Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

12 Bugsy Malone (Paramount Pictures, 1976): written and directed by Alan Parker; with Jodie Foster

13“My Name Is Tallulah,” music and lyrics by Paul Williams

14“Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” written by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe

15 Pretty Baby (Paramount Pictures, 1978): written by Polly Platt; directed by Louis Malle; with Brooke Shields, Susan Sarandon, and Keith Carradine

16 Lolita (MGM, 1962): screenplay by Vladimir Nabokov, based on his novel; directed by Stanley Kubrick; with Sue Lyon, James Mason, Peter Sellers, and Shelley Winters

17 Manhattan (United Artists, 1979): written by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman; directed by Woody Allen; with Woody Allen, Mariel Hemingway, and Diane Keaton

QUESTIONS AND COMMANDMENTS, MATZOH, MEZUZAHS, MENORAHS, AND A CRASH COURSE IN CHRIST

Fiddler on the Roof

The Ten Commandments

Jesus Christ Superstar

The Odessa File

The Chosen

It is 1971, and I am a seven-year-old girl living with my parents and four older sisters in our small sepia-toned village of Anatevka, somewhere in Russia, sometime in the very early twentieth century. Our life here is hard but merry; we are always singing. Papa is the head of the household, of course, the Papa, the Papa! we sing, who day and night must scramble for a living, feed a wife and children, say his daily prayers! But Mama, aproned and head-scarfed, always pounding bread dough or stirring pots of soup, is the one who is really in charge, we all know, the one who must raise the family and run the home, so Papa’s free to read the holy book , and our home is redolently female: even from here, munching popcorn and watching us rapturously from my scratchy red velvet seat in the dark, I can smell the warm milk from our cows in the barn, the potato-starched laundry flapping sun-hot dry on lines in our chicken-scratch’d yard, the linen pillows oiled with our long brown hair. Our hovel of a house is flurried and flounced with petticoats, it glistens with brass lamps and bubbles of chicken fat goldening those pots on the stove, and the two precious silver candlesticks Mama brings out for our Sabbath prayer, and which she will give to my oldest sister Tzeitel on her wedding day. (Only my three older sisters Tzeitel, Hodel, and Chava appear to have names; we younger two, it seems, are interchangeable.) Our rickety wooden synagogue gleams with the gold Star of David and the shining Torah, is made warm by our heated devotion and our beloved Rabbi, who is all bicker and josh. Somewhere else in our village are glimpses of an expansive cold gray church where cold gray people worship a dead man hanging on a cross, somewhere there are Russians, all of them are the “Others,” but as Papa says, We do not bother them, and so far, they do not bother us . We keep to ourselves and our traditions, our Tradition! Somewhere out there in the world there is, or there will be, revolution, men and women dancing together and peasants rising up against a tsar and the sound of metal swords and screaming horses and people trying to change the workings of the world. .

But here, our village soundtrack is a dulcet minor key, a fragile yet tenacious violin song that bursts into hummable melody, it is mournful and joyous all at the same time and makes me want to dance; we pluck our chickens and pitch our hay to the beat, our choreography is wholly expressive of our lives, our faith, our very souls.

But a reminder, a refrain: Papa is the Head of the Family, yes, who has the right, as Master of the House, to have the final word at home! He is our benevolent king, our loving, huggable tsar, the patriarch made persuadable by our female kisses or tears. He dances for us in the barn or along a dirt road, arms raised to his buddy-buddy God in both supplication and gratitude. My Papa, his name is Tevye, and he is cheerfully volatile, he dreams of being a rich man, all day long he’d biddy biddy bum , but he loves his cart horse and milk cows as much as he loves us, his wife and five daughters, he is all belly and grizzled eyebrows and scratchy beard. Papa explains to me, to all of us, the importance of our Tradition! , that

TEVYE

because of our traditions, everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to do,

how to sleep, eat, work, wear a fringed prayer shawl, cover our heads to show our constant devotion to this God of ours who is thoughtful enough to provide these Traditions! , such comforting, tidy rules on exactly how we must live our lives, how we must always behave. Such security, in that directive, instructional love.

Here in our cinematic Anatevka life, here in the home I love , it is always a burnished sunrise or sunset. Our Jewishness is the harvest gold of our kitchen appliances, the color of supermarket challah yellow with egg yolks and glistening fat bubbles of Campbell’s chicken soup. Our Jewishness is made luminous with candles and copper kettles and fresh milk. We glow with our Jewishness.

I became a Jew when I was seven.

But I was already Jewish, actually, a default Jew by birth, byblood. My father was raised a Lutheran in the backwoods of Wisconsin, trudged every Sunday by his icy single mother to the town church three miles away until he was eight years old and decided “the whole goddamn thing was bullshit”; he refused to have any more to do with God or religion or spirituality or faith of any kind. But my mother was Jewish, if unobservant, and so, according to both Jewish law and Nazi propaganda, I was born a Jew, too. My maternal grandmother was born in Poland to the village rabbi but shed both accent and religious observation as part of her teenage immigrant assimilation in America; she became even less observant upon marrying my secular Jewish grandfather, who, if anything, was an anti-Semitic Jew, a Reagan Republican Jew, disdainful of any public form or expression of religion, embarrassed by Jewish shtick or Catskills humor he felt evinced a lack of sophistication, and perpetually annoyed with Israel for always causing so much trouble. My grandparents had been members of a temple in the early days of their marriage, mostly, I suspect, for the card games and cocktail parties they loved, especially my dance-on-the-tabletop, former-flapper grandmother. But when they fell on hard times and could not afford their temple dues — a financial shame that would haunt my grandfather forever — they asked the rabbi for some temporary leniency: Help us out, please, we are members of this congregation in good Jewish standing , and were told No. No, you must leave. Their temple membership was revoked, they were cast out from the flock, disowned, dismissed, and whatever Jewishness was left in my grandfather died at that humiliating moment; he swore he was done with Judaism, forever.

And yet there remained some Jewish markers in my grandparents’ home: A small metal and enamel thing called a mezuzah nailed to their front doorframe; a blue metal can the size of a brick with Hebrew lettering on it and a slot at the top for spare coins, to raise money for some undefined Jewish organization; and a dark, to-my-child-eyes huge oil painting of a solemn-eyed, black-garmented man hunched over a book, which might have been a portrait of my Polish great-grandfather rabbi or some artist’s rendering of Shylock, or simply a generic Portrait of a Jew. I spent a great deal of time at my grandparents’ home as a child, and this painting, staring down at me on the comfy couch where I would sleep overnight, confused me, felt both comforting and foreboding. Maybe it was a portrait of God. What did I know?