In the late 1990s I met Mazursky while
working on a volume on American film by U.S. poets and fiction writers. After
having invited numerous poet and fiction-writing friends to contribute essays,
I became disappointed with the results, and began to look to film writers
themselves as possible contributors. A mutual friend, knowing of my project,
offered to introduce me to Paul, and we spent an enjoyable afternoon talking.
Strangely, today I remember none of our conversation and can’t even remember
the name of the friend who introduced us. Mazursky did seem open to the idea,
but, later abandoning the project, I never got back with him. I have the
feeling, also, that I’d met Mazursky previously at a bar in the highrise office
building across the street from my home where I often joined director Paul
Bertel (in whose Scenes
from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills Mazursky
had acted), photography curator
Robert Sobieszek, and others; but obviously we did not know one another very
well or I would remember more clearly.
about that fire
by Douglas Messerli
by Douglas Messerli
Paul
Mazursky (director) Yippee / 2006
So too does the noted film director, Paul
Mazursky bring up just such questions regarding his own sudden decision to
travel to Ukraine in 2005 to attend an annual Hassidic event: the celebration
at the gravesite of Rabbi Nachman of Beslov (1772-1810)—who rejuvenated the
Hassidic movement by combining the esoteric symbolism of the Kabbalah and deep
study of the Torah—in Uman, three hours from Kiev, the place where the director’s
own grandfather fled to escape anti-Semitism.
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).
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 My Year ____) 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—a davening, dancing, singing, whirling,
twirling through—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 shar.
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.
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 annual 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
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