I've taken a circuitous road to Vanderbilt. I grew up in a Conservative Jewish family in Ottawa, Canada, with a three year interlude in London, England. (Conservative Judaism, not conservative politically.) When high school ended, I moved as far away from my home town as I possibly could, which meant Halifax, Nova Scotia. My original plan was to be a lawyer, just like my Zaidy was, but I swerved after graduating. I got a job teaching ESL in Taipei, Taiwan, and after three years applied for grad school on a whim. That whim took me to University of Victoria, which took me to Vanderbilt University.
My research focuses, broadly, on the self-construction of diasporic Jewish identity through literature and culture. For my Master's at UVic, I looked at late Imperial Russia. My great grandparents on my mom's side, Joseph and Ettie Bebchuk and Pauline Zinman, fled from Russia in that time period. I wanted to learn more about the choices they and others like them made. My research has since shifted to the twenty first century, because I've felt called to understand more about myself and the choices other young, secular Jews like me are making. This project is just another facet of that latter exploration. I wanted to interrogate my specific vulnerabilities around Judaism in order to understand what other young Jews in my shoes might be feeling.
I decided to make a video project exploring these various strands of my identity. For me, Judaism has been both a place of family and love and a place of toxicity and trauma. Every Friday night, we celebrated Shabbos Dinner with my family, a ritual that continues over Zoom and one that I hold very dear to my heart. Outside of the familial space, it becomes more tense. I am explicitly non-observant, anti-Zionist, deeply skeptical of organized Jewish structures, and have spent my life feeling alternately disaffected and ostracized. This film is my way of sitting in this tension, and understanding how to reconcile my commitment to my Jewishness and hesitancy to commit to Jewish community. The title, Forty Years in the Desert, references the Torah and positions this as a quintessentially Jewish journey. The desert metaphor became more and more prominent as I reworked the piece, and understood what it might represent both as a specifically Jewish narrative and as a cinematic tool for representing a sense of both isolation and wondrous possibility.
The chief "narrative" of this film comes from a roughly hour-long Zoom conversation with my sibling, Ophira, where we discussed our respective conceptions of family, identity, and Jewishness. Ophira is an incredibly talented performer and producer based in Toronto, and the chance to collaborate with them on such a deeply personal project has been an absolute gift. Between the excerpts of our conversation, I've included meditations through other aspects of my relationship to Judaism: film and audio from my cousin's Zoom Bar Mitzvah, a conversation with my dad where we go over letters from my Zaida Roy (great grandfather), a quiet reflection on the violence I saw in my final trip to Israel. The film juxtaposes these struggles, resolutions, and separations, ending on the note that to be Jewish is to struggle, rather than to have any clean resolutions. I anticipated my film ending on a far more bitter note than I actually did, and I'm grateful to Ophira for helping me reach a place of greater understanding.
Outside of the Zoom recordings, much of the footage (particularly the establishing shots of the desert, including the opening and closing scenes) were shot during a recent trip with friends to Palm Springs, California. The desert pictured in this photo is Andreas Canyon, part of the Indian Canyons Nature Preserve in Riverside County. The aerial shots were taken on a flight from Palm Springs to Phoenix. All conversational footage was filmed in Nashville. My filmmaking method consists of gathering a ton of footage, and allowing my story to be guided by the footage I've accumulated rather than trying to fit the footage into a prescribed story. For example, the very last sections I filmed and edited together were my conversation with Ophira, and the section detailing my trip to Israel. The story of Forty Years in the Desert could not have been told without either of them. The non-linear editing encouraged by Adobe Premiere had me swapping around various sections until the final product felt right.
I am incredibly fortunate to have access to a massive treasure trove of writings from my ancestors. My great-great-great-great aunt, Rachel Calof, wrote a memoir of her life as a homesteader in North Dakota in the late 19th century. My great-great-great uncle, Maier Calof, wrote a memoir of his own in 1944. My great-grandfather, my Zaida Roy, was a prolific and reflective letter writer, and many of his letters and speeches are at my parents' home in Toronto. I'm honoured that my sibling and I are able to carry on our family's long tradition of storytelling. Going through Zaida Roy's letters with my father helped reinforce the fact that my Judaism was not just my own; rather, I was and am a part of a much deeper family and communal structure. Many of the still shots in my film were sent to me by my mother, father, and Bobba (grandmother), with any others pulled from my Facebook.
I realized very quickly that I would have to expose and sit in various moments of tension and trauma that have highlighted my estrangement from various Jewish communities. The Berlin pizza parlour incident - an incident heightened by the fact that the one Jewish person who I knew had my back, my friend Paige, was away from the table and didn't know about the incident until I came to her sobbing about it later. My trip to Israel, where I was forever shaken by the ruthlessness and Islamophobia of the fellow Jewish teenagers I was there with. Several moments that didn't make it into the video, but were in my conversation with Ophira. Naming these violences was cathartic, and they had to be a part of my project. Working through them in a safe space with my sibling made it easier.
Through this process, I've learned an almost impossible to categorize amount about myself. I've realized that I love filmmaking and visual storytelling, and while this is one of my first films, it certainly won't be the last. I feel as though I've shared an intense and intimate experience with my family, both through the making of the film and our viewing of it. I've learned not to "force" a narrative, both in my storytelling and in my research - if I do the work and accumulate the footage and info, a narrative will emerge. And I've learned to challenge notions of community in my research - one's notion of community does not need to be bound to conceptions of The Jewish Community, rather than any gathering of like-minded Jewish folk. It encourages me to spend more time disrupting these concepts of community rather than accepting them as inherently correct.
I'm very proud and honoured to present Forty Years in the Desert.