The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center Invite to Visit a New Cycle of Movies – Movie-Prose About the Jewish Life
Regular movie screenings and discussions of the picturizations of the literature works which are part of the Jewish Life Prose book series will be regularly held at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center under the author’s cycle: the Jewish Life Prose. The series of Knizhniki, the publishing house with writer and translator Asar Appel standing at its origins, is distinguished by the variety of judgments, themes, styles, and subjects – like the life of the Jews itself. It publishes such Nobel prizemen as I. B-Zinger, Saul Bellow, Imre Kertész, and such famous writers as Shalom Aleheim, Stefan Zweig, Meir Shalev, Primo Levi, Cynthia Ozick, Giorgio Bassani, Arthur Miller, David Grossman, Etgar Keret and many others.
Every movie screening will be accompanied by open discussions of the movies, their literature background and interpretations of the texts in the pictures, the leading Russian movie critics and Borukh Gorin, the founder and mastermind of the cycle, the chief editor of Knizhniki and Lechaim magazine, will participate in the discussions.
Borukh Gorin: «The Jewish theme was forbidden during the postwar Soviet period. And numerous literature pieces published in the western countries were beyond reach of the Russian readers. This is why the books of such writers as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth in the Russian language were almost non-existent. We didn’t know the books which were iconic to the world literature and were often picturized. The main break, which existed on both sides of the Curtain, was the break of cultures. The Soviet government managed to put us into vacuum, sometimes such a term as self-publish books appeared, but the movies never reached us. There were masterpieces which were screened here because they were renown, but they rarely touched upon the theme of the Jews. The new cycle of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center: Movie-Prose of the Jewish Life is, on the one hand, the possibility to popularize the names and books which passed us by and, on the other, the possibility to learn how our western contemporaries lived.»
June 11, Goodbye, Columbus by Larry Peerce will be screened and discussed as part of the Movie-Prose of the Jewish Life cycle. This is a movie version of the eponymously named book of famous American prose-writer Philip Roth; it describes different problems of the second and third generation of the assimilated American Jews. The heroine of the book and the movie is a typical Jewish-American «princess.» Her parents managed to become successful thanks to their good work and they didn't limit their child in anything. The woman loves her parents back and never disappoints them. Her chosen one is a self-contained and independent from his parents man. He is not sure about his future and doesn’t know what he expects from life.
