. When are you going to write your book, your story?
MB: I’m not old enough yet. I’m only 83. When I get to be 93, I’ll start thinking about, ‘Maybe I should write an autobiography?’

“Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt With Nazis,” a new documentary, portrays filmmaker Gaylen Ross’ attempt to understand why Reszo (Rudolf) Kasztner, a Hungarian Jewish leader who saved more than 1,600 people in war-time Budapest – more than Oskar Schindler – on the so-called Kasztner train, remains so controversial to this day.

In the course of the film, Ross tells several interrelated stories, including that of Kasztner’s rescue efforts during the Holocaust, as well as the stories of his life in Israel, his infamous libel trial (Kasztner was accused of collaborating with the Nazis) and his 1957 assassination by Ze’ev Eckstein, a right-wing Israeli nationalist. Finally the various threads are brought together as Kasztner’s daughter meets with her father’s murderer and Israel’s Yad Vashem acknowledges the importance of Kasztner’s rescue efforts, and accepts the Kasztner archive as part of its collection.

Kasztner has been faulted on many counts: for whom he saved and how he chose them (even though Kasztner personally chose very few of the train’s passengers, he did put his wife and 19 of his relatives on the train). For how he saved them – by negotiating with Eichmann and other German officials. And, finally, for not saving more people – 600,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered during that time, at one point as many as 12,000 a day – and although Kasztner had received Rudolf Vrba’s report on Auschwitz and the Nazi plans for the extermination of Hungarian Jewry, among the accusations made against Kasztner was that he did not sufficiently inform Hungarian Jewry of the report or its contents (a charge he disputed at his Israeli trial).

Kasztner is accused of allowing a few to live so that the others would go to their deaths without protest. As one of Kasztner’s daughters asks: “Why Kasztner? Why is Kasztner blamed for everything?”

The emotion Kasztner provokes to this day is striking. It’s as if those Jews who survived and those whose relatives were killed have displaced their anger at the Nazis and their own guilt feelings, both for surviving and for not saving others, onto Kasztner.

My father, Bruce Teicholz, knew Kasztner. They met in Budapest shortly after my father’s arrival there in early 1942 as a Polish refugee. Kasztner was co-head of the Hungarian Jewish Rescue Committee, my father was co-head of the Polish Jewish Rescue Committee, both of which helped refugees. When the Nazis arrived in Budapest, Joel Brand and Kasztner were the ones to negotiate with Eichmann. My father went underground, leading a group of forgers, couriers, smugglers and fighters who worked with Brand and his wife, Hansi.

My father, who died in 1993, defended Kasztner, believing, as the Supreme Court of Israel would come to conclude, that in impossible circumstances Kasztner did what he could and that lives were saved. “The thing you have to understand about Kasztner,” my father used to say, “is that he was a lawyer.” By which he meant that although Kasztner was never a practicing attorney, his instinct was to negotiate.

One of the arguments made by Merav Michaeli, Kasztner’s granddaughter, in “Killing Kasztner” is that “negotiating” doesn’t fit with how Israelis define their heroes – they prefer fighters or martyrs. Many of Kasztner’s critics argue that it is immoral to have negotiated with the Nazis at all, and that anything gained was done so at an unacceptable price – the lives of Jews.

Kasztner also symbolizes a rift in the Jewish psyche between resistance and accommodation, assimilation and defiance – and in Israel, between Ben-Gurion’s Labor Party and Menachem Begin’s Likud Party. Kasztner worked in a Labor post. The Defense at the trial sought to bring down the Ben-Gurion government, and Kasztner’s antagonist in his libel trial, attorney Shmuel Tamir, would eventually serve as Begin’s justice minister.

Many in Israel turned against Kasztner when it was revealed at trial that Kasztner gave affidavits in favor of SS officer Kurt Becher, commissar of all German concentration camps and chief of the economic office of the SS in Hungary – which spared Becher from being prosecuted at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials (Becher appeared as a witness). Kasztner also gave affidavits on behalf of Nazis Hermann Krumey and Dieter Wislency, whom he had negotiated with in Budapest. The Israel Supreme Court never reversed the lower court’s judgment about the “criminal and perjurious way” Kasztner saved Becher.

However, the film reveals that Israeli historian Shosanna Barri uncovered documents that indicate that the Jewish Agency not only knew of Kasztner’s dealings with Becher, but that its officials also were in dialogue with Becher themselves, hoping to gain Becher’s help in recovering Jewish property and in tracking Eichmann after the war’s end. This leaves open the question: Why didn’t Kasztner say anything about this? Was Kasztner covering for the Jewish Agency? Was he waiting for them to step forward and clear him? In the end, was Kasztner loyal to a fault?

Finally, Kasztner’s assassin, Eckstein, is an extremely compelling character. If you’ve ever wondered how terrorist organizations recruit assassins or suicide bombers; if you’ve ever wondered how an educated young person from a good family can be convinced that he needs to take on such a mission – watch this film.

Eckstein explains that his brain was “poisoned” by right-wing extremists who wanted to purge Israel of its corrupt elements, beginning with Kasztner. He says that today he bears no connection to the young man who committed those acts, but he nonetheless accepts full responsibility for his actions. In the film, a meeting between Kasztner’s daughter and his assassin is arranged at the daughter’s request (the assassin at first refuses, then relents). The meeting, albeit dramatic, is neither cathartic nor revelatory, but does seem to offer Kasztner’s daughter a measure of comfort, if not closure.

In light of all this and in spite of all this, the question remains: Why Kasztner? Why was he such a lightning rod?

To understand Kasztner you have to consider the human dimension and consider the man: imagine a person from Cluj, a Transylvanian border city, who arrives in Budapest and appoints himself as the representative of the Jewish people – that takes a certain chutzpah, a certain ego. There is something about Hungarian Jews of that era, in general, and in particular those worldly, assimilated Hungarian Jews who arrived in Budapest as lawyers and journalists (many of whom became playwrights or screenwriters and ended up in Hollywood). They seemed to think of themselves as magicians – charming, entertaining, able to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

Kasztner believed time was on his side – that if Eichmann could be stalled, the war would end.

Was Kasztner arrogant? Was he resented? Was he damned for what he did? And damned for what he couldn’t do?

Imagine being a Jew in a room with Eichmann, or riding in an SS staff car with Becher as Jews were being murdered daily; it is as horrifying as it is daunting to contemplate. Lives were in the balance and, thanks to Kasztner, lives were saved – not only those on the Kasztner train, but those that Becher spared in the concentration camps and those my father helped to get false papers or cross the border to safety.

Eichmann and the Third Reich had their own larcenous and murderous ambitions. But did Eichmann and Becher know the war was coming to an end? Did they fear war crimes prosecution? Did Becher give information to the Jewish Agency about “the Becher deposits,” confiscated Jewish fortunes in return for Kasztner’s affidavit? Nothing happened in a vacuum.

It is a human impulse to second-guess, to judge, to write history as a moral lesson, with right and wrong, winners and losers, heroes and traitors.  But history is made by complex characters. We may never know the full truth animating the motives, agendas and politics of Kasztner or his many antagonists. But “Killing Kasztner” makes the case that history is a narrative in flux that can be rewritten as our own understanding of events deepen, and that Reszo Kasztner, in all his complexity, deserves to be remembered.

“How’s it going?”

As a tough year ended and a new decade began, it seemed a fair question. While The New York Times has looked to bowling alley attendance as a gauge of our nation’s condition, I turned to Jonathan Greenstein and his recent auction of silver Jewish ritual art, or Judaica, to determine the health, wealth and current condition of the Jewish community.

On Jan. 11, 2010, J. Greenstein Co., the country’s only auction house dedicated to Judaica, held a sale of 185 lots including Kiddush cups, Torah shields, finials as well as rare items as an 1830 Chanukah lamp from Alternberg, Germany, (estimated at $65,000-$85,000), that graced the cover of the auction catalogue.

But first, you may be wondering, who is Jonathan Greenstein and what makes him such an expert?

Born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Greenstein traces his interest in Judaica to one significant occurrence in his youth: getting kicked out of the Yeshivah of Flatbush in ninth grade.

“My deal with my parents,” Greenstein recounted recently, “was that they would let me go to public school if I got a part-time job.” So beginning at 13 1/2, and for the next three and a half years, Greenstein worked part time in an antiques store. The owner, who was not Jewish, allowed the boy to take Judaica items that caught his eye, in lieu of pay. And so, with a $20 Kiddush cup here and an $80 Kiddush cup there, Greenstein began to collect.

Greenstein went on to Brooklyn College, receiving bachelor’s and master’s degrees in health administration and pursuing a career in home health care. However, he continued collecting and trading Judaica. When he discovered that although there are silver experts, “there is no expertise in Judaica,” he took it upon himself to become an expert.

Greenstein is the first to admit that his education is not a formal one; it is all “hands on.” What then makes for an expert in silver Judaica?

“Understanding silver, understanding fakes and forgeries, understanding the history of Jewish art, understanding the history of the Jewish people, understanding various art forms,” he said, adding that you also need to “understand silver trademarks and similarities between Jewish and non-Jewish art forms of certain periods.”

In 2003, Chabad, to which he already was a donor, asked Greenstein to organize a charity benefit featuring an auction of Judaica. The event was a success, and Greenstein’s path was set. He got an auctioneer’s license in New York and the following year opened up J. Greenstein and Co. He now holds two auctions a year — this month’s was his 11th, and in February he will be begin accepting items for the next, which will take place in June. Greenstein said he no longer collects for himself (“I don’t want to compete with my clients”), but he does serve as a consultant to other auction houses and for collectors, advising them on what to buy — and what not to buy; what is fake, for example.

Greenstein believes there are more Judaica fakes than in almost any other field. “You can’t buy Judaica in Israel,” Greenstein says referring to antique Judaica. He warns of fakes in almost every shop on King David and Ben-Yehuda streets in Jerusalem. Most common, he says, are fakes with Russian silver marks — Greenstein recommends anyone making a major purchase ask an independent third party to authenticate. (Greenstein is in the process of writing a textbook to help identify fakes.)

In our conversation, Greenstein waxed poetic about the distinctive characteristics of Ashkenazic work from both Western and Eastern Europe — he described a piece from Poland as magnificent because it expressed “the Jewish soul”; he also admires Sephardic work, with its intricate decorations; and even Judaica from the American Colonial era, such as the work of Paul Revere’s contemporary, Meyer Meyer.

Greenstein still owns a health care company, although he has given up its day-to-day operation. Judaica has taken him places, such as into the homes of major Jewish philanthropists, leaders and celebrities whom he would never have had access to “selling wheelchairs,” he said. That has been one of the most rewarding aspects of his journey, he told me.

He said that the majority of Judaica collectors are 50 and over, often non-observant Jews who respond to the pieces aesthetically or because of a connection between the object’s provenance and the buyer’s own heritage. For some, owning Judaica is a way to express their connection to Judaism. Sometimes the emotional response trumps a rational assessment of authenticity, or, for that matter, value.

Which brings me back to the marketplace. I asked Greenstein how the economic downturn and the Madoff fraud had impacted the current Judaica market.

“A lot more things have become available,” he said. “A lot of things popped out of the woodwork in the last couple of years.” And the unique pieces did well.

“Quality will always sell,” Greenstein explained. “There’s a concept of ‘fresh’ when something hasn’t been on the market for 20 or 25 years.” For example, “there’s a menorah that Sotheby’s had that had a provenance of 130 years in one family…. It’s never been on the market in my lifetime — they estimated [it] at $200,000-$300,000. I went up to $250,000 on behalf of a client — it sold for just under half a million — $470,000 hammer [plus commissions and taxes]. When things are fresh, unseen and sexy, they go for a lot of money.”

Which brings us to his Jan. 11 auction. Greenstein offered up 185 lots — of which 50 did not sell or meet their minimum. The top-selling items, with one exception, sold at the low end of the estimate (the Chanukah lamp on the catalogue cover sold for $65,000), and the item that topped the estimate, a silver etrog container, sold for $2,500 above the high estimate. Yet Greenstein assured me that “the sale was our best,” selling a total of $550,000 worth of Judaica, a record-breaking sale.

“The Judaica market is very strong,” Greenstein said. These days, he said, “people are investing in tangible assets,” adding that these “were not 2007 prices.” The market, he said, had become rational, not emotional. He added that he is so enthusiastic about the market that he has moved up his next auction from August to June.

So to recap: “How are things?”

Things are not what they were. Quality and “freshness” matters. People who didn’t think they would need to be in the marketplace as sellers, are. As a result, things have rationalized and there is optimism about the future.

Welcome to the new “new.” Welcome to 2010.

History often seems to take place on a stage distant from our own experience – yet the exhibition “Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968,” which opened at the Skirball on Nov. 19, reminds us that even our recent past can deliver a strong message for our times.

“Road to Freedom” is a collection of more than 170 iconic images by more than 35 photographers – including Danny Lyon, Morton Broffman, Charles Moore, Bruce Davidson and Gordon Parks – spanning the civil rights movement. It moves from Rosa Parks’ arrest in 1955 to Martin Luther King Jr.’s death and funeral in 1968. The show is accompanied by several other exhibitions, including Eric Etheridge’s “Breach of Peace.”

“Road to Freedom” comes to the Skirball from the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, where it was conceived and organized by photo curator Julian Cox. It fits the Skirball’s mission to express “the vitality of American democratic ideals,” said Skirball associate curator, Erin Clancey: “The images in this exhibition are iconic of the democratic process.”

The show is, indeed, striking on several levels. First of all, the historical aspect: Although we may recall the civil rights movement as a series of sit-ins, protests and marches, today, four decades later, it seems like ancient history, a distant memory. It is hard to believe that not so long ago African Americans in this country lived under conditions that claimed to be “separate but equal” but were anything but. A 1962 image by Lyon taken in Georgia shows two water fountains: one, a solid block of metal of the type one sees at schools, beneath the sign: “White.” Next to it, a smaller, and in every way lesser, fountain stands under the sign “Colored.” It is a simple image that clearly depicts the second-class status once afforded American blacks.

The exhibition takes the viewer on a panoramic tour of the civil rights struggle as it progressed from freedom riders to the early protests in Birmingham to the March on Washington, and the march from Selma to Montgomery. There is also a section on Los Angeles and the 1965 Watts riots (added for the Skirball) as well as one on the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr.

The photographs in this exhibit vividly capture the violence perpetrated against those who dared challenge the status quo: Joseph Postiglione’s images of an integrated Greyhound bus set on fire in Alabama; Bill Hudson’s of a police dog attacking a young African American man in Birmingham; Charles Moore’s photos of fire hoses turned against crowds to disperse and subdue protesters; and a shot of blood-spattered John Lewis and Jim Zwerg, beaten in Montgomery. And there are the photos of the Klan and crosses burning in the night that remain frightening to this day.

This exhibition reminds us that in this battle for human rights and dignity, lives were at stake. A section of the show is devoted to James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, an African American and two white (and Jewish) freedom riders who were arrested by the police and released to Klan members, who murdered them. Another section contains photos from the funeral of King, including Constantine Manos and Bob Adelman’s photos of the great civil rights leader lying in his open casket.

The overall effect is immersive and moving.

The role of the press in making the civil rights cause a national one is also a part of this show. Today, when the mainstream media is often derided and facing danger of being dismantled, it is important to recall the outrage, shame and call to action these images produced in everyday citizens, politicians and even in Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

At the same time, the companion exhibit, Eric Etheridge’s “Breach of Peace,” offers a wonderful window into the lives of the 1961 wave of freedom riders, pairing their mug shots with portraits of them today. It is fascinating to read about what motivated them to get involved and what has become of them. Many continued on as political activists, some on the local or even national level – yet, overall, they were just people who became motivated to play a role in history and were, for the most part, changed by the experience. Among those featured are the stories of Bob Filner, then a Cornell student from Queens, today a congressman from San Diego; Jorgia Siegel, then a freshman at Berkeley, today teaching Lamaze classes in Santa Barbara; and Joan Pleune, then a senior at Berkeley, today active in the Granny Peace Brigade protesting the war in Iraq.

As part of the exhibition, one can also watch the award-winning short documentary film, “Voices of Freedom,” which includes both historical footage and present-day interviews with photographers and activists from the era, co-produced by Cox and produced, directed and edited by Neal Broffman, son of photographer Morton Broffman.

Another short documentary, “Partners on the Road to Freedom,” produced with excerpts from the PBS documentary “The Jewish Americans,” on the role of Jewish Americans in the civil rights movement and their common cause with African Americans is shown continuously in the exhibition space. It is definitely worth watching and includes footage of the German-born Rabbi Joachim Prinz’s speech at the March on Washington, where he spoke of the Jewish community’s bond with the African American community as “solidarity born of our own painful experience.”

Two companion exhibitions are also on view. One is “After 1968,” which also was conceived by the High Museum and includes recent and commissioned works by young artists born in or after 1968. The other, titled “An Idea Called Tomorrow,” was co-conceived by the Skirball and the California African American Museum (CAMM) in Exposition Park, and organized by CAMM, showcases works by 12 contemporary artists that address issues of social justice and the active role we all must take in that process. This last show will be on view at both museums.

The combination of the “Road to Freedom,” “After 1968” and “An Idea Called Tomorrow,” Clancey points out, addresses civil rights’ “past, present and future.”

After having a few days to let the exhibition’s images sink in, I found that I kept thinking of the photographer Moneta Sleet Jr.’s image of a young King reading a book on Gandhi. In all the talk of civil rights and protest, it is easy to forget that the key tactic of King’s battle was militant nonviolence. As the exhibition details, protesters were trained to respond to taunts, insults and violence with nonviolence. In the civil rights struggle, practicing nonviolence exposed the weakness of the oppressors, giving protesters the moral high ground and affirming the justice of their cause.

The power of nonviolence is the message that stayed with me long after I finished touring the exhibit – and it is what makes “Road to Freedom” relevant to our times and so fitting for the Skirball, whose own permanent collection highlights the struggle for freedom and the power of democracy.

King was murdered more than 40 years ago. He is still celebrated, but his message of nonviolence now seems forgotten.

The conflicts of our recent times, most notably in the Middle East, have been stories of responding to violence with violence in the search for peace and freedom. As the Middle East leaders and their antagonists harden their positions, I wonder what would happen if their own people, along with their supporters at home and throughout the world, were to embrace the militant nonviolence of the civil rights movement.

Given the present situation and current times, it seems an impossible tactic, almost laughable. Yet looking at the photos in the “Road to Freedom” – at what the freedom riders, the protesters and the marchers faced, and the dream they made possible – I wondered whether the true path to peace and freedom wasn’t staring me in the face.

When the German forces surrendered to the Allies in May 1945, World War II in Europe ended. However, for the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, the trauma of what they endured wasn’t over. For many, the effects lingered on in ways large and small, noticeable and not, often in ways their families came to know.

Rita Lurie was one such person. She survived the war in hiding, a young child hidden for two years in a Polish farmhouse attic with more than a dozen members of her family, and she witnessed both her mother and her infant brother perish before her eyes. At war’s end, she passed through a succession of Displaced Persons camps along with her extended family before arriving in New York. Her father remarried, to a Holocaust survivor he met in the DP camps.

In time, Lurie herself married and moved to California, where she raised three children. Her eldest daughter, Leslie, became quite accomplished: while an undergraduate at UCLA, she held the student seat on the California Board of Regents; after graduating UCLA Law School, she held a 9th Circuit clerkship; she was an NBC television executive and producer; she was a founding board member and past president of the Alliance for Children’s Rights; she is a member and former president of the Los Angeles County Board of Education and has been on the board of several other nonprofits. She married Cliff Gilbert, an attorney (they have since hyphenated their names as Gilbert-Lurie), and they are parents to two children and a stepson.

Reading this, you might think that you already know everything you need to know about Rita Lurie and Leslie Gilbert-Lurie – another story of the triumphs of a Holocaust survivor and her overachieving progeny – but in the pair’s recently published “Bending Toward the Sun: A Mother and Daughter Memoir” (Harper), the reader is given an extraordinarily candid account of the deep impact the Holocaust has had on survivors and their descendents.

I recently sat down with Lurie and Gilbert-Lurie to discuss how the book evolved and the insights it yielded.

Lurie explained that she was encouraged to write her story because of the feedback she received from students when she spoke at schools. Although she feared her stories would seem frightening, the students found them inspiring. Lurie wanted to record those stories, and she wanted to pay tribute to her mother and the others who had died in the Holocaust.

Over the years, Lurie had written bits and parts of her story for herself. Various friends had encouraged her to write her story more fully and even offered to help her, but Lurie found the process difficult and frustrating. At one point, Gilbert-Lurie offered, “Maybe I could help you write it.” Her mother was ready to start immediately.

“I don’t think she heard the word ‘maybe,'” Gilbert-Lurie now says.

“I really wanted those stories out there,” Lurie said. “Frankly, I thought it would be cathartic.”

The process took 12 years. The first several were taken up by fact gathering. Two or three times a week, Gilbert-Lurie met with her mother, getting her to tell her story from the beginning. At the same time, they realized they also needed to consult Lurie’s sister, two of her uncles and three first cousins, all of whom had also survived in the attic and were still alive. So they traveled to interview them.

Almost from the start, Gilbert-Lurie sensed that she wanted to tell her mother’s story, but also how it had impacted her.

“I knew that my mother’s story was distinctive,” Gilbert-Lurie said. Very few families were able to survive hiding together in such large numbers for so many months, as has been so famously illustrated by Anne Frank’s story. At the same time, Gilbert-Lurie was well aware that the world might react with, “Oh, not another Holocaust story.”

“We wanted to tell the story a different way,” she said. So Lurie tells her story with extraordinary attention to detail, both factual and emotional. “I think I hung onto those facts and details,” she said, “because it made me feel more complete. I wasn’t just a mannequin; I was a person.”

Lurie relates her life after the war and in the United States, and the difficulties she has had in her relationships with her family members, relatives and in feeling loved, as well as the roles her husband and her children have played in her life. She is unusually honest and extremely frank about her feelings of inadequacy and about her years of therapy and episodes of recurring severe depression.

Lurie told me that she surprised even herself with her candor.

She also describes how, after the war, she was molested – once by a survivor in the DP camps and another time by a relative. These events, she says, “had a profound impact on me, and that I worked through in therapy.” She was concerned about possible reactions to such revelations, but felt they needed to be in the narrative.

Gilbert-Lurie stressed that the book makes the point that no one is all good or all bad. In Poland, Lurie’s family may have been saved because a German told them not to show up at the train deportation. It was Polish peasants who hid them, and there were others who did not denounce them, although their attic hiding place was not a complete secret (the extra body heat melted the snow on the roof – a giveaway). And on the other side, not all the Holocaust’s survivors were good people.

The book’s second part includes Gilbert-Lurie’s account of her life, including her extreme separation anxiety, as well as the separation anxiety that her own daughter, representing the third generation, has experienced. Gilbert-Lurie said that writing about herself was in some ways more difficult than writing her mother’s story, in part because she knew it would be less dramatic. Nevertheless, she felt it was important to share how the trauma of one generation impacts the next, and the one after that. Whether the reason for the impact is biological, as some scientists are now suggesting, or psychological or sociological is not as important for Gilbert-Lurie as recording that it occurs.

“There are so many children in so many parts of the world who experience deep trauma and don’t get the psychological help they need,” Gilbert-Lurie said. “I want people to be aware it’s not just their generation … but generations after that will be more fearful and more anxious as a result of what their parents went through, and there are probably ways to mitigate that if we are aware of some of this impact.”

Gilbert-Lurie recounts how at one family gathering, one of her relatives said of her fellow survivors, “We’re all still half-numb.”

Writing the book was difficult, and on occasion the authors had to take breaks from the material. At the same time, Lurie became very attached to the experience of working on the book with her daughter – so much so that after they finished she felt a tremendous loss. And to this day she is plagued by feelings of guilt – often in the face of her own or her children’s or grandchildren’s happiness. Still, Lurie says, “one thing I don’t want is pity,” adding, “I am very happy with my life. I feel very blessed.” To which Gilbert-Lurie is quick to add, “My mother was very focused on giving us the love and security they never had.”

Yet … yet there is a private world of deeply felt emotions that “Bending Toward the Sun” exposes, revealing the long shadow of the Holocaust from generation to generation.

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 regularly in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles.