Foreskin

Noel Vera

"Europa Europa" makes for a fascinating parable despite the fact that-
-or perhaps especially because--much of the story is true. Salomon
Perel's story--of a young Jew who flees Nazi persecution, is forced
to join the Russian "Kosmonol" and later the "Hitler-Jugend"--speaks
to our morally ambivalent age: was Salomon (or Solly, as he's
sometimes called) a hero or heel? How far should someone go to
guarantee his survival? Is his declaring his Jewishness at war's end
Salomon's way of rising up to reclaim his original identity, or yet
another ploy he's playing to be accepted, to stay alive? And--though
we may not actually have seen such an event and Salomon never admits
to doing so (and I would understand if he never did), the thought
comes up in one's mind--did he ever turn in or have a role in turning
in a fellow Jew during his time with the Nazis?

Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland has been much praised (and much
criticized) for treating the story in a subdued manner, never quite
giving us the dramatic intensity inherent in this kind of material.
Lina Wertmuller's "Seven Beauties," to name a film on a similar
subject, dove straight for the jugular with regards to the question
of "how far are you willing to go?" and piled atrocity upon atrocity,
grotesquerie upon grotesquerie. The result is memorable, but seemed
too much like a stunt, a cartoon, like one of those hypothetical
situations people ask to test you, at once too complex and not
complex enough to deal with the full implications of the question.

Holland, faced with the bewilderingly rich ambiguities of her
character, decided to put them all on the big screen and let us
decide for ourselves, which I believe took considerable courage--to
pick a side or position no matter how popular/unpopular may actually
be easier than to allow different sides to speak out. Better yet, the
detachment points up something you rarely see in films about or
related to the Holocaust and its survivors: a sense of irony.
Salomon's quest to stay alive is also a quest to retain his identity,
his sense of self, however fragile and attenuated it may ultimately
become; by war's end he may survive, but our sympathy for him, his
plight, whatever makes survival actually worthwhile, may not.

And then, of course, there's the question of his penis. Circumcised
as according to Jewish tradition, it's literally the one tiny bit of
truth Salomon can't pretend doesn't exist, or can't pass off as being
gentile; any time he exposes his maleness he literally risks exposure
of himself as a Jew. Holland piles on the dilemmas--the call of
nature, changing clothes with others in a locker room, a gay Nazi's
interest in him.

It's a hilarious twist on the old adage, that a man's penis will lead
him into trouble; here, it can literally cost him his life. In a
strange way Salomon is lucky--his shortened foreskin marks him; no
matter what he says and does, if he dies and is taken to the morgue
to be embalmed, the moment he undresses he will be immediately
identified. He's never in doubt as to what he really is, no matter
how confused his mind or confusing the circumstances may be, and that
may have been the one thing that kept his head on straight throughout
everything that happened.

Critics have compared Holland's film with Polanski's "The Pianist;"
the two have radically different flavors, I think. Polanski's film
early on has much of his absurdist, astringent humor, later on
transforms itself into a haunting poem on loneliness and isolation;
Holland's film keeps the poetry at a minimum (I do love the image of
Hitler waltzing with Stalin) and maintains a skeptical eye on Solly,
waiting to see what foolishness he's liable to stumble onto next
("Foolishness" in the sense that it may help him survive, but you're
always aware of how silly it looks from where you're sitting).

More interesting would be to compare this film with "Empire of the
Sun," J.G. Ballard's semi-autobiographical story of wartime survival,
this time among the Japanese. Ballard's Jim may be a younger cousin
to Holland's Solly, but unlike Solly he has no foreskin to remind him
of who he is. The question of race is never really raised--Jim
surrenders and is promptly put in a POW camp--but Jim's plight is, if
anything, subtler and even more perilous: he regards the war as some
kind of grand boy's adventure, and he loses sight of who the enemy is
supposed to be, and what his role is as a British prisoner. The camp
becomes a "University of Life" where he learns about all the things
that matter to him (and not all the things that real life, or at
least life raised as a British subject, would teach him), and he
regards the Japanese--in particular, the inept youths being trained
as kamikaze pilots--as his idols, if not actual friends (forget the
Steven Spielberg adaptation, where Jim's story not only becomes a
real boy's adventure but Jim starts to develop a sense of morality--
not what Ballard's strange, strange novel is all about).

Holland's film may not quite reach the level of surreal wit of
Ballard's novel, but it's headed in the same general direction; more,
since Solly is older, the question of sex comes into play in the form
of Leni (a radiantly beautiful Julia Delpy), a young, nubile, anti-
Semitic Nazi determined to raise babies for the Fuehrer's Thousand
Year Reich, and hoping Salomon would contribute his sperm to the
cause. Leni is the very personification of Aryan maidenhood, and the
worst reminder of Solly's predicament--he aches for her, yet dares
not touch her. His ruse has not only rendered him un-kosher and
possibly immoral, it's made him impotent as well; when Leni throws
herself at him and he has to refuse, you can't help but count
yourself lucky you're not in his place.

(The film is being screened as part of the Goethe Institute's Artur
Brauner Retrospective; click on this link for details:
http://www.goethe.de/ins/ph/map/en879333.htm)

(First printed in Businessworld, 5/5/06)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)