Ganef (2020)
A VIVID EXPLORATION OF JEWISH TRANSGENERATIONAL TRAUMA
London, 1962. A little girl is playing a solitary game. She spins around a deserted entrance hall, round and round she goes, until she finally loses her bearings and falls flat on her back.
A maid is dusting around the living room, humming to herself. The little girl slips behind an armchair, reaches for an ornament resting on the fancy tiered table and gives it a shake. The ornament jingles. The maid stops dead in her tracks, dusting cloth in hand, mouth agape. The little girl sneaks over, closer and closer she steals. Suddenly, the maid swings around, transforming into a monster, and sets after the girl, who scampers off, screaming with joy. They race through an empty house, expertly avoiding collision with the antique pieces of furniture, barely disturbing the long net curtains drawn across the windows. Just as the maid-monster grabs hold of the child and proceeds to tickle her to death, there is the sound of a key turning. ‘Mummy!’ cries the girl and runs out of the room.
The door opens. But instead of embracing her daughter, the mother presses a brace of shopping bags into her hand. “Take them to my room!” says the mother, her voice pinging with urgency. “Quick, shefele, quick! Don’t let anyone see you!” The girl does as she was told. Later on, in the safe confinement of her bedroom, the mother throws off her shoes and loosens the belt, rubbing her temples: one of her headaches is coming on. ‘Why can’t people see the bags?’ asks the little girl, again. And so the story begins to unravel, in that disorientating, freefalling way that often accompanies the apparent lack of an inciting incident. It is only when we see the number tattooed across the mother’s left forearm – the chilling souvenir from the Auschwitz Konzslager complex – that we understand that, unlike most stories, the inciting incident in Ganef had already occurred, many times before in Jewish history.
Ruthie.
According to the United States Holocaust Museum, it wasn’t until the 1960s that the Second Vatican Council officially renounced the ancient charge that Jews had murdered Christ – the charge first brought up by the early Christians shortly after the crucifixion in the early 1st century Judea. A couple of millennia worth of blame and relentless persecution is bound to leave a lasting imprint upon the very soul of a race. Feelings of guilt and unworthiness, belief that no person is safe and no place is home, tendency to cling to the past just so it doesn’t get a chance to sneak into to the present and thieve away the future are all signs of a deeply ingrained transgenerational trauma.
In the interview for Manhattan Short Film Festival, the British-born writer and director Mark Rosenblatt explains how Ganef examines the ways trauma can be inherited by the next generation. “I wanted to explore that trauma in a complex way – how destructive and pernicious and self-perpetuating it could be. How trauma of this kind, whoever the victim, lives on beyond the short lifespans of news cycles, for lifetimes and for generations. How it can breed mistrust, some understandable, some irrational and unnecessarily divisive. How a parent who survived acute trauma might often try to protect their child from the world and only succeed in turning them against it.”
Lynn.
The atmosphere in Rosenblatt’s film, resounding with childhood innocence at first, rapidly darkens with that turn of the key. This is the point of no return. During the remaining ten or so minutes, that innocence slips away and is gone forever. The previously loving relationship between the shiksa maid and the young Jewish girl is shattered. Hearts are broken. Secrets are flashed across the screen, only to be stashed away again, in a place that may or may not prove to be safe in a long run. The suddenness of the events is shocking. The irreversibility of them, also. And thus the story returns to its source: the early 1940s Frankfurt. There is a knock on the door. Except this time it is not the mother hauling in the shopping bags – it is a German soldier, here to take that which doesn’t belong to him. A ganef who effortlessly bridges the void between the mother’s nightmares and the little girl’s reality. Like a virus, he mutates and lingers until the next opportunity to grow and multiply presents itself.
Rosenblatt chooses to stop here. Rightly, perhaps. Still, I can’t help but feel that he could have at least hinted that even the transgenerational trauma of this enormity can be healed by each and every one of us insisting on shaping the world we are prepared to live in. But maybe that’s another film for another time.
The stamp of evil.