Shtarkers.(The Talk of the Town)(Defiance)(Movie review)

On a recent Sunday, members of an extended Jewish clan, most of them Brooklyn-born, gathered at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in lower Manhattan, to watch a movie about their family. The movie was not a compilation of old wedding films or aging, ketchup-tinted bar-mitzvah footage but a screening of Edward Zwick's new feature, "Defiance," which opens in December. The film is still a family film, though, since it tells the largely unknown and entirely true story of the Bielski brothers' brigade: of how Tuvia, Zus, and Asael Bielski fled from Poland into the Belarusian forest in 1941--after the Einsatzgruppen had begun the mass slaughter of Jews that marked the first phase of the Holocaust--and managed not only to hold off the German Army, in grudging compact with Russian partisans, but to recruit Jewish civilians and keep them concealed for three years in the forest. By the end, almost twelve hundred Jews were living in the Belarusian woods, in a series of encampments that included libraries, nurseries, and clinics. The story, very well played by Daniel Craig (everyone's favorite non-Jewish Jew), as Tuvia, and Liev Schreiber, as his angrier younger brother Zus, is stirring--"Every day of freedom is an act of faith," Tuvia tells the demoralized band on the forest floor--and stops short on a mildly hallucinatory note: a title card at the end explains that the two surviving Bielski brothers (Asael died in the war) eventually emigrated to Brooklyn, where for decades they worked as cab owners and truck drivers, a small nest of heroes in the middle of Midwood. (Zwick had originally considered starting the film there, with a scene of a customer finding himself in the back seat of a taxi and realizing that he was being driven by a Bielski, as one might be driven down Broadway by a Maccabee.)

Though both Zus and Tuvia have been dead for more than a decade, the remaining Bielski relatives were there for the screening--drifting down, like every Jewish family in New York, from older Sadies and Izzys to younger generations of Courtneys and Chloes. The central enigma of the movie, as Zwick said in a pre-screening speech, is the moral source of unexampled heroism: what made the Bielskis act so bravely at a time when everyone else was helpless or in despair? One look at the surviving Bielskis helped explain a good deal that metaphysics could not: the second and third generations of the Bielski men are, as their fathers must have been, what ...