Scratch your successful Israeli emigre, says a new film, and find layers of longing and guilt
REMEMBER WHEN YITZHAK Rabin characterized the estimated half-million-or-so Israelis living in the United States as "a fallout of weaklings?" Okay, so he apologized shortly after the Gulf War, impressed, he said, by the solidarity exhibited by Israel's various expatriate communities, many of whose members actually returned during the Iraqi bombardment. But if you discuss the issue of yeridah (literally, "going down") with even the most settled Israeli expatriate in Los Angeles, you're likely to hear a spirited defense of Rabin's earlier "J'accuse." As depicted in "America in Hebrew," a new documentary by Ruth Minster Tousson, herself an Israeli emi-grant, it sometimes seems that those who forsake the Promised Land for a try in the Land of Promise ultimately become their own best detractors.
Consider, for instance, Arye and Esther Fuechter, who arrived in Southern California in 1977 with three grown children. Having prospered as the founder of the Regba kitchen modeling firm, Arye decided, after a trip to California, that he liked the West Coast lifestyle. So he sold the business and home, and moved the family to Los Angeles.
There, Arye quickly established himself in the same line of work, ultimately securing a more profitable business and an even bigger home. Esther, lost at first with no English, eventually became a mover in an Israeli chapter of B'nai B'rith and a founder of the local Israeli scouts program. As grandchildren arrived, she settled into the role of family matriarch. The Fuechters would seem to have it made. At a party, however, Arye introduces the filmmaker to a friend he characterizes as "one of the bad Israelis" Rabin must have had in mind. It's a joke, but someone at the table chimes in, not at all in jest, with the comment that "The minute you're here and not there, you're not one of the good ones."
This is an attitude the Fuechter children must somehow have internalized while growing up in Los Angeles. The eldest, now in his mid-30s, his Israeli-born wife and their children will, by film's end, pick up stakes and resettle in Israel, causing their parents the same kind of anguish their parents caused others by uprooting themselves two decades earlier. Minster Tousson's film, now being shown, with help from the Israeli Consulate in L.A., in small venues across the U.S., never pronounces judgment on the people it portrays. After all, the filmmaker, who has lived here since 1984, comes to her subject from the inside, and is more interested in illumination than denigration. In tracking the fortunes of three emigre families and a single woman from 1993 through 1999, her film nevertheless paints a bleak and painful portrait of what would appear to most observers to be a vibrant and successful community. It is a community that inhabits what is, in effect, a Hebrew-speaking bubble world.
Numbering between 30,000 (according to the Jewish Federation) and 120,000 (according to consular officials), the Israelis of Greater Los Angeles have created a vibrant niche within a wider Jewish community 600,000-strong, and within the polyglot mosaic of a city that has come to epitomize the concept of multiculturalism.
Today, Israeli Angelenos boast any number of professional, political and cultural groups and institutions, including theater and dance troupes, a choir and several newspapers. Indeed, as befits a city that is both the dream capital of the world and its fifth-largest Hebrew-speaking center, it is possible to live here, amid the sun, palms and stucco, without having one's nose rubbed too harshly in the fact that one ever left the sun-bleached streets and comforting racket of Tel Aviv.
Calabasas resident Ruti Stockfish, husband Amos and their first child drifted to Cali-fornia in 1984. Estranged from, or at least uninterested in, Jewish and Israeli life in L.A. for many years, the Stockfish family eventually began integrating into the wider Hebrew-speaking community as new friends showed them what's out there. When Minster Tousson brings Ruti and her eldest daughter to an Israeli scout meet in North Hollywood, they express shock and delight at the spectacle of khaki-clad Israeli kids at a flag-raising ceremony and discussing their prospective military service.
After the 1994 earthquake, Ruti shows Minster Tousson the cracks in her walls, the broken furniture and collapsed chimney. As she ponders the verities of living on ground that moves violently from time to time, we realize that, with Ruti, we are actually looking at the cracks that have opened up in her own life. Despite her lovely home, her well-adjusted children and her many friends, something is missing. No matter how successful and adjusted they become, Minster Tousson, 39, told The Report over steamed dumplings at a Chinese deli barely a stone's throw from the epicenter of the Northridge quake, "there is the pain and regret that comes from leaving the place you once called home. Other immigrants experience similar feelings. But among Israelis, and especially secular ones, they are compounded by guilt, and by the problem of maintaining an Israeli identity while living outside it. It's a pain that never goes away. With the passage of years, it often gets worse."
Minster Tousson found herself succumbing to this gnawing affliction soon after moving to the U.S. with her first husband. A native of Ramat Gan, she had been an actress, appearing in student films and small, "off off-Broadway" productions in Tel Aviv. Upon completing his military service, her husband took her to Philadelphia to visit his brother, who persuaded them to spend a few years living in the States. Eventually, they moved to Los Angeles, where Ruth followed a familiar route, waiting on tables at night and studying drama at the Beverly Hills Playhouse during the day. It was there, in an advanced acting workshop, that she met Nancy Cartwright, an aspiring actress who would eventually land a job as Bart's voice in "The Simpsons." Cartwright had seen Minster Tousson's film work in the form of flashbacks she created for a stage production of the play "Equus." "Nancy was pregnant," she recounts, "and approached me about doing a documentary she would fund on her experience giving birth at home." So far so good. But when Cartwright's career took off in 1990 with the debut of "The Simpsons," her agent and manager urged her to shelve the film. "They didn't think giving birth in full view of the public was a good career move," Minster Tousson recounts, "and Nancy found herself agreeing," so the film was never released. IN 1993, MINSTER TOUSSON MADE a second documentary, "Children of the Dream," about a visit of Ethiopian-Israeli teenagers to South Central L.A. But even as she contemplated one community's emigration experience, she found herself increasingly considering the problematic nature of her own.
Resolved to make a film from an insider's point of view, and resigned to financing it herself, Minster Tousson began documenting aspects of Israeli communal existence on the West Coast. But, by the time she had shot over 100 hours of film, she realized that she was trying to tackle too much. Friends and colleagues urged her to strip the film down to a few principal characters and the core issue of what it means to live with the inevitable pain of emigration. She says she finally understood that it would be necessary to think about what being an emigrant meant to her. In coming to America, she eventually gave up her husband, proximity to her family in Israel, and huge chunks of her language, culture and identity. The process was a little like dying, she says, but it also entailed the prospect of being reborn.
One of the characters she chose to retain was Tali Hefez, a single woman in her 30s who originally came to California for one year, for work. Years later, Tali is seen eking out a modest living as a secretary, and appears not to have an active social life. Still, when Tali's brother flies in to persuade her to return, she insists that she "made aliyah to America," and has no intention of leaving. Then, when the brother appears to have given up Tali for lost, she announces she will go back, after she gets together a bit more money. In the film's afterword, we learn that, four years later, Tali is still sitting on her suitcases.