"Klezmer on Fish Street"
Directed by Yale Strom, produced by Elizabeth Schwartz, released by Castle Hill Productions.
"Klezmer on Fish Street" is an incompetent documentary which alleges there is (according to the film's press notes) "a resurgence of interest in Jewish culture" in today's Poland. The notion behind this grand statement is a thriving so-called Holocaust Tourist Trade, including a "Schindler's List" tour of the Nazi death camps and the now-extinct Jewish neighborhoods of Poland's major cities. There is also a supposed strong Polish excitement in klezmer music, a distinctly Russian-Polish music identified with the Jewish culture of this part of the world; supposedly, many non-Jewish Polish musicians are playing this music to SRO concert engagements throughout Poland.
Unfortunately, what is depicted on screen completely contradicts such notions. Open air performances of klezmer music by a group of young Americans visiting Poland is received by Polish pedestrians with gazes that range from studied indifference to outright contempt. An evening street celebration following the Jewish Sabbath brings out both the local police (who seem to come with built-in sneers) and insults from local Poles suggesting the celebrants should go to Israel. Few vestiges of pre-1939 Jewish culture are preserved and spray painted swastikas turn up on more than one occasion. As for the Holocaust Tourist Trade, it seems to thrive on cheap souvenirs depicting traditional Jewish art and a few restaurants which may or may not even be kosher (the film doesn't even have the intelligence to ask who is doing the cooking and how the food is being prepared).
"Klezmer on Fish Street" is actually a hodgepodge of vague and unfinished thoughts, bizarre comments, and some of the most amateurish production values in a supposedly professional production. In one hilarious moment, an Israeli tourist is being interviewed when a man walks in front of him and stops in the center of the camera's focus. The screen is filled with a huge close-up of the intruder's ear while the Israeli tourist babbles on from behind the man's head.
Elsewhere in the film, the young American klezmer musicians take their instruments on a tour bus destined to the site of the Treblinka concentration camp. The idea of bringing accordions and violins to a death camp is troubling enough, but even more unusual is the fact the bus never gets to its destination. We get to see a roadside McDonald's, but there is no tour of Treblinka. Elsewhere in the film are whooshes of wind blowing heavily into a microphone, soundtrack levels rising and falling willy-nilly, poorly-blocked close-ups which make the interview subjects look comic, night time footage which is so dark that you cannot tell who is speaking, and selections of Yiddish songs presented without English subtitles.
There is also a lengthy interview with a folk dancing teacher who seems have studied choreography with the Three Stooges. His concept of Jewish folk dancing looks suspiciously like the Curly Shuffle. Then there is also some inane historian who claims klezmer music is "the soundtrack for the Jewish experience" (that will come as news to the millions of Jewish people of Sephardic heritage) and who worries about the gentile takeover of klezmer with this deathless concern: "The issue is not that a white boy can play the blues, but can a goy play the Jews?" Oy vey!
The cruelest blow of them all, however, is the fact this movie has a theatrical distributor and is playing in commercial engagements. In view of the scores of gifted documentary filmmakers whose professinal quality features cannot get a screen, this is the biggest insult of them all.
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