And yet. Early in the movie, Reuven is surprised Danny has no idea who Errol Flynn is, and Danny must explain: “I’ve never been to a movie. We don’t go to the movies.” Looking to broaden Danny’s perspective, Reuven takes him to a museum for the first time, where they pause for a long while before a marble female nude.
REUVEN
What do you think?
DANNY
It’s a deception. Have you noticed how we have no pictures or paintings on the walls of our house? It’s because the images detract from what’s real. And what’s true.
REUVEN
I see you haven’t stopped looking.
DANNY
That’s because it’s beautiful.
Next up for the boys, a movie house, for some Van Johnson musical confection; Danny is unimpressed, bored. But then the newsreel begins: The “Nazi Murder Mills,” with documentary footage of American troops liberating the concentration camps. Here we go, I think, begin the parade of those brutal, brutal images I have seen so many times by now. Again, really? I do not want to watch them again, I do not want another fix — or want to trigger the need for another fix — but I find myself shaking, my heart quickening. And I realize what is moving me, here, is Danny’s reaction to them. It is his first time seeing these images, and his horror is newborn and unfiltered, uncynical, raw. There are tears in his eyes, his jaw is both tightened and slack, his face seems to lose its shape; he is disappearing into these images, the way I once did, and watching his pain both shames me and reawakens my own. This image of Danny, a fictional character in a fictional movie, does not detract from what’s real, or from what’s true; it brings me back to what is real and true, an essential part of who I am, as a human being and a Jew, and for that I am also grateful.
I will never forget.
The expression in Esther’s eyes, on Daniel’s face, will stay with me, always.
YENTL
Papa, please forgive me
Try to understand me
Papa, don’t you know I had no choice?
Can you hear me praying?
Anything I’m saying?
Papa, how I love you
Papa, how I need you
Papa, how I miss you
Kissing me good night23
My grandfather Al didn’t get a first-born son, his own ben-Albert. His first child was my mother, Beverlee, born in 1933. A chubby, frizzy-brown-haired, big-personality little girl, one who decided, very early on, that she was not going to be ignored — a defining moment of my mother in childhood is a cinematic one, captured on old Super 8 film: My grandfather loved taking home movies, and we have a flickery scene of a dozen assembled kids where we see my mother determinedly pushing (shoving?) herself to the front of the crowd to wave and beam and mug for the camera. All her life she would envy the slim blond Gentile girls around her. But if she wasn’t ever going to be blond or thin or pretty, she was always going to be noticed, damn it, be the star of the show.
But her father adored her — this according to my mother, who loved telling me the stories of his adoration, spoiling her with riding lessons and fancy clothes and taking her off to Chicago jazz clubs when she was only fifteen and sixteen and (then voluptuous) could pass for twenty-five. Whatever made her happy. Through her two marriages and two divorces he still always did for her, took care of her; he would always be the dependable male presence in her chaotic life, always be the Papa, the benevolent Daddy-King who enabled and indulged her, paid her bills, bought her jewelry and furniture and cars, babysat her own daughter (me) so she could both remain a child and keep the wild party going, stay at the center of every shot, every scene. She filled the screen, indeed, was larger than life, charming and charismatic, needy and narcissistic, and entirely exhausting.
She and my father divorced when I was twelve, and in the following years her unthinking dependency on my grandfather increased. (Her dependency on me, too — it became my responsibility to take her contact lenses in/out every morning/evening, because her porcelain fingernails were too long. For an example picked at random.) She clung harder to my grandfather, relied on his willingness to manage the majority of life’s basic logistics for her, while simultaneously plunging into a crazed second adolescence: She and a flock of other fortysomething, recently divorced and disoriented, once-voluptuous, now-overweight women established a favorite booth at a local supper club, where the befriended waitresses and bartenders would comp their drinks or slip an extra baked potato onto a shared steak dinner, and they could drink martinis and dance disco and distract themselves from their upheavaled lives three or four nights a week.
There began a stream of men in and out of our house — my mother and I shared a bathroom, and I never knew what strange guy might be exiting the shower in the morning, a flowered beach towel around his waist. These were generally unsavory characters, guys who were typically unemployed or unsavorily employed: Drug users and dealers, mostly, guys with records and rap sheets, guys in between their “own place” (hence, their presence in our house), guys with nagging ex-wives and girlfriends and assorted children, guys who would disappear from my mother’s giddy frame of reference (and our house) after a few appearances and soon be replaced by another.
My grandfather was increasingly annoyed, frustrated, appalled. I was busy at school, with friends, with my first after-school and weekend job at a bakery; I didn’t question any of it. I was usually asleep when my mother came home in the middle of the night, wafting cigarette smoke and martinis and the latest guy’s syrupy aftershave. I didn’t mind that I began eating dinner and sleeping over at my grandparents’ house even more often, spending several nights a week watching TV and slurping those root boor floats with my Grandpa, or happily going clothes shopping together. I thought it was edgy and sophisticated when my mother threw parties where strangers got black-out drunk on generic vodka or snorted coke off the modular glass coffee table it was my responsibility to Windex twice a week. I was unaware when my mother planned to mortgage our house to cover some guy’s bail, a plan that finally galvanized my grandfather to anger; fearing I would wind up homeless, he flat-out refused to “help her” with the mortgage process. I heard about that one only several years later. Maybe that particular guy is still in prison. But my grandfather’s anger and resentment took hold, began to boil. This is not how a woman should live her life. This is not how a woman must behave. Not a mother. Not his daughter.
Some things I cannot, I will not, allow!
The final blow came while I was far away; I was twenty-one, on a scholarship year in France, lonely and disoriented and drinking way too much myself, when I heard there had been a blowout between my grandfather and my mother. I have heard multiple versions of the story over the years from various family members: No two versions match. But the essential moment seems to be a disrespectful comment made by my mother to my grandfather; in some versions it is an ill-timed teasing, a foolishly blurted joke; in others it is an all-out nasty “Fuck you, Dad, I don’t need you or your help! You don’t own me!” Either way, my grandfather swore he was done with her, forever. She was disowned, dismissed, cast out from the flock. Declared dead.