The synopsis of the film M summarizes it thus: Menahem Lang takes us into his native neighborhood of Bnei Brak, one of the bastions of the ultra-orthodox Jewish world, where he grew up and where, as a child, he was sexually abused. Fifteen years later, in 2018, he returns to confront his abusers. He undertakes this return with the director Yolande Zauberman and her camera, who probe the places and the men.
Plurielles — We came out of the cinema deeply shaken, marked, almost burned by this film, without really knowing why. We saw it again, we asked friends to go see it so that we could talk about it together, but we did not agree: some told us it was a film about pedophilia; we answered no, that there was something more. It is because we are trying to understand this something more that we wanted to meet you.
Yolande Zauberman — This something more, what is it?
Plurielles — Why this question? For you, is it only a film about pedophilia?
YZ — No, but this something more, what is it?
Plurielles — When you say, in previous interviews, that you had the chance to come closer to the world of your ancestors, to enter it, through a wound, what do you mean?
YZ — It is not a film about a community, it is a film within a community. I did not make a film about the Hasidim1. But it is true that I kept telling myself: what luck I have to be able to be in this place. And they could feel that I was experiencing it as a stroke of luck. That is also why they let me come near them. I could not have felt that as completely under other circumstances. The fact of entering through a wound meant that the wound took charge of everything that frightened me in this world. As a result, I could let my heart speak — and my gratitude too at being there, at being invited to navigate this world.
Plurielles — But this wound?
YZ — Pedophilia, of course, and I think the truth has not been told about sexuality, including that of the victims. We have not said what rape and abuse have done in the world in general, and to Jews in particular. This subject has in fact never been broached.
Plurielles — Yet a great deal is being said about it right now.
YZ — Yes, but not among Jews. People talk about rape and don’t ask where it comes from, and it does come from somewhere. Among Jews, basically, apart from M, nothing exists. You’ll tell me that among Catholics, nothing existed for a very long time. But it is developing considerably: French society has just set up a commission on incest. From that point of view, the world is doing better.
Plurielles — At the end of the film, you quote Kafka: “I am among my own with a knife to attack them, I am among my own with a knife to protect them,” and you add, “This film is my knife, to protect them.” To protect whom?
YZ — My own.
Plurielles — My own, who?
YZ — Many people. Not only Jews — the people I love, humanity, children. Why did I make this film? Because it is a problem as old as the world. There is a whole education, a care to be given to what is a disease that perpetuates itself in silence. I think the greatest crime today is silence. In fact, I understand silence better since they explained to me what the “galgal” is: you are raped, you will rape, in silence precisely. As a result, people are afraid to speak. When you are attacked, you say so, but not when you are raped. It is like that popular knowledge about the vampire: you have been bitten, you will bite in your turn. Whereas the only way not to be a rapist is to speak. Rape kills entire generations, and it does not happen on one generation only — it touches everyone. In fact, rape explains much of the brutality of the world.
Plurielles — In Bnei Brak, where you filmed, Satmars2 live. Did you sense a particularity there?
YZ — It is the same in all closed worlds. There, someone took me by the hand to enter this world, and what it had that was particular in a certain way was the relation to truth. I was astonished to see how openly they laid themselves bare. Either they spoke or they did not speak, but there was no in-between. In Israel, we know it is among the ultra-orthodox that there are the most rapes, especially among men. It is men who rape men and who are raped by men. It is the same in the Catholic Church. The Satmars are communities even more closed than the others. The more closed a community is, the more difficult it is to resist. It is like a disease. In Fritz Lang’s film M le maudit (M), he indeed says that it is stronger than he is. That is why one must treat. Moreover, Israel is at the cutting edge of therapy, even among the religious. They have a program based on speech, as with Alcoholics Anonymous: the victims are on one side, the abusers on the other, and in several stages, they speak to one another.
Plurielles — In your film, the protagonists speak simply, with a nearly childlike naïveté, as if something of childhood had frozen in them. How do you explain it?
YZ — They are not formatted as we are. They do not read newspapers, they do not watch television, they do not go to the theater. They are formatted otherwise, by the yeshivot3, by the study of the Bible, which is full of violence. The “galgal” I was speaking of is a way of entering a circuit of men, from father to son, from son to father.
Plurielles — Women are completely absent from your film.
YZ — They are off-camera. I was interested in the men; it was in their world that my character went and that I could go. I really think that even if it unfortunately happens to girls, it is more frequent among boys.
Plurielles — Can we say to ourselves: they do not have the women of their choice, they marry young, they have very many children, they do not live a happy sexuality, so they fall back on a sexuality of men among themselves.
YZ — Yes, it is like in India, but things are changing there. Many absolutely magnificent girls are taking up more and more space and power. Bnei Brak is more open than Mea Shearim4, even if it is very relative; it is an interesting place, and I am glad to have known that in my life.
Plurielles — In the film, you show a yeshiva where each is the rabbi of the other. That proceeds from a tremendous openness.
YZ — Yes, it is about a young man who created a more open place because he knows that otherwise a good number of young people will leave. He created this place so that people could breathe. He said something magnificent to me: I pray to see only what is beautiful in the people I love.
Plurielles — There is nevertheless something unprecedented revealed to us about these ultra-orthodox societies: the parents know and they let it happen.5
YZ — But it is so in all societies. I know Lebanese who were raped in Jesuit schools and who put their sons in the same schools. Among Buddhists, there are enormous numbers of rapes. Rape chooses neither its religion nor its color. And there are forms of repetition: 85% of rapes are committed by people who have been raped. I believe that to be a human being is to be capable of emerging from a form of stupor in which one creates repetitions.
Plurielles — Your character, Menahem, is someone exceptional. Where is he today?
YZ — He lives in Paris, he has married, he sings, he is a cantor, a very complex character, given to excess. For the film, he was a remarkable guide, but he undertook it in a spirit of vengeance, which was not at all my case. We came together at the end of the film, when I said to him: “Menahem, you don’t realize how happy you are here. I don’t see you anywhere else.” In Bnei Brak, he understood everything, he was welcomed everywhere, he would start singing and everyone would come closer. It made him profoundly happy. But he kept saying he hated them. Yet, right at the end, he said to me: “I think you’re right: I love them.” It is true that the film allowed him to reconcile with his family.
Plurielles — The Israeli series Shtisel sends back a very positive image of this orthodox world. There is a hiatus between this series and your film — it is the same world and yet two opposed visions are given of it.
YZ — I disagree. My collaborators said that an allergy exists a priori against this religious world, but they all came out with a form of admiration. It is a world where there is much warmth, as one sees in the film, with those streets where families stroll at two in the morning, with little girls in princess dresses, those very warm collectives of men. People are very warm, they embrace, they speak, they tell the truth, and the truth dazzles. I think people know how to see.
Plurielles — “That so intense a light can well up from such a film is not the least of miracles,” wrote Jacques Mandelbaum, the critic for Le Monde. There is in the film a kind of luminosity, a kind of black sun. How do you explain that? Does it come from him, from you, from the situation?
YZ — The film expresses a microclimate, Menahem is its arrow, but despite everything it was I who drove the film, even in relation to the places in a certain way. I was filming things that mattered to me and that he did not necessarily see. It was almost magical. For example, the day when, in Jaffa, I saw this man, who was both a victim and an abuser, come out of the sea and walk toward us. Menahem was stunned, he said to me: “It’s God who wants us to make this film.” People came toward us, like the man we see at one point in the cemetery. There were moments of genuine grace. But this film was possible because I was not fascinated by this world; I saw the difficulty Menahem had living while remaining locked inside this story. I am delighted that Menahem reconciled with his father.
Plurielles — The mother is very much in the background.
YZ — Yes, it is terrible, but Menahem adores his parents.
Plurielles — Menahem seems to have been a child who was poorly loved. He says at one point: “I lacked affection in my family and my father put on a mask when I spoke to him.” And he also says that the third abuser, the one of whom he was “the little husband,” had given him a great deal of love, that he fed him, clothed him.
YZ — Yes. When you are a filmmaker you must show people at the best of what they are, but without idealizing them. There is a relation to truth that one asks of the characters and that one must have all the more when holding a camera. People feel it — it is incredible how they lay themselves bare. People told me unbelievable things, even when my camera was not there.
Plurielles — In Israel, has the film been shown?
YZ — Yes, in Jerusalem, in the cinemathèques.
Plurielles — This film did not provoke debates there?
YZ — Frankly, in Israel, no one needs this film to know there is a problem. But I never used this film to give lessons to people.
Plurielles — And today, is this discussion already far behind you?
YZ — No. It is true that I accompanied this film a great deal, because we were afraid of the reaction of the Jewish community; it had to be accompanied to calm the fear it might arouse; people were afraid to go, but afterwards they talked about it a great deal around them.
Plurielles — For us, this film goes much further than a denunciation of pedophilia; it carries us toward other shores, other reflections. You articulate it with this chance of having had contact with the world of your forebears, of your ancestors. The wound leads to the world of the ancestors.
YZ — Yes, I would never have entered it without the force of this wound. I am not here to judge what exists; I am here to try to understand how the world works. In fact I am not sentimental — I left with questions and I was answered. We react through the intimate; only the intimate is political, but political not in the dogmatic sense.
Members of a mystical current of Judaism founded in the eighteenth century by Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Baal Shem Tov or Besht (the master of the good Name). Centered on piety and charity, focused on the individual in his direct relationship with God, Hasidism opposes the erudite and rigid tradition of rabbinic Judaism.↩︎
Hasidim of Satmar: a Hasidic obedience founded in Transylvania. This sect is strongly anti-Zionist and established mainly in the USA.↩︎
Religious schools.↩︎
Ultra-religious neighborhood in Jerusalem.↩︎
Menahem’s mother, faced with his account, presents a closed face. She does not comment, giving the impression that she always knew, but that it would not have been in her power to do anything to modify the course of things. One finds a similar silence and fatality in the shtetl, where the very young children were taken from the age of 3 to the heder to learn to decipher the Torah. There the master, the melamed, beat them, sometimes left them waiting for hours on end in the cold and the dark; the whole shtetl knew how it went, the mothers knew it and were heartbroken, but everyone accepted it — it had always been so, for every generation. “The mother may shed bitter tears at the sight of her beaten child /…/ she will not lift a finger, will not say a word of protest.” Cf. Olam (Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, Plon), pp. 80-83.↩︎