In the face of death, despair and deprivation, the Jews of the Vilna Ghetto maintained a theater, an orchestra and even a cabaret.
Up until the final days before the Nazis liquidated the Lithuanian ghetto and shipped the surviving Jews to extermination camps, performances were jammed and lent the inhabitants a final fleeting hour of pleasure and normalcy.
Even in the more typical Lodz Ghetto in Poland, which serves as the model for the film “Jakob the Liar,” there were cultural programs, lectures and an underground library.
The players in the Vilna Ghetto cabaret and revues often wielded a subtly subversive sense of humor, sometimes in the presence of Nazi officials, as the oldest, and often sole, Jewish weapon targeting their oppressors — as well as themselves.
As author Henry Bulawko asks in his anthology of Jewish and Israeli humor, “If Jews were deprived of the power to laugh at their own distress, what would be left of them?” and a Yiddish proverb proclaims that “laughter is heard farther than weeping.”
Hollywood employed the weapon to puncture grandiose Nazi pretensions in the early 1940s, notably in Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” and Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be.”
But that was before the world knew the true depths of the Holocaust. Understandably, it has taken filmmakers considerable time to inject humor, absurdity, fantasy and fable into Holocaust themes, and to show Jews as something more than suffering victims, or, rarely, heroic Resistance fighters.
On stage, the taboos were broken earlier. Los Angeles playwright Shimon Wincelberg used both mordant humor and piety in his 1962 play “Resort 76.” The drama even introduced a character, who, like Robin Williams as the protagonist in “Jakob the Liar,” tries to keep up the morale of his fellows by inventing news of Allied victories, supposedly gleaned from a hidden radio.
The pervasive humor is even darker in “Ghetto,” by the Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol. He includes a mind-bending scene, in which a Vilna Ghetto ensemble belts out “Swanee” in Yiddish for the entertainment of the jazz-loving SS commander.
It has taken a long time to bring this sensibility — some may deem it sacrilege — to the screen. Last year’s Oscar-winning Italian film, “Life Is Beautiful,” a tragicomedy with Roberto Benigni that is set partially in a concentration camp, has been credited with first breaking the taboo.
In actuality, “Jakob” was completed before the Italian picture, but held for a delayed release. The same holds for “Train of Life,” a French film, which won’t be screened commercially in the United States until November.
The fact that the three movies were shot roughly within a year of each other may be coincidental. More likely, together the films — one American, one Italian and one French — represent a new stage in the artistic perception of the Holocaust, just as some scientific discoveries occur at the same time in widely separated places.
Not all will agree, but Peter Kassovitz, director and co-writer of “Jakob,” and himself a Jewish child survivor, sees his film as having reached a higher level in the evolving interpretation of the Holocaust.
“Audiences wouldn’t have accepted `Jakob’ 20 years ago, and I wouldn’t have dared touch it,” he says. “It has taken time to see the Holocaust not in mythological but in human terms.”
There are both similarities and distinctions among the three films.
Both Benigni in “Life Is Beautiful” and Williams in “Jakob” are average men who become heroes in spite of themselves. Both are fated to see the promised land of liberation but not to reach it.
The main difference is that “Jakob” could have happened in real life — and Jurek Becker, who wrote the original book, is himself a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto and concentration camps.
By contrast, “Life Is Beautiful” is a fable, sensitively and sometimes wittily told, but still a fable.
“Train of Life” goes even farther, telling a tale in which the Jews of a Russian shtetl outwit the approaching Nazi troops by “deporting” themselves en masse on an ancient train, with some of the villagers disguised as German guards.
Romanian writer-director Radu Mihaileanu has created an imaginary shtetl, a la “Fiddler on the Roof,” with its foolish wise men and wise fools, and frequently pushes his bickering characters over the top.
This did not prevent him from dismissing “Life Is Beautiful” as “Shoah-Lite,” using the Hebrew term for the Holocaust.
Professional competition aside, the directors of the three films shared the knowledge that they were treading on dangerous ground. The mere use of humor or the absurd, or even worse a tasteless misstep, invited charges of demeaning or trivializing the great Jewish tragedy of the century.
The protests were already leveled in the Vilna Ghetto, where opponents of offering plays and entertainment put up Yiddish leaflets demanding, “Oyf a besoylem shpilt men nit keyn teater” (“You don’t perform theater in a graveyard.”)
Ephraim Kishon, Israel’s best-known satirist, asked why he never wrote about the Holocaust, answered, “My sense of humor was consumed in the flames of Auschwitz.”
The sensitivity to Holocaust trivialization is especially acute among American Jews, who experienced the mass slaughter secondhand, mainly through books and films. Those who were closer, particularly survivors, are often more ready to take a generous view of the foibles of their fellow sufferers.
At the same time, the memory of the Holocaust has evolved into a semi-religion among many American Jews, expressed through a growing proliferation of memorials, museums and observances.
For them and others, the release of “Jakob” will surely reignite the question of the appropriate artistic criteria in representing the Holocaust, and the danger that some works will cross the line and fall into the abyss of Holo- kitsch.
The memory of the Holocaust will endure, but artistic standards and perspectives in interpreting it will change over the years. Each generation must find its own language, says “Train of Life” director Mihaileanu, and he would not be surprised if his young son one day dealt with the subject through the medium of a rock opera.
Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum also advances a flexible criterion, saying, “What we ask now of any artistic creation is, `Is it worthy? Do we learn something? Is it ultimately respectful?'”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
