A blessing on your house

Hearat Shulayim (Footnote)

Crit

Ah, fathers, sons, mothers, wives, and Talmudic scholarship. This is tragedy in a damn near Aristotelian sense: a great (in his way) man strives, sees triumph so close that he hubristically assumes it his, then is cheated out of the deserts of his life's herculean labor by perverse fates. Destruction in this case takes a sort of reverse Oedipal spin: his son Uriel, who follows in a skewed parody of Eliezer's academic footsteps--and wins the renown his father was denied--becomes the target of the envy and bitterness that poison his life.

Through a bizarre (one might unkindly say implausible) confusion, Uriel has the opportunity to make a heroic sacrifice on his father's behalf, which inevitably makes everything worse, even as it inspires perhaps Eliezer's most impressive research effort.

A film so beautifully painful that it put me in mind of Woody Allen's distinction between life that is horrible and life that is merely and blessedly miserable. And as a bonus, a few minutes of Fiddler on the Roof in Hebrew!