The other candidate had a smaller but more vocal following, including the support of Jill Rosenberg, known to favor the cutting edge. This photographer was a young girl just out of Bennington College, a small and agile creature who could slip into nooks and crannies without being seen. Her photos were less polished than those of the veteran photographer, but they had the virtue of originality and candor. According to her supporters, she was adept at capturing moments that “summed up the essence of the event.” Typical was the photograph in Jill’s album that showed her, arm lifted in admonishing gesture, mouth open, as an implacable Josh sat slumped in a chair. “I look at that photograph,” said Jill, “and everything comes back.” Carla had perused Jill’s album (which included a shot of herself and Mark staring straight at the camera as if hit by a stun gun, a piece of bar mitzvah cake still clinging to the side of Mark’s mouth), agreed that the young photographer was enormously gifted (her work resembling that of the famed, if also famously troubled, Diane Arbus), and quickly decided to go with the boring, middle-aged photographer.
With the videographer the choice had been simpler. In this area, there was only one name that could be considered—everyone said so: the Steven Spielberg of bar mitzvah video, Cass Sunshine. Sunshine, originally Charlie Sunberg, had graduated from Cherry Hill East High School fifteen years ago and enrolled in the USC film program in the hope of cracking the Hollywood nut. Finding that nut harder to crack than expected, he returned home with the more modest ambition of cracking the Cherry Hill nut. Here he was successful with a vengeance. He had, as the saying goes, turned bar mitzvah videography on its head.
To begin with, in order to make the service in the synagogue interesting, he had hit on a brilliant technique: the reaction shot.
“The reaction shot,” he explained to his clients, who liked being on the inside of the cinematic process, “is the key to pulling you through the service. Usually, they show you the kid up there droning away: Baruch ata Adonoi, blah, blah, blah. What a drag!” (It was understood that Cass was woefully detached from his Jewish roots and had no interest in the bar mitzvah as such, but this was vaguely seen to be a mark in his favor. It demonstrated his devotion to “pure cinema.”) He continued, “You have to liven it up, show there’s somebody out there—maybe listening, maybe not—who cares? You need visuals, not just the kid—snore.”
Cass had brought along a shopping bag full of tapes to demonstrate, and Carla realized how wise she had been to schedule the visit for the afternoon, when Mark was at the office. Her husband might have lacked patience with the Steven Spielberg of bar mitzvah video, whose artistic tendencies, it was said, needed to be indulged if he was to do right by an affair.
Eager to show Carla the livening effects of the reaction shot, Cass pulled out a tape and cued to an appropriate spot. A bar mitzvah boy was shown droning for a second or two, then the camera panned to the congregation, revealing a series of interesting vignettes—a mother fiercely chastising an unruly child; an uncle asleep, mouth open, yarmulke askew; a line of gentile faces, glazed with incomprehension, trying not to register any response for fear it might be the wrong one.
“You get the idea,” Cass drawled, popping the tape out of the VCR. “We show you what’s really going on. It lightens the mood, gives you some visual interest, not just the kid with his Baruch ata Adonai.”
Carla had wanted to ask whether Cass had to get permissions from the congregants so indecorously represented, but he had already moved on to a more crucial part of the video: the party following the service—which is to say, the meat of the event. He now handed Carla a card that resembled a menu in one of those restaurants where sandwiches are named for famous people or places. In this case, the listings were of great movies in the cinematic tradition that could serve as stylistic models in filming the bat mitzvah.
The Godfather:
A festive but magisterial record of your event. Maintains a sense of family dignity and holds to old-fashioned notions of decorum and prescribed liveliness.
The Fiddler on the Roof:
A boisterous rendering. Makes much of the Jewish elements of your event, focusing on tradition and on the charm of the elderly and the very young. Note: A Fiddler video often works best with a klezmer band.
The Annie Hall:
A whimsical approach that chooses one character, say Uncle Phil, who has a big mouth or tells a lot of jokes, and weaves his comments throughout. Adds continuity and humor to the record of the event.
The Nashville:
A stylish montage effect. Lots of cross-cutting between, say, Grandma dancing the hora and Aunt Jennie flirting with the bartender. Makes for interest and originality.
Cass had hit on the idea of cinematic models when he returned to Cherry Hill after his hiatus on the West Coast and toured some of the new housing developments that had sprung up in his absence. It was the era of semicustom homes that were being marketed according to celebrated edifices or styles in the architectural tradition: the Sienna, the Fontainebleau, the Blenheim, etc. He realized that he might do the same semicustom marketing with the great cinematic tradition.
Cass showed Carla snippets of the sample tapes for each of the stylistic options, taking time to explain the techniques involved. After viewing the tapes, her conclusion was that the Godfather style was most in keeping with their family’s sensibility.
“Godfather’s classy,” pronounced Cass approvingly. “Go for it.”
“But we are having a klezmer band,” Carla noted, glancing at the menu that associated klezmer with the Fiddler on the Roof option.
“No problem,” said Cass. “We can customize and do a Godfather with Fiddler overtones.”
Carla said she’d consider this suggestion—along with the price tag (which approached that of a modest independent feature film)—and get back to him.
Chapter Twenty-eight
After Cass LEFT, CARLA PREPARED TO RUN OVER TO THE geriatric center, where she wanted to discuss the videographer’s options with Mr. O’Hare.
O’Hare’s knowledge of the mechanics of the bat mitzvah had become veritably encyclopedic in the past few weeks. He now had definite opinions on such things as the timing between the dancing of the hora and the serving of the matzo ball soup, not to mention the niceties of whether Mark’s father, Charles Goodman, should perform the Motzi alone, or whether a male relative from the Kaplan side should perhaps be brought in as well, to balance things out. “Families can get testy that way,” said O’Hare. “What about that Uncle Sid you mentioned? Is he mobile? Does he have his faculties? Maybe he might do the wine prayer in a pinch.”
Carla agreed that there was wisdom in this advice. Perhaps, she said, O’Hare might want to consider a career in bar mitzvah planning; he seemed to have a flair for it.
Before she left for the geriatric center, however, Carla went to check on her mother. Jessie had not been puttering around the kitchen or straightening up the den, which was her usual occupation at this hour, and Carla wondered if perhaps she was feeling under the weather and had gone upstairs to lie down. She found Jessie in her bedroom, not napping but watching a videotape on the small TV on her night table. This was strange, since Carla didn’t recall having rented anything in the past week.
“What are you watching, Mom?” she asked curiously. The tape was clearly not one of the musicals or ’40s melodramas that her mother tended to favor.
“It’s a tape of The Merchant of Venice,” said Jessie in a rather supercilious tone, “with that famous English actor, what’s his name?—I think he’s dead now.”
“Laurence Olivier?” Carla glanced at the screen, where Olivier was indeed recognizable in a frock coat talking to two other men in frock coats in what was unmistakably Shakespearean language.
“It was made for English television,” Jessie explained. “They have higher-class taste over there.”
“I see,” said Carla, unused to being lectured by her mother on British taste.
“This one is set in a diffe
rent period,” continued Jessie. “You see the costumes aren’t what you’d expect.” She gestured to the frock coats. “But it’s the play all the same. And I have to admit that this what’s-his-name does a lot with the Jewish moneylender part. I don’t like the daughter, though—but then I’m prejudiced.”
Carla, ignoring this critical evaluation, asked, “Where, might I ask, did you get this copy of The Merchant of Venice?”
“Oh”—Jessie faltered a moment—“from the new video store up the way.” (In point of fact, Hal had gotten the tape for her from the new video store, and she planned to return it to him at their lunch tomorrow.)
“Are you telling me you drove all the way down Route 73 to that new store, Videos Unlimited?” Carla knew that Jessie was a fearful driver, not inclined to venture anywhere that she hadn’t been before.
“And why not?” said Jessie, growing huffy. “I’m not helpless, you know.”
“Okay, okay,” said Carla, assuming that her mother’s imagined fling with Shakespeare had emboldened her as a driver. “My mistake. I just thought you didn’t like to drive out that far, that’s all.”
“Shh!” said Jessie suddenly. “This is the part I wanted to hear.”
It was Shylock embarking on the famous speech that explained why he was seeking revenge against the Christian who owed him money. Carla and Jessie sat without speaking as Olivier took flight, the lines rendering him at once noble and pitiful.
“‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’” intoned Olivier, his voice rising to an epic lament. “‘Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?—fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.’”
“Powerful,” murmured Carla.
“Yes,” sighed Jessie, turning off the TV and standing up, “he did himself credit there. The rest—feh!—but that speech was something. But enough with the Shakespeare already,” she pronounced, to Carla’s relief. “It’s time I started dinner.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
“This is AMAZING STUFF!”
Hal Pearson was sitting in a corner of the roof dining room at the Yale Club in New York City with his old college friend Anish Patel. Anish had been Hal’s roommate at Yale and was now an assistant professor of English there. His exclamation was in response to a paper Hal had e-mailed him the night before.
In the context of contemporary academic life, Anish was an odd bird. He was a literary conservative at a time when most rising academics were liberals, and an ethnic minority who not only didn’t champion contemporary ethnic literature but believed that the literary canon effectively ended with Dr. Johnson.
Anish could buck the multicultural trend because his background placed him technically out of bounds. Born into the lower castes of Indian society in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Calcutta, he had applied himself to his studies with a tenacity and vigor that had earned him scholarships to Andover and Yale. In the end, despite being the descendent of a people who had suffered the yoke of imperialist oppression, he had become a rabid Anglophile—in Hal’s words, “more jingoist than Kipling.”
“Personally, I don’t care what the politically correct types think,” Anish often declared to Hal, “I like the great old books and I don’t take their authors to task for prejudices and limitations they had no way of recognizing. I’m fed up with you guys who insist that the geniuses of the past should share your enlightened views. You conveniently ignore the fact that it takes time—and great writing—to prepare the way for enlightened views.”
As Anish’s words suggested, Hal’s tastes in literature and in politics were more ecumenical than his friend’s, and they often became embroiled in heated debates in which Hal argued that a particular author (say, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, or Vladimir Nabokov—not to mention Philip Roth or Toni Morrison) belonged in the pantheon of literary greats, while Anish argued that said author was an overhyped piece of garbage. What they shared, however—and what kept the friendship strong—was a mutual devotion to Shakespeare. They never quarreled about that, and it was the reason why they were meeting at the Yale Club today.
Anish was thumbing excitedly through the sheaf of pages that Hal had e-mailed him. The two men had often shared ideas during college and graduate school, though they had ultimately taken different career paths. Anish had accepted a professorial position at Yale, while Hal had gone on to teach the great unwashed—i.e., the middle-schoolers of Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Anish said he didn’t understand Hal’s choice. He had seen dirt and ignorance enough in Calcutta, and couldn’t imagine wanting to see more of it in the New Jersey suburbs. He was pleased to have a wood-paneled office, a few prissy graduate students to advise, and plenty of time to peruse the quartos and folios of his beloved bard in Yale’s Beinecke Library. Hal, for his part, said he didn’t care about wood paneling. He wanted to bring Shakespeare “to the people”—and Cherry Hill middle-schoolers seemed as good a sample of that group as you were likely to find anywhere. Besides, he happened to be one of those rare adults who liked kids. He thought they were amusing and interesting—something that Anish found impossible to comprehend.
But in the present instance, such differences were forgotten. Anish was excitedly turning over the pages in his hands while Hal looked on with pleasure.
“It’s amazing!” Anish exclaimed again. “It’ll turn Shakespeare scholarship on its head. The journal will never hear the end of it.”
“The journal” was the Shakespeare Biannual Review, an academic journal that no one read but that was highly respected in certain circles, albeit very small ones. Anish was its editor.
“The idea that we can trace Jessica’s betrayal of her father in The Merchant of Venice to a real woman of Hebrew persuasion who rejected Shakespeare’s advances sheds light on the entire development of his career,” Anish continued enthusiastically. “It makes The Merchant, as you say”—he flipped through the article and read from one of the pages—“‘a nodal point in the canon, from which the other plays spring rather in the manner of a theme and variations. ’ All Shakespeare scholarship will have to be revised in the face of it.” (In making his case, Hal had adopted the academic tone of the world he had left behind.)
“It is good, isn’t it?” agreed Hal exultantly. The more he had mulled over Jessie’s story, the more interesting and exciting the implications seemed to be.
“It’s sensational! Altogether without precedent!” Anish exclaimed, then paused and gave his friend a penetrating look. “I assume you have sources to support your ideas?” His voice had suddenly taken on a concerned note. “You didn’t just make the whole thing up, did you? If you did, it’s an impressive leap of imagination, I grant you, but no use to us.”
“No,” said Hal slowly. “I didn’t make it up. But the source is unorthodox.”
“Unorthodox is all right,” said Anish hopefully. “We’re none of us High Church here, are we?”
“I should say not,” said Hal. “You’re Hindu and I’m a Methodist, which leaves Church of England more or less beside the point.”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with the Church of England,” Anish noted. “But I assume some sort of evidence stands behind this.”
“As a matter of fact,” said Hal tentatively, “the source hardly counts as a source at all.”
Anish frowned more deeply. “A source that is not a source—sounds mysterious.”
“Yes,” admitted Hal, “I suppose it is.”
“Don’t tell me you are going to pre
sent me with three caskets and ask me to solve riddles in the manner of poor Portia’s lover. I could never understand what Shakespeare saw in that selfish bastard Bassanio—”
“And now you know why,” Hal jumped in enthusiastically. “Shakespeare created him to get back at his beloved and her father, Jews who had turned their backs on him. It was Bassanio, as I argue”—he pointed to his paper—“who was Shakespeare’s own alter-ego—a figure of self-loathing thinly disguised as a leading man. Not that elements of Shakespeare aren’t present in the character of Shylock as well, as I explain here on page nine.”
“Yes, yes, very ingenious,” said Anish impatiently. “The characters are predictably overdetermined, all stemming from the traumatic rejection by the Jewish woman—that’s clear enough. But how do you come by it—that’s the question?”
“I’d rather hold off on any further explanation,” said Hal in a tone Anish knew meant the case was closed. “I’m not sure I’m in a position to reveal my source—and you’d probably be inclined to discount it anyway. The point is whether the theory makes sense.”
“It holds together wonderfully,” said Anish, “but without hard evidence, what’s the point? You might as well write a novel. I realize that for many in our field the distinction is inconsequential. They write theories and say they’re as good as facts, then they hogtie the facts and make them serve the theories. Their rationale: Since we can’t know anything for certain, who cares what the particular proportion of truth to fiction happens to be? But we at Shakespeare Biannual hold to that unfashionable thing known as truth. Which is only to say, we don’t publish anything without footnotes.”
Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan Page 15
