Cinema Paradiso - from Karl Marx to Kiryas Joel

To Salvatore Di Vita

Cinema Paradiso

The music of Ennio Morricone makes the film. One shouldn’t listen to Morricone outside of cinematography. I made that mistake when I bought Morricone’s CD for “Once Upon the Time in America”. My mother while driving: “can you please turn this off, can’t take it, so sad”.

Speaking of “so sad”, Harvey Weinstein, the genius, he cut almost an hour from the Director’s Cut of the movie and made a better film. So what if you don’t understand the subplot of the tragic love. It leaves things open-ended, a mystery. You can fill in the blanks as your imagination allows.

I was in a math high school, with many Jews, about 60% of my class. Three of those were my gang. The original band of four, bedsides myself there was P., K, and V.

The Gang Member No. 1 — P.

This vivid memory, night after a blizzard in Moscow. Like the opening scene in “A Serious Man”. The streets and squares are hushed, there are no people. Consistent with how we felt.

That evening, I visited my classmate P., and we went for a long walk. Sparkling, crunchy, deep snow. Monuments and houses in a theatrical pools of yellow light. P. produced a rare snack, Vietnamese Dried Bananas. What a distinct, memorable taste, sweet and tangy with the exotic banana smell. Many years later, I found Vietnamese Bananas in the dry fruit section of the Trader Joe’s. It tasted exactly like the bananas on that snow-covered night in Moscow.

I heard that P., to my great surprise, became frum. He ended up in Jerusalem and then disappeared from the radar. We all, the rest of the gang, searched for him for 30 years, no exaggeration, until the past week when I finally found him in a surprising place, Kiryas Joel, New York.

I got a text from Brooklyn: “There is a man sitting in my office, he thinks that all Chabadniks must know each other, he is VERY religious, and he says you are classmates!”

I telephoned right away. He greeted me by my nickname, that no one outside the band of four uses or knows.

P. on the telephone line: “Ain, Zvei, Drei”, what is the lock code for the mikveh? Nine kids later, he said, all this time he was in a kollel in Yerushalaim. He changed his name. Explains why we couldn’t find him. He is now in a kollel in Kiryas Joel. “Israel is bad, Zionism is bad, there will be blood, Ukraine is Amolek”, etc. Like reading from the script…

I think coming to America NOW is insane, but I was wrong about everything else. Or was I too correct for its time?

One episode I will never forget. We are about 16 y.o. in a class. No one in Russia thinks or cares about Karl Marx. P. raises his hand and says: “How does that agree with the theory of Karl Marx?” and “What is the role of the proletariat in this?” We couldn’t believe it, and ridiculed P. for months, no, years, no decades.

If you think of it, Karl Marx or Kiryas Joel is consistent with the hard ideological bend. He is still playing the same role…

I was going to write about the rest of the gang ארבעה נכנסו בפרדס

In short:

בן עזאי הציץ ומת — this is I. 
 בן זומא הציץ ונפגע — this is V., Geza gangster businessman who is now back in Moscow (he lived in Boston and Miami).
אחר קיצץ בנטיעות — this is our ideological P., now in Kiryas Joel.
עקיבא יצא בשלום — this is K., the religious math PhD who lives in Haifa. Like Rabbi Akiva, he is a ger.

Or maybe my three friends never even seen the gates of the Cinema Paradiso at all?