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The Quarrel

Posted on April 21, 2022May 6, 2022 by Village Vidiot

“The Quarrel,” Canadian, April 21, 2022 (1991), DVD.  A friend suggested this one for me as it looks at arguments within traditional Jewish culture and those who choose more secular lives.  Its years after World War II.   Chiam  (R.H. Thompson) is a fully securlarized Russian/Ukrainian borYiddish writer living in New York City.  He comes to Montreal to deliver a poetry reading  on Rosh Hashonah after World War II.  There he confronts his agnostic view of life.  First, he’s cajoled into being the 10th man at a minyan for a dead man.  Then he meets his former best friend and fellow Yeshiva student Hersh (Saul Rubinek, himself a child of a DP camp in 1948) who has remained traditional and started his own yeshiva in Montreal.  There, these two Holocaust survivors, both of whom have lost their families to the Nazis, reengage with their love and quarrels about God, religion, meaning, guilt and survival.  The arguments are both intimate and global, and both learn much more about their friend.  I appreciated this film but found the production values undercut some of the positives of the story, which is very powerful, the dialogue, which is both cutting and loving, and the arguments, which are still meaningful.  It’s a real 1980s film.

 

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