One good German

Ha-dira (The flat)

Crit

What Arnon Goldfinger knows about his grandmother before she dies, leaving her family to clean out the Tel Aviv apartment to which she and her husband had emigrated from Berlin in 1937: that she never made any attempt to learn Hebrew, that she never stopped considering herself German, that the décor and extensive library in the flat made it "Berlin in Tel Aviv" for him.

What he learns in the process of dealing with the piles of gloves, purses, and scarves left behind--and the books, all in German! ("No one reads Shakespeare," a dealer tells him. "No one reads Balzac. Goethe? Forget it")--is that she has also kept a vast trove of documents dating back to the couple's days in Germany. And from newspapers and magazines and personal letters in this archive, the filmmaker makes about as shocking a discovery as a Jew could make: that his grandmother and Zionist grandfather had been friends with an SS officer and his wife until emigration . . . and then, making regular trips to Germany after the war, had rekindled that friendship.

And those, incredibly, are just the beginning of the discoveries. A truly remarkable documentary.