Benigni's Corrective Vision
GRUBER, RUTH ELLEN
A LETTER FROM ROME Benigni's Corrective vision By Ruth Ellen Gruber Rome Amplifying his original brief and devastating review of Roberto Benigni's Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful, New...
...Several new Jewish studies programs or centers have been initiated, including courses in Yiddish in Venice, Rome and Bari that are run by non-Jewish teachers...
...Indeed, Ovadia was one of the first to voice praise when the movie came out...
...They spoke Italian, not Yiddish or Hebrew...
...I hope I stimulate others...
...To millions of moviegoers, Guido has introduced a more realistic portrait of the Jew in Italy...
...I wanted the audience to ask themselves, why are they deporting Benigni, how could they take even him...
...This is not the sort of flaw or oversight that Denby seems to imply...
...He appears everywhere from big-time theaters in major cities to open-air piazzas in provincial towns to Jewish community-sponsored events...
...A LETTER FROM ROME Benigni's Corrective vision By Ruth Ellen Gruber Rome Amplifying his original brief and devastating review of Roberto Benigni's Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful, New Yorker film critic David Denby complained that Benigni's character "is identified as a Jew, though there's nothing particularly Jewish about him...
...Much of this interest revolves around klezmer music, Yiddish, Jewish jokes, and other facets of the Eastern European shtetl experience—so much so that a headline in a leading newspaper last year proclaimed "Songs, Theater and TV: It's Yiddish-mania...
...In the original version, which lacks the opening paragraphs of contextual information supplied for foreign viewers, Benigni's Guido isn't identified as a Jew until halfway through the movie, when there is a shocking episode of anti-Semitism...
...He describes himself as a saltimbanco, an acrobat...
...they took part in all spheres of public and political life—thousands were even members of the Fascist Party...
...A Sephardic Jew born after World War II in Bulgaria, he moved with his family to Milan as a small child and first began exploring his roots as an adult...
...Ovadia insists that he is only a performer...
...I hope that some will say that they started with me and went further...
...The key figure in the popularization of Jewish culture here over the past decade, especially Eastern European Jewish culture, has been the charismatic singer and actor Moni Ovadia...
...In fact, Jews have lived continuously in Rome for more than 2,000 years, and while only 30,000 or so now live in Italy (out of a total population of almost 60 million), most are still highly integrated and intensely Italian...
...For apopular public image of the Jew as an "other,' an exotic perpetual outsider, has paradoxically been fostered by a surge of interest in Jewish culture...
...they wore standard dress...
...What I do on stage is to explain the effect that the Yiddish world has had on me...
...Italian Jews were highly acculturated before World War II...
...Yehoshua are lionized when they come to Italy on promotional tours...
...I am trying to do my part in making Yiddish known, but in a personal way...
...Ovadia receives rave reviews for his elaborate theatrical productions that often address Holocaust themes, and his "Yiddish Cabarets" based on Eastern European Jewish legend, music and Catskills-type humor...
...Rather, it is a comic facsimile of the mispronunciation of a native Yiddish-speaker clumsily trying to speak Italian...
...He performs on TV, radio and in movies, addresses high school groups and scholarly conferences, and has been written up repeatedly in the national media...
...Guido is perfectly Italian—not a Woody Allen-style New York neurotic, a Mitteleuropa coffeehouse intellectual, a battle-scarred Israeli, or a caftaned, Yiddish-speaking shtetl dweller...
...But it is not the Yiddish of the cities and vanished shtetls of Eastern Europe...
...Ruth Ellen Gruber is a correspondent for The New Leader, based in Italy...
...Years ago as a student, when I went to synagogue in Rome for the first time, I was astonished that the only thing physically distinguishing members of the congregation from other Romans was their wearing Stars of David, ratherthan crosses, around their necks...
...It is possible that today they symbolize the salvation and survival of human identity...
...But whatever the case, the film certainly "went further...
...Reviving the language was a "political act," he declared...
...With his long graying hair, tiny wire-rimmed glasses, old-fashioned clothes and often exaggerated gestures, his onstage persona exemplifies the stereotyped Jew...
...Scores of books on Jewish subjects are published annually...
...Benigni's message is particularly important in today's Italy...
...Major newspapers and magazines feature frequent articles on Jewish topics, and even fashion magazines, including the Italian edition of Glamour, have run features on the subject...
...Speaking at the Rome Jewish Community center last year, Ovadia acknowledged that many of his jokes could sound anti-Semitic if told by a non-Jew...
...Each year of late sees a proliferation of Jewish-themed performances, exhibits, and music-and-culture festivals...
...Psychologist Enzo Morpurgo says: "In a world that is racing toward conformity, the Jews represent a group that can be recognized and characterized...
...Physical differences from Catholic Italians were, and are, minimal...
...But he did not address the question of whether his performances before non-Jewish audiences might have the effect of legitimizing stereotypes...
...Worse, his punchlines often revolve around Jewish greed and the size of Jewish noses...
...Authors such as Chaim Potok and A.B...
...The objection missed an important aspect of the movie that has been overlooked or disregarded amid the passionate polemics about its message...
...Neapolitan author Erri De Luca taught himself Yiddish...
...He adopts a Yiddish accent when telling jokes about characters named Moishele and Avromele, and his books go so far as to print many of the "w" sounds as "v"s...
...One result has been that Jews are being held up as symbols of exile and survival in a quickly changing world...
...For all the universal appeal leading to its international success, one needs to remember that the film was made by Italians for an Italian audience...
...He declared Roberto Benigni "an honorary Jew...
...It is quite conceivable that Benigni would never have been inspired to make Life is Beautiful if Moni Ovadia had not set off the boom of interest here in things Jewish...
...Instead, it is one of the film's main points...
...Benigni's movie deliberately underscores this fact: The people who were abruptly branded subhuman, deported and subjected to a desperate game of survival, it says, were indistinguishable from their neighbors...
...This, he has written, offers the reader "a crumb of the flavor of the spoken [Yiddish] language...
...Then, suddenly, down comes this ax that smashes his life, just as it really happened...
...Guido] is a Jew who lives his life, who is not involved in politics, who does his job...
...I wanted to portray a Jew who was not recognizable by precise signs, but who was the same as I am," Benigni told Rome's Jewish monthly Shalom last year...
...I am not a scholar in search of reality but a performer in search of feelings that stimulate an interest in [the Jewish] world," he told me...
...But the image that Ovadia projects is problematic...
Vol. 82 • April 1999 • No. 4
