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DIVAN
Directed & Produced by: Pearl Gluck.
Director of Photography: William Tyler Smith.
Edited by: Zelda Greenstein.
Music by: Frank London.
Released by: Zeitgeist.
Language: English, Yiddish & Hungarian with English subtitles.
Country of Origin: USA. 77 min. Not Rated.
DVD Features: Odds and Ends: 30 minutes of additional footage, with Q & As & follow-ups. Trailer. Yiddish & English subtitles.

Raised a Hasidic Jew, Pearl Gluck’s childhood fantasy was to graduate from high school, marry a Torah scholar and have 10 kids. A lot has changed since then. The filmmaker’s parents divorced when she was 10, propelling her into a secular Manhattan lifestyle instead of a religious one in Brooklyn. Since the divorce, Gluck’s relationship with her ultra-religious father has been shaky – he wants her only to marry and have kids. In part to rekindle their relationship and also to discover her roots and family history, Gluck travels to Hungary to retrieve a family heirloom, a couch on which important rabbis once slept. The documentary chronicles Gluck’s journey to recover the couch and come to terms with her Judaism and her family.

Accompanied by a klezmer soundtrack, Gluck combines family home videos with scenes of her European trip and interviews with Jewish friends, who have also become less religious over the years. Her personal journey is interesting and she is enthusiastic, but the viewer isn’t fully invested.

In one scene, Gluck peers into the oven of a Hungarian bakery and the audience can almost smell the warm chocolate cake. She tells us that these bakers, along with wig makers and other community members, are full of the old Yiddish tales she wants to recover. While the couch is her main mission, her trip to Hungary was funded by a Fulbright grant designed to gather old Yiddish tales. But we never hear these stories and are left wanting more. The DVD extras provide a few more interesting details on the divan, but most of the relevant information is already in the film. Deborah Lynn Blumberg
September 20, 2005