about that
fire
by Douglas Messerli
Paul Mazursky (director) Yippee / 2006
A few years ago, Howard came home to
report what he found as a rather troubling phenomenon, an event that offended
him. He and two other Los Angeles County Museum of Art curators were walking
for a few blocks on Highland Avenue when they were suddenly approached by three
young Hassidic boys: “Are you Jewish?” they queried. All three were Jewish, and
they immediately knew what the young men were asking, not if they were or were
not Jewish, but might they not wish to become Hassidic. “Jews don’t
proselytize,” Howard later responded. “In their 17th and 18th century
traditional costume, they were asking us to join them in their outdated dress
and beliefs; they were urging us to join in their kind of tribalism which I
very much resent.”
A visit to his optician, David Miretsky, occasioned the journey, when Miretsky reported that the glasses would not be immediately ready since he was going on a pilgrimage.
“Jews don’t go on pilgrimages,” responded Mazursky.
Miretsky answered, “Well I do,” explaining how every year over 20,000
mostly Hassidic males gathered at Rosh Hashanah to sing psalms at the gravesite
of Nachman, an experience that had utterly changed his life.
Other acquaintances, Rabbi Ezriel Tauber and Moroccon-born rock musician
Shmuel Levy, were also planning to attend, and before he apparently had thought
through the consequences, the notably “secular” and atheist-leaning Mazursky
found himself agreeing to join them and the film the experience. As Miretsky
reports, “He was skeptical at first. Jews are skeptical by nature.”
It is, in fact, Mazursky’s American tourist-like skepticism which helps
to make his documentary Yippee such a
likeable film. Most of the others surrounding him are already convinced, and
each make claim to having been completely transformed by the experience of
traveling to what, at first, appears as a kind of male-bonding retreat of
several days. Despite his friends’ quite expert explanations of the traditions
surrounding the events and preparing him for what he soon discovers for
himself, Mazursky almost clumsily lurches through the outlandish event, trying
to explain to others why his camera is trained upon them (no one he meets seems
to have ever heard of any of his films, including his Isaac Singer retelling of
Enemies), questioning their unusual behaviors, and vaguely flirting with
local Ukrainian women whom he meets (“I want to see a beautiful women. I’ve
been locked away for days with 25,000 men,” he quips).
Traveling through Munich he briefly encounters the spectacle of the
German Oktoberfest, which might be said to represents the antithesis of the
experience he is about to encounter, but, in fact, shares many similarities. If
the huge German beer halls (which I describe, with a reaction very similar to
that of Mazursky in one of My Year volumes) are filled with seemingly neo-Nazis exuding the pure
joy of their drunkenness; the streets of Uman, we soon discover, are filled
with dancing and singing Hassids in an equally ecstatic sense of being.
Throughout, Mazursky finds a great deal to entertain both himself and
the audience. A comedian known as the Jay Leno of Tel Aviv gives his
impressions of Israeli leaders and ex-Arab leaders such as Benjimin Netanyahu
and Yassar Arafat. An engaging neurosurgeon from London wittily denies the
misogynist-seeming makeup of the crowd while simultaneously dishing the
happiness of his own married life. And throughout, Mazursky tosses out one-liners
and with a near fanatical joyfulness repeats again and again a single joke:
Schwartz meets Cohen in the
garment district. He says “I heard
about the fire.”
“Shhhh! Tomorrow!”
As if to prove Mazursky right about
his notion that only Jews know how to laugh, nearly everyone he meets laughs
heartily at his somewhat anti-Semitic comedic implication that Cohen is
planning to set his own business afire—presumably for the insurance money.
At another point he and his friends take a short trip to visit the home
of Nachman’s grandfather, Baal Shem Tov; and later they celebrate late into the
night by drinking the best of Ukrainian vodka, resulting in their own
drunkenness.
And then there is the thousands of Hassidim—davening, dancing,
singing, whirling, twirling through space—who through their ecstasy of pure joy
utterly contradict any feelings one may have harbored about their being an
over-serious, hermetic, and isolated sect.
Mazursky admits that as a young boy growing up in Brooklyn he had
himself taunted the local “seder boys,” claiming that, if nothing else, the
trip to Uman has given him a new sense of their “all being individuals” and a
new feeling of tolerance, something which I believe the audience comes to share.
At the end of his film, however, he admits that he has had no major
transformation and, that despite the claims of his friends that he is refusing
to admit any personal or religious revelations, he remains a secular and
skeptical Jew.
By that time Nachman was suffering from tuberculosis, and died soon
after at the age of 38. According to legend, Nachman had long before reported
that Unman, where in 1768 more than 20,000 Jewish martyrs had been buried after
the Haidamak Massacre of Unman, was to be the location of his burial site.
Upon the last Rosh Hashana of his life, Nachman invited his followers to
visit the city on an annual pilgrimage:
If someone comes to my grave, gives a
coin to charity, and says these ten Psalms
[the Tikkun HaKlali], I will
pull him out from the depths of Gehinnom! It makes
no difference what he did until
that day, but from that day on, he must take upon
himself not to return to his
foolish ways"
Through the revolutionary and later
Communist regimes only a few risked the voyage. And during World War II, after
Hitler himself visited the city, more than a thousand local Jews were shot and
thrown into the lake. The fact that the Hassidic men now gather at this bloody
spot each year, argued the neurosurgeon, is statement itself of the healing
possibilities of history.
The town that once had signified the
horrible fire of violent hate was now annually lit-up (quite literally as we
observe) with the spiritual celebrations of those whose ancestors had so
terribly suffered, Mazursky’s narrative suggests. Without perhaps really
intending to, the fires embedded within the tales told in this director’s story
(the fire of Nachman’s home, the firing of weapons) have unintentionally
redeemed Cohen’s greedy potential act of Mazursky’s slightly enigmatic joke.
Los Angeles, September 10, 2014
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2014).
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