Histoires d'Amérique (Histoires d’Amérique: Food, Family and Philosophy). 1989. Belgium/France. Written and directed by Chantal Akerman. With George Bartenieff, Judith Malina, Eszter Balint. Restored by the Royal Film Archive of Belgium — CINEMATEK and Fondation Chantal Akerman; DCP courtesy Janus Films. 96 min.
With great humor and pathos, Chantal Akerman transforms the Jewish-American immigrant experience as seen through the Yiddish stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer into a richly embroidered series of Talmudic parables, dialogues, and Borscht Belt jokes centering on the existence of God in a post-Holocaust world; piety and doubt; ritual, law, and transgression; tradition and assimilation; and the age-old conflicts between parents and children and husbands and wives. Bridging the old, vanished world of shtetl life, pogroms, ghettos, and death camps with the (failed) promise of the new world, Akerman’s quintessentially New York film, shot along the East River waterfront, seeks to redress a longing of her own: “My own story,” she observes, “is full of blanks, full of missing links, and I do not even have a child.” Recalling the experience of approaching Singer with the idea of this film, Akerman observed, “Singer writes in Yiddish; he’s one of the last Yiddish authors. He himself says: ‘It’s both a tragedy and a responsibility.’” Yiddish, she continues, “is a language which was Freudian before Freud and which, in its primitive way, tells us a lot about our subconscious and about two thousand years of exile. A language with a sense of humor, so to speak, and some of whose words have slipped into the American language. And what do these émigrés, religious or renegades, revolutionaries or lovers, do when they meet in a delicatessen? They tell each other stories of religious émigrés, renegade émigrés, revolutionary émigrés, émigrés madly in love, or émigrés who survived the camps. So it is these people with their stories and places that I would like to find and film; the stories, characters and places that inspire Isaac Bashevis Singer.”
As a prelude to the screening on Friday, September 12, the cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton, Akerman’s longtime collaborator, performs a selection of secular and religious Jewish music.