“...examines the complex relationship between the practical and the passionate self, the realist and the dreamer, and the importance of those moments in life that make you feel 'airborne.'”
—Erin Kodicek
- Click to buy from:
-
-
-
Oct 2005
3rd
Philadelphia Inquirer
FROM PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER Daniel Rubin October 03, 2005 So I’m the mail room, looking for press releases and crap CDs when the mail guy hands me this book: Stars of David, Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish.
What do I look like, a lox? I ask him.
I take it, and am struck by the list of 62 American Jews on the cover that writer Abigail Pogrebin has talked to about being Jewish, and I have just one reaction.
Kyra Sedgwick?
Leonard Nimoy I know already. Aaron Brown is not so much of a stretch. Or Al Franken. But Kyra?
I open the book, and find an actually interesting interview with Dustin Hoffman, who casually advises the author over breakfast that she is not so smart ordering an omelet, when she could be having a couple egg whites, scrambled loosely, with a yolk thrown in, some salsa, onion, garlic and a little olive oil.
This I can relate to. He starts talking, about how Mike Nichols cast him as Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, making the actor’s career, when everyone else was picturing a Robert Redford. He goes on about nose jobs, his first wife - a tall Irish Catholic dancer called “the bone structure,” by a Jewish relative - and then tells a long story about making Marathon Man that will serve as our sermon as Blinq prepares to go into the well for a day and consider matters of faith.
The script had Hoffman’s character shooting Nazi tormentor Laurence Olivier point-blank at the end. Hoffman couldn’t do it. Go hire someone else, he told John Schlesinger, the director, and William Goldman, the screenwriter.
“I remember Goldman saying, ‘Why can’t you do this? Are you such a Jew?’ I said ‘No, but I won’t play a Jew who cold-bloodedly kills another human being. I won’t become a Nazi to kill a Nazi. I won’t demean myself. ...”
This dilemma winds up in the film’s dialog, Olivier’s character taunting him, “You can’t do it, can you? You don’t have the guts.”
Hoffman’s character doesn’t shoot. Instead, he winds up throwing these diamonds Olivier has been chasing. They roll into a grate beyond his grasp. Hoffman is calling Essen, essen to the Nazi. Eat, eat.
“I wanted to do what felt the Jew that’s in me.” Hoffman says. “I want him to swallow those f#$%ing diamonds for all those people he tortured and he killed - “Eat these f#$%ing diamonds because that’s what it was all about to you.”
Olivier dies, and Hoffman throws his gun away.
“And that’s important to me: that I didn’t shoot him in the end. Being a Jew is not losing your humanity and not losing your soul. That’s what they were unable to do when they tried to erase the race; they tried to take the soul away. That was the plan.”
Not sure why this book fell into my hands today. There are no coincidences. Something to think on as the sun sets.
Kyra Sedgwick?
- Category:
- Reviews & Praise
