Israeli Bourekas Films , livre ebook

Indiana University Press - Rami Kimchi

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

104 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

A genre of comic melodramas produced in the 1960s and '70s, Bourekas films are among the most popular films ever made in Israel. In Israeli Bourekas Films, author and filmmaker Rami Kimchi sets out a history of Bourekas films and discusses their origin.

Kimchi considers the representation of Sephardi or Mizrahi Jews in the films, noting that the material culture reflected in the the films presented a culture that was closer to the European Yiddish culture than to the Middle Eastern world of the Mizrahim. Kimchi reflects on the enormous popularity and commercial success of Bourekas films, uncovers how they were made, who made them and why, and discusses the impact of the films on Israeli cinema today.

Israeli Bourekas Films is a film insider's view of the characters, stories, and cultures that made Bourekas films such an important part of Israeli life.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Birth of the Bourekas: Sallah and Its Innovations
A Thematic Analysis of Bourekas
Mizrahi Self Representation Films
Bourekas and Classical Yiddish Literature
The Dynamics of Continuity between Two Disparate Cultures
Bourekas Legacy: Post-Bourekas and Neo-Bourekas
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

Jewish Studies

Jewish

HISTORY

Histoire

Película fotográfica

Jews

Cinema of Israel

Bourekas film

Yiddishkeit

Sallah

General officer

General

Film

Informations

Publié par	Indiana University Press
Date de parution	03 janvier 2023
Nombre de lectures	2
EAN13	9780253063434
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	8 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

ISRAELI BOUREKAS FILMS
SEPHARDI AND MIZRAHI STUDIES
Harvey E. Goldberg and Matthias Lehmann, editors
ISRAELI BOUREKAS FILMS
Their Origins and Legacy
Rami Kimchi
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.org
2023 by Rami Kimchi
Publication of this book was supported by funding from the Publishing Committee of Ariel University, Israel.
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2023
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-06341-0 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-06342-7 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-06344-1 (e-book)
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Birth of the Bourekas: Sallah and Its Innovations
2 A Thematic Analysis of Bourekas
3 Mizrahi Self-Representation Films
4 Bourekas and Classical Yiddish Literature
5 The Dynamics of Continuity between Two Disparate Cultures
6 Bourekas Legacy: Post-Bourekas and Neo-Bourekas
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
B OUREKAS FILMS - THE ONLY ORIGINAL I SRAELI FILM CYCLE , 1 CONSISTING of some of the most popular Israeli films ever made-have been experiencing a boom of exposure during The last two decades. Produced between 1964 and 1977, these films have gained an outsized presence in Israeli contemporary cultural discourse: a popular television series was dedicated to them ( A Black and White Movie , 2011); two stage musicals were adapted from original Bourekas scripts and ran successfully on Israeli stages ( Sallah , 2008, 2014, 2021; Snooker , 2013); a book (by me) was published about them ( The Israeli Shtetls , 2012); and newspaper articles have discussed the film cycle s heritage and legacy. 2
The name of the cycle, Bourekas , derives from a popular Sephardic-Mizrahi pastry that has its origins in Turkey. The phrase Bourekas film was apparently coined by the director Boaz Davidson and first entered Israeli cinematic discourse outside of any gastronomic reference in an interview Davidson gave to Yael Ontokovsky in 1975, following the commercial success of his first Bourekas film Charlie and a Half ( Charlie Vahetzi , 1974). Davidson did not yet speak of Bourekas films but rather of a Bourekas culture . The phrase denoted what was, in his view, the primitive, vulgar culture of Mizrahi immigrants to Israel: I objected in the strongest way to the Bourekas culture, but then I suddenly realized what an idiot I was. We live here in a jungle of Bourekas, in a jungle of ethnicity, and we are surrounded by a jungle of accents and languages (Ontokovsky 1975, 57; my translation).
In Orientalism , Edward Said (1978, 30) quotes Antonio Gramsci to describe how a researcher s awareness that he himself is a product of a historical process-one that has left infinite intellectual and emotional traces in his consciousness-is a necessary prerequisite to any serious career as a cultural critic. My own study of Bourekas films emerges from just such a personal awareness; the traces that sunk into my consciousness as a child in Israel are essential to it.
When I was about ten years old, I was first exposed to the popular comedies and melodramas that I would only later come to know as Bourekas films. The films enchanted me. I was drawn to what Ella Shohat (2010, 122) later defined as their carnivalesque logic and anarchistic atmosphere. However, it never crossed my mind then that there was supposed to be a connection between my modern Sephardic Jewish family, who emigrated from Egypt to Israel in 1950, and the people I laughed at on the screen, with their poor material culture and their emotionally and intellectually narrow, premodern Jewish world. From my vantage point as a child, their reality was one that belonged to some kind of Others that I could only vaguely identify as Israeli traditional Jews.
Only years later did it dawn on me that the authors of the films were aiming to represent me and my family. This awareness led to a great cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, it was quite clear that both the producers of the films and most of their audiences saw the reality portrayed in the Bourekas films as a legitimate representation of Mizrahim in Israel. But by the same token, I clearly felt that my family, like other Mizrahim that I knew, embraced a material culture and a set of values, norms, and codes of behavior completely different from what was attributed to the Mizrahi communities in the Bourekas films. This dissonance became more acute in college when I was exposed to the works of classical Yiddish writers, which described the Jewish shtetls (rural towns with a large Jewish minority population) in eastern Europe. It seemed to me then that there were similarities between the world that came to life in these works and the world of the Mizrahi neighborhood as portrayed in Bourekas films.
The aim of this book is to plant my intuition in academic soil. My study of the Bourekas attempts, first of all, to define this cinematic cycle by separating it from other groups of Israeli films, more clearly delineating its features. Second, I aim to examine the connection between Bourekas and the texts of classical Yiddish literature-in particular, their portrayal of life in the Jewish shtetls of eastern Europe. Lastly, I trace the Bourekas legacy in contemporary Israeli cinema. I hope that the findings from these avenues of research eventually lead to a comprehensive explanation of the Bourekas central place in Israeli culture, their enormous popularity and commercial success, and their impact to the Israeli cinema of today. In a way, I hope to evoke in this book something of a child s fascination with Bourekas as entertainment alongside the adult recognition of what they really meant for Israeli discourse as a cultural phenomenon.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T HE MAJOR AND FINAL STAGES OF THIS WORK were supported by Ariel University, Israel, while the initial stages of it were supported by the Department of Near Eastern Studies and the Frankel Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Michigan; the Jewish Memorial Foundation, New York; and the ISEF Foundation, Israel. My thanks to all for their generous support.
Much gratitude to Yehuda Shenhav and Ella Shohat, whose work and activism have been inspirational to me and drove me to take interest in the Bourekas in the first place. To my dear friends and colleagues Yaron Shemer, Sami Shalom Chetrit, and Gilad Zukerman, whose researches were a guiding principle for me.
The long and winding road that led me to this book started at the University of Michigan. I would like to express much gratitude to Anita Norich, Carol Bardenstein, Catherine Benamou, and Shahar Pinsker, from whom I learned so much that was relevant to this study, for their guidance in the initial stages of it.
Thanks to Ilan Avishar, Anner Preminger, Yaron Eliav, Ilan Tamir, Albert Pinhasov, Orzion Bartana, Amit Goren, Menachem Einy, Izhak Goren-Gurmezano, Yigal Cohen-Orgad, Michael Zinigrad, Yehuda Danon, Yehuda Ne eman, Yossi Goldstein, Yoel Cohen, Rafi Man, and Gabriel Ben Simhon, my colleagues and friends, for their empathy and support.
Thanks also to my editors, David Lobenstine, Katie Van Heest, Elisheva Lahav, and Micaela Ziv. Appreciation to Harvey Goldberg and Matthias Lehmann, the series editors at Indiana University Press, especially to Harvey, whose wisdom and support accompanied me so gently along the way. I appreciate the interest Gary Dunham, editor in chief at Indiana University Press, showed after he reviewed my manuscript, and I am grateful to him and to the editorial assistants Ashante Thomas and Anna Francis for being responsive to my requests and for their dedication in bringing this work to fruition.
Thanks also to the photos rights holders Yoni Hamenachem, Assa Dorat, Moshe Edri, and Gidi Dar for their kindness and generosity and to the staff at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque Library, the Beit Ariella Library in Tel Aviv, and the Tel Aviv University Library.
My most profound thanks to my family, my children Danielle and Michael Kimchi, and their mother, Carmel Gottlieb Kimchi, for their sacrifices and support and to Jacques Kimchi and Henriette Azar-Kimchi, my beloved parents, who unfortunately did not live to see it come true.
ISRAELI BOUREKAS FILMS
INTRODUCTION
W HEN THE H OLLYWOOD MUSICAL F IDDLER ON THE R OOF (Norman Jewison, USA, 1971) told the story of a Jewish peasant who struggles to adjust to modern times, capturing the hearts and imaginations of millions all over the world, some spectators may have identified the film as a creative adaptation of Tevye the Milkman by the Yiddish writer Shalom Aleichem. They may also have noticed that the hybrid space, a conglomeration of rural village and urban entity that the film depicts as Tevye s residence, is in fact a Jewish shtetl-a small, rural town in nineteenth-century eastern Europe in which Jews were a large minority. However, it seems that only a handful of people knew that Haim Topol, the Israeli actor who played Tevye in the film, had only seven years earlier-wearing a similar outfit, adorned with the same beard, and dwelling in a comparable hybrid space-played the eponymous role in Sallah (Ephraim Kishon, Israel, 1964), the first and archetypical father in Israeli cinema s only original cycle: Bourekas films.
As has been the case for many national cinemas of recently formed countries, Israel