The Jewish calendar is filled with commemorations, but now the coronavirus has disrupted many of our ritual celebrations. Expectations have been dashed, but unexpected new experiences have followed. And sometimes, things work out differently, and the story now has a different, even happier ending. We have all adapted. Families have shared graduations, weddings, funerals, holiday meals and religious services via cell phones and computer screens. In the disruption, people have found themselves together in new ways. It’s made room for new ways of relating, and we are even more grateful for the connections we have. With new experiences, we are changing.

The choices I am making these days show me I’ve changed. A recent incident on an airplane mirrored an experience I had almost four decades years earlier, an experience that had burned itself into my mind, and left a deep scar on its folds. The recent incident, which might have passed by without notice, showed me that my life is changing in remarkable ways. If we pay attention to and think over the details of our lives now, we may see that our lives are changing in good ways.

In 1981 I was on my way to El Salvador to cover the war and change the world. When the plane stopped in Guatemala, a tall dark man with a heavy black mustache boarded carrying a colorful red, orange and yellow woven plastic bag. He spotted the empty seat next to me, unloaded his bundle in an overhead bin farther back, and came and sat down heavily and grinned at me from under his mustache. He was returning from Washington, D.C. with his boss, who turned out to be a most powerful man. 

The encounter would send my life into a darkening spiral that would take decades to climb out of. Descending into the bowels of the capital city that night, the smell of the cooking fires filled the air like Purgatory.

 This last year, wildfires in the California hills had shut down Highway 101 briefly, but friends assured me that everything was under control now, and I should come on my planned trip. My sister, terrified of fires, begged me not to go. “You’re always going into dangerous places,” she said. I caught a flight out of Albuquerque, with prayers for my safety trailing behind me.
After we took our seats on the plane, at the last minute a cheerful group of young people carrying colorful woven bundles and knapsacks trooped onboard. One girl spotted the empty seat next to me, stashed her woven plastic bundle in an overhead bin further back, and then came and plopped down. She grinned at me from under an orange fur hat that framed purple hair and which color also complimented a purple-fringed cowboy jacket. 

As we took off she she pulled out a book by the naturalist Terry Tempest Williams. She told me her name was Sage, she was studying to become an herbalist, she was part Navajo, and her mother was Jewish. She said her Jewish grandmother encouraged her career as an herbalist. 

I told her, “I’m Jewish and my husband is Navajo.” I thought this was true serendipity.
Sage was either nonplussed or unimpressed. I said, as a further overture, that if she came to Albuquerque again, my husband might introduce her to some traditional herbalists. She seemed light-filled, free-spirited and confident. 

I asked, “What’s your style called?” 

Sage said, “It’s whatever makes me feel like myself.”
At baggage claim, her friend took a snapshot of us for me. Later, I studied it. I was surprised to see that her T-shirt had a picture of a Celtic endless knot just like the metal ironwork I’d been transfixed by in O’Niell’s bar the previous week. That Celtic knot had sent me into a reverie—all things connected and came full circle in one’s life with no real exit—but then, behind the Celtic ironwork in the bar was a door with an exit sign over it. So there was an opening, like the thinking of a Navajo weaver to include a line traveling to the edge of the rug so the pattern is open.

      In the photo with Sage in the airport terminal photo, there was a sign behind and directly over us on the back wall, “Baggage.” I also saw the woven red, orange and yellow plastic bundle. Now it jarred loose the memory of that plastic bag I’d seen the man carrying when he boarded the plane in Guatemala when I was 27,  another kind of baggage that I’d carried,  attached to memories imprisoned in my mind.      
That imprinted moment had, like a filmstrip unrolling, now been recast with Sage the lovely herbalist instead of the sinister Salvadoran. A new story, now on the light, bright side.      

After I arrived in California, the uncontrollable wildfires began to close in. I didn’t stay. I was glad to have met Sage, and to have seen a completely different time and place with the smell of burning and death in the air. But this time I chose to leave, before the fires flared again. 

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Gallup Independent, May 30, 2020

New Mexico Jewish Link, Vol. 50, 2020

February, 2020 Film Review: New Mexico Jewish Link
First Place, Reviews, New Mexico Press Women Awards 2021

In 2020, Jojo Rabbit, an anti-hate satire, was up for 6 academy awards in February, including Best Picture, and it won for Best Adapted Story. The film script is inspired by a novel, Christine Leunens’ Caging Skies, that in turn was based on a true story. That it won for Best Adapted Story is surprising, even ironic, as the way the movie ends is uplifting, whereas the novel becomes progressively darker. This begs the question: What serves us better, an inspiring story or one that hews closer to historic truth? 

Jojo Rabbit is written and directed byTaika Waititi, who grew up in New Zealand with his mother, who told him about the book. Waititi’s father is Maori and his mother is of Russian Jewish and Irish descent. Perhaps this mixture gave him a more creatively flexible way of thinking.

What I hope is that Jewish people will go to see this film and bring their non-Jewish friends to see it. It is funny, it is poignant, and it delivers an important teaching. Those who despised Mel Brooks’ The Producers and who, understandably, cannot watch a film that satirizes Hitler, will probably not appreciate it. Nevertheless, it has sufficient merit that the Shoah Foundation approved it for their educational programs. 

Claudia Ramirez Weideman, the foundation’s associate director of education technologies, explained to reporter PJ Grisar in the Feb. 26, 2020 Forward that, when they saw an early screening, “Everyone, I think, could see the enormous potential that the film could bring to promoting understanding around anti-Semitism, humanizing of ‘The Other,’ promoting empathy. . .”

The story begins by introducing Jojo, a 10-year-old German boy, with a friend who as the written script’s direction describes: “is none other than Jojo’s Imaginary Friend, Adolf Hitler. However, it’s not the Hitler we’re all used to, he’s imaginary and therefore can only know what Jojo knows.” Jojo is looking forward to spending the weekend with the Hitler Youth, where he is indoctrinated into hating Jewish people. This role, played by Waititi himself, did not exist in the original novel. It works throughout the film to show us the thrall that Hitler had over young people, and changes that Jojo’s character finally undergoes.

       At the camp they chant “Horns / Serpent tongue / Fangs /Green blood / Claws, while their teacher proudly writes the children’s words on a blackboard. At the top of the board is the heading: “The Jew.” Later Jojo sits in his tent with his friend Yorki and fantasizes about catching a Jew. 

Yorki, who is a bit less sanguine about the whole business, asks him, “But how would you know if you saw one?”

Jojo says, “Oh I’d know. I’d feel its head for horns. And they smell like Brussels Sprouts.

Yorki replies, deadpanning, “Oh yeah, I forgot about the Brussels Sprouts bit.”

Jojo, undeterred, says, “Imagine catching one and giving it to Hitler. That’d be a sure-fire way to get into his personal guard.”

Elsa is the heroine of the film 

But Jojo gets seriously injured with a permanent scar to his face, and has to come home, only to discover that his mother Rosie, is hiding a Jewish teenager, Elsa, in their attic. Rosie is played with scintillating wit by Scarlett Johansson, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role. When Jojo stumbles across Elsa, instead of cowering, Elsa grabs Jojo by the neck and demands he tell her who she is, saying, “Yes. You know.” 

Jojo gulps and futilely replies, “A Jew.” 

“Gesundheit,” Elsa jokes, like he’d said ‘achoo.’

Elsa, played by the 19-year-old actress Thomasin McKenzie, is the pivotal star of the film in this viewer’s mind. Her courage and humor are transcendent, redeeming the film and providing a role model for those of us who have recently felt cowed by resurgence of anti-Semitism. 

After his encounters with Elsa, Jojo runs back to his room where his ridiculous imaginary friend Adolf says “She’s pretty rude, y’know. That’s just my two pfennige.”

Jojo gets the idea to have Elsa draw him a book about Jews. He says, “So, I’d like you to draw a picture of where Jews live. A typical hive; where you all sleep, eat, and where the Queen Jew lays the eggs.”

Elsa replies, “You really are an idiot.”

Later Jojo’s mother Rosie goes up to the attic and says to Elsa, “How do you love a son like this, a kid who believes the things he does? In the end, you have no choice. I know he’s still in there somewhere, the little boy who loves to play and runs to you because he’s scared of thunder.”

Jojo visits Elsa again, and again she overpowers him, and says, “There are no weak Jews. I am descended from those who wrestle angels and kill giants. We were chosen by God. You were chosen by a pathetic little man who can’t even grow a full mustache.”

Jojo knows if he tells on Elsa, he would get her, his mother and himself killed as well. But what fun is it to have a secret if you can’t tell, a little? He goes and tells his Hitler Youth leader, Klenzendorf, who is now in the town, “I’m writing a book.” 

Klenzendorf asks, “What’s it called?” 

Jojo says, “‘Yoohoo Jew,’ It’s an exposé on Jews.” 

Klenzendorf thinks this is hilarious. He shows Jojo his secret fashion drawings of uniforms dressed up with sequins and tassels. In this is an important educational point, the hint that Klezendorf, played by Sam Rockwell, is not really a Nazi, because, for a true fascist, everyone must conform; the uniform, the thinking, the style must be ‘just so.’

Later upstairs Elsa tries to tell Jojo, “You’re not a Nazi, Jojo. You’re a 10 year old kid who ‘likes’ swastikas and ‘likes’ dressing up in a funny uniform and wants to be part of a club. But you’re not one of them. Not you.”

            I took a non-Jewish friend to see the film. Afterwards she asked me if I was disturbed by the anti-Semitic caricatures that Jojo made. I explained that the point was to show how infantile and ridiculous they were. Ridiculous but also tragic in their consequences. Many young people today don’t know about the Holocaust, that six million Jewish people, throughout all the towns and cities and villages of Europe, were hunted down and murdered.

Evil has a certain appeal. It is hard to understand, that appeal. But this film delivers a significant body blow to that evil. Sometimes by showing up evil, making it ridiculous, without letting our guard down, we can see it for what it is. In this way perhaps we are not doomed. 

The ending (spoiler alert)

Unfortunately, even after Jojo becomes enamored of Elsa, it takes him almost to the end of the film to kick out his imaginary friend Adolf, to let go of his fanatical loyalty, when the Allies occupy the town. Elsa asks, Who won? Is it safe to go out? At first he says, no, the Germans, but then, tells her the truth and they go out. There the movie ends. 

It is at this point that the book, Caging Skies, is only half-way through and takes a significant turn, as Leigh Monson pointed out in ‘Jojo Rabbit’ is One of the Strangest Adaptations Ever – Here’s How It Differs From the Book. The boy, in the book Johannes, doesn’t let go. He lies, he tells Elsa that the Germans won and he keeps her inside for himself for four more years until finally they turn on each other in hatred. This shows us the true dangers of indoctrination – it is a story that does not have a Hollywood finish.

The film ends with a quote from the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, 

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final.”

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