Yiddishlands: A Memoir

19. Double Feature

Montreal, like Vilna, was a Catholic city, full of churches, monasteries, nunneries , Jesuit schools built like Lukishki Prison, only on much greener grounds, with herds of black-robed nuns roaming the streets and a huge crucifix lighting up the sky atop Mount Royal. The most forbidden act was having an abortion. The second was going to the movies. Drive-ins were banned to protect Catholic youth from making out in the back seat of their jalopies and no one under the age of sixteen was admitted even to a regular movie theater, this to prevent another fire like the terrible fire of 1927 at the PalaceTheatre,whereuntoldnumbersofchildrenstampededandperished in the flames. Exceptions were made only for Snow White, Dumbo, and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, provided you were chaperoned by an adult. For all that, the hand of the Church did not reach to Huntingdon, a mostly English-speaking and Protestant town that lay very close to the U.S. border, or as far as Cape Cod where we vacationed. The Provincetown Art Cinema changed its foreign bill every other day, which meant that if we didn’t go out for dinner with the Hoffmans we could see as many as three or foursubtitledmovies,inadditiontothedoublebillattheWellfleetDrive-In, a long and difficult Eugene O’Neill play at the Provincetown Playhouse and summerstockinHyannis.ThesubtitledmoviesinItalian,French,Spanish, 115 19 Double Feature and Greek were especially important because from them I learned that the Church was not very popular in Europe, and some courageous film directors like Luis Buñuel had even made fun of the Last Supper. In He Who Must Die, the people of a Greek village crucified their local Jesus all over again. The love scenes in these movies were extremely forthright, which may explain why my parents shipped me off to Camp Massad, where I discovered to my horror that morning prayers were mandatory, a regime, as Mother would say, as bad as going to Catholic school. That summer I scribbled something really vulgar on the wall of our bunk. The shame of it was so great that my bunkmates were sworn to secrecy and have never to this day revealed the nature of my transgression and a year later God took pity on meandallowedtheFirstMontrealInternationalFilmFestivaltoopenatthe Loew’s where for one glorious week in June I could see five forbidden films every single day. It was worth blowing a whole year’s allowance for the thrill of being the only high school kid among all those French speakers who looked as if they never went to church. It was lonely, though, not having anyone to talk to about why the British working class had such a hard time falling and staying in love as compared to the French whom nothing, not even marriage, could stop, or why it was that only the Poles and Russians still made movies about the Second World War, until I was befriended by Henry Farkas, film reviewer for the Outremont High School Rostrum. On a Friday night in October, a few days after Simchas Torah, Henry invited me to join him for a screening of Leni Riefenstahl ’s Olympiad Part I at the McGill Film Society. No one checked our student IDs and the price of admission was only fifty cents. On the way home, Henry carried on about the dreamlike quality of the lighting, the splitsecond editing, the close-ups and strategic use of slow motion. I tried to discuss the glorification of the Nazis and how the Negro Jesse Owens stole the show. Mother explained to me that Henry was a self-hating Jew, like all the Communists who got kicked out of Hungary. After that, I went alone. The Society ran three series: International Films, Silent Movies, and Cinema d’Essai. We swore by the same bible, the organizers and I, because by the time I went off to college they had screened almost half of the sixtyeight titles in Parker Tyler’s Classics of the Foreign Film and we worshipped the same directors: Eisenstein, Lang, Renoir, and Bergman. I lived for those Friday nights. Going there alone, I never had to admit that the experimental films were completely beyond my comprehension. At first, watching chapter nineteen 116 silent movies with live piano accompaniment made me laugh, until I understood how perfect they would be for seducing Esther. Esther kept the largest file of my stories...