On Yom Kippur, Adam Shapiro and a Ballroom Dancer Screen a Nakba Documentary With Holocaust Echoes

The High Holidays produce anxiety for me. Some of the anxiety flows from the “days of awe” themselves, in which you are to make an inventory of your sins against laws that are meaningless and laws that are not; and then there are my Jewish issues. I’m not observant, I rarely set foot in a synagogue, what am I doing here now? My mother had six kids to defeat Hitler and I married a non Jew and just write about how bad Israel is. Added to that is the guilt of not buying a ticket. Most synagogues sell tickets. It is a way of paying the overhead of a beautiful building the rest of the year by mulcting the High Holiday Jews. Here too I am a moocher or to use the Yiddish, shnorrer. I drift up the stairs to the balcony or take an envelope vowing to myself that I will send in a check, and don’t.

A good friend made a pre Yom Kippur dinner and we ate at his place on the Upper West Side. We put on yamulkes and he said the prayer for bread. More guilt that I had forgotten the prayer. We had fish and Pellegrino water. We walked to Ansche Chesed. En route we passed a journalist who has in-laws living in the Hebron religious settlement. I once blogged angrily about the fact that he won’t be public about this. I said L’shana Tovah, he smiled back. My friend and I went up to the nosebleed section for the Kol Nidre. There were some well-known journalists in the balcony, and in fact as the rabbi began the service he said that one writer he saw had won a Pulitzer Prize in the last year. So the Jewish idea of yiches, prestige, was right there. I also have mixed feelings about that, it is one of my personal devils.

Then the woman cantor sang the Kol Nidre three times in a beautiful voice. Kol Nidre is the most solemn of all Jewish services, the opening of the Yom Kippur service when the synagogue is a court and you say All vows are off. Kol Nidre means all vows. The convolutions of the 2000-year-old legal language always escape me. All bets I make are off, for the year to come also, I cannot be counted upon, and I will admit that over the next 25 hours–Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky offered a very good explanation of all this. In a sense it is about guilt and dispensation. He told the story of the Jazz Singer, and said it ends up with Al Jolson who is going out with a non-Jewish girl going back home and leading the Kol Nidre. He spoke of the impatience of Jews with worldly vows, that they are a way of taking the lord’s name in vain, not something to be trusted, and there’s a need at this moment of reflection to declare all vows off in the name of forgiveness. The rabbi said that was the simple meaning of Kol nidre: We forgive all of you everything. I forgive you. He told us to cry out with feeling, I forgive all of you. We did it. Then he told us to do it again, we hadn’t done it with enough feeling. So we did it again. It was pretty great. 

I felt guilty leaving but I had an event. They were showing a Nakba film at NYU, produced by Adam Shapiro, who became famous during the last intifada for trying to protect Palestinians in Ramallah. It is odd that they would be  showing the film at 7:30 on Yom Kippur but what the heck. I tried to slip out unbenownst to any journalist. I hugged my friend and said, I forgive you and left the synagogue and ran downtown.

Shapiro’s film “The Nakba Dailies” (Episode 1) was an act of devotion. It was interviews with about 20 or 25 Palestinians who still remembered the Nakba. The memories were interlayered and were all concrete. There was very little philosophizing. There was a very powerful range of privileged Palestinians and simple Palestinians, so you thought, this is a society like ours. The stories were clipped and just tremendously affecting. A man spoke of a woman who had had her two babies killed by Israeli soldiers with bayonets. After that, he said: “She was a person, but not a real person.” A woman told of leaving Jaffa on a boat and the panic at the waterfront as a woman threw her children one after another to her husband in a boat and one of them slipped into the water between the boat and the dock and disappeared forever. The mother became hysterical. The father cried out, God will make this up to us, and urged her to get the other children aboard. I repeat this story partly because I always like to remind readers that when Jews speak fearfully about being pushed into the sea by Arabs, it is because unconsciously they know that Arabs have already had the pleasure, so maybe the Jews are expectant of turnaround.

There were endless stories that put flesh on the idea of ethnic cleansing. “Deir Yassin destroyed us,” a man said, his voice still tremulous. The pretty girls were lined up against a wall and assaulted, a woman said of another massacre. Twice children, now old, told a version of the story I have heard from my own friend about Kristallnacht, that there came a point when the mother said to the father, I am leaving. There were memories of people pushed out of their houses at night, of being told, “If you stay, you die.” Of armed resistance that as John Mearsheimer has written was more like a riot than an effective campaign. Of going along the Ramle road as a little girl and crying again and again for water till at last her mother with half a bag of flour on her head brings her muddy water they must drink through a towel. Of a very formal besuited man who says he has been successful in Syria for one reason, because he had watched as his father’s heart was broken by losing his land and by his going to the border of the Golan Heights to look at it through binoculars. “Of course, he was killing himself.” And on and on.

At the end of the film, the refrain was 15 days. All the Palestinians who abandoned their possessions and beloved homes believed that they could return in 15 days. Some had even left their beloved for 15 days. In one village near the Lebanon border the people made a pact. Half the families in the village had managed to get official Israeli papers. Rather than those families stay and the rest leave, the families divided the papers, mothers and fathers, so that each family would have someone with legal standing. The parents split at the Lebanon border, to see each other 15 days later. They have never seen each other again. 

The film reminded me most strongly of Holocaust documentary, in that there was little commentary and confidence in the filmmaker that the enormity would present itself to the viewer with such impact that nothing more need be said. The film is an important addition to the general category of Nakba documentaries that are coming out in the last few years. This is a hugely important trend. It is bound to change my country, just give it time. 

At the end of the film, the credits thanked all the people in different countries who had helped them. Defiantly, the credits did not name Israel. It was called Palestine, though later Adam Shapiro said, the place called Palestine that goes now by the name of Israel. He wore jeans and two earrings, he reminds me a little of Julian Schnabel. Schnabel’s confidence, Schnabel’s father-love. Shapiro’s father was in the audience and chatted proudly with people afterward. With a Brooklyn accent. A noble family. Shapiro’s wife Huwaida Arraf was also there.

After the screening, there were two people on stage to talk about Nakba memories. One was a ballroom dancer named Pierre Dulaine. He wore a black suit and had the tremendous grace and presence you would expect of a ballroom dancer.  He was born in Jaffa, he was a refugee in several countries, sharing a 4-meter-by-4-meter room. He has worked at ballroom dancing around the world. He has, as he said, been very lucky. But he almost wept with gratitude comparing the film to Holocaust movies and saying how important it was to honor the torments of his parents, who were not lucky. “I’m just very humbled to be here tonight… We never hear about what went on in Palestine. Oh what a great life I had, in spite of my upbringing… My parents suffered…”

Then Adam Shapiro passed the microphone to any one in the audience of about 100 who had a Nakba memory. Several young women spoke. They generally said that the Nakba was still cloaked in silence in Palestinian families. It is hard to get the stories from a grandmother or grandfather. It is like a rape. Lubna Hammad of Adalah-NewYork told of going to a Holocaust memorial in Germany and being upset by the hypocrisy: that there is no mention of what some Jews then did, in the name of the Holocaust victims, to a people in her homeland.

Afterward I went out for a beer with a new friend, a fellow Jewish luftmensch. I generally keep the fast on Yom Kippur. But I was feeling more irreligious than ever, I guess, and though there had been many Jews in the NYU hall, including the lovely Hannah Mermelstein, there was no mention of Yom Kippur. So I ordered a beer and so did my friend and when the waitress put down the ramekin with nuts I had some of them. Feeling guilty and saying to myself, well I will extend the fast an hour or two tomorrow. Cheating. All vows.

It is a very cleansing feeling for me to be with a Jew who feels as strongly as I do about this. Then I do not feel guilty about my transgressions. He said, This is not about two privileged sensitive Jews coming to find out about this stuff, it is about the Palestinians. I know, I said, but the truth is “you and I are both coming to find out about this (as privileged people). That happened with us.” He smiled patiently. Still it is about other people. Well of course. He told me about meeting Adam Shapiro several years ago at another Jew’s house, a journalist who doesn’t like to be public about his feelings about Israel, being careful. At the Jewish journalist’s house that night Shapiro said to my friend, “You have to go see the occupation.” Seeing it is completely different from reading about it, or seeing movies. 

So my friend finally went to Palestine. “And what did you think?” We didn’t look at each other.

“Shattering. Beautiful. Mindbending. Shattering.”

Yom Kippur. 2008.

Related posts:

1. Adam Shapiro, who will speak tonight in NY, is subject of extremist death threat
2. Adam Shapiro shocked to see friend show ‘fealty’ to Israel lobby
3. Jimmy Carter and the Jews–Demme’s Documentary
4. On Yom Kippur
5. Dershowitz says, actually Nakba was Palestinians prolonging the Holocaust