One of the most amazing aspects of the story of the founding of Israel is the revitalization of Hebrew as a spoken language, and that story is dramatized in a very interesting way in a charming and entertaining new series from KAN 11, The Deer, which is running on Tuesdays starting March 5 after the news.
Episodes will be available on kan.org.il after they air.
The series – created by Keren Margalit, who made the wonderful show Yellow Peppers, about a family in the Negev with a son on the autism spectrum a few years ago – is inspired by actual events, although a sly disclaimer at the beginning states that there is no way now to know what really happened and what didn’t.
The Deer (HaZvi in Hebrew) was a newspaper founded by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the leading proponent of making Hebrew into the language of the Jewish homeland. He is played by Or Ben-Melech, who portrays him as a driven but charismatic figure filled with boundless energy, fighting an illness, apparently tuberculosis.
This isn’t a dry historical tale, but is told through the eyes of Fruma (Suzanna Papian), a young, rebellious Russian-Jewish woman who moves to Jerusalem in 1885 with her parents and two sisters.
All Fruma wants to do is return to Odessa to be with her lover, a revolutionary, and there is nothing in Palestine that interests her.
Hoping to lift her spirits, her father speaks to Ben-Yehuda, an acquaintance of his, and gets him to offer his daughter a job.
Ben-Yehuda is intrigued by her language skills – she can speak some Hebrew already – and her air of self-confidence, and he gives her a job as a typesetter.
It’s always a joy to see any depiction of the old, labor-intensive process of typesetting, and the letters and the printing press are evocatively photographed.
There’s some comedy involving the family’s efforts to fit in – it’s always hard to be an immigrant – and Fruma’s sisters both fall in love with the same young Russian guy. But Fruma’s work on The Deer is at the heart of the story.
We know that Ben-Yehuda won his battle to revive and modernize Hebrew – as historian Cecil Roth wrote: “Before Ben-Yehuda, Jews could speak Hebrew; after him, they did” – but it wasn’t easy, and much of the series is about his struggle against ultra-Orthodox zealots who do not think Hebrew should be a secular, spoken and written language.
The series shows him getting harassed in the street, and the plaque outside his home on Ethiopia Street in Jerusalem still gets torn down sometimes, proving that some things never change.
After a bunch of religious thugs attack a young woman, calling her a whore and beating her, Ben-Yehuda wants to report on the incident, but he is threatened by the owner of his printing press, who says he will no longer allow The Deer to be printed on his press if an account of the attack appears in its pages.
Fruma is understandably upset by the incident and admires Ben-Yehuda’s courage when he finds a way around the press owner’s threat.
An alliance forms between Fruma and Ben-Yehuda early on, and she becomes an investigative reporter for The Deer, helping him fight the extremists.
Papian, who starred in Avi Nesher’s The Monkey House and in the series Sovietzka, is one of Israel’s most exciting actresses, with real star quality, and she brings this story to life. She also looks great in the period dresses, and has the sassiness of some of the great screen comedians, like Jean Arthur or Myrna Loy.
The Oscars
The Oscars are coming up on the night of March 10 in the US and early in the morning on March 11 in Israel. The red-carpet coverage will be broadcast here starting at 10:30 p.m. on Yes Movies Drama on Sunday, while the ceremony itself will be shown on the same channel at 1 a.m. on Monday.
Hard-core Oscar fanatics should take note, it is starting earlier than usual this year, at 4 p.m. Sunday in Hollywood. Those who don’t want to lose a night of sleep can watch a rebroadcast of the ceremony, also on Yes Movies Drama, on March 12 at 9 p.m.
This year, most of the Oscar-nominated films were, I felt, overhyped and overrated, but Israeli director Tal Kantor made a wonderful movie which is nominated for best animated short, Letter to a Pig. It’s the story of a girl who meets a Holocaust survivor and hears how a pig saved his life during the war, and it’s available to see on Hot VOD and YesVOD.
Many of the other nominated movies, such as Oppenheimer and Barbie, are available to watch on VOD channels and streaming services, but there are also some great classic Oscar winners that you can catch.
Cellcom TV is featuring many Oscar-winning films of the recent and more distant past. The older titles on its list include The Godfather and The Silence of the Lambs, while it also has most of the Academy Award-winning films of the past decade, among them the surprise winner from Korea, Parasite; The Green Book; and last year’s winner, Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Yes Cinematheque is featuring Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II, which won six Oscars, including Best Picture, and which many consider the best sequel of all time (perhaps tied with Toy Story 2), as well as the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, Kramer vs. Kramer, and about a dozen other Oscar winners.
If the Oscars put you in the mood for classics, you might want to check out Amazon Prime Video, which recently added dozens of wonderful oldies. For some reason, it doesn’t have a “Classics” category, but just browse “Top Movies” and you’ll find dozens of terrific choices, including Billy Wilder’s incomparable The Apartment, which won five Oscars in 1961, including Best Picture, Best Director, and, of course, Best Writing for the screenplay by Austrian-Jewish émigré Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond.
The movie tells the story of C. C. Baxter, a lonely insurance-company worker, played by Jack Lemmon, who gets bullied into lending his conveniently located apartment to his bosses for their extramarital trysts. When he falls in love with one of the company elevator operators, played by Shirley MacLaine, his life gets more complicated than he could ever have imagined.
While it may sound like a formulaic rom-com, it’s anything but, as it shows the real despair of a hardworking man who is taken advantage of by the corporate system he is stuck in, and – no spoilers – a character attempts suicide, which leads to some real insights about depression. It’s extremely funny and sophisticated in a way that puts today’s movies to shame.
I would quote some of the rapid-fire dialogue, but it wouldn’t make sense out of context, although there is one nice moment worth mentioning – when Baxter’s neighbor, a doctor, gives him some timely advice: “Be a mensch!”