Steven Spielberg (3 page)

Like many other successful Jewish creative artists in the twentieth century, Spielberg built his career not by declaring his “otherness” but by seeking acceptance and common cultural ground with the American majority, by trying to become one of them. “I've always worked to be accepted by the majority,” he said in 1987. “I care about how I'm perceived—by my family, first; by my friends, second; by the public, third.”

In choosing to concentrate his youthful energies on making movies rather than paying attention to his schooling, Spielberg rebelled against the
traditional
Jewish reverence for education and literacy. By declaring his
independence
from that part of his cultural tradition—and from the middle-class values typified by his father, who despaired because of Steven's refusal to finish college and follow in his footsteps—Spielberg was casting his lot with another kind of Jewish cultural tradition, the more disreputable but equally vital mass culture established in Hollywood by immigrant Jews of his
grandparents
' generation, popular fabulists who drew much of their inspiration, and their audiences, directly from the humbler elements of the
shtetl.
Those early Hollywood moguls created the homogenized popular image of the American Dream. As Neal Gabler wrote in
An
Empire
of
Their
Own:
How
the
Jews
Invented
Hollywood,
“The movie Jews were acting out what Isaiah Berlin, in a similar context, had described as ‘an over-intense admiration or indeed worship' for the majority, a reverence that, Berlin also noted, sometimes oscillated with a latent resentment too, creating what he
sympathetically
called a ‘neurotic distortion of the facts.' Hollywood became both the vehicle for and the product of their distortions.”

It was not until he became middle-aged that Steven Spielberg took the profound and irrevocable risk of redefining himself before the world by fully embracing his ethnic and religious heritage. Making
Schindler's
List
was an act of psychic health and integration that took him back full circle to those first memory images of the synagogue in his Cincinnati childhood. “This is truly my roots,” he declared. What finally enabled him to make
Schindler's
List
was his long-deferred decision eight years earlier, at the age of
thirty-eight
, to leave his childhood behind by accepting the responsibilities of fatherhood:

“I had to have a family first. I had to figure out what my place was in the world…. When my [first] son [Max] was born, it greatly affected me…. A spirit began to ignite in me, and I became a Jewish dad at the moment of birth and circumcision. That's when I began to look at myself and think about my mom, my dad, what it was like growing up, what my childhood was like. I began crying at every movie. I began crying at bad television. At one point I thought I was having a bit of a breakdown. I tried to go back, seeing what I had missed, and I realized I had missed everything….

“Suddenly I'm flashing back to my childhood and remembering vividly the stories my parents and grandparents told me…. My father was a great storyteller, and my grandfather [Fievel] was amazing. I remember hearing stories from him when I was four or five and I'd be breathless, sitting on the edge of his knee. My grandfather was from Russia, and most of the stories were very indigenous of the old country.”

O
NE
of the stories Fievel told was of how he learned his lessons. As a Jew growing up in Odessa, Russia, in the late nineteenth century, Fievel was prohibited from attending secondary school by the czarist government's
numerus
clausus
(closed number), a quota system severely limiting the number of Jews allowed to receive a higher education. But he found a way around the edict. Steven remembered what Fievel told him: “They did allow Jews to listen through open windows to the classes, so he pretty much went to school—fall, winter, and spring—by sitting outside in driving snow, outside of open windows.”

A version of this memory made its way into
An
American
Tail.
Separated from his family after coming to New York, Fievel Mousekewitz forlornly presses his nose against a pane of glass to watch a group of little American mice attending school. Always the outsider, even in America, the strange new land of freedom, where there were supposed to be “no cats.” Though Steven Spielberg failed to acquire his grandfather's yearning for education, he too became a storyteller, and he never forgot the image of the boy sitting outside the schoolhouse, or what it showed him about being a Jew in a hostile land.

Always convenient scapegoats during economic and political upheavals in a land of deep-seated anti-Semitism, Russian Jews in the late 1800s were
subjected to increasingly frequent and brutal pogroms (the Russian word for “devastation”). In his childhood, Steven listened with fascination to his grandparents' tales of pogroms. The social and economic liberties of Russian Jews were restricted further by laws compelling them to live only in
shtetlach
and barring them from most occupations except for certain forms of trade. Nearly 2 million Jews fled Russia and Eastern Europe for the United States between 1881 and 1914, “a migration comparable in modern Jewish
history
only to the flight from the Spanish Inquisition,” Irving Howe wrote in
World
of
Our
Fathers.
America was seen “not merely as a land of milk and honey,” observed novelist Abraham Cahan, “but also, perhaps chiefly, as one of mystery, of fantastic experiences, or marvelous
transformations
.”

Steven Spielberg's ancestors were part of that vast migration, settling in the hospitable midwestern city of Cincinnati, which, in the words of historian Jonathan D. Sarna, was then “the oldest and most cultured Jewish community west of the Alleghenies.” Some of his relatives remained in Russia for
generations
to come, and some eventually went to Israel, but many of those who did not emigrate were murdered along with the rest of their communities in the Nazi Holocaust. His father estimates they lost sixteen to twenty relatives in the Holocaust, in both Ukraine and Poland.

The original roots of the Spielberg family, Arnold Spielberg says, may have been in Austria-Hungary, where some of his ancestors, before emigrating to Russia, may have lived in an area controlled by the Duke of Spielberg. The Spielberg family name, which is German-Austrian, means “play mountain.”
Spiel
connotes either recreation or a stage play (cf. the English word “spiel,” meaning a recitation), and
berg
means mountain or hill. It is a fittingly
theatrical
name for a playful adult who works in show business and ever since his childhood has loved to build and film miniature mountains. A “play
mountain
” appears as a central plot device in
Close
Encounters
of
the
Third
Kind:
Richard Dreyfuss obsessively constructs in his living room the image of the Wyoming mountain where, in the film's magical finale, the alien mother ship makes its landing. A film production company Arnold and Steven Spielberg formed early on, when Steven was a college student in Long Beach,
California
, was called Playmount Productions.

Steven's grandfather Shmuel Spielberg, who in America would change his name to Samuel, was born in 1873 in Kamenets-Podolsk, Russia. Once ruled by Lithuanian-Polish nobles and known in Polish as Kamieniec Podolski, it is now part of the independent state of Ukraine. In 1897, a few years before Shmuel's departure for America, Kamenets had a population of about forty thousand, including about sixteen thousand Jews.

Most of the Jews spoke Yiddish as their principal or only language, and they lived as all Russian Jews did, in a tightly knit, insular community whose religious and cultural tradition brought comfort and mutual support in the midst of hostility. Although anti-Semitism permeated many of the
city's institutions during the reigns of Czars Alexander III and Nicholas II, the memorial book of Jewish life in Kamenets reports, “In general, relations between Jews and non-Jews in town were correct.” Even during the
Ukrainian
pogroms of 1881 and the widespread pogroms of 1905, there were no massacres in Kamenets, although there was some vandalism of Jewish property.

Steven's grandfather Shmuel was the second son of a farmer, rancher, and huntsman named Meyer Spielberg and his wife, Bertha (Bessie) Sandleman, who also had three younger daughters. When Shmuel was about five years old, both his parents died in an epidemic, and he was raised by his brother, Avrom (Arnold Spielberg was given the Hebrew name Avrom in his honor). Shmuel worked on his brother's ranch as a cowboy, rounding up cattle and horses. Jews were conscripted into the czarist army for a six-year period, and Shmuel found his way into the army band, playing the baritone, a brass wind instrument. “By staying in the band,” his son Arnold relates, “he
managed
to keep from getting killed or shot. And then he became a cattle buyer for the Russian army. He used to go up to Siberia and buy cattle, and he dealt with Manchuria. When the Russo-Japanese war started [in 1904], he just said, ‘I will not get back into the army again.' He escaped to America in 1906, and then he brought my mother in 1908 [the year they married].”

Samuel (Shmuel) Spielberg's wife, Rebecca Chechik, “Grandma Becky” to Steven's generation, was the daughter of Nachman (Nathan) Morduhov Chechik and Reitzl (Rachel) Nigonova Hendler, who had eight other
children
. The Chechik family name, which is also spelled Tsetsik and means “linnet” in Russian, later was Americanized to Chase.

The Chechiks had a brewery in Sudilkov, a
shtetl
that no longer exists. Sudilkov was in the Kamenets area, near the larger town of Shepetovka, where some other family members lived. Arnold Spielberg relates that his grandfather Nachman Chechik “prayed and studied the Torah. His wife ran the brewery business. She was a shrewd woman. She and the children ran the business. My uncle Herschel, the oldest son, was the brewmaster. In those days, the old Jewish men, if they could get out of business and study the Torah, that's what they did.” The brewery trade was forbidden to Jews by the Russian government in 1897, and some of Rebecca Chechik's siblings eventually emigrated to China. They lived in the Manchurian city of Harbin and then in Shanghai's British enclave, the setting for the opening scenes of Steven Spielberg's World War II film
Empire
of
the
Sun.

Samuel Spielberg, Arnold's father, worked for a few years as a grocer and a peddler in Cincinnati before he found a steady but modest living as a jobber, operating a store on West Third Street. “He'd go down to the small stores in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio,” Arnold explains. “He'd buy up their merchandise that they had not been able to sell. He'd buy what they called job lots, or incomplete lots. He'd bring them to his store and he'd sell them
to other merchants, or to retail; he had some retail trade. And, of course, in the wholesale trade he sold to even
smaller
stores.”
†

Arnold's mother, Rebecca, was “a very enterprising woman. She took care of the kids and ran the house. She was interested in politics—we were Democrats from way back—and she'd read a lot, go to plays, go to concerts. She'd join all the Jewish organizations.” Mildred (Millie) Friedman Tieger, a longtime friend of Steven's mother, remembers Rebecca as “a strong, powerful woman, very smart, and more domineering” than her husband.

In addition to their son Arnold Meyer Spielberg, who was born on
February
6, 1917, Rebecca and Sam had a younger son, Irvin (called Buddy or Bud), who became an aeronautical engineer and worked on NASA's space program, and a daughter, Natalie, who married Jacob (Jack) Guttman and with him ran a family business that manufactures cake decorations (Natalie died in 1992).

S
TEVEN'S
mother's side of the family, the Posners, originated in
Poland
. “Posner” means “a person from Pozna
ń
,” the name of a city and province in western Poland (also spelled Posna
ń
or Pose
ń
). Pozna
ń
was taken over by Prussia in the late eighteenth century, and as the late Dr. Jacob Rader Marcus, dean of American Jewish historiography, noted in a 1994 interview, “Germans despised Posners. If a German says, ‘He's a Posner,' it means he's held in contempt.” But the Posner ancestors of Steven Spielberg had a more worldly background in Russia than the Spielbergs, for the
Posners
' cosmopolitan hometown of Odessa, a bustling port on the Black Sea, was known as “The Paris of Russia.”

In the end, however, Jews were scarcely more welcome in Odessa than they were anywhere else in Russia. Odessa was the site of regular anti-Jewish riots, and an unusually severe pogrom occurred there in 1905, the year of the attempted revolution and the mutiny by sailors on the battleship
Potem
kin
(later the subject of Sergei Eisenstein's silent film classic
Potemkin,
which includes the famous Odessa Steps sequence). When Odessa's Jews
celebrated
the czar's promise of reforms, four hundred Jews were killed in
retaliation
during four days of mayhem. Such attacks—which also occurred in several other parts of Russia during 1905—were provoked by the
authorities
and executed by local ruffians with the help of policemen and Cossacks.

That year of turmoil was the year Philip Posner, born in Odessa in 1884, came to Cincinnati to make a new life for himself and his family, one he
hoped would be safer from persecution and tyranny. He would remain devoutly Orthodox, resisting the modernizing influences of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment movement that flourished in Odessa, and the Reform movement in America. But Odessa's cultural ferment would leave an imprint on his consciousness, despite the deficiencies of his formal education. An artist
manqué,
Philip Posner would pass along his artistic inclinations to his daughter and his famous grandson.