Rami Kimchi
Israeli Bourekas Films: Their Origins and Legacy
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023. ISBN-10: 0253063426
Reviewed by Jessica Carr1
It is a truism that Yiddish and Yiddish literature have been marginalized in Hebrew national culture of Zionism and the state of Israel. Rami Kimchi’s Israeli Bourekas Films uncovers how the Yiddish literature of the upbringing of Israeli directors has had a diffuse yet significant influence on Israeli film beyond an overt use of the language itself. Kimchi argues that traces of the “imagined shtetl” can reverberate throughout the genre of Bourekas (named for a Mediterranean pastry), offering a roadmap of how Ashkenazi Hebrew culture has projected anxieties about modernity onto Mizrahi neighborhoods on the Israeli screen, since 1933 (2, 46). His argument about the significance of classical Yiddish authors, Y. L. Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, and Mendele Menachem Sforim, in Zionist reception and Israeli national culture in contrast to the place of Yiddish language and literature in American Jewish life and reception in addition to showing how Yiddish literary forms shaped Ashkenazi Hebrew national perceptions of the Jews who would become Mizrahim versus American Jews. When Hollywood was interested in the shtetl, Israeli cinema was too, Kimchi argues, but had to disguise that interest given the animosity toward Yiddish (91).
Kimchi offers a poststructuralist critique of and return to auteur theory, arguing “the author’s control over the film should thus be dialectically understood and take into account the complex and dynamic relationships between artists (film directors), institutions, and certain cultural and sociopolitical circumstances.” He therefore analyzes the real space and the abstract features of the semiotics, “consider[ing] all the signifiers of the filmic text – both metaphoric and metonymic – as the result of conscious and unconscious rhetorical measures taken by the director of the film as a representative of his culture and class” (7, emphasis in original).
Bourekas films are a previously established and well-known genre. Kimchi argues that the genre is difficult to describe in a way that captures all the goals of the directors, the imaginative or representative work of the films, and that it does not offer pejorative descriptions of the people depicted in the films, especially Arab Jews. The modernist school of thought tended to see the films themselves, like any popular film, of little value as spaces of cultural production (29). Kimchi is especially influenced by postcolonial reading, namely Ella Shohat’s work (33). He argues that how to interpret the canon’s meaning has been unclear, which films should be included, and how to define the genre. Therefore Israeli Bourekas Films contours a clear definition and reads the semiotics of the films intertextually in postcolonial context.
In chapters two through four, Kimchi proposes a definition of Bourekas. They are “a distinguishable cycle of eleven films produced between 1964 and 1977” (89). Beginning in 1964, he sets Sallah Shabati as the archetype of the genre, and ending in 1977 links the close of the films’ relevance to the rise of the Likud Party to power. Kimchi offers two more archetypes: Fortuna (1966) of the genre’s orientalism and Katz & Carasso (1971) of the “social escapism” (34). The eleven films “share a particular, paradigmatic representation of the Mizrahi neighborhood, community, and family as a premodern Jewish community, focalized through the agency of a director with an Ashkenazi cultural background.” The films displace negative ideas about the shtetl, internal insecurities of Ashkenazi directors, and ideas constructed within Yiddish literature dating to East European urbanization during and after Jewish confinement to the Pale of settlement, onto Jews from West Asia and North Africa. It is by this very orientalist projection that the conception of “Mizrahim” or “Oriental” Jews came to exist as a figment of Hebrew imagination (89).
The projection of the shtetl onto Jews indigenous to North Africa and West Asia creates an assumption that there is a singular, authentic Mizrahi community. Even those who argue that Bourekas films distort that reality have missed the point, per Kimchi. “The Bourekas offer neither a twisted nor biased Mizrahi reality but a totally different one” (90, italics mine). Transferring the anxieties of East Europe onto life in the Mediterranean, the films are ironically Eurocentric even as they hope and claim to build a Hebrew national culture. The films suggest that Ashkenazi directors were not familiar with the objects of their representation, and this distance shows in the physical forms on screen and in the overall tone of affection, or lack thereof, in Bourekas. Instead, Kimchi argues that “this paradigm of representation” sought “to persuade the Mizrahim that the gaps between them and the Ashkenazim, although justified, would be closed in the coming generations” (emphasis in original). The deliberate instruction of the oriental paradigm, thus imagined Mizrahim, as the primary audience, postcolonial theory already frames how they were not “dupes” for engaging the popular films, even as Kimchi notes that the paradigm sought to argue that Mizrahim would modernize via assimilation, namely by marriage to Ashkenazi Israelis (106).
Kimchi argues that hasbara has spread the message of Zionists elites’ superiority to other Ashkenazim not to speak of “Mizrahim,” and many Ashkenazim have, somewhat inexplicably, adapted this viewpoint. In 1964, Sallah embodied Zionist ideology and the hope for Jewish transformation in the land, showing on one hand “the warped nature of the Jewish diasporic human being” yet that transformation was possible and that reintroduction or conversion to Hebrewness was possible (14-15). This viewpoint created a dichotomy of diasporic Jew versus elite Zionist Hebrew, and the former “had to earn their Hebrewness.” This displaces antisemitic stereotypes of Jews onto the diaspora and even onto Holocaust survivors and other non-Zionist arrivals, AKA “Zionist-to-be” characters with images of transformation through Zionist tropes such as Hebrew labor and making the desert bloom (15).
Kimchi shows how the visualization of space is semiotically connected to diaspora and linguistic politics. For example, in Sallah, a wide camera shot shows the largest space, the dining room, where Hebrew is spoken and a medium shot shows a negotiation to “purchase” Sallah’s daughter, a supposedly retrograde gender politics more representative of the shtetl than the kibbutz. Then, inside a closet, the tightest space and camera angles, a secretary counts the money out in Yiddish to pay him for the transaction (19). Depicting women as symbols and objects to be sold, purchased, or won rather than as fleshed out characters with their own goals and agency is a classic trope of Yiddish films that is continuous in the Bourekas genre. In later chapters, Kimchi deconstructs how this scene, or three scenes, becomes definitive for several tropes in the Bourekas films. He argues that Bourekas represent Mizrahi communities using themes of the shtetl such as ruthless competition born out of limited economic means, even destitution, and that the films take this poverty and struggle as a metonym for the entire life of the community (94-97). This competition becomes the focal point of Bourekas films’ narratives, “and the cinematic sequence uses a rhetoric of low configuration” (89).
From 1964-1977, Yiddish vernacular was strong in Israel despite the language’s rejection in elite Hebrew national culture and the place for Yiddish literature was improving, especially in print in translation from Yiddish to Hebrew. The paradox between the readiness to mock Yiddish language and to represent it reductively even as directors were familiar with it as a vernacular and as a literature stands at the center of the Bourekas genre. During the same time, by contrast, exactly zero books were printed in Ladino or Judeo-Arabic. The fact of this paradox may be explained, Kimchi argues, by the sociopsychological role of carrying Yiddish constructs into Hebrew culture. Kimchi asserts that “the Yiddish canon…ease[d] the oedipal guilt of Jewish elites for abandoning the shtetl and the traditional Jewish world,” the language and culture of their ancestors. Even as the makers of Hebrew national culture asserted they were creating a “more authentic” Jewish world, they experienced themselves cutting their cultural world off from the diaspora, their family circles and cultures, and even their personal exilic subjectivities (113-117).
In other words, although the state of Israel had existed for nearly two decades, by the emergence of the Bourekas genre in Hebrew national culture Kimchi concludes that Yiddish still undergirded a key aspect of what Ashkenazi filmmakers understood Jewishness to be, in terms of strengths and weaknesses, individually and communally. They experienced the differences between their own practices and other Jews in the Mediterranean while at the same time they recalled their own insecurities in Europe, including their status as “internal others.” Projecting these insecurities onto Mizrahim helped filmmakers overcome their insecurities, “ratify[ing] their status as colonizers and strengthen[ing] their colonial control” (122). This projection claimed Ashkenazi superiority and bade Mizrahim to follow their cultural model, suggesting that the influence of Arabness on Jews was mutable if loathsome, thus orientalizing Arabness itself as fundamentally premodern. Kimchi subtly suggests the unsuitably of Arabs not only for the Jewish Israeli state, but perhaps for any nation-state if citizenship must be earned.
By focusing on the shtetl in living memory, Kimchi takes part in a field of what we might call “critical shtetl studies.” Since Ben-Cion Pinchuk’s Shtetl Jews under Soviet Rule: Eastern Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust (Blackwell, 1991), publications such as Jeffrey Veidlinger’s In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2016) and Irina Kopschenova and Mikhail Krutikov’s The Belarusian Shtetl (Indiana University Press, 2023, translated by Bela Shayevich and Sebastian Schulman) have offered critical studies of “the shtetl” as a construct, examinations of individual historical shtetls in eastern Europe, and the legacy of these towns after the events of the Holocaust. Recently, some scholars, for example, Nomi Stolzenberg and David Myers’ American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York (Princeton, 2024), have argued political practices of the shtetl may have transferred to places such as the United States.
Kimchi’s excellently researched and argued work responds to several significant historiographical trends, beginning with postcolonial theory, including the work of Ella Shohat and Homi Bhabha as he notes. Israeli Bourekas Films is also part of a contemporary study of hybrid Yiddish/Hebrew Israeli cultural practices that takes seriously the place of Ashkenaziness in the construction of Israelism and Zionism, including such works as Shachar Pinsker’s Where the Sky and the Sea Meet: Israeli Yiddish Stories (Magnes Press, 2023) and Liora Halperin’s Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948 (Yale University Press, 2014). Kimchi also helps carve out a significant field of postcolonial literary study of Jewish migration, alongside several scholars such as Judith Roumani whose Francophone Sephardic Fiction: Writing Migration, Diaspora, and Modernity (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) I have previously reviewed in Sephardic Horizons and the work of Harriet Murov, Sasha Senderovich, and Karolina Krasuska in the field of Yiddish. Kimchi helps show the importance of Mizrahi images and culture for Ashkenazim and links the historiography of Sephardi and Ashkenazi Studies. This type of transcendence could help develop a new era in Jewish Studies in which porous boundaries are not made impermeable and colonial constructs are not reified in the goals and conclusions of scholarship.
1 Jessica Carr is the Berman Scholar of Jewish Studies and an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Carr’s first book The Hebrew Orient: Palestine in Jewish American Visual Culture, 1901-1938 (2020) is available from SUNY Press. She is currently working on a book on Jewish graphic novels, tentatively titled Exile on Main Street: Incarceration and Police States in Black and Jewish Graphic Novels from Slavery to the Holocaust.