Yiddish

“Do Revenge” is Flawed–and Antisemitic

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Netflix’s popular, steamy high school drama Elite is set in a madly upscale Spanish high school where almost everyone is impossibly beautiful or handsome, impeccably dressed in various versions of the school uniform, and engaged in plots and counter-plots to hassle a classmate for one reason or another. It’s total fantasy with almost zero actual classroom scenes.  Wild partying in lavish homes and clubs, heavy drinking, sex and striking attitudes take the place of education. Oh, and there’s a murder in that first season that triggers a police investigation reminiscent of Inside Man.

Watching the new Netflix movie Do Revenge, inspired by Strangers on the Train, you’ll see almost all of that plus hat tips to Clueless, Heathers, Cruel Intentions, and Mean Girls with less wit and a lot more viciousness masked as comedy.  No murder, though.

The two teenage girls at the center of the movie enacting vengeance on each other’s tormentors perform nasty criminal acts which I guess we’re supposed to find funny. And they do it to an upbeat soundtrack wearing colorful outfits when they’re not in uniform.  Even the scholarship girl who’s ashamed because her mother is a nurse and she doesn’t live in a mansion manages to look like a model in one scene after another.  Perfect clothes and jewelry, perfect hair, perfect makeup.

Adding to the overall unreality is the fact that as one Chicago film critic pointed out, most of the leads are in their mid-to-late twenties and they definitely look it. And there are some unbelievable plot twists that seem dreamed up by someone who was stoned at the time. 

But most egregiously, the writers update old anti-Semitic tropes: the movie’s villain is a Jew hater’s fever dream.  He’s vengeful, super-wealthy, politically connected, psychopathic, soulless, manipulative and bent on destruction just because it’s sport to him.  He’s even a sexual predator which is right out of the Nazi playbook.  His identification is teased before the end when he starts going totally off the rails and we now very clearly see that this monster has been wearing a Star of David. In case you missed it early on.  And even though it’s tiny, the camera keeps it central as he’s unmasked as a master manipulator and freaks out.

Oh, and before he does, he perversely uses a Yiddish word, kvell, the verb that expresses pride in something good, when he brags about all the misery he’s caused. 

That’s totally gratuitous, and the bond the two female leads form after having savaged each other profoundly just adds to the generally sour fantasy.  As they drive off at the end, maybe we’re meant to think of Romy and Michelle’s friendship, but they lack the charm and depth of those characters.

Do Revenge can be very funny in spots and has some good crisp dialogue, but as it got nastier by the minute, it felt as if the writers were more interested in indulging their bigotry and mining other people’s work than writing something truly original.   What’s sadder is that not one major film critic has noted the ugliness at the core of this film.

 

 

 

“The Paris Showroom” Was Badly Edited

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This historical novel builds on fascinating, horrible facts. While plundering the belongings of deported or imprisoned Jews, rich and poor, the Nazis in Occupied Paris “processed” their goods in three locales, including the Lévitan department store. 

Anything valuable that officers, their wives or mistresses might want was displayed and the rest sent off to Germany, no matter how prosaic an item it was.  Damaged goods were repaired for the greater glory of the Reich and personal effects like letters and photos were burned.

The 800 prisoners forced to do this labor lived in appalling conditions and the author makes their plight very vivid, but that’s one of the book’s few strengths.

I really wanted to love The Paris Showroom because I’ve read hundreds of books over the years, fiction and nonfiction, about WWII, including books about France during the Occupation. 

But I couldn’t. The dialogue too often seems American and contemporary, with characters saying things like “Whatever” and “True that” and “Beats the heck out of me.”

Then there’s an apartment house concierge who sounds like a 2022 guru or life coach and far too wise.  Worse than that, one of the two main heroines seems unbelievably naive and uninformed: though she’s twenty-one, in 1944 she still doesn’t understand how or why the war started (!) or what the Occupation really means. Her questions can be unbelievably dim and it’s hard to root for someone so out of touch with reality.

Blackwell also gets some things wrong like the French name for The Phony War, that period from September 1939 and April 1940 when there was virtually no fighting on the Western Front.  How could she have missed something so basic?

Another error that’s hard to comprehend from a seasoned author: She says the Jews wore “golden stars.” Not remotely: it was a Yellow Star. I suspect professional historians might find even more problems than I did. 

Though she peppers the book with bits of French for atmosphere, Blackwell for some reason uses the English “huh?” rather than the French “hein?” which you’d get from context. And rather than use “bibelot” she employs the very popular American word from Yiddish “tchotchke”– but doesn’t quite get its meaning right either.  The book is filled with choices like this which you would expect a careful editor or copy editor would have caught.

While there’s a touching family reunion in The Paris Showroom, that and almost everything else in the book is often overshadowed by minute details about fan making.  Don’t ask.

Lev Raphael is the former crime fiction reviewer for the Detroit Free Press and author of 27 books in genres from memoir to mystery.  His work has been translated into 15 languages and he coaches, mentors, and edits writers at https://www.writewithoutborders.com.

I’m Grateful To Know More Than One Language

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New stories about people being harassed and threatened because they’re not speaking English are a sad sign of how xenophobia is becoming normalized in the country.  And they disturb me personally.

I grew up with Eastern European-born parents who spoke at least ten languages between them. They used English with me and my brother, but more often than not spoke Yiddish to each other whether at home or in public. Russian, too, if they had something snarky to say about someone, or if they didn’t want me and my brother to know what they were discussing.  Likewise, arguments when they escalated went to Russian, which both my parents had spoken since childhood.

The apartment building I grew up in was filled with immigrants. Most of them spoke German, though there was some who spoke Russian or other languages.  Way before I traveled anywhere, I felt the world was at my doorstep because of this linguistic richness.

I found the ability to shift back and froth from one language to another simply wonderful.  I envied the ability to be private in public, to have not just one “secret Language,” but a handful of them.  And I was often delighted when one of my parents would realize a store owner, for instance, was from some country whose language they spoke but I never heard at home–like Romanian.

I studied French in school and did well, thanks to having a francophone mother, and it’s helped me in Canada and Western Europe.  I went on to study German and learned it well enough to do use it for introductions and readings on book tours in Germany.  When it looked like I might be teaching in Sweden not so long ago, I plunged in and had a ball learning the language, and learning about the people and culture.  Now I’m studying Dutch because I want to write about Flanders in perhaps more than one book.

Studying a language opens doorways you didn’t even know existed. But harassing people who aren’t speaking English is the sign of a closed and fearful mind.

Lev Raphael is the prize-winning author of the travelogue/memoir My Germany and 24 other books in many genres.  You can study creative writing with him online at writewithoutborders.com

Language Bigots Don’t Understand America

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A New York lawyer’s rant about Spanish-speaking workers at a Fresh Kitchen recently went viral, and rightfully so.

The lawyer was infuriated to hear Spanish, which the counter workers were speaking to each other, and to some customers.  He’s not only intolerant, he’s ignorant.  Since the time when it was still called New Amsterdam,  New York City has welcomed people seeking freedom and opportunity, whether they spoke Portuguese, Dutch, German, Italian, Polish, Yiddish, Vietnamese or any other language.  Hundreds of languages are currently spoken in New York.

Many immigrants might not know English when they get here and perhaps may struggle with it all their lives.  But if they don’t learn it or learn it fluently, their children do.  It’s a pattern that’s been repeating itself one generation after another and has helped us become ever more diverse.

When my parents came here in 1950 from Eastern Europe via Belgium, my mother spoke English, but my father didn’t and he had to learn it at his place of work.  Between them, they spoke close to a dozen European languages.  While Yiddish was their everyday choice, they often switched to Russian because they wanted privacy from me and my brother.  But they could speak it in public, too, and they did.

I heard several languages in my apartment building and grew up in a neighborhood where you could hear German on the streets, and then later Spanish.  I never felt threatened.  I felt the opposite.  These other languages were siren calls for me to make myself fluent in a second language at the very least.  And something more: they fueled my desire to travel outside of the country and experience other cultures as authentically as I could.

I teach on a campus with several thousand Chinese students.  They don’t frighten or enrage me.  I find the experience fascinating since Mandarin, Cantonese, and other languages spoken in China aren’t like any language I know or have studied.  Hearing spoken Chinese, I feel connected to the world outside my small Michigan college town, even if I don’t know what’s being said.  And I’m reminded how connected we all are, which makes me want to re-double my efforts in learning Dutch, my latest challenge after having spent two amazing weeks in Flanders.

As for hearing employees speaking to customers in something other than English, my mother spoke Polish with the butcher she frequented, and Russian whenever she realized a store employee was from somewhere in Russia.  I envied her knowledge, flexibility, and fluency.  And if a guy like the lawyer at Fresh Kitchen had gone postal about her not speaking English, I’m sure she would have had a wide range of terms to put him in his place.  But politely, because she was always dignified, and her English had a British tinge to it.

Lev Raphael is the best-selling author of a guide to the writing life, Writer’s Block is Bunk, and 24 other books in genres from memoir to mystery.  You can study creative writing with him online at writewithoutborders.com