KLEZMER ON FISH STREET
Directed by: Yale Strom.
Produced by: Elizabeth Schwartz.
Director of Photography: David Leitner.
Edited by: Yefim Gribov.
Music by: Yale Strom.
Released by: Castle Hill.
Country of Origin: USA. 85 min. Not Rated.

Klezmer on Fish Street is an incompetent documentary, which alleges there is (according to the film’s press notes) "a resurgence of interest in Jewish culture" in today’s Poland. The notion behind this grand statement is a thriving so-called Holocaust tourist trade, including a Schindler’s List tour of the Nazi death camps and the now-extinct Jewish neighborhoods of Poland’s major cities. There is also supposed strong Polish interest in klezmer, a distinctly Russian-Polish music identified with the Jewish culture of this part of the world; allegedly, many non-Jewish Polish musicians are playing this music to SRO concert engagements throughout the country.

Unfortunately, what is depicted on screen completely contradicts such notions. Open air performances of klezmer music by a group of young Americans visiting Poland is received by Polish pedestrians with gazes that range from studied indifference to outright contempt. An evening street celebration following the Jewish Sabbath brings out both the local police (who seem to come with built-in sneers) and insults from local Poles suggesting the celebrants should go to Israel. Few vestiges of pre-1939 Jewish culture are preserved and spray painted swastikas turn up on more than one occasion. As for the Holocaust tourist trade, it seems to thrive on cheap souvenirs depicting traditional Jewish art and a few restaurants which may or may not even be kosher (the film doesn’t even bother to ask who is cooking and how the food is being prepared).

Klezmer on Fish Street is actually a hodgepodge of vague and unfinished thoughts, bizarre comments, and some of the most amateurish production values in a supposedly professional production. In one hilarious moment, an Israeli tourist is being interviewed when a man walks in front of him and stops in the center of the camera’s focus. The screen is filled with a huge close-up of the intruder’s ear while the Israeli tourist babbles on from behind the man’s head.

Elsewhere in the film are whooshes of wind blowing heavily into a microphone, soundtrack levels rising and falling willy-nilly, poorly-blocked close-ups which make the interview subjects look comic, nighttime footage so dark that you cannot tell who is speaking, and selections of Yiddish songs presented without English subtitles.

Then there is an inane historian who claims klezmer music is the "soundtrack for the Jewish experience" (that will come as news to the millions of Jewish people of Sephardic heritage) and who worries about the gentile takeover of klezmer with this deathless concern: "The issue is not that a white boy can play the blues, but can a goy play the Jews?" Oy vey!

The cruelest blow of them all, however, is the fact this movie has a theatrical distributor and is playing in commercial engagements. In view of the scores of gifted documentary filmmakers whose professional quality features do not get distribution, this is the biggest insult of them all. Phil Hall
April 17, 2004