This new department will represent, we hope, house-room for short pieces on a wide variety of subjects—reflections on and reactions to ideas and events; reports on occasions and happenings; comment on plays, films, music, and art; or just notions, sudden insights, and fancies. The accent will be on the brief and the informal; and perhaps on culture, in its broadest sense, rather than on politics—but we have no intention of being too rigorous in this respect either. On this horizon, we confess only to a bias in the direction of latitude rather than longitude. For its first two pieces, “On the Horizon” offers a review of Meyer Levin’s film The Illegals and a personal reflection by one of our younger writers on prejudice as a sin. Robert Warshow is managing editor of COMMENTARY. Myron Kaufmann is a newspaper man in Baltimore.
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Probably no evidence will ever be sufficient to make us fully understand the experience of Europe’s Jews in the past fifteen years; but all evidence is immensely important. We owe a debt to Meyer Levin for The Illegals, a film record of the flight of one group of Jews along the path of illegal emigration, from Poland to Haifa (and thence to Cyprus), during the fall of 1947. I wish The Illegals were a better film; but a camera automatically records what is before it, and in this case it is the record that counts most—the faces and bodies of the Jews who survived: it is impossible to watch them in even their most commonplace actions without feeling the presence of the events to which they can testify. (I think it tells something of our state of mind that there were perhaps twenty people in the theater when I saw the film. I should not have been there myself if I had not been asked to go.)
The Illegals is like a travelogue made in a tunnel: no scenery, no incidents, only a destination. Most often the Jews are seen walking in a tight procession through some forest across some border—it might be anywhere—or packed into closed trucks, or in a cramped and characterless room in some camp or reception center, once or twice in a freight car. Poland to Czechoslovakia to Austria to Germany to France to Italy—these places are only names; the Jews move across Europe in a trance, noticing nothing, offering no comment, speaking only to those who can tell them what step must be taken next: tear up your papers; go to the Judengasse and ask for Shlomo; go to this or that village and from there across the Alps.
The camera wanders sometimes, but usually within very narrow conceptual limits, diminishing the characters against a monotonous background of destruction, picking out ruined buildings, wrecked tanks, and once, with hesitant and ambiguous opportunism, a crucifix. But for the Jews, once they have seen the absolute emptiness of the ruined ghetto of Warsaw, even ruins have no meaning. They stay inside their windowless vehicles and constricted dormitories, their private world, touching bodies in an intimacy that seems all the stronger because it is usually sexless and practical; they stand always in a circle, looking inward, at each other. The main characters, Sara and Mika, have one possession, a camera: they use it only to photograph each other in stiff poses standing on a heap of rubble; it is a way of saying all they have to say: we have survived. This is not even a statement of triumph; it is simply, for this moment and these people, the one fact of their experience that they are ready to absorb and make use of. Some day they may be willing to say more, but not in Europe and not for Europe; for the moment, like the featureless mass of the ruined ghetto itself, they have been drained of content.
Indeed, Europe does not exist for them; it is only meaningless boundaries and anonymous officials—a whole system, no doubt, but no longer any concern of theirs except to circumvent it and get away. And for this, there is a counter-system, equally vague and impersonal: committees, offices, card indexes, the Shlomos and Reubens of Haganah with their discreet conspiratorial skills. Within this counter-system, there is a password, the greeting “Shalom,” which runs through the film like a slogan, bearing an intolerable weight—this word and the word “Palestine” must serve these people almost as the whole of culture and belief: the only world that really exists is the one they have heard of but not seen—Palestine, an idea at the end of the tunnel.
Shut off from experience, they use their names as proof of their existence, and when the necessities of escape require that names be changed to match whatever papers are available, they will not quite give in. “Rachel Benyamin,” Sara says to the man checking off names on a list, “but my real name is Sara Wilner.” And they write their names on Europe’s walls—my flesh touched this spot; how else can one know one is alive in a world without landmarks? One man searches on the wall of a freight car: “I wrote my name in a car like this on the way to Auschwitz.” But Auschwitz was more than a word, and no one says anything.
There is also a kind of plot, in which Sara and Mika are separated and meet again finally on the ship that takes them from Europe. But the plot counts for little: one does not care that this particular couple has been separated and reunited; indeed, one hardly cares about the particulars of anyone’s suffering: if there are to be survivors, then for the spectator—and for the “system”—one survivor is the same as another: it matters only to Sara Wilner that she is not Rachel Benyamin. They are a mass of statistics, differentiated only enough to show that the statistics do refer to real human beings. But for the Jew in the audience, it is the very bareness of their personalities that brings these people inescapably close. In the theater, one’s own name matters as little as Sara Wilner’s: Jews, as Jews, are interchangeable; if even one man has been killed because he was a Jew, then we are all survivors.
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From the beginning, one is conscious of a certain amateurishness in the film: situations are sketched crudely and hastily; the main characters move stiffly and speak their lines like children in a high-school play, hardly ever achieving just the right tone and emphasis; the very use of the camera sometimes suggests those films of family excursions that are made to be shown to friends, and the voice of the commentator, especially in the early parts, is too often like the voice that accompanies such films: there’s John swimming; there’s Mika in the ruins of the ghetto.
Some of this crudity reflects a lack of imagination and taste. One example is the unspecific journalistic “effect” of the crucifix shot I have already mentioned; in a film that permits so few “intrusions” of the non-Jewish world, this particular symbol is almost the worst possible choice, since the meaning of the crucifix, under the circumstances, can only be ironical, but the irony itself belongs to the Christians (for a Jew, there must be more relevant comments on the treatment of Jews than to say it is un-Christian) and is in any case too general. Another example is the introduction of “voices” rising from the ruined ghetto, as if it were necessary to establish that the murdered Jews had a claim to live. Much of the crudity, also, must be the result of the conditions under which the film was made: in the movement from place to place, it was most important to record as much as possible and as quickly as possible; many sequences had to be filmed at night and necessarily without adequate lighting; and the characters speak English, a language they have not assimilated.
But before the film is over, one comes to feel its crudity—and even, in some sense, its lapses of taste—as something essential, a quality of the life it portrays. In flight from their past, these Jews are forced to reconstitute themselves out of nothing—at best, out of the merest scraps, a hasty and rough amalgam of the anti-culture of the camps and the (to them) mythical culture of Palestine. This is their awkward age; one cannot watch even their gaiety, though it is genuine enough, without feeling that it lacks true cohesion. Like adolescents, they have not yet developed a style—or, rather, the style is a hastily assembled surface, and they remain frozen in formlessness underneath: what is their constant singing but an attempt to achieve form?
But the spectacle of normal adolescence is made tolerable by its character as part of a social whole, one stage in a more or less determined life-history; we think we know what the adolescent is likely to become. These people are not adolescents; their “awkwardness” springs precisely from the fact that they have been wrenched from the normal social and historical context and have become a world to themselves. And therefore their personalities take on a certain fixity and abstraction, just as their own image of the world, contained as it is in a number of symbols and ceremonials referring to a mythical future, is necessarily fixed and abstract. They are like figures in some pageant expressing a meaning that must remain ultimately unclear simply because this particular spectacle is the only means of expressing it; and the crudity of the figures who enact this spectacle—their archaicism, so to speak—is a part of the meaning: they exist, one might say, for this occasion only, this moment of history, deprived of the past and therefore deprived also of the future, which can have meaning for us only as a development out of the past. It is almost impossible to think of them as moving back into what we regard as the normal stream of life without at the same time denying the significance of what has happened to them: this is what makes it so difficult to confront them clearly, and why so much that has been said about them seems mere rhetoric, whether the rhetoric of optimism or that of despair.
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It is possible to ask whether these figures can ever really become anything else than what they are. The film has no answer to give and it makes a bad mistake in trying. Mr. Levin identifies himself very closely with the people in his film (he himself plays one of the few “acted” roles), and much of the film’s documentary value comes, no doubt, from its having been made so completely from the inside. But this necessarily leaves it with no perspective beyond those scattered elements of life and culture which the fleeing Jews themselves have hastily collected, and which they employ less as definitive ways toward any clearly defined state of “health” than as temporary psychological expedients to protect them from an intolerable past. Perhaps one cannot expect that they themselves should at once face and assimilate their experience—though if there is any way to health for them, it must require this sooner or later. But if we are to understand what they represent (I assume it is important to try), then we should not too readily accept their own version of the meaning of their behavior—more especially because in their desperation they have seized upon certain cultural elements that are likely to be accepted as automatically meaningful.
These elements consist, on the one hand, of the more or less official symbols of a Zionist future—Hebrew songs and dances, the Jewish flag, the word “Shalom,” the word “Palestine”—and, on the other, of certain “fundamental” concerns (also connected with Zionism): the conception of Palestine as a “soil” in which to strike “roots”; above all, a fierce concentration on children—the expected baby who must be born in Palestine, the child of the new “generation,” who is to represent victory, happiness, life, everything that Europe is not. There is a profusion of children in the film, but the camera rarely lingers on them for their own sake—as if they were not interesting because they are not survivors. And the Jews carry them across Europe like so much necessary furniture to be used in setting up their homes in the new land. As the ship sails into Haifa harbor, escorted by a British warship, a child is born. In another shot, the camera moves in for a close-up of a child at its mother’s breast. And as the film ends, Sara looks hopefully to the future, expecting her own child.
For these Jews, it is the mere fact of survival that counts most. Perhaps Palestine itself is sometimes no more to them than a symbolical embodiment of their survival, a name to be written on the earth as they write their own names on the walls of their stopping-places, to prove that they have lived. How much more than this Palestine can be will be determined only in the future—the real future, not the future they create as a protection against the past—and for each of them separately. (Even the obvious analogy between the modem exodus from Europe and the biblical exodus from Egypt, which is immediately suggested by this film and has become almost a standard formula in journalism, requires examination: the Jewish awareness of a long history often masks a refusal to be aware of history at all.) And those children, too, born to be a new generation in the new land, must be recognized for what they are: a psychological expedient, one more evidence of survival and thus, perhaps, a way out of the real problem, which is not survival but the reestablishment of humanity. The fact that the children are also real children only makes the problem sharper. In the context of the events that stand behind this film, is a picture of a baby at its mother’s breast necessarily a symbol of hope?
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