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How Gray Was My Valley
Heidi Kingstone / London
 Paul Morrison, director of "Solomon and Gaenor" |
The tragic landscape of Wales, blanketed by a heavy slate-gray mist, opens the film "Solomon and Gaenor," one of the five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film this year. The scene�s unremitting bleakness continues as the camera pans across the harsh terrain of the Welsh mining valleys. The people are equally gray, toiling as they do under the dual hardships of poverty and life in the mines in the early 1900s. The two title characters, the young Welsh Baptist Gaenor and her Jewish lover, Solomon, provide the film its only relief from unremitting darkness, a point perhaps emphasized by the red dress Solomon gives his lover at the start of their romance.
It�s rare to find a Welsh movie nominated for an Oscar, but this beautiful, haunting and sad feature is a gem of a picture, whether or not it wins on March 26. The novelty of this turn-of-the-century love story is that the dialogue�s in two fairly obscure languages: Welsh and Yiddish. (There is also an English version, but it too includes a lot of Welsh and Yiddish.)
The backdrop to "Solomon and Gaenor" is a wave of anti-Semitic rioting that raged against Jewish shopkeepers in the Welsh town of Tredegar, and spread throughout the valleys in 1911. Small Jewish-owned shops became an easy target, as racial tension mixed with industrial unrest, the residue of a miners� strike that had just ended. What fascinated Paul Mor-rison, who wrote and directed the film, was the juxtaposition of the two hard-working, religious communities that were so different and yet so similar: both poor, strict in religious observance, patriarchal, with basic survival needs dominating daily life.
Though Morrison, a British documentary filmmaker and psychotherapist, is Jewish, he was astounded to learn that there had been a Jewish community in the valleys of South Wales. A small nucleus still exists, concentrated mainly in Cardiff.
The seeds of the movie were planted almost 10 years ago, when Morrison was researching "A Sense of Belonging," his documentary series about the British-Jewish experience. It was then that he came across an exhibition about the now-defunct synagogues of the valleys at Cardiff�s Welsh Folk Museum.
"The British-Jewish experience is different from that of America, where everyone is an immigrant," Morrison explains. "The Jews were expelled from Britain in 1290 and were re-admitted under Oliver Cromwell four hundred years later." Nonetheless, Morrison adds, they still feel like newcomers. "There�s a sense that we�re here under sufferance, that we have to be good, that we have to be more British than the British. The state of mind that goes with that is: Don�t make waves. Don�t be too pushy."
The film is set in a time when British Jews - like their American counterparts - were facing an influx of their brethren from Eastern Europe, some 235,000 between 1881 and 1914. "It was forbidden to speak Yiddish in school, and as a result the language was virtually wiped out in a generation," says Morrison, 55, who grew up in London, and remembers feeling very clever at being able to pass as a non-Jew. There are loud echoes of this in the film when Solomon - played by the handsome Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd - while courting Gaenor, initially conceals his Orthodox background and passes himself off as the non-Jewish Sam Livingstone.
The characters, both around 20 years old, live with their families in isolated, tight-knit communities. The obedient, pretty Gaenor stays at home to help her mother, while her younger sister goes off to school. One day she opens the door to the "packman," who lugs his cotton samples from house to house. It is, for both of them, love at first sight.
Morrison sees Solomon as a character trapped in his Jewishness, living at a time when the only alternative to the Orthodox model is a complete denial of his Jewish identity. "Of course there was that impulse among Jews, as there was with Solomon, to throw off the shackles of the past," says the director. "It�s a very British Jewish phenomenon. Gaenor is somehow more accepting of his Jewishness than Solomon is himself."
At least toward the film�s tragic end. Initially, Solomon keeps his roots secret, even as the two become lovers. When she gets pregnant, Gaenor is denounced by her church and decides she will not see Solomon again. Only months later, visibly with child, she goes to find him and discovers he is Jewish.
The mining valleys of South Wales, were, at that time, experiencing a coal rush of sorts, with miners coming from Italy, Spain, Eastern Europe and other parts of Wales to prospect. Jews, like Solomon�s father, Isaac, who had been hounded out of Lithuania by anti-Semites, worked in "service industries" as peddlers and tinkers. In Isaac�s case, he owns a pawnshop and sells cotton door-to-door. When Solomon assumes that role, it leads to his fateful meeting with Gaenor, who is played by Welsh actress Nia Roberts. Graceful, slender and blonde, Roberts, 27, has a number of TV credits to her name, but this is her first major feature-film role.
The two characters struggle to conform to the demands of their insular and prejudiced families, but ultimately their passion for one another prevails. Their plans to elope are foiled by the riots, after which Gaenor is banished to the country to bear her child. Solomon is sent to Cardiff but he sets off to search for Gaenor. By the time he does, having crossed the valleys in winter, he is dying. On his deathbed, under a tallit, the couple undergoes a Jewish wedding, and even have a conversation in Yiddish. For Morrison, Gaenor�s act in effect gives Solomon back his Jewishness.
Morrison, who declared himself an honorary Welshman after almost five years spent dreaming, researching and writing the film, says the fact that it is seen and experienced in Wales as authentically Welsh is a source of great pride for him.
The film resonated personally for the director in many ways. Both his parents grew up in shops, albeit it in London, similar to the one owned by the characters Isaac and his wife, Rezl, played by the well-known Maureen Lipman.
"It wasn't for the glamour," says Lipman on why she took the role. "My mother didn't like me in it at all - no hair, big nose. I took it because of the Yiddish. I wanted to hear those words in my mouth. It was a challenge, as the only Yiddish I had ever heard were swear words."
"I felt I knew Isaac�s shop," recalls Morrison. "My grandmother ran a grocery store and my grandfather, who was a bit of an anarchist, ran the People�s Photography Studio. I also spent a lot of time walking up and down the Welsh valleys talking to elderly people about their stories of courtship and love. Every one I spoke to knew a Jew named Hymie Cohen. Of course, this was not their real name but had become some kind of generic name.
"If you grew up Jewish in a non-Jewish world," says Morrison, "you are forever negotiating between your Jewishness and, in my case, my Englishness." This includes the question of whether to marry a Jew or not. Morrison didn�t.
Morrison believed so strongly in the project that he bought the terraced house in Clydach Vale that serves as Gaenor�s home - not only because he was sure the film would be produced, but also because he knew that unspoiled houses in the valleys are hard to find.
Although this is Morrison�s first feature film, he has many documentaries behind him, including "From Bitter Earth," a feature-length film about drawings and paintings done in the concentration camps and ghettos of Nazi-occupied Europe; "Like Other People," an award-winning work about sexuality and the handicapped; and "Divide and Rule - Never!" about racism, which took first prize at the Oberhausen Film Festival in Germany.
As a by-product of the recognition bestowed on "Solomon and Gaenor" by its simply being nominated for an Oscar, there is talk of re-releasing the film in the U.K., where it came out last April and did well as an art-house movie. Sony Classics will release it in North America in late August. (No commercial distributor has yet picked it up in Israel.)
What the Oscar nomination has done is make life easier for Morrison. At present he is working on another feature film called "For Your Love," about the struggle with the meaning of commitment and identity against a modern backdrop of endless choice - a very different situation from that in "Solomon and Gaenor," where choices were so limited.
"I didn't think the movie was going to be as good as it is," says Maureen Lipman candidly. "But it's a story that you have to tell over and over again. Love triumphs over hate."
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