Shtisel, Hannah Karenina, and Geese

[mallorys_camera]

Shtisel is The Sopranos except the background milieu is not America’s Mafia but Jerusalem’s ultra-ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Meaning that it’s a long story arc that unspools over many episodes although each episode is also a standalone piece with its own nuances, motifs and symbolic vocabulary. If you watch closely, the end of each episode is the beginning of the episode transformed! My favorite kind of narrative! Inevitable latency, one might call it.

The overall story arc is neither sensational nor heroic, being merely an account of the ups and downs in the lives of one particular family. Their world is very tightly observed: every drink of water downed with a blessing; every trip into an interior marked by a kiss to the mezuzah. In such an abundance of observance, spiritual life actually becomes quite mundane—in both the literal and pejorative senses of that word.

The acting is superb.

The patriarch of the family, Shulem, is a completely dysfunctional father, husband, teacher and human being, and yet the actor who plays him is so likeable—in something of the same way that James Gandolfino was likeable—that the viewer is seduced into complicity.

The other main protagonist is Shulem’s son, Akiva—played by the almost supernaturally good-looking Israeli actor Michael Aloni—who alone out of the Shtisel family seems to be blessed or cursed with the ability to feel emotion outside the rigid structure imposed by ultra-Orthodox proscriptions. Akiva’s freer—not free!—spirit provides much of the conflict that’s essential to all good narrative: He’s an artist constantly pressured to stop painting and to stop falling in love with inappropriate women.

The little actress who played the lead in Unorthodox makes an appearance, too, as Ruchami, Shulem’s rebellious teenaged granddaughter. Rucham reads forbidden books! One of my favorite scenes is Rucham reading Hannah Karenina to her younger brothers, bowdlerizing ad lib as she gets to the smutty parts where Vronsky kisses Anna’s hand.

Anyway, I could ramble on for pages and pages and pages about how very brilliant this show is, and then all 4.3 of my readers would grow very bored.

Suffice it to say, I highly recommend it, and it’s on Netflix in Hebrew with English subtitles.

###

Other than that? It was very, very hot yesterday: In the four hours between the start and finish of tromping and gardening chores, the thermometer rose from the mid 70s to 95°, and I honestly thought I might pass out by the time I got home.

As I was climbing the hill to the old rose garden, this vast flock of geese and half-grown goslings espied me and began rushing me.

What the hell? I thought. Do they want to attack me?

I was very curious about this behavior, so I stood my ground.

They got up close but they did not attack! Instead, they stopped about five feet away and began this bizarre kind of… dance:

Watch on YouTube

I kinda love that weird up-and-down thing geese do with their necks! I like to imagine Brachiosauruses doing the exact same thing 160 million years ago.

Comments

[mistersmearcase]

I guess I might watch Shtisel. It's been recommended to me before. It's been a bit of a hard sell because I don't have a great deal of love for the ultra-Orthodox. I moved to NYC from places with Not Many Jews and thought here I am, among my brethren, until around the fourth time a Hasid sidled up to me and excuse-me-are-you-Jewished me and I started to learn about their actual deal and remember that all orthodox religions are alarming to me. Unorthodox was doable partly because it was mostly in Yiddish, a language I am of course in love with, rather than Hebrew, a language I was forced to learn a little of for my dreaded bar mitzvah and the language of my parents' overbearing Israeli friends...so yes a harder sell. But I don't have a series right now so I'll give it a shot.

[mallorys_camera]

I'm not a big fan of the ultra-Orthodox either. But this is a really good series. Some of it's in Yiddish! The scenes with the older characters.

[rebeccmeister]

Huh! I wonder if they were expecting food? That seems like mostly-grown gosling behavior.

[mallorys_camera]

Yeah, it did not feel like predator or defender behavior. I would immediately have thought they were begging except I've never seen a Canada goose beg.

[lethe1]

The park where I used to live nearby had a lot of geese and as soon as they spied anyone with a plastic bag they would rush over, expecting food. They would get annoyed sometimes when they weren't given any.

PS I've added Shtisel to my Netflix watchlist.

[mallorys_camera]

Yes, I think they were begging. I've never seen Canada geese beg before! 😀

I think you will like Shtisel.