TORONTO — Israeli society in the early 1960s was conservative, if not puritanical. But as the sensational trial of arch Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann got under way, Israelis began snapping up a series of soft-core-pornographic pocketbooks, known as stalags, at kiosks.
Named after German prisoner-of-war camps where captured allied soldiers were held, stalags were virtually the only pornography available in Israel at the time.
Stalags, one of the lowest forms of pulp fiction, usually told perverse tales of American and British PoWs being physically abused by beautiful, busty, scantily clad, sadistic female SS guards usually wearing high boots and wielding whips. Some stalags, however, turned on Israeli “avengers” who took out their rage on Nazis in Germany.
Whatever the story line, each stalag invariably ended with the prisoners taking revenge on their Nordic-looking tormentors by raping and killing them.
These peculiar pocketbooks, which glorified sex and violence, are explored in Ari Libsker’s Stalags – Holocaust and Pornography in Israel, one of the films of Jewish interest scheduled to appear at the forthcoming Hot Docs documentary film festival (which runs from April 17-27).
Stalags – which will be screened on Thursday, April 24, at 9 p.m. at the Al Green Theatre and again on Sunday, April 27, at 7 p.m. at the Isabel Bader Theatre – is an engaging and intriguing film about a short-lived cultural phenomenon that surfaced as Israelis were exposed to the enormity of the Holocaust for really the first time. Today, stalags, a curiosity, can only be found in second-hand book shops.
According to Libsker, stalags were portrayed as Hebrew translations of English works, but in fact they were written by Israelis such as Maxim Gilan, who went go on to be the publisher of a leftist magazine on Arab-Israeli affairs, and Eli Keidar, a failed journalist whose mother lost her entire family in the Holocaust.
The first stalag, which resembled a lurid comic book, appeared after the Eichmann trial began. It was a bestseller, bought by 80,000 readers.
Two years after the first edition rolled off the press, stalags disappeared. Having offended Holocaust survivors, they were outlawed after a court ruled that they peddled pornography. An Israeli judge comments that stalags were “the figment of sick Israeli minds.” Libsker suggests that the edition that crossed all lines of acceptability was I Was Colonel Schultz’s Private Bitch.
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To See If I’m Smiling, by Tamar Yarom, recounts the experiences of six women in the Israeli army who were shaken or traumatized by what they saw or had to do while in uniform. They are articulate, voluble and sensitive.
Yarom made this documentary many years after watching a Palestinian terrorist suspect being tortured. It will be shown on Wednesday, April 23, at 9:15 p.m. at the Al Green Theatre and again at the Bloor Cinema on Sunday, April 27, at 1 p.m.
Meytal, a boyish-looking medic, wanted to save lives and jumped for joy when she was posted to the Palestinian territories. But when she was asked to clean the corpse of a Palestinian who had been illegally abused, she was shocked and, later, could not sleep. “How in hell did I think I’d ever be able to forget?” she asks plaintively.
Rotem, an observer, was overcome by moral qualms after a soldier shot a Palestinian she had spotted. Inbar, an operations sergeant, was torn by pangs of conscience after a commanding officer changed a report. Dana, an education officer, was shunned after becoming a whistle blower over the theft of Qur’ans. Tal, a welfare officer, still shudders when she remembers the glare of hatred of an aggrieved Palestinian woman. Libi, a combat soldier, seems grief-stricken after making 80 Arabs stand in the hot sun for 12 hours.
Judging by this film, military service can leave a negatively indelible impression on some Israeli soldiers.
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A Day In Palestine, a Canadian short of six minutes by Mary Ellen Davis, Jose Garcia-Lozano and Will Eizlini, is bereft of commentary and full of dreamy images of Palestinians climbing Israel’s separation barrier, holding aloft the Palestinian flag and chanting slogans as Israeli soldiers descend menacingly from a hill.
These flickering vignettes are supposed to symbolize Israel’s occupation of the territories and elicit sympathy for the Palestinian cause, but they show only one side of the conflict. It will be screened at the Bloor Cinema on Sunday, April 20, at 6:30 p.m. and Saturday, April 26, at 12:45 p.m.
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Poland was convulsed by a wave of state-sanctioned anti-Semitism, disguised as anti-Zionism, in the aftermath of the Six Day War. This campaign forced at least 20,000 Jews – the vast majority of whom were Communists who had assimilated themselves into Polish society – to leave the country between 1968 and 1969. Jacob Dammas, a descendant of one of those Jewish families, was born and raised in Copenhagen, Denmark.
In Kredens, a simple film 26 minutes in length with profound implications, he makes a sentimental journey to Wroclaw, Poland, to recover a family memento, a wooden cabinet known in Polish as a kredens. But as much as Dammas wants to reclaim this piece of furniture, the subliminal purpose of his trip is to make contact with Poles who knew his parents, even vaguely, and thus close a historical circle. He has a need to do that because neither his mother nor his grandmother – who lives in Israel today– wish to discuss the events that led to their flight from Poland.
In impromptu visits, Dammas talks to several Polish men and one woman. They are usually fairly hospitable, but cannot help him find the kredens, his link to the past. Yet interestingly enough, almost all his interlocutors resort to a kind of implicit racism by stating that he does not look Jewish.
Kredens will be screened immediately after Stalags.
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A Road To Mecca: The Journey of Mohammad Asad, by Georg Misch, is utterly fascinating. It’s the story of Leopold Weiss (1900-1992), a descendant of rabbis and a European Jewish convert to Islam who wrote a bestselling memoir (The Road to Mecca) and learned texts on Islam and who served as Pakistan’s first ambassador to the United Nations. This curious figure, whose goal was to reconcile Islam with the West, is fleshed out to only a certain degree. It will be screened on Saturday, April 19, at 9:45 at the Royal Ontario Museum and again on Sunday, April 20, at 1:30 p.m. at the Cumberland.
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Stalags and To See If I’m Smiling are also scheduled to be screened at next month’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival.