Tackling the Holocaust the Solondz way . . .

Jewish Telegraph, February 2002

FILM-maker Todd Solondz tackles the Holocaust in his latest work, Storytelling.
The controversial film features a Holocaust refugee’s daughter (Julie Hagerty) mouthing platitudes about the Shoah, prompting her son to reply: ‘‘So you’re saying if it wasn’t for Hitler, none of us would have been born?’’
Hagerty also collects for a Jewish charity whilst ignoring the suffering of her Salvadoran maid.
‘‘I think sometimes there is a kind of awe and reverence that one has to question when talking about the Holocaust,’’ says 42-year-old Solondz.
‘‘If one looks at it as something otherworldly, then one is failing to grasp the fact that it was very sadly not otherwordly but very real. There is a danger of unwittingly exploiting the tragedy in ways that tend to trivialise it, if one doesn’t see it in a proper context.
‘‘And certainly, the family in the movie doesn’t have strong moral bearings on how to understand or explain the significance and meaning of this black cloud that does in fact hover over post-World War II Jewish history.’’
Solondz of Manhattan adds: ‘‘The Holocaust was very much brought home to me, to the extent that we had relatives who survived or didn’t survive. I was taught early on that whether or not I regarded myself as Jewish, Hitler certainly would have determined that I was a Jew.’’
Solondz, who describes himself as an atheist, attended an Orthodox yeshiva, followed by a Conservative religious school to prepare for his barmitzvah.
He was then enrolled in an all-boys prep school, which inspired his 1996 award-winning film Welcome to the Dollhouse.
‘‘There were only two Jews in my class, and, unlike me, they fit in with the country club set — they were sort of like The Garden of the Finzi-Continis Jews,’’ he said.
In Storytelling, Solondz has created an overtly Jewish family for the first time. He named them Livingston (‘‘nee Leventhal’’) after his hometown because they represent the kind of suburban Jew he found there.
‘‘One thing that interests me is the way that some Jews perceive assimilation as a way to raise their social standing,’’ he says.
Of the Livingston parents forcing their lazy son to go to college, Solondz explains: ‘‘That’s emblematic of how the Jewish value placed on education can be confused with the acquisition of status and material success.’’
He claims that at a screening ‘‘someone once asked, ‘Do you hate blacks, Latinos and Jews?’ All I can say is if I do, I’m somewhat egalitarian.’’