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

REB SAUNDERS

through the wisdom and the pain of silence. To teach him other people are alone, are suffering, other people are carrying pain. And he learned through the wisdom and the pain of silence that a mind without a heart is nothing.

Reuven, clearly disapproving, does not respond, so Reb Saunders asks — still of Reuven, not Danny:

REB SAUNDERS

So, you think I’ve been cruel? Maybe. But I don’t think so, because my beloved Daniel has learned. So, let him go. .

And he finally turns to Danny:

REB SAUNDERS

Daniel? You heard?

DANIEL

Yes, Papa.

REB SAUNDERS

And when you go forth into the world, you will be proud, and go forth as a Jew? And you will keep the commandments of a Jew?

Daniel begins to cry.

REB SAUNDERS

Maybe you should forgive me. For not being a wiser father. .

They embrace; now both of them are crying, and I am crying, too, for it is so moving to watch this stern patriarch soften, express weakness and doubt, accept Danny for who he really is, to share in this loving reconciliation between parent and child.

I am also moved during the scene when the United Nations votes Yes on a resolution to support the state of Israel, the first step in the actual creation of a Jewish homeland; Reuven and his father, listening to the news on the radio, are overwhelmed with joy, and although I consider myself shamefully apolitical, when the newscaster announces, “We have a State! After two thousand years of exile, we can go home again!” I cry, too; I have never felt “exiled,” and yet, in some odd way it feels good to have a “home,” to know a home exists. I remember that sixth-grade debate, and I am embarrassed not just by my eleven-year-old’s lack of understanding, but also by my lack of interest in even trying to understand, my lack of curiosity about the world, and I am surprised and grateful I feel so deeply about this, now.

But watching this film, I am finally — it’s about time, I am almost eighteen years old — awakened to the gender politics at play in these Jewish lives, a theme almost invisibly woven throughout the films I have seen. In the end, Golde was not really in charge of anything beyond what kind of soup to make; she had no say in the tearing apart of her family, could only cower and weep before Tevye’s decisive rage. Her household of strong-willed daughters, like Moses’s giggling sisters-in-law, or his own wife, Sephora, were kept far too busy cooking and cleaning— And who does Mama teach, to mend and tend and fix? Preparing me to marry whomever Papa picks? The daughters, the daughters! — to play any role in life beyond nurturing mother or supportive wife. The women of Christ’s Judea are backup singers, backup dancers, but other than Mary Magdalene (who was most likely not a prostitute, but a woman who left her husband and children to follow a different path in life), they are virtually absent from any significant event; all these women peer through curtains at the goings-on during temple services, are hidden away in the kitchen while the men celebrate the Sabbath with food and drink and intellectual debate, they wait, freezing, by the side of a road for the men to finish their prayers. At a wedding in The Chosen , the women are not merely separated by a rope, as in Fiddler , but by an actual wall, lest there be, what? Contamination? Temptation? Separate is not equal. Danny’s mother (no wig, but her head always so snugly wrapped in a white scarf it looks as though she’s undergoing chemo) is only ever seen cooking or cleaning or serving tea. At some point, Reuven begins crushing on Danny’s younger sister Shaindel, teasing her about reading a book:

REUVEN

Aren’t you supposed to be helping your mother in the kitchen?

SHAINDEL

Is that all you think a girl does? Cook and clean?

and of course he thinks that; we haven’t seen a woman in this entire movie do anything else. Danny, feeling he must dash Reuven’s hopes of a relationship with Shaindel, explains her marriage has been arranged since she was just a child, to the son of another rabbi:

REUVEN

Does she like him?

DANNY

I don’t know. I’ve never asked her.

Because it is not, of course, of any consequence how she — or Tzeitel, or Mary M. — might feel (despite the Hasidic honoring of feeling ) or might wish to live her own life, not in the face of a Jewish Tradition! of patriarchal hierarchy, one that relies on those man-written religious texts as supporting evidence of the will of God.

This film is not intended to be a story of women, or of mothers and daughters. But as in other cinematic depictions of the lives of Jewish women, in their very invisibility, or in the visibility of their home-and-hearth roles, their story is still being shown. And it is a story of oppression-within-oppression, of limitation and squandered potential, one that leaves me with a sour undertaste, but also a relief, a gratitude that in my own irreligious, very un-Jewish upbringing, I was spared all that. I am glad to be separate from these “true brethren” of mine.

And yet. Early in the movie, Reuven is surprised Danny has no idea who Errol Flynn is, and Danny must explain: “I’ve never been to a movie. We don’t go to the movies.” Looking to broaden Danny’s perspective, Reuven takes him to a museum for the first time, where they pause for a long while before a marble female nude.

REUVEN

What do you think?

DANNY

It’s a deception. Have you noticed how we have no pictures or paintings on the walls of our house? It’s because the images detract from what’s real. And what’s true.

REUVEN

I see you haven’t stopped looking.

DANNY

That’s because it’s beautiful.

Next up for the boys, a movie house, for some Van Johnson musical confection; Danny is unimpressed, bored. But then the newsreel begins: The “Nazi Murder Mills,” with documentary footage of American troops liberating the concentration camps. Here we go, I think, begin the parade of those brutal, brutal images I have seen so many times by now. Again , really? I do not want to watch them again, I do not want another fix — or want to trigger the need for another fix — but I find myself shaking, my heart quickening. And I realize what is moving me, here, is Danny’s reaction to them. It is his first time seeing these images, and his horror is newborn and unfiltered, uncynical, raw. There are tears in his eyes, his jaw is both tightened and slack, his face seems to lose its shape; he is disappearing into these images, the way I once did, and watching his pain both shames me and reawakens my own. This image of Danny, a fictional character in a fictional movie, does not detract from what’s real, or from what’s true; it brings me back to what is real and true, an essential part of who I am, as a human being and a Jew, and for that I am also grateful.

I will never forget.

The expression in Esther’s eyes, on Daniel’s face, will stay with me, always.

YENTL

Papa, please forgive me

Try to understand me

Papa, don’t you know I had no choice?