A Holocaust survivor transcends his son into a Jewish activist in KADDISH, an emotional documentary now restored in 4K. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.Watching KADDISH, I was instantly reminded of my paternal grandfather. Despite being a non-practicing, super secular Jew (so non-practicing, super secular that I didn’t find out he was Jewish until 17 years after his passing), he still had riveting stories to tell my sister and me when we were kids about the history of World War II. As a bombardier in the Pacific, he saw it all. Planes going down. Pilots getting killed. Explosions. Mayhem. You name it. Things were…quite dark.
“One time,” he always used to tell me. “My co-pilot got his head completely blown off by a Japanese plane…”
Um…
Exactly. My exact reaction, and even all these years later, I still think about whether what he told me at my age was appropriate or not. (Let’s not forget the time he explained the Holocaust to me while driving my sister and me into the city…) Was it appropriate or necessary? Should I have been older before I found out the atrocities of World War II? Could learning about this extremely violent past of my grandfather leave a troubling side effect on my psyche?
I bring up this anecdote because KADDISH, a brilliant, very underrated 1984 documentary by Steve Brand, is similar in its depiction of a father with a traumatic past and a son who learns about it young. In this case, however, the son is REALLY affected by it, so affected that he becomes a Jewish activist.
Our stories, however, are totally different. The son in KADDISH is Yossi Klein (now Yossi Klein Halevi) and his father Zoltan, a Holocaust survivor. Zoltan’s childhood, of course, was terrible. Born in Northern Transylvania (present-day Romania) in a town with approximately 4,000 Jews, his home was reacquired by Hungary during the war. When the country refused to consent to Hitler’s demands and send the town’s Jews to concentration camps, Germany invaded Hungary. Zoltan’s parents were murdered in Auschwitz. He survived by hiding in a hole in the ground…for six months.
WOW. So obviously, this is not a “minor” childhood trauma, like a time you bumped your head as a kid and had to get stitches, let’s say. This is extreme. Zoltan’s childhood, like so many survivors, is extreme. Unspeakable. Simply put, it’s devastating.
When Zoltan immigrated to America in 1950, he was a non-practicing Jew at this point unwilling to have children. Having lost so much faith in the future of Judaism, he couldn’t fathom the reasoning for wishing to bring kids into this world, especially after the atrocities he just witnessed. Nevertheless, Zoltan did eventually have two children, Yossi and Karen, with his wife, Breindy, in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. (And if you don’t know it by now, Borough Park is a VERY Jewish place to this day.)
Yossi’s childhood, and this may be true for a lot of children of Holocaust survivors, wasn’t totally normal. Some parents read bedtime stories to their kids when they tuck them in. Zoltan, on the other hand, would recount the horrors of his life and the Nazi regime to his offspring. The effect it had on Yossi was so intense that by sixth grade, Zoltan’s son created a Zionist group with other students. He wrote article after article for Jewish newspapers and even protested (and was later arrested) all the way in Moscow during the Soviet Jewry movement. Zoltan’s tragic life story lit off a bomb in his son’s head, setting him forth on a path to ensure that the Shoah never happens again.
Yossi, who eventually made aliyah in 1983, has a lot more to say in KADDISH. As a viewer, you can feel his passion, fury, and trepidation coming off the screen. He talks a lot in this film, and some of what he says even echoes his father when he first arrived in America. Is the risk of another imminent Holocaust possible? Is having more Jewish children actually a bad idea? Why are Jews still so hated? Why them? Was the Holocaust, an unprecedented tragedy for European Jewry, just a preview of something equally calamitous to come?
“A Jew,” he says. “Is constantly on the verge of annihilation, revelation. Constantly on the verge.”
The more you watch KADDISH, the more you can relate to Yossi’s furor. Let’s not forget that this movie came out in 1984, a period where films about the Holocaust were pretty rare. The fear was still there, that lingering thought that even though Hitler died, Jews were still hated by so many people. Antisemitism didn’t just disappear after the war, no matter how much we wish it did. It’s this social relevancy of KADDISH, almost 40 years later now, that makes it so memorable. With antisemitism on the rise again and again, these worries are back in our lives. We feel an obligation, like Yossi, to get out and do something about it.
Filmed over a period of five years and digitally restored in 2021 with funding by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Sundance Institute, KADDISH made a brief return to theaters at the 2022 New York Jewish Film Festival. However, it’s still, in my opinion, unfairly unknown by the public. The restoration is incredible, but it’s the emotional punch of Brand’s film that makes it stand out. Yossi’s relationship with his father is sad but so beautiful. Zoltan never deserved the childhood he was forced to endure, but if he never told Yossi about his life, his son wouldn’t be the Jewish activist he is today. More importantly, the two of them might never have had such a close bond had Zoltan not disclosed his history.
“The more persecuted you are,” Zoltan says early in the film. “The closer you become to your family.”
Tragedies can kill our souls, but they can also bring us closer together. There’s a lot to think about in KADDISH, but in the end, I think its ultimate question is this: if you are the child of a Holocaust survivor, what should your responsibility be?
To learn more about Yossi Klein Halevi, visit YossiKleinHalevi.com.
KADDISH is available to rent anywhere, including Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and YouTube.