LIVING APART
by
Douglas Messerli
Heidi
Ewing and Rachel Grady (directors) One of Us / 2017
My husband Howard tells the story of the time he and other members of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Modern and Contemporary Department were leaving a restaurant meeting and were approached by a Hasidic man with two children. The father asked them whether they were Jewish; all were, in fact, but knew that what he was really attempting to do with his leading question was to talk to them about conversion to his sect. Even more disconcerting, as the youngest of his sons walked toward them, his elder brother warned him not to get close to these “outsiders.” One day, while I was leaving a large store, a similar thing happened to me. Los Angeles, after all, like New York, has several large Hasidic communities, many of them wearing traditional black garb with large fur hats.
A few years ago, I reviewed Paul
Mazursky’s telling of his visit at the annual celebration of Hasidic Jews in
the Ukraine, Yippee: A Journey to Jewish
Joy, in which he presented that gathering as a joyful and happy affair. But
after watching Heidi Ewing’s and Rachel Grady’s One of Us yesterday, we are forced to perceive the insularity and
isolation of, at least the Brooklyn Hasidic, as hinting at a far darker view
of this group, who have kept their identity and religious principles primarily by
blocking themselves off from the rest of society.
To those who firmly believe, of course,
and are willing to sacrifice their personal identities in order to sustain
their faith, I am sure that such community closeness must offer great joy. But
for those among them who question or doubt, life within such a community it may
not only be stifling, but absolutely dangerous.
Later Etty not only allows her face to
be shown but describes the limited education that her children have received,
with textbooks blacking out all images of women, and delimiting all information
that does conform with the group’s faith. By the end of her gut-wrenching tale
the lawyers hired by the Hasidic community have convinced the judge to take
away her children, separating the children to various of her husband’s
relatives, and grant her only a once-a-month overseen, visitation.
But all of these three have a hard time
of it. Luzer who lives out of an off-road camper, suggests that the group
purposely isolates their members so that they simply cannot escape. They can’t
know the world “out there,” and so are dependent on the group. It is clear
that, even though he has begun to make a new life, it is difficult to adjust
the changes his life has entailed.
Although Ari’s family seems in closer
touch, and he finally does find a way to cure himself of his cocaine addiction,
by film’s end he and we are still not sure how he might get on with his life.
Uneducated in many ways, these individuals have few choices for getting good
jobs.
We
know that, because of their obvious dress and their insular lives, the Hasidic
Jews were devastated by the Holocaust, and it is hard to blame them for fearing
those outside their closed community. But as Ewing and Grady make clear in this
probing documentary, they have now closed off their world almost as
aggressively as the Nazis sought to close theirs. Keeping away from the rest of
the world and locking up their sons and daughters into a dark closet of conservative
denial has, perhaps, transformed a sustaining faith into a cult not so very
different from the Christian fundamentalists the same directors documented in
their previous film, Jesus Camp. At
least these three individuals have now truly joined “us,” a world of almost impossible diversity.
Los Angeles, November
11, 2017
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