CREDITS Director Arnon Goldfinger Producer Amir Harel with Arnon Goldfinger, Oshra Schwartz & Zebra productions Ltd. Screenplay Oshra Schwartz Cinematographer Yoram Millo Editor Einat Glaser-Zarhin Sound Tomer Ilan Featuring Mike Burstyn Lillian Lux Susan Burstein-Roth Fyvush Finkel Shifra Lerer Israel Becker Mina Bern Israel, 1999 In English, Yiddish & Hebrew, Color & B/W w/English subtitles 1:1.66, Mono Running time: 85 minutes www.thekomediant.com SYNOPSIS The glory days of the Yiddish stage are brought to life in this bittersweet saga of a legendary theatrical family, the Bursteins. Pesach’ke Burstein, the dancing-singing comedian, was born in a small Jewish town in Poland in the late 19th century. Drawn to the disreputable profession of komediant (actor), fourteen-year old Pesach’ke ran away from home to join a traveling troupe of Jewish actors - from that day on, the theater became his life. Armed with an engaging ability to whistle, young Pesach’ke arrived in New York in 1924 and quickly became a leading figure in the Golden Era of Yiddish theater. On stage, he met and fell in love with sixteen-year old rising star Lillian Lux. The couple would later marry and together embark on a triumphant acting tour of South America and Europe, only to narrowly escape on the last boat out of Poland in 1939. After the war, the Bursteins became the parents of twins, Mike and Susan, who before long were given the stage names Motele and Zisele. By the age of seven, the two children were appearing regularly on the stage, accompanying their parents as they wandered around the globe in search of the dwindling Jewish communities of a decimated and dying Yiddish culture. After the establishment of the State of Israel, the Bursteins came to Israel with the thought that it would be a natural home for their performance, but they left Israel and went back to new York after discovering that in Israel Yiddish was downtrodden in a manner unlike every where in the world. In time, the pressures of theatrical life would take its toll on the Bursteins. At age 18, stage-shy Susan would escape via early marriage, followed shortly thereafter by her brother Mike, whose solo success would leave Pesach’ke and Lillian without their show’s star attraction. Smoothly incorporating rare archival footage and interviews with Yiddish stage veterans (including Fyvush Finkel and Shifra Lerer), this tightly edited, briskly paced documentary is as richly bittersweet – filled with laughter and tears, schmaltz and grit – as the Yiddish theater itself. PRODUCTION NOTES The Komediant was born almost out of a therapeutic need. One day in 1995 director Arnon Goldfinger met scriptwriter Oshra Schwartz. The two were in a state of depression after separation from their spouses. “We talked a bit – up ‘til then our acquaintance had been rather superficial – and we raised a rather absurd idea: to make a movie as a vehicle for respite from depression,” Goldfinger recalled. “We were very naïve. We thought to make two films – one fiction, one documentary.” Time passed, and in their next meeting, Schwartz shoved under Goldfinger’s nose a newspaper clipping and told him this would be the subject of their documentary. It was an article about Mike Burstyn, who was visiting Israel at the time. “I was very reluctant,” Goldfinger related, “but Oshra convinced me to meet with him.” The meeting was a big surprise for Goldfinger. “I remember him as Kuni Leml (Bursyn’s famous movie role), a twenty-year-old guy, and found myself standing in front of a man in his fifties. It turned out that this was a very significant moment in his life: He had just turned fifty, his wife had recently died of cancer, and he found the idea of a documentary on him appealing. Oshra and I decided to see if there was a movie here, and we met with him again in order to begin the research. Things changed when Burstyn began to tell us about his family. In fact, he didn’t tell us much - we started to read articles in the archive and began to ask him questions.” At the start, Burstyn responded with hesitance to Schwartz’ and Goldfinger’s interest in his family history and in Yiddish. “I think that over the years Mike suffered greatly from the Yiddish label he was tagged with, and it took time until we succeeded in gaining his trust. We made it clear to him that we were not investing so much time in a film in order to ridicule Yiddish.” Thus Schwartz and Goldfinger became party to the history of the Burstein family. The head of the family, Pesach’ke Burstein, who passed away in ’86, ran away from his father’s house in Poland when he was 15 years old in order to join a wandering Jewish acting troupe that appeared before Jewish audiences in little towns. In 1924, Pesach’ke arrived in the United States and became a star in New York’s blooming Yiddish theatre scene. After his first wife left him, he married Lillian Lux, who was 22 years his junior. The couple appeared together on the stage – primarily in the musical A Village Wedding, with which they were identified more than anything else – [a performance] that became a hit. After the Second World War, the Bursteins had twins, Mike and Susan. When they were seven years-old, Mike and Susan – or by their stage names, Motele and Zisele, – began to appear regularly on the stage, as part of their parents act, and thus the Burstein family wandered around the globe. “During my meetings with Burstyn in ’96, he explained, as if in passing, that he planned to stage a performance of Village Wedding in Israel. Mike was to play the role that Pesach’ke had always played, and his mother Lillian was to appear at his side. I knew this was an opportunity that would never repeat itself, and therefore I decided to begin shooting, although I still had not begun to find the backing for the film.” The first meeting of Goldfinger with Lillian Lux, Burstyn’s mother, left Goldfinger amazed and enchanted. “She told me captivating stories filled with imagery and made me laugh; she is a woman with such a powerful presence,” he said. “After the meeting with her it was clear to me that my film would be on the Burstein family and the Yiddish theatre. I began filming the rehearsals and we filmed the play, although I didn’t know one word of Yiddish. The cameraman, Yoram Millo, and the soundman Tomer Ilan, knew more Yiddish than I did,” he says. Afterwards, Goldfinger set about intensively learning Yiddish and an in-depth investigation, with plans to begin filming in late 1998. “They were not young people, to say the least, so I knew if I didn’t hurry up, they were liable not to be around when I would want to film them.” At this point, the only one with which Goldfinger and Schwartz had not made contact was Susan, Mike’s twin sister. Susan had severed herself from her family when she was about 18; she was fed up with endless performances and the life as an itinerant artist, and she wanted a normal family life like any average girl. When she was 18 Susan met a man who was 15 years her senior and married him. In a particularly moving moment in the film Susan recalled her wedding, which took place at midnight because the members of the family had a performance the same night, and they were not ready to cancel it. From that point on, Susan lived detached from her family. In the period in which the film was being shot Susan was in the process of Chazarah betshuva*. “I feared she would not cooperate with us,” admitted Goldfinger, “and I didn’t really know how to approach her. Lillian told me that Susan was in Jerusalem, and I was elated that at least she was accessible and not somewhere in New Jersey. We went to meet her, and she turned out to be the surprise of the film. Although we set out to film with a detailed and precise script – something that is not characteristic of documentaries – the film came out differently in the end, to Susan’s credit.” “The first meeting with her was very good. I was worried about the possibility that she would not want to talk, but my fears were groundless. She told us everything, and a lot of her stories turned out to be the opposite of what Lillian told us. This was one of the outstanding features of The Komediant. Because each of the family members was interviewed separately they didn’t have the opportunity to coordinate their versions, not even to know what each of the other family members would tell. Thus, we ended up with a mosaic of stories – a number of perspectives on the same events that at times unite and at times contradict one another. The participants in the film are overloaded with guilty feelings about their past,” Goldfinger concluded, “and their way to cope with these feelings is to distance them and rewrite their history from scratch. I think that the film is loaded with layers, and as it unfolds it penetrates familial queries and conflicts that engendered identification for me, such as, for instance, the exceptional child in a bourgeoisie family who wants to be an artist, and going against the desires of your parents.” Another thing that attracted me to the film,” added Goldfinger, “is that it has all the elements of a novel.