Va, vis, et deviens...Live and Become

New York has two Israeli film playing in small art cinemas these days. One, 'A band's visit' has come back to Manhattan screen being shown a week in late December 2007 to qualify for the Oscars in the best foreign film category; the second, 'Va, vis, et deviens' or 'Live and Become' is being shown uptown and downtown. 18Brumaire already reviewed 'A band's visit' in December, so good reader please look for it in the 2007 postings. 'Live and Become' is the work of a Roumanian film maker who looks at Israeli society through the gathering of Ethiopian Jews or Falasha who were transported on the wings of an eagle [see Exodus for the quotation] were brought home to Eretz Israel. 18Brumaire won't give the hook of the film away, but recommends that you see it. It touches on many of the themes which post modernist love to wax long and confusedly on, but 'Live...' does not. The return to 'la terre sainte' by long lost Jews who practised pre rabbinic Judaism touched a nerve in Israel. The orthodox rabbis tried to circumcise them symbolically, to 'convert' them to the faith that they rigidly interpreted. This aroused resistance and brought shame on orthodoxy. Yet the presence of blacks within a primarily white, European Israel tested Israel far more than the Jewish state bargained for. 'Live and Become' is the bittersweet story of an Ethiopian mother in the refugee camps of Sudan, with deep pain in her busom, pushed her only surviving son to join a Falasha woman whose only son had just died, so that as she says that he can 'live and become' a human being. The boy's foster mother dies of tb, but she has him repeat the long line of her forefarthers so that the Israeli authorities won't return the boy to the life in a camp. Ultimately a left wing, secular Sephardic family adopts him...Schlomo...and therein turns the tale. At school, no one wants to sit with him; a classmate rubs his skin in order to see if his blackness rubs off like dirt; the parents in the boy's elementary school try forcing his withdrawl out of fear that he would infect children of theirs [translation, he would transmit among other diseases the horrible AIDS]. A girl from an orthodox family falls for him but her father out of prejudice threatens him if he ever sees his daughter again, on one hand, and on the other suspects being black he is not a Jew, but a freeloader who has come to eat from the rich Israeli trough. In order to gain the father of this girl's acceptance, he throws himself into interpreting the Torah. The father is on the jury, and choses 'blindly' the subject of the contest. What is the colour of God and Man? The Hassid rival chooses White, but Schlomo is a better exegete and he uses his skills to thwart the racism that is at the heart of Israeli society. 18Brumaire won't go into the in's and out's of the film, but the longing of the boy for his mum left in Sudan haunts him. He finds a sympathetic Falasha rabbi to help him send letters to her, for he is illiterate in his own Amharic. This kindly rabbi teaches him Amharic and truly blessed that he is, he shepard's Schlomo through his Judaism although he knows the boy's secret. In this, he earns a 'mitzvah' a blessing from on high. 'Va, vis, et deviens' says it all in the title...Jews toast life and here is a tale of life and life giving. Yet, underneath it all, it hits all the right keys on assimilation, the longing for safety yet the wrenching for one's homeland; it touches on the deep racism within Israeli society, whereby the Sephardic and Falasha and the Jews from India are less than welcome into a Jewish state in spite of the millenia of observing Jewish ritural and tradition. It captures of the colonialism of mind and the spirit which is ever unbeatable and in small ways triumphant.