Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  There was truth in that mea culpa, enough to make even his admirers uneasy about Spielberg’s potential for growth and development. Would he continue to resist the responsibilities of full maturity as a man and as a filmmaker, indulging his boyish fondness for pulp adventure (the Indiana Jones movies), infantile humor and overblown production values (1941, Hook), and special-effects fantasy extravaganzas (Poltergeist, Jurassic Park) while becoming self-consciously skittish when he ventured into mature sexual territory (The Color Purple, Always)? Would he overcome his anxieties about confronting his audience—and himself—with the kind of socially conscious, controversial subject matter he has touched upon only intermittently throughout his career?

  In his annus mirabilis (1993) that saw Jurassic Park break E.T.’s world-wide box-office record by grossing nearly a billion dollars, Spielberg finally silenced many of his detractors with Schindler’s List, his masterful film version of Thomas Keneally’s book about a gentile businessman who saved eleven hundred Jews from the Holocaust. The film was hailed as “a giant bar mitzvah, a rite of passage … his cinematic initiation into emotional manhood.” Such praise was double-edged, for it implied that in his first twenty-five years as a professional filmmaker, Spielberg had never before made a serious, mature, adult film, an assumption that unfairly denigrated the best of his earlier work, from his landmark TV movie Duel to the timeless fantasies Close Encounters and E.T. and the flawed but deeply moving dramas The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun. After Spielberg started winning awards for Schindler’s List, his grade-school teacher Patricia Scott Rodney, one of the first people to encourage his filmmaking talents, commented, “I’ve heard him say, ‘Finally I’ve made a serious film.’ I recognize that as Spielberg humor.”

  “The critics in awe of how much I’ve stretched just don’t know me,” Spielberg said. “This is no stretch at all. Schindler’s List is the most natural experience for me. I had to tell the story. I’ve lived on its outer edges.”

  But few people, least of all Spielberg himself, questioned that Schindler’s List marked both a profound enrichment of his art and a triumphant midlife point of personal maturation. “I feel a very strong pull to go back to traditions,” he said at the time. The film was the culmination of a long personal struggle with his Jewish identity, a struggle that had helped determine his choice of a career and his orientation as a popular, mass-market filmmaker. He spoke of that struggle in interviews at the time of Schindler’s List:

  “I never felt comfortable with myself,” he admitted, “because I was never part of the majority…. I felt like an alien…. I wanted to be like everybody else…. I wanted to be a gentile with the same intensity that I wanted to be a filmmaker.

  “I was so ashamed of being a Jew, and now I’m filled with pride…. This film has kind of come along with me on this journey from shame to honor. My mother said to me one day, ‘I really want people to see a movie that you make someday that’s about us and about who we are, not as a people but as people.’ So this is it. This is for her.”

  Spielberg’s early rejection of his Jewish roots, and his gradual return to them, was an experience he shared with many Jews in his post-World War II, post-Holocaust generation of baby boomers. He was a child of second-generation American Jews who broke away from their roots and for whom assimilation was part of the price of social acceptance and professional advancement. As a result, Spielberg, like many others in his generation, grew up questioning the relevance of his old-world heritage and the faith of his parents and grandparents.* In the white-bread culture of the Eisenhower era, Jewish baby boomers such as Spielberg became increasingly Americanized as they drifted from their cultural identity and became, in large part, a generation of outwardly assimilated but inwardly alienated suburb-dwellers. Spielberg and his movies came to typify the suburban experience, as he himself became, in Vincent Canby’s phrase, “the poet of suburbia,” a designation hardly suited to win honor with cultural elitists who scorned the middle-American ethos that suburbia had come to represent in the 1950s.

  Spielberg once defined his approach to filmmaking by declaring, “I am the audience”; it was as if his own personality, through a self-abnegating act of will, had become indistinguishable from that of the majority. His prodigious popularity was a sign of how thoroughly assimilated he had become. Though his films sometimes engaged in social criticism, his refusal before Schindler’s List to assume all the responsibilities of a socially conscious filmmaker—he once called himself an “atheist” on serious subjects—was bound up with his refusal to define himself as a Jew. He was in danger of losing touch with an essential part of himself, the part that stemmed from being part of a minority.

  While associating himself with Jewish charities and liberal political causes, Spielberg tended to aim for the broadest mass appeal as a filmmaker, largely avoiding Jewish subject matter and not asserting his ethnic identity as overtly as such directors as Woody Allen and Paul Mazursky. Still, Spielberg chose Richard Dreyfuss (“my alter ego”) as his protagonist in Jaws, Close Encounters, and Always, when other directors might have cast a WASP leading man in those roles, although Spielberg did not direct attention to the characters’ ethnic backgrounds. The unleashing of the magical powers of the Ark of the Covenant to destroy its Nazi captors in Raiders of the Lost Ark reflected Spielberg’s affinities with Jewish mysticism, but in the context of a frivolously escapist storyline; after making Schindler’s List, Spielberg said he could no longer stomach the use of Nazis as figures of mere entertainment.

  A more revealing exception to the rule of Spielberg’s general avoidance of specifically Jewish themes was the 1986 animated film An American Tail, on which he was an executive producer. It tells the story of a Jewish immigrant mouse named Fievel Mousekewitz, who comes to America to flee persecution (by Cossack-like-cats) at home in Russia. Fievel, whose adventures continued in An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991), was named by Spielberg after his beloved maternal grandfather, Philip Posner, an impoverished Russian immigrant whose Yiddish name was Fievel.

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  THE Spielberg family history reflects the archetypal Jewish-American journey of the last hundred years, from persecution in Russian cities and shtetlach (small towns) to religious freedom in the New World, and in succeeding generations from the comforts and limitations of a traditional midwestern Jewish-American community to the hazardous opportunities offered by the largely WASPish suburbs.

  Spielberg’s not atypical rejection of the values of his devoutly Orthodox maternal grandparents was in large part a defense mechanism against his feeling of growing up an “alien” in a predominantly Christian society. That feeling grew increasingly stronger in him as his college-educated parents moved the family up the socioeconomic ladder from Cincinnati to Camden and Haddon Township, New Jersey, and then westward to Phoenix, Arizona, and Saratoga, California.

  Like many other successful Jewish creative artists in the twentieth century, Spielberg built his career not by declaring his “otherness” but by seeking acceptance and common cultural ground with the American majority, by trying to become one of them. “I’ve always worked to be accepted by the majority,” he said in 1987. “I care about how I’m perceived—by my family, first; by my friends, second; by the public, third.”

  In choosing to concentrate his youthful energies on making movies rather than paying attention to his schooling, Spielberg rebelled against the traditional Jewish reverence for education and literacy. By declaring his independence from that part of his cultural tradition—and from the middle-class values typified by his father, who despaired because of Steven’s refusal to finish college and follow in his footsteps—Spielberg was casting his lot with another kind of Jewish cultural tradition, the more disreputable but equally vital mass culture established in Hollywood by immigrant Jews of his grandparents’ generation, popular fabulists who drew much of their inspiration, and their audiences, directly from the humbler elements of the shtetl. Those early Hollywood moguls created the hom
ogenized popular image of the American Dream. As Neal Gabler wrote in An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, “The movie Jews were acting out what Isaiah Berlin, in a similar context, had described as ‘an over-intense admiration or indeed worship’ for the majority, a reverence that, Berlin also noted, sometimes oscillated with a latent resentment too, creating what he sympathetically called a ‘neurotic distortion of the facts.’ Hollywood became both the vehicle for and the product of their distortions.”

  It was not until he became middle-aged that Steven Spielberg took the profound and irrevocable risk of redefining himself before the world by fully embracing his ethnic and religious heritage. Making Schindler’s List was an act of psychic health and integration that took him back full circle to those first memory images of the synagogue in his Cincinnati childhood. “This is truly my roots,” he declared. What finally enabled him to make Schindler’s List was his long-deferred decision eight years earlier, at the age of thirty-eight, to leave his childhood behind by accepting the responsibilities of fatherhood:

  “I had to have a family first. I had to figure out what my place was in the world…. When my [first] son [Max] was born, it greatly affected me…. A spirit began to ignite in me, and I became a Jewish dad at the moment of birth and circumcision. That’s when I began to look at myself and think about my mom, my dad, what it was like growing up, what my childhood was like. I began crying at every movie. I began crying at bad television. At one point I thought I was having a bit of a breakdown. I tried to go back, seeing what I had missed, and I realized I had missed everything….

  “Suddenly I’m flashing back to my childhood and remembering vividly the stories my parents and grandparents told me…. My father was a great storyteller, and my grandfather [Fievel] was amazing. I remember hearing stories from him when I was four or five and I’d be breathless, sitting on the edge of his knee. My grandfather was from Russia, and most of the stories were very indigenous of the old country.”

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  ONE of the stories Fievel told was of how he learned his lessons. As a Jew growing up in Odessa, Russia, in the late nineteenth century, Fievel was prohibited from attending secondary school by the czarist government’s numerus clausus (closed number), a quota system severely limiting the number of Jews allowed to receive a higher education. But he found a way around the edict. Steven remembered what Fievel told him: “They did allow Jews to listen through open windows to the classes, so he pretty much went to school—fall, winter, and spring—by sitting outside in driving snow, outside of open windows.”

  A version of this memory made its way into An American Tail. Separated from his family after coming to New York, Fievel Mousekewitz forlornly presses his nose against a pane of glass to watch a group of little American mice attending school. Always the outsider, even in America, the strange new land of freedom, where there were supposed to be “no cats.” Though Steven Spielberg failed to acquire his grandfather’s yearning for education, he too became a storyteller, and he never forgot the image of the boy sitting outside the schoolhouse, or what it showed him about being a Jew in a hostile land.

  Always convenient scapegoats during economic and political upheavals in a land of deep-seated anti-Semitism, Russian Jews in the late 1800s were subjected to increasingly frequent and brutal pogroms (the Russian word for “devastation”). In his childhood, Steven listened with fascination to his grandparents’ tales of pogroms. The social and economic liberties of Russian Jews were restricted further by laws compelling them to live only in shtetlach and barring them from most occupations except for certain forms of trade. Nearly 2 million Jews fled Russia and Eastern Europe for the United States between 1881 and 1914, “a migration comparable in modern Jewish history only to the flight from the Spanish Inquisition,” Irving Howe wrote in World of Our Fathers. America was seen “not merely as a land of milk and honey,” observed novelist Abraham Cahan, “but also, perhaps chiefly, as one of mystery, of fantastic experiences, or marvelous transformations.”

  Steven Spielberg’s ancestors were part of that vast migration, settling in the hospitable midwestern city of Cincinnati, which, in the words of historian Jonathan D. Sarna, was then “the oldest and most cultured Jewish community west of the Alleghenies.” Some of his relatives remained in Russia for generations to come, and some eventually went to Israel, but many of those who did not emigrate were murdered along with the rest of their communities in the Nazi Holocaust. His father estimates they lost sixteen to twenty relatives in the Holocaust, in both Ukraine and Poland.

  The original roots of the Spielberg family, Arnold Spielberg says, may have been in Austria-Hungary, where some of his ancestors, before emigrating to Russia, may have lived in an area controlled by the Duke of Spielberg. The Spielberg family name, which is German-Austrian, means “play mountain.” Spiel connotes either recreation or a stage play (cf. the English word “spiel,” meaning a recitation), and berg means mountain or hill. It is a fittingly theatrical name for a playful adult who works in show business and ever since his childhood has loved to build and film miniature mountains. A “play mountain” appears as a central plot device in Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Richard Dreyfuss obsessively constructs in his living room the image of the Wyoming mountain where, in the film’s magical finale, the alien mother ship makes its landing. A film production company Arnold and Steven Spielberg formed early on, when Steven was a college student in Long Beach, California, was called Playmount Productions.

  Steven’s grandfather Shmuel Spielberg, who in America would change his name to Samuel, was born in 1873 in Kamenets-Podolsk, Russia. Once ruled by Lithuanian-Polish nobles and known in Polish as Kamieniec Podolski, it is now part of the independent state of Ukraine. In 1897, a few years before Shmuel’s departure for America, Kamenets had a population of about forty thousand, including about sixteen thousand Jews.

  Most of the Jews spoke Yiddish as their principal or only language, and they lived as all Russian Jews did, in a tightly knit, insular community whose religious and cultural tradition brought comfort and mutual support in the midst of hostility. Although anti-Semitism permeated many of the city’s institutions during the reigns of Czars Alexander III and Nicholas II, the memorial book of Jewish life in Kamenets reports, “In general, relations between Jews and non-Jews in town were correct.” Even during the Ukrainian pogroms of 1881 and the widespread pogroms of 1905, there were no massacres in Kamenets, although there was some vandalism of Jewish property.

  Steven’s grandfather Shmuel was the second son of a farmer, rancher, and huntsman named Meyer Spielberg and his wife, Bertha (Bessie) Sandleman, who also had three younger daughters. When Shmuel was about five years old, both his parents died in an epidemic, and he was raised by his brother, Avrom (Arnold Spielberg was given the Hebrew name Avrom in his honor). Shmuel worked on his brother’s ranch as a cowboy, rounding up cattle and horses. Jews were conscripted into the czarist army for a six-year period, and Shmuel found his way into the army band, playing the baritone, a brass wind instrument. “By staying in the band,” his son Arnold relates, “he managed to keep from getting killed or shot. And then he became a cattle buyer for the Russian army. He used to go up to Siberia and buy cattle, and he dealt with Manchuria. When the Russo-Japanese war started [in 1904], he just said, ‘I will not get back into the army again.’ He escaped to America in 1906, and then he brought my mother in 1908 [the year they married].”

  Samuel (Shmuel) Spielberg’s wife, Rebecca Chechik, “Grandma Becky” to Steven’s generation, was the daughter of Nachman (Nathan) Morduhov Chechik and Reitzl (Rachel) Nigonova Hendler, who had eight other children. The Chechik family name, which is also spelled Tsetsik and means “linnet” in Russian, later was Americanized to Chase.

  The Chechiks had a brewery in Sudilkov, a shtetl that no longer exists. Sudilkov was in the Kamenets area, near the larger town of Shepetovka, where some other family members lived. Arnold Spielberg relates that his grandfather Nachman Chechik “prayed a
nd studied the Torah. His wife ran the brewery business. She was a shrewd woman. She and the children ran the business. My uncle Herschel, the oldest son, was the brewmaster. In those days, the old Jewish men, if they could get out of business and study the Torah, that’s what they did.” The brewery trade was forbidden to Jews by the Russian government in 1897, and some of Rebecca Chechik’s siblings eventually emigrated to China. They lived in the Manchurian city of Harbin and then in Shanghai’s British enclave, the setting for the opening scenes of Steven Spielberg’s World War II film Empire of the Sun.

  Samuel Spielberg, Arnold’s father, worked for a few years as a grocer and a peddler in Cincinnati before he found a steady but modest living as a jobber, operating a store on West Third Street. “He’d go down to the small stores in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio,” Arnold explains. “He’d buy up their merchandise that they had not been able to sell. He’d buy what they called job lots, or incomplete lots. He’d bring them to his store and he’d sell them to other merchants, or to retail; he had some retail trade. And, of course, in the wholesale trade he sold to even smaller stores.”†

  Arnold’s mother, Rebecca, was “a very enterprising woman. She took care of the kids and ran the house. She was interested in politics—we were Democrats from way back—and she’d read a lot, go to plays, go to concerts. She’d join all the Jewish organizations.” Mildred (Millie) Friedman Tieger, a longtime friend of Steven’s mother, remembers Rebecca as “a strong, powerful woman, very smart, and more domineering” than her husband.