http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/entertainment/12791498.htm
By Judy Stone
Special to the Mercury News
When Liev Schreiber dedicated his new film to his Jewish grandfather, it was more than testimony to a lifetime of love and sacrifice. For the spirit of Alex Milgram, born in a Jewish village (shtetl), inexplicably hovers over the tale of the Ukrainian grandfather in ``Everything Is Illuminated,'' the first film that Schreiber, a Tony award-winning actor, wrote and directed.
Based on the bestselling novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, the film recounts the search of Jonathan (Elijah Wood), a young American who travels to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather's life during World War II.
He is accompanied by a Ukrainian would-be translator, Alex (Eugene Hutz), who massacres the English language and Alex's grandfather (the Russian actor, Boris Leskin), who claims to be blind, but drives the Heritage Touring car which carries Jewish tourists in search of their history. Along for the trip is the old man's pet dog, name of Sammy Davis Jr. Jr.
Wisely, Schreiber used a scalpel to eliminate chapters in Foer's book that explored Polish shtetl life from 1791 to 1942 and he changed the ending. ``The biggest challenge for me,'' Schreiber said, ``was to shift the film's tone.'' That ranged from the hilarious opening scenes to the somber conclusion, and he didn't mind expressing the thoughts that led to the surprise ending.
While Schreiber was in pre-production, and musing over the character of Alex's outspokenly anti-Semitic grandfather, he saw ``Hiding and Seeking,'' a documentary that strangely almost replicates Foer's fiction.
The documentary is the true story of a search for the Polish peasants who saved three Jewish brothers from the Holocaust at risk to their own lives. The ancient grandmother, doubled over in pain, clearly remembers the Jews they helped, but grimly notes that the brothers never even sent a postcard after they left Poland.
That film stimulated Schreiber's ideas about the contrast between the way those who died in the Holocaust were memorialized and how little thought was given to those who lived and what they had to go through in order to survive. ``The very least of which was to deny their faith,'' Schreiber said. ``Spirituality was no longer acceptable if you wanted to stay alive. Beyond that, they had to give away children, to point fingers at family members and friends, to lose their identity and other horrible, horrible things in the name of survival. They sometimes defined themselves in a non-Jewish way.''
Schreiber, a towering figure with a gentle voice, went on without pause. ``I grew up on welfare, on the lower East Side of New York and lived in the abandoned buildings called squats. My grandfather, a chivalrous, cultured man who came to America before 1920 to escape anti-Semitic pogroms, worked very hard to raise me and support us. He delivered meat from the meat market to the diners. My mother drove a taxi and made puppets and sold them on the streets. She was an artist and a painter but never made a living doing that. Now she lives in a Virginia ashram, which has given her a sense of well-being in a community that shares interests and spirituality with her. She always wanted me to be proud of my Jewish heritage.''
But at the same time, he saw Jewish slumlords who were burning people out of their homes in order to sell their real estate. ``I thought, `Well, I'm a Jew and my mom tells me we're the chosen people, so how could these people be so cruel?' I thought that the Jews who came to America did have justifiable paranoia and fear and that set off a new kind of (Jewish) anti-Semitism. So I chose to change the ending of Foer's book hoping that the character of the grandfather could articulate some of that and do it in a cathartic way,'' he said.
``Alex's grandfather had denied his own Judaism in order to survive and was living in a kind of shame and guilt and tremendous anger. He was spiteful and anti-Semitic but at the same time he ran a business that helped Jewish people find what happened to their loved ones.''
Out of Yale School of Drama for only seven years, Schreiber began achieving recognition for the diversity of his roles in movies (a transvestite, a murderer, Orson Welles, a cuckolded husband) and on and off Broadway (``Cymbeline,'' ``Hamlet'' and a Tony Award for ``Glengarry Glen Ross''). In a 1999 New Yorker profile on Schreiber, his work drew an unusual accolade from Dustin Hoffman: ``He has a kind of wisdom about human contradictions that is beyond his years.''
Perhaps Schreiber understood those contradictions as a result of his own extraordinarily difficult, angry, attention-getting thievery as a youth. Or maybe from the example of his socialist grandfather who lost his life's savings in helping his often troubled daughter in the fight to gain custody of Liev when he was 4 from her wealthy husband.
The beloved grandfather who was his father figure died at age 93 in 1993. Since then, Schreiber said with a sweetness of remembrance, ``Everything I did was motivated by my grandfather. Every character I played, everything I've written was motivated by him. He was my model of what it is to be a mensch, a man.''
He was writing a script about his grandfather when he read ``A Very Rigid Search'' by Foer in the New Yorker, which foreshadowed the novel. ``I felt deeply connected to it,'' Schreiber recalled. ``He had done in 15 pages what I had been trying to do in 100 and had done it with humor.''
He believes that Foer is happy with his changes. ``He told me, `The book's the book and you're doing the film.' ''
`Everything Is Illuminated'
In theaters now
Rated: PG-13 (violence, language)
Starring: Elijah Wood, Eugene Hutz, Boris Leskin.
Director: Liev Schreiber
Running time: 1 hr., 42 min.