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Sidney Lumet:
The Memory of Guilt
Like Woody Allen, who may be popularly considered the quintessential New
York filmmaker, Sidney Lumet belongs to the small but significant group of
directors who use that city as their physical and psychological environment.
Whether through comedies (like Bye, Bye, Braverman and Just Tell Me What
You Want) or intensely dramatic thrillers (like the police trilogy Serpico, Prince of
the City, and Q & A), Lumet sets his stories as singularly in New York City as does
Allen. But whereas Allen romanticizes the city, Lumet often criticizes its volatile
mixture of racism and cynicism. Allen sees New York from Central Park West
– the museums, galleries, movie theaters, restaurants, and parks. Lumet’s New
York remains the gritty ethnic reality of the neighborhood streets. And to Lumet,
New York City rarely measures up to its promise.
Along with Woody Allen’s preoccupation with the city that contains a larger
number of America’s Jews than any other, Sidney Lumet shares Allen’s sense of
guilt. As Danny Rose (in Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose) expressed this, “Guilt
is important. . . . I’m guilty all the time and I never did anything.” Characters
plagued by guilt frequently recur in Lumet’s pictures as well. Guilt, of course,
is not unique to the Jewish psyche, nor is Lumet the sole director with an acute
sense of shared responsibility (Alfred Hitchcock, born and raised a Catholic,
quickly springs to mind), but guilt does exert a strong force in Jewish life. Yom
Kippur, for instance, the Day of Atonement, stands as the holiest day of the year
for Jews. Though this holiday is the subject of occasional jokes for Woody Allen,
Sidney Lumet takes the concept of atoning for one’s sins very seriously indeed; in
fact, guilt rests at the heart of his most significant films.
For Lumet, the question of guilt and atonement intimately relates to other
aspects of the Jewish tradition. The importance of the family, so central in
Jewish culture, is a strong motif in Lumet’s cinema. From his most important
films, including The Pawnbroker and Daniel, to some of his most minor efforts,
like The Wiz or Family Business, families are central in a way that is unusual
for American directors. The family, the moral center of Jewish life, remains the
educational and intellectual wellspring from which many of Lumet’s characters
emerge. The biblical injunction that the sins of the fathers will be visited upon
the sons tragically influences Lumet’s protagonists. Their sense of political
commitment and social justice is also a product of their Jewish background. As
Lumet himself has stated, “I guess when you’re a Depression baby, someone with
a typical Lower East Side upbringing, you automatically get involved in social
issues.”
Lumet’s upbringing immersed him more deeply in Jewish culture – and in the
particular world of Yiddishkeit – than any other director in the American cinema.
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The son of Baruch Lumet, a Polish-emigre member of the famous Yiddish Art
Theater, Sidney was born in Philadelphia in 1924 and moved with his family to
the Lower East Side two years later. He made his debut on the Yiddish stage at
the age of four. An almost constant engagement in Yiddish theater and radio
structured Lumet’s boyhood. By age eleven he made the transition from Second
Avenue Yiddish playhouses to uptown Broadway theaters, but he continued
to appear in many plays with Jewish themes. Just as important for his later
development as an artist, he also appeared in many plays with a well-defined
social conscience, the most famous being Dead End (1937), which featured him
in a supporting role.
Following service in the Army Signal Corps during World War II, into which
Lumet enlisted as soon as he was of age, he returned to the theater. In Ben
Hecht’s play A Flag is Born, written and staged to aid the American League for
a Free Palestine, Lumet replaced Marlon Brando in the central role of David.
Although he soon turned to directing for theater, and more importantly for
television during its Golden Age of the 1950s, the social consciousness and ethnic
sensibility that he developed on both the Broadway stage and in the Yiddish
theater never left him.
Lumet’s recollection of his youth as the foundation of his adult consciousness
suggests perhaps the most important lesson he takes from his Judaism: the
command to remember. He structures his most compelling Jewish films (The
Pawnbroker and Daniel) with flashbacks, both driven by characters who always
remember; in fact, they cannot forget. For Lumet, therefore, the past exists with
the present. It is not simply the fact that his characters can never escape their
past. Rather, the past preconditions their every move. “Judaism,” observed
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, “is a religion of history, a religion of time. The
God of Israel was not found primarily in the facts of nature. He spoke through
events in history.” So too Lumet’s characters are personalities in history; they
speak to us through their past responses to events and their present reactions to
that past. The viewer gains understanding by seeing the past and present woven
together.
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SESSION THREE
Film, 1965
Director: Sidney Lumet
Screenplay: Morton Fine &
David Friedkin
Sol Nazerman: Rod Steiger
Jesus Ortiz: Jaime Sanchez
Rodriguez: Brock Peters
Marilyn Birchfield: Geraldine Fitzgerald
Mabel: Thelma Oliver
Length: 116 minutes
Jesus: Mr. Nazerman, when
are you going to teach me?
he Pawnbroker
The search for social justice, the tragedy of family
separated by social forces, and the injunction to remember
dominate The Pawnbroker. Based on the novel by
American Jewish author Edward Lewis Wallant, it was the
first American film to situate a number of scenes inside
the death camps. While popular movies like The Diary
of Anne Frank (1959) and Judgment at Nuremberg (1960)
invoked the Holocaust, only The Pawnbroker dared to
show the camps. Although the death camp scenes occupy
only a small portion of the film, these scenes become
seared into our memory almost as deeply as they are for
Sol Nazerman, the survivor who cannot forget the horrors
of his past.
Like many of Lumet’s protagonists, Sol Nazerman finds
himself compelled by both social and personal history to
remember, plagued by what Frank Cunningham eloquently
calls “the insistence of memory.” Although the events of
the Holocaust were essentially European, America’s Jews
account it (along with the establishment of Israel) as the
fundamental, defining contemporary experience. Yet if
Nazerman loses sight of the meaning of life, the need to
fight for family ties and social justice, Lumet never does.
The Holocaust thus becomes an event of uniquely tragic
dimensions for Jews, as well as an opportunity to speak to
the contemporary American condition.
Sol Nazerman is tormented by his memories of not
only the death camps, but also the loss of his entire family
and his friends. The film opens on the anniversary of
his wife’s death; throughout the days that pass within the
film, Nazerman refuses to remove this calendar page. This
memory, this remembrance, not only torments the shellshocked survivor, but specific incidents of the Holocaust
also intrude unbidden upon him.
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Nazerman’s Death-in-Life
Woman in pawn shop: Here
I is again. It’s like bailing out
an old boat filled with water.
You pawn something, you buy
something else. And then you
pawn that. Each time it seems
the boat is getting deeper into
the water . . . . Oh come on, Mr.
Nazerman, smile. Here I am with
a load of profit for you.
It is the act of remembrance – although we do not
immediately realize it – that drives the film’s first scene.
Slow-motion, idealized images of a family outing begin
the film, only to be interrupted by the more mundane
realities of Sol Nazerman’s current life in suburbia. These
slow-motion memories of a happier and then tragic time
gradually unfold throughout the film. Finally, we see these
memories as beginning the end for Nazerman’s life in
Europe, as well as beginning the end of his emotional life.
Even if Nazerman’s body survived the Holocaust, his spirit,
his essential humanity, died. By their very recurrence, they
become the foundation for Nazerman’s current alienated,
horrified, and horrifying state.
Yet Lumet finds it insufficient that we merely
understand, through flashbacks, what drives Nazerman to
his death-in-life. Although Holocaust memories certainly
explain Nazerman’s alienation from his American inlaws (who wish to take a trip to Germany to soak up
the atmosphere!), and they explain his coldness to the
pathetic customers who enter his shop, they do not justify
it. The cinematic transitions to the Holocaust scenes from
the present day carry a thematic weight. We come to
understand that in contemporary New York City things
happen that no one of good conscience should allow to
continue. Though we might not believe that the urban
slum of Harlem, where Nazerman’s pawnshop is located,
is comparable with the Jewish ghettoes in Europe, we can
still appreciate the sense of moral outrage that questions
how such things can happen today.
Nazerman himself, at least unconsciously, draws the
parallels for us between the horrors of poverty in New
York and the Nazi death camps. Walking to his car one
night, he willfully ignores the screams of a young boy
trying desperately to climb a schoolyard fence, only to be
dragged down and beaten. The sight of the fence and the
sound of the screams compel his memory to a moment in
the camp when a prisoner rushed to escape, was caught
on the barbed wire and dragged down by vicious dogs. A
shot of Nazerman’s anguished face in this flashback places
him on the scene, helpless and shocked. A return to the
present shows some of that same anguish as he gets in his
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Nazerman: If you’re looking for
a handout, why don’t you say so?
Miss Birchfield: I don’t believe
these contributions are handouts,
and I’m very sorry that you do.
I think that anything that one
can do for the children is an
investment in one’s own future.
Nazerman: I’m not particularly
concerned about the future.
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car and shakes while driving away. Nazerman is not alone
in ignoring the cries for help in the present-day Harlem
slums. Lumet carefully shows us that others get no more
involved that he does – but this fails to make Nazerman’s
actions any more acceptable.
The pathetic sight of a pregnant young woman pitifully
trying to pawn a glass ring she mistakenly thinks is a
diamond inspires another connection between past and
present. As the young woman struggles to remove the
ring from her finger, Nazerman’s memory flashes back
to Nazi guards callously removing rings from women’s
hands as they nervously held onto barbed-wire fences.
This scene, mostly devoid of identifiable characters, is
the most powerful Holocaust memory of all, capturing
in a seemingly simple way (a single traveling shot on a
horizontal line) the utter dehumanization of the Jews by
the Nazis. Another graphic memory, a cut between the
exposed breasts of a prostitute trying to seduce Nazerman
and the memory of his wife’s sexual subjugation by a Nazi
officer, is also disturbing and powerful.
The strategy of juxtaposing images from Nazerman’s
alienated present to his horrifying past works in another
fashion as well. Lumet implicitly contrasts Nazerman’s
death-in-life to Jesus Ortiz’s energetic optimism. To
Nazerman’s alienation from his American family, seen in
the opening sequence following the first flashback, Lumet
counterpoints Jesus and his mother, who are close and
caring. Although they live in a slum, Jesus indexes his
faith in America by insisting that his mother speak English.
That Jesus has no father and that he looks to Nazerman
to fulfill this role (he continually asks Nazerman to teach
him and wants to learn from a master) makes Nazerman’s
alienation from his current surroundings that much more
tragic, for him and for Jesus.
Lumet also juxtaposes Nazerman’s passionless
lovemaking with Tessie, wife of his friend Reuben (who
was killed by guard dogs on a barbed-wire fence, as
seen in a Holocaust flashback), and Jesus’s energetic and
passionate sex with his girlfriend Mabel. In fact, two
scenes featuring Mabel, a woman who turns to prostitution
to help her lover, are either followed or preceded by
scenes featuring Tessie. Yet other Holocaust survivors,
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like Tessie and her father Mendel (portrayed by Lumet’s
father, Baruch), maintain more of their humanity than does
Nazerman. Mendel berates the pawnbroker for refusing
to face up to the past, for giving up on life, and for
providing the Nazis their ultimate victory. Tessie calls on
him for love and support, only to find she can never obtain
compassion from one of the “undead.”
Nazerman’s death-in-life is evident in the way he
treats his customers. Unwilling to engage in common
pleasantries, to pass the time of day, or even to exchange
philosophical musings with the pitiful people who
pawn the remnants of their lives, Nazerman refers to his
customers as animals, thus denying their humanity as
the Nazis did the Jews. At the same time, examples of
antisemitism continue in the present: A customer trying to
pawn a radio that clearly does not work calls Nazerman
a host of antisemitic names, although Nazerman remains
impervious to the man’s slurs. Later, Jesus demonstrates
a more innocently stereotypical antisemitism that moves
Nazerman to passion. In response he delivers a monologue
of enormous power, giving both Jesus and his audience
a history lesson in antisemitic imagery and how the Jews
have dealt with generations of bigotry.
Still, Lumet seems to say, even if others turn their
backs on the urban poor in the ghettoes, the Jews should
not. Because of their history of oppression and suffering,
the Jews can never be like everyone else. Their own
background and traditions should make them especially
sensitive to modern social evils and willing to fight
contemporary social problems. So even if we understand
Nazerman, even if his survivor guilt and continual torment
make us weep for him, we cannot allow what happened to
the Jews to happen again – to them or to anyone else.
The Pawnbroker has fueled a great deal of controversy
for its treatment of Jewish-related issues. Many see the
film as part of a process Lawrence Langer terms “the
Americanization of the Holocaust.” Judith Doneson
observes that such films “utilize American symbols and
language to convey an American perception of the
[European] Holocaust. . . . The Holocaust functions as a
model, a paradigm, or a framework for understanding
history. It is a metaphor that teaches a lesson.” In the case
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of The Pawnbroker, she writes, the lesson seems to be that
“American society is responsible for the suffering of . . .
blacks” just as the “good” Germans who did nothing during
the war were responsible for the suffering of the Jews
under the Nazis.
Others have criticized Wallant for equating the
Holocaust with the contemporary ghetto. Dorothy
Bilik, for example, writes, “If Wallant is using scenes of
lacerating horror to point to the continuing presence of evil
in the world, he is overstating his case. If he is drawing
parallels, the extremity of the Nazi scenes undermines the
similarities.” Alan Berger seconds this critique, claiming
that “the American-born Wallant misreads and domesticates
the Holocaust. He suggests that the Harlem ghetto,
suburban New York, and the death camps are all points on
the continuum of human misery. Overcoming this misery
may be accomplished only through community with those
people – Jews, Christian, black, whites – who care about
others.”
Another charge leveled against the film is that the
Jewish survivor becomes much like a Nazi himself
– Nazerman, the Nazi man. The victim becomes the
victimizer. The film singles out the Jewish survivor
as being more guilty than others. It is apparent that
Nazerman suffers almost unbearably as the memories of
the Holocaust torment him, yet it is still shocking when
he decries his customers in language similar to the Nazis’
descriptions of the Jews. As a pawnbroker, he is that most
visible symbol of oppression and greed. The tragedy of
Nazerman is twofold: survive the Nazis a hollow shell
of a man to permit, even become complicit in, another
oppressive situation. Annette Insdorf observes, “Nazerman
is not the only passerby who simply walks past the group
of kids beating up a black boy.” But if the story singles
out the Jew, it is because the Jew should know more.
Nazerman may be no worse than the rest of the “good
Germans,” yet as a Jew, he should be better, he should
not let it happen here. Jews have a special burden to bear
witness to history, to remember, and to learn from it.
Critics have also taken issue with what they see as the
film’s Christian, even anti-Jewish imagery. Judith Doneson,
among others, finds an aspect of The Pawnbroker in which
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“Judaism . . . is indicted for its failure to provide spiritual
sustenance. Indeed, can it be coincidence that the name of
the Puerto Rican assistant is Jesus? Judaism, it is intimated,
lacks that essential ingredient of ‘love thy neighbor’ found
in Christianity.”
Ilan Avisar finds the film an “extreme example of
Jewish self-hatred” and calls its basic premise a “bogus
analogy between the horrors of the Holocaust and living
conditions in Spanish Harlem.” He writes that “despite
Sidney Lumet’s statement that ‘there certainly was no
attempt to show Harlem as a modern concentration camp,’
his film projects exactly that notion. The contemporary
locale is shown through pictures of heaps of shoes and
ragged clothes whose iconography is part of the Holocaust
footage and they function here to present an urban ghetto.”
Critics have not failed to note the final image of Nazerman
impaling his hand on the pawnshop’s receipt spike, with
its Christian implications, and thus to condemn the film for
turning the Jewish survivor into a Christian, for allowing
the symbolically named Jesus to be Nazerman’s savior, and
for transforming Nazerman into a Christ-like figure. The
symbolism is impossible to miss. Avisar also criticizes
what he considers to be the film’s essentially Christian
vision. “Nazerman, because of his traumatic experience
at the hands of the Nazis, almost understandably behaves
like one of his former tormentors: his name suggests that
he is a kind of Nazi-made man. But at the end of the film,
he is redeemed and is thus qualified to be looked at as
the man of Nazareth.” Berger, too, takes up the charge of
Christianizing Nazerman, noting, “Nazerman, whose name
may be read as Nazerene, becomes fully human . . . only
by becoming a kind of Jewish-Christian everyman.”
The Pawnbroker undeniably makes comparisons
between the situations of Jews under the Nazis and people
of color in contemporary America. One standard by
which critics judge the film revolves around the question
of the Jewish specificity of the Holocaust and the unique
magnitude of the event. Earlier Holocaust films such as
The Diary of Anne Frank and Judgment at Nuremberg both
succumbed to the universalization of the Holocaust, the
Jew either representing all humanity or their extermination
greatly deemphasized. Through its structure and story,
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Ortiz: I gotta know one thing.
How come you people come to
business so naturally?
Nazerman: You people? Oh I
see. Yeah. You want to hear the
secret of out success. I’ll tell you.
. . . .You start out with a period
of a few thousand years in which
you have nothing and sustain
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The Pawnbroker remains open to the charge of the
relativization of the Holocaust. But its Jewish specificity
is never denied. Sol’s Jewishness remains central to the
narrative. He is a victimized man, one virtually destroyed
solely because he is Jewish.
The scene where Nazerman pierces his hands on the
spike also functions as a symbol of his return to feeling.
He screams in agony as the sharp point pierces his flesh,
a scream in excess of the pain he suffers. But the spike
is not an arbitrary symbol; rather, it is precisely what
Nazerman has used to derisively dismiss his clients. They
pour their hearts out to him – the old man who wants
some intellectual conversation, the young woman who sells
her wedding band, the drug-addicted antisemite – while
Nazerman impassively impales their pawn tickets on the
spike, killing their dreams as the Nazis killed his reality.
The film indeed can, we believe, be read another way.
It recognizes that while the outcome of the Holocaust
cannot be changed, the situation in urban ghettos is
eminently changeable, if only people would take notice.
The horrors of the ghetto may pale by comparison to the
horrors of the Holocaust, but they are horrors nonetheless.
Good Germans stood by while Nazis brutalized and
murdered Jews, but are not the urban poor, blacks and
Hispanics, brutalized and murdered while society at large
remains aloof? If it is too late to save the Jews, we can at
least rectify the horrors in our own backyard. Who better
than Jews to understand the horrors of contemporary
society? This does not detract from the magnitude of their
own tragedy.
yourself with a great bearded
legend . . . .
While you watch, consider:
◆Nazerman’s
speech when Jesus asks him “How come
you people are so good at business?” How does this
speech sum up Nazerman’s world view?
◆
The way that Lumet photographs the death camp
scenes. How do his visual choices affect the audience’s
visceral responses to this material?
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◆How
Lumet’s use of flashback, the so-called “shock
cuts,” functions to relate Nazerman’s past to his present
situation. How do these scenes explain Nazerman’s
life?
◆
Do you feel sympathy toward Nazerman? Is he heroic
or tragic?
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Discussion Questions
◆Nazerman
is a Jew without community. Why?
◆Some
commentators have attacked this film for
Christianizing the legacy of the Holocaust. How does
the role of Jesus, as well as Nazerman piercing his
hand with the spindle, fit into this critique? Do you
find this a valid or invalid criticism?
◆Has
Nazerman, as part of his name implies, turned into
a Nazi himself? How does his emotional treatment of
his “customers” compare to his treatment by the Nazis?
More globally, does the life of the minorities (blacks,
Hispanics) in Harlem compare to those of the Jews in
Nazi Germany? Is this a fair comparison to suggest?
◆
Does the tragedy Sol Nazerman has experienced justify
any of his actions toward others?
◆
Although this was one of the first films to be made
with a Holocaust theme, there have been a large
number produced since then, as well as many books,
documentaries, and Holocaust museums – the new
national museum in Washington and others around the
United States. Why is the Holocaust so central to the
identity of American Jews?
◆
Many Holocaust scholars (like Laurence Langer) have
argued that American films see the Holocaust only
through a particular perspective, one that must find
some good even within the greatest evil. Do you
agree?
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◆Is
the impact of this film on contemporary viewers
different than it might have been when it was first
released, because of the audience’s greater familiarity
with the Holocaust?
◆Can
films like this one, or Schindler’s List, increase an
audience’s historical awareness? Their sensitivities?
What are their limitations? Drawbacks?
◆
Although the film’s theme is the systematic murder of
European Jews, it provides little sense of what was
lost, other than on the personal level (which is very
real for Nazerman). Can you think of a film about the
Holocaust that gives viewers a full sense of the tragic
destruction of a thriving Jewish culture? Why is this an
important theme?
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SESSION FOUR
Film, 1983
Director: Sydney Lumet
Screenplay: E.L. Doctorow
Daniel: Timothy Hutton
Susan: Amanda Plummer
Paul: Mandy Patinkin
Rochelle: Lindsay Crouse
Jake Ascher: Ed Asner
Length: 130 minutes
Speaker at rally: Is this socalled American justice? . . .
Can anyone believe that this
heroic young couple, torn from
their home, separated from their
precious children, are being
persecuted for anything more
than their proudly held left-wing
views, for believing in the dignity
aniel
“I survived. I survived and they didn’t.” Such is Sol
Nazerman’s plaintive cry in an affecting moment in The
Pawnbroker. The same might be said by Daniel, the hero
of Sidney Lumet’s look at the Jewish Old Left in New
York just before and after the Second World War. (The
story is patterned loosely but clearly on that of Julius
and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted as spies and executed in
1953.) Both Daniel and Nazerman, traumatized by past
events, remain plagued by their memories. Virtually all
of their families were destroyed, killed by the pernicious
forces of antisemitism: The antisemitic madness of the
Nazis swept up Nazerman’s family in the Holocaust; the
madness of the Cold War, containing a large component
of antisemitism with its anticommunism, swept up Daniel’s
family in the social sickness of the American 1950s known
as McCarthyism.
The similarity of present circumstances due to past
trauma – alienation from one’s family, cutting oneself off
from life in the here and now in response to a horrendous
event in the past – links Daniel to Nazerman. The most
notable narrative strategy in The Pawnbroker was the
graphic matches between past and present. Daniel
reproduces this strategy, perhaps not as memorably, but
no less significantly. For instance, Lumet juxtaposes scenes
where Daniel visits his sister Susan in a psychiatric hospital
with scenes where he visits his parents in prison, awaiting
their execution.
of man and the right of each and
every individual to the fruit of his
labor . . . .
Daniel Isaacson’s Legacy
Is the similarity of structure between The Pawnbroker and
Daniel meant to compare the events in these films? Is it
the case that Lumet wishes to compare the Holocaust with
McCarthyism, as he earlier compared the Holocaust to the
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Susan: . . . Because the name
Isaacson has meaning. It’s
important. What happened to the
Isaacsons is history. . . . I’m not
ashamed of my name. I’m proud
of who I am.
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ghetto?
Interestingly this film, which spans the immediate
prewar and postwar eras, and features a character who
served in the army during the war (Paul Isaacson), almost
totally ignores the Holocaust, barely mentioning it. Yet
by the similarity of structure between the two films
Lumet reminds us that American antisemitism also had a
murderous component.
Lumet compares Daniel’s triumph to Nazerman’s
tragedy. Both films demonstrate how the past cannot,
and should not, be forgotten. But they also demonstrate
that the past must be overcome. The grim conclusion of
The Pawnbroker leaves us wondering what will happen
next. The upbeat conclusion of Daniel leaves no doubt
that the mastery of the past has been accomplished. It
also leaves no doubt that the mastery of the past has
been accomplished by the legacy of the past. The social
activism of his parents, although it made martyrs and
maybe even dupes of them, leaves Daniel with a memory
not of guilt but of desire – the desire finally to love and
cherish his own family and to join in a cause to benefit
many.
Daniel’s refusal to accept the mantle of victimization
and his active confrontation with the past finally separate
him from Nazerman. Nazerman’s memories of the
Holocaust come to him unwelcome and unbidden. Daniel
deliberately remembers the events of his tragic childhood;
he seeks out the people from his past who still survive.
He constantly asks questions of his adoptive parents and
tries to learn more from the widow of the lawyer who
defended his parents.
The film’s climactic sequence comes when Daniel
confronts the major witness the state used against his
mother and father. In the present, Selig Mindish, former
dentist to the neighborhood Communist cell, is a senile,
broken old man. Mindish’s daughter, Linda, is hostile
to Daniel, blaming his parents for her father’s troubles.
This is an ironic twist to Daniel’s former bitterness against
Mindish. Thus Daniel finally overcomes the demons of his
past yet holds on to its valuable lessons: the importance of
family and social involvement.
Daniel, an adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s respected
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Daniel’s adoptive father
(speaking of Paul and Rochelle):
They believed. They had the
faith. And they were prepared to
suffer the passion of their faith.
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novel The Book of Daniel (1971), was released in the early
1980s, and it recalls not only the Old Left years from the
1930s through 1953, but also the New Left years starting
in the 1960s. Thus, the film reclaims not one but two
legacies of the American Jewish political experience:
the political activism of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson (the
more dramatically memorable and compellingly tragic of
the film’s intertwined story lines) and Susan Isaacson’s
involvement in failed causes, all 1960s icons – Eastern
religions, psychedelic drugs, sexual promiscuity, and
would-be revolutionary politics. While Daniel begins the
film sneering at his sister’s latest cause – to form the Paul
and Rochelle Isaacson Foundation for Radical Studies – as
just another one of her passing fads, by the film’s end
he embraces this utopian ideal. The film mirrors Jewish
participation in the Old Left with Jewish participation in
the New Left. While the controversy surrounding this film
revolves around the image of the Old Left and the way in
which Paul and Rochelle Isaacson clearly are modeled on
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the film reveals the importance
of family life in the continuing tradition of the Jewish fight
for social justice in America.
While the image of the Rosenbergs looms in the
background of this film, Daniel is far less interested in
the specifics of the Rosenberg case than in its generalities
– its specifically Jewish generalities. So many of the
scenes set among the Old Left activists (from the prewar
era through the Isaacsons’ execution during the Cold
War) focus on their Jewish background and culture. One
sequence reveals Rochelle conversing with her mother.
The older woman speaks in Yiddish; the daughter replies
in English – a wonderful encapsulation of the loss of
Yiddish on the part of the quickly Americanized children
of the immigrants. Moreover, the near-poverty in which
they live and the reference to Rochelle’s father, driven to
an early grave by the punishing labor of the sweatshops,
reminds us of the difficult days of the ghetto and, later,
the Depression. Finally, when we learn that Rochelle
has given two dollars, money the family clearly does not
have to spare, to the Scottsboro Boys (a group of black
youths unjustly accused of rape in Alabama), we see the
commitment of the Jewish Old Left to social justice for all.
American Jewish Directors: Three Visions of the American Jewish Experience 53
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Equally revealing in its Jewish specificity is a short
scene played on a stairwell at CCNY (City College of New
York). It is not just the high level of political discourse
that impresses us, not even the invocation of antifascism;
but rather, the memory that CCNY provided a gateway for
New York’s working- and lower-middle-class Jews into
the professions. Surely the most challenging invocation
of Jewish culture comes when Rochelle exclaims that her
execution will stand as Daniel’s Bar Mitzvah – one of the
few references to religion in the film, but a revealing one
for the way the Isaacsons made Communism a substitute
for Judaism, as was the case of many other American Jews.
What seems to be a message common to Lumet’s
previous films was overlooked in the controversy that
immediately greeted Daniel. Although Daniel follows
Doctorow’s novel quite closely (indeed, the script is by
Doctorow himself), the novel was virtually controversyfree. Criticism of the film revolves around the manner
in which the story follows the case of Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg quite closely and yet veers away from it
significantly: The Rosenbergs had two sons, not a son and
a daughter; the film portrays the Isaacson as innocent,
while history judged the Rosenbergs’ guilt. This controversy
remains interesting primarily for the way it reveals the
continued discomfort of American Jewry and for the way
it demonstrated how people implicitly view the power
of cinema compared to the power of the novel. When
the Rosenbergs were tried, convicted, and executed, few
were willing to proclaim their innocence, certainly not
official Jewish organizations. Whether they were guilty
or not, however – a question that will not cease being
debated – the death sentences were surely extreme,
indicative of anticommunist paranoia that was out of
control. (This was also the time of the HUAC hearings
into the movie industry, which had a definite antisemitic
aspect.) Even if they were guilty, the Rosenbergs were
clearly symbols. As sacrificial victims, the fact that they
were Jewish carried many implications that the American
Jewish community might have recognized and challenged.
That the judge who sentenced them to death, permitting a
host of questionable legal maneuvers on the government’s
part, was himself Jewish only illustrates an inclination on
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Daniel (speaking of Susan):
What if she’s not ill? What if she’s
inconsolable . . .
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the part of many Jews to eagerly conform to prevailing
attitudes. In a similar vein, when the film Daniel was
released, many condemned an American Jewish filmmaker
for his attempts to revisit and reassess America’s past.
The result was to consign Daniel to relative obscurity,
its commercial prospects crushed by the very audience
required to stimulate interest in a film with a political
stance and a historical vision.
The controversy surrounding Daniel may owe less to
the liberties it takes with the Rosenberg case than to its
reminders of the Jewish involvement with the Old Left.
In the anticommunist 1980s the specter of Jews as onceactive in the Communist Party was perhaps not something
assimilated, middle-class, predominantly liberal Jews cared
to remember. American movies shy away from politics
as they do from religion; Daniel interweaves these two
subjects into one powerful film.
While you watch, consider:
◆How
does Lumet show the various time periods in the
film?
◆How
does Daniel view issues of social justice and
activism, particularly in relation to his parents and sister?
◆What
sort of bond do Daniel and Susan have with each
other?
◆
Does the name Daniel Isaacson have any significance?
◆How
do the Paul Robeson songs relate to the story?
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Discussion Questions
◆What
does the film tell us about social activism? Was it
different in the 1940s? The 1960s?
◆What
is the role of the past in this film? Can we ever
ignore our past? How might we triumph over our
traumas?
◆Why
does the Isaacsons’ community – the Communist
party – seem to abandon them, except when it was, as
their lawyer explains, a public relations advantage to
embrace them?
◆In
what ways does politics replace religion as the
defining point of Jewish identity for some people? Do
you see contemporary examples?
◆How
do themes of social justice, political commitment,
and freedom relate to Judaism? Is social activism a
Jewish tradition? Is it an obligation?
◆
Does a Jewish son have a responsibility to defend the
name of his parents?
◆
Linda Mindish exclaims that her family “lost our friends
and lost our honor.” What does she mean? Is there
anything that would cause a Jewish family in the 1990s
to lose their honor?
◆
Many Jews are drawn to the right as well as the left
in politics; Jews are prominent as neoliberals and
neoconservatives. Does the same “Jewish instinct”
motivate them?
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Suggestions for Reading and Viewing
Books
◆Cunningham,
Frank R. Sidney Lumet: Film and
Literary Vision. Lexington: The University Press of
Kentucky, 1991. English-professorial run-through of
Lumet’s career through Q & A, concentrating on the many
literature-into-film adaptations.
◆ Desser, David, and Lester D. Friedman. AmericanJewish Filmmakers: Traditions and Trends. Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 1992. Places these and other
American Jewish directors in an ethnic and cultural context.
◆ Doctorow, E.L. The Book of Daniel. New York:
Bantam, 1979.
◆Wallant, Edward Lewis. The Pawnbroker. New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961.
Films
◆
Twelve Angry Men (1957). Lumet’s theatrical film debut
features Henry Fonda fighting racism and prejudice in an
urban courtroom to acquit a youth of murder.
◆ Bye, Bye, Braverman (1968). Adaptation of Wallace
Markfield’s novel, To an Early Grave – very specifically
Jewish, very specialized, very funny.
◆ Serpico (1974). Fact-based drama, and first of Lumet’s
“police trilogy” dealing with corruption in the NYPD and
the promise of an ethnically and racially harmonious city.
◆ Dog Day Afternoon (1975). Another fact-based drama
set in neighborhood New York, demonstrating sympathy
and solidarity for the ethnically or sexually oppressed.
◆ Network (1976). Biting satire from the pen of Paddy
Chayefsky, about corruption and cynicism in the mass
media.
◆ Just Tell Me What You Want (1980). High-intensity
comedy of fabulously wealthy Jewish businessman, his
younger shiksa mistress, and their misadventures in show
business.
◆ Prince of the City (1981). Second and most acclaimed
of Lumet’s police trilogy details ethnic tribalism along with
the problems of corruption.
◆ Garbo Talks (1984). Charming comedy with Anne
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Bancroft as a feisty Jewish mother whose son tries to grant
her a dying wish: to meet the legendary film actress.
◆ Running on Empty (1986). Jewish former sixties radical
still on the run in the 1980s tries to keep his values and his
family intact.
◆ Q & A (1990). Underrated third entry in the police
trilogy, most forthright about the insidious evils of racism
and ethnocentrism.
American Jewish Directors: Three Visions of the American Jewish Experience 58