The film MENASHE, which is playing in theaters now, is a most unusual movie. It’s unusual because its actors primarily speak Yiddish. There are English subtitles, of course. It’s unusual because it gives viewers an intimate look inside an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn—the sort of Hasidic community whose members seldom or never go to the movies. It’s unusual because it’s a significant feature film that boasts first-time film actors and a director, Joshua Z. Weinstein, who never before helmed a feature film project.
What makes MENASHE worth noting and certainly worth seeing is not its unusual aspects. No, what makes MENASHE special is much more conventional. This film imparts a story to which viewers can relate, and is peopled by wonderful actors who have exceptional abilities to make the audience care about all that they feel and do.
The story follows a Hasid widower for a couple weeks or so, as he deals with making a memorial service for his departed wife and regaining custody of his adolescent son. You see, the head rabbi of the sect enforces the Orthodox ruling that a child must be raised in a home with two parents. Stories of parents yearning for lost or unattainable children fit right into traditional Yiddish melodramas of theater and film. In the 1937 Yiddish-language film VU IS MEIN KIND? (WHERE IS MY CHILD), Celia Adler’s immigrant character spends 25 years searching for her child who was taken away from her. She cries out like a bleating sheep, “Vu is mein kind? Vu iz mein kind?” This is the sort of Yiddish melodrama that has brought tears to so many through the years.
But MENASHE takes a melodramatic plot and modernizes it. The character Menashe wants to raise his child, but we do not have to cry our eyes red as we witness his struggle. We feel for him and we feel for his son. Instead of deep heartache, we experience their intimacies; we care about them. We even laugh with them during the good times they have together.
The lead actor is Menashe Lustig, an Orthodox Jew who made his debut as a public performer on YouTube a few years ago. His choice of career has been quite controversial among fellow Orthodox Jews who discourage such popular entertainment. But other sects are more liberal, so he was able to make a start as an actor. And what an actor this man is! He is Charlie Chaplin in THE KID. He is Wallace Beery in THE CHAMP. His expressive face tells us everything; who needs subtitles!
As Lustig plays him, chubby, cherubic Menashe is a lovable shlamazel – a gentle, comical character to whom life has been less than kind. He works hard at a grocery for low wages with a mean boss, owes people money, had little luck with his marriage, but has a perfectly wonderful young son. Even a shlamazel can have a bit of mazel!
MENASHE’s director was nominated for and won awards at a long list of major film festivals all over the world. It’s a film that could have been lost in the many many movies that are being produced these days. But it would have been a darn shame if MENASHE got lost among other product. Even though the story takes viewers to an unfamiliar world of ultra-Orthodox Jewry, one to which they likely never will travel, MENASHE needs to be seen. Why? Because within this inaccessible community lies a story of human kindness and emotional suffering to which any feeling person in any community on earth can relate.
Audrey Kupferberg is a film and video archivist and appraiser. She is lecturer emeritus and the former Director of Film Studies at the University at Albany and has co-authored several entertainment biographies with her husband and creative partner, Rob Edelman.
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