In the penultimate scene Michael visits the daughter/author/holocaust survivor in her beautifully decorated, tasteful, classy Manhattan apartment we can’t help realizing she can afford thanks to the income from her book selling well because she lived to tell the tale of her ordeal.
She needs these aesthetic surroundings and the security of wealth to make her feel protected and safe. It’s 1995: she’s had half a century to reprocess the scintillating identity we now realize emerged in ‘the camps” and must have been a huge factor in helping her survive.
She’s no ordinary woman. She’s the living embodiment of moral outrage directed with calculated self-assured precision Jewish women use to assert their precious dignity. Irrespective of how things might be going with the man or non-existent man in their life. At least they have this moral altitude, no Rabbi would ever dare try to deny.
Have I set the scene… rightly?
Her and Michael have a fencing match with their wits in which he is the stand in for Hanna who has hanged herself. Before she did this she learned to write. After she did this she wrote her suicide note / will. Though Hanna has already one this fencing match before it even starts, Michael doesn’t quite know this.
Then the Holocaust survivor – exquisitely played by Lena Olin – says: ”there must be, there’s a Jewish organization for everything.” This is where our film begins!
I won’t presume to call it a sequel per se. I mean this in the sense: Miami Vice picks up where Collateral ends, and The Reader continues from where The Hours left off. The Departed continues in Boston from the Gangs of New York in Manhattan… and so on. Proof of Life becomes State of Play… Zak and Mimi make a porno is a remake of Jersey Girl… don’t get me started!
“There’s a Jewish organization for everything.” Oh yeah. There most certainly is.
In our film this fictionalized Jewish organization which in reality is called Jewish Community Services carries on its good work from offices in Sandringham, a suburb of Johannesburg. It’s a social work agency funded by the largesse of Donald Gordon whom we’ll rename Hymie Cohen in the film. He’s made a mint out of life insurance, and… developing shopping centers in Britain.
JCS… provide counseling and support to Jewish women abused by their husbands, they rehabilitate drug addicts, they… find jobs for the unemployed and mend families when there’s a divorce or bereavement. Good works are there aim. Doing good is their theme! When a child in the community is in need of foster parents they won’t let this child go without the love and warmth they proudly consider a birthright for Jewish children especially.
