Violence against Jews; reasons to emigrate
Lisa persisted: the main reason to emigrate was to escape violence against the Jews, correct?
LISA: Lisa, interviewing her grandfather, Max Yet the reverberations, the repercussions of the pogrom, you had to feel! That had to be one of the reasons... well, wouldn't you say that was one of the things that pushed yourself and so many others out of Russia... to go to America?
MAX: Max, interviewed by Lisa or talking with other family members Say it again, say it again.
LISA: That the discriminations against the Jews was a large reason why you and so many others decided to leave.
Max disagrees and quietly reminds Lisa not to paint the Eastern European Jews with too broad a brush:
MAX: Because we realized – that is the parents – the parents realized, even those years, were different kind of a sections that they have different interests, one from the other. You couldn't take, let's say a hundred thousand Jews just because they are Jewish names of significance and single out, that these are the enemy; and others, these are not the enemy, friendly, because you couldn't measure things like that, on a scale like that, just because from their names. They were Jews, and they were pretty rich. They didn't need to go away from the small town. [Your grandfather] started off his life in America, and being a tailor in a cleaning store. They had their America right there and then. But there were only a few of them.
Lisa finally understood Max's gentle redirection, reinforcing what she already knew: a documentarian must be very careful to not impose their preconceptions on their sources.
NARRATOR: Lisa, backgrounding/commenting. One of the fundamental difficulties in documentary is achieving and maintaining a consistent level of understanding between interviewer and subject. Although a tendency to make assumptions on the part of the interviewer is not uncommon, this in itself is not necessarily detrimental to the purpose at hand. It is the level of awareness of one's assumptions that plays a determining role in the success of the documentary.
Anti-Semitism looms large for many Jews, sometimes as an imminent existential threat. Apparently Lisa brought this to the interviews with Max.
NARRATOR: The above dialogue illustrates these difficulties. In my desire to romanticize Max's early life, I wanted him to reveal that rampant anti-Semitism forced him to flee to America. I wanted him to prove the cause-and-effect relationship of events that seems so clear-cut in the history texts, i.e. PERSECUTION+POGROMS = FLIGHT TO AMERICA.
"Romanticize"? This would seem to refer awkwardly to the black-and-white alternatives: shtetl life as either entirely safe, bucolic, and Jewish. Or as a hell-hole of anti-Jewish prejudice inevitably leading to violence and death, with immediate exile the only escape. Far beyond the scope of this document to do more here than suggest that this is a false dichotomy.
NARRATOR: But Max described his knowledge of the pogroms in an easy, unaffected way. His choice of words came across in a deceptively simplistic manner, forcing me to read them over and over again to make certain that he was in fact in Tsarist Russia. Rather than describing the situation in beautiful prose à la Isaac Bashevis Singer, Max related his knowledge of the pogroms as he understood it to be: unadorned, clear, and informal.
We can observe some 30 years after Lisa conducted these interviews and over 100 years after the events of Max's life in Wysokie: More likely Max wasn't emotional about the pogroms because he and his Wysoker family and neighbors had no direct experience of them, nor any milder incidents locally that might lead to violence. There are no documented reports of anti-Semitic violence in Wysokie. That was, evidentally, their reality.
NARRATOR: Insofar as Max's denial of pogrom activity in Wysokie Litewskie is concerned, personal involvement is a determining factor. Max chose to remember subjects of a large, general nature with much more clarity than he did situations that directly involved him. It makes sense that there would be reverberations of the major pogroms even in the small towns.
Max owned to knowing about the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. If he knew the awful details, why wasn't he more alarmed? At point, there's no way to do more than suggest that he knew quite a bit about the details, but –as he said explicitly-- he felt that Wysokie was a very different place, one in which a pogrom was exceedingly unlikely.
NARRATOR: In fact, in the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1905 the writer implies that there was some anti-Semitic activity in Wysokie Litewskie, such as arson and vandalism. Max never mentioned any such disruptions in his town; it is possible that he had blocked out any memory of personal confrontations with official anti-Semitism.
Lisa refers to a 1905 source describing anti-Semitic violence in Wysokie, but it is difficult to identify and locate the source material to dig deeper. An apparently matching document, here, contains only a very brief mention of Wysokie in list of dependencies of the city of Brest. There is no mention of violence or anti-Semitism. Is the source material actually from from a 1906-1913 Russian-language derivative, Evreyskaya Entsiklopediya? This document is aparently available only in Russian, so -- not immediately accessible.
/13/ Salo W. Baron The Russian Jew Under Tsars and Soviets (New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1964) p. 57