Sultan Knish
It is only toward the very end of Avalon, the film capturing
the disintegration of Jewish family life in America, that the movie
gives the closest thing to a clear identification of a thing that it had
withheld all along, their Jewish identity, by focusing momentarily on a
Star of David on a tombstone.
Only
in death are the Krichinsky family, who have Americanized their last
name to Kirk and Kay, identified fleetingly as Jewish. It is also the
only time that they participate in a religious ritual.
The
Krichinsky family ritual is family. It is a clan that exists for its own
sake, its elders revisiting and passing along their fragile memories
and transforming them into family traditions. But the family is too
fragile to live on memory alone, leaving Sam Krichinsky, its patriarch,
in a nursing home, cut off from his family and wishing that he had known
everything was going to change so that he would have done a better job
of remembering.
The Thanksgiving ritual includes Joan Plowright's
Eva Krichinsky asking each year whom they are thanking if she is the
one who killed the turkey. There is no answer because there is no
religion. The family is its own religion, its rituals assembled by the
five brothers as they adapted to life in America and are expected to
endure forever because of the magic of kinship memory.
It sees no
reason to thank anyone but itself. But its own existence is dependent
on older traditions and verities that it has discarded. Its own
traditions are based on fragile personal memories that do not endure.
Krichinskyism
is no substitute for Judaism. The community of a single family is no
match for the overarching pressures tearing apart the rest of society.
Rituals without religion and industry without G-d leads to the end of
community and family. Family alone is not enough to sustain a culture.
Not when it is cut off from the larger family of its own culture and the
beliefs of that culture fragmenting into the nuclear family and then
the individual.
The Krichinsky family thinks of itself as Jewish,
but it is a private Jewishness expressed in immigrant culture, in a
handful of customs in a family that otherwise observes nothing else, in
scraps of Yiddish, and in the confidence that their inner difference is
as culturally permanent as their DNA and will be passed on from
generation to generation like the family circle meetings and the
unreliable recollections of the four elder brothers who are its American
patriarchs.
Instead the religion of the family is torn apart by
petty quarrels, by migration from the cities to the suburbs and by the
shift of generations.
Avalon begins with a large
multi-generational family sharing a boisterous post-war Thanksgiving
meal and toward its end that vast sea of kinship has been reduced to
Sam's son, the successful but apathetic Jules Kaye spending Thanksgiving
eating a frozen TV dinner with his aspirational wife Ann in front of
the television sat as they watch a fictional family going through its
comic routines.
Ann, who had alienated her husband and son from
their extended family in order to become her idea of the perfect family,
has finally found her ideal family on the flickering television screen.
And she isn't alone. Real flawed families are exchanged for perfect
fictional families. Life becomes television and television becomes life.
Jules
Kaye goes from selling televisions to selling commercial airtime on
television to watching television instead of communicating with his
family. His last conversation with his mother that we see is about a
television commercial and as his son visits his senile grandfather is a
nursing home, a television plays, unwatched, in the background, as it
does in many scenes of imploding family life.
The rowhouses of
Avalon exist as the ideal America that Sam discovers on leaving the boat
and arriving on the Fourth of July amid fireworks and waving flags. As
his son prepares to move to the suburbs, he worries that he is getting
too far away from Avalon. And indeed the distance helps tear apart the
family's rituals of closeness. But the end was inevitable regardless of
the move.
Avalon was a temporary state of being based on a
kinship between brothers, as brothers gave way to a second generation of
cousins and second cousins for a bewildering menagerie of family ties
that a tired Ann struggles to explain to a brood of children on the
stairs who are all related to each other in some way, the mere existence
of blood ties growing ever more distant is no longer enough.
And
the neighborhoods that once hosted new immigrants are doomed. Violence
will make white flight inevitable. And that will destroy the oases of
family life making it impossible to reconstruct that physical closeness
even if its members, like Ann, were not already desperate to trade the
stifling familiarity of family for an individual empowerment that is
nothing more than hollow aspirational consumerism.
Jules' cousin
Kirk is thinking in terms of bigger and bigger discount department
stores, Washington's Birthday and Fourth of July sales, aggressive
advertising and discounting and even more aggressive debt. The two men
are making the good life more affordable for a broader group of
Americans, but they also ushering in a consuming materialism that is
coming to exist for its own sake.
The only way to fund the
constant expansion built on constant debt is to convince your customers
to do the same thing. The definition of the good life shifts from
family-centric to possession-centric. Happiness becomes a credit card
with a large credit limit and pay no attention to the interest rate. The
aggressive sales push is being discovered in a thousand places at the
same time as K&K makes its ultimately doomed bid to run a discount
department store. Its modern counterpart is Amazon.
The toxic
combination of entertainment and consumerism makes shopping and
ownership into its own culture. It is a culture that traded flawed real
things for perfect unreal things. It trades Krichinsky for Kay and Kirk
and spends Thanksgiving watching perfect families on television with
everyone together and alone at the same time. It isolates itself in an
unreal bubble of its own making and wonders at its own unhappiness.
While
their parents worked for their children, the children work for
themselves with little point except the accumulation of the trophies of
modern life; cars, country club memberships and the rest of the good
life. Their empty materialism primes the next generation to find an
ethical dimension for that prosperity in the politics of the left. And
so Krichinskyism gives way to liberalism.
Avalon's tagline is
"They shared a dream called America." but it is likely that the dream
will take Michael, Sam's grandson and Jules' son, last seen in a
seventies getup with his own son, in a post-American direction.
Michael
has the sentimental connection to his grandfather, but not an
understanding of the choices he made. He fondly retells the story of his
grandfather's arrival to Baltimore on the Fourth of July without
actually understanding its meaning. To his father, it was second-hand
nostalgia, to him it's even less, but it will inevitably play a role in
constructing his identity and his politics.
Disregarding the
Ashkenazi Jewish custom that Sam mentions in the nursing home, not to
name children after living relatives, Michael treats Sam as if he were
already dead. A memory to be recycled into an even feebler identity
based not on collective family memories, but on personal nostalgia. And
personal nostalgia for someone else's culture is all too easily
politicized.
Sam and Jules have left their descendants with
little other than a sense of loss, a missing space whose nature they do
not entirely understand and which they will seek to fill with anything
from cults to consumerism to leftist politics.
A thousand Jewish
Avalons have come and gone in American life, going from thriving
centers of Jewish life to taking on the role of "the old neighborhood"
and finally vanishing into the ghetto or a yuppie development to which
their own unknowing grandchildren return without even realizing it.
Sam
Krichinsky was in love with America. It was his ideal place. His
Camelot. His Avalon. His descendants are Americans in a time when they
are no longer certain what that means anymore. Their Jewishness is
incidental to them. Their family is a disintegrating memory. Its place
has been filled by mass entertainment and a search for ideals, perfect
worlds like those seen on television, self-help myths and political
utopias to replace the lost imperfect world of Avalon.
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