“There are two of me,” Blume told Haaretz: “Me the grown-up, the grandmother, and me who still sees the world through the eyes of a child. I can be 4 years old or 12 years old. That’s not something I think about, but when I am writing I guess that’s where I go. To that part of myself which is still at that age.” Great news for the inner tweens in all of us, who now never have to stop listening to Party in the U.S.A. What?

Of Margaret, the title character in one of her most well-known books, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Blume recalls: “Margaret was the kind of a child I was. It was my relationship with God I wrote about. I had that kind of relationship with God. I actually felt the presence of God when I was alone in the room talking to God. It is not my story though.”

And for those of you looking for your next Judy Blume fix, the film version of Tiger Eyes, which Blume adapted with her son, who also directed it, is reportedly in post-production. Talk about the circle of life. And winning!

Relatedly (maybe) in the world of things written about young adults, Motherlode, the Times’ parenting blog, asks parents: “Are you your child’s ATM?” The answer, according to a survey on personal finance web site The Mint, is overwhelmingly yes: “The poll results show that 63% of today’s kids 17 and younger are “always” given extra money when they asked for it, and 26% of children 17 and younger “sometimes” receive extra money when they ask.”

And just what are our future leaders doing with their newfound funds? “Overall, the most commonly selected reason why kids today ask for extra money is to buy tickets to a movie/concert/sporting event (40%), followed by food/drink (24%) or to buy a toy/game/phone (19%). Only 15% answered that extra dollars are spent on school/educational purposes, and 1% wanted funds to give to or participate in a charitable effort.” Way to go, 1%!

(Also, mom, if you’re reading this, I’m going to need some cash. The LIRR doesn’t pay for itself.)

“You didn’t love it,” I said, after reading the story. “The author hasn’t played fair with the reader. He’s tacked on an ending that comes out of nowhere and doesn’t grow indigenously from the materials he’s presented.”

“I don’t care,” she said, crisply summing up the marriage. “I loved it anyway.”

“Try to stay awake,” I said. It was late at night in Great Neck, Long Island. “I’ll show you a story that will prove my point.”

She agreed. I generally have a few half-formed notions floating around in my head, ready to be topped off at some future point. I went to work on one of them in the attic, a large, comfortable space with a cot, an oaken desk, and a picture window that looked out on the backyards of a cluster of psychiatrists who had been drawn to the neighborhood. I found it perfect for taking naps—and occasionally doing some work.

Jeannie Berlin and Charles Grodin in The Heartbreak Kid, 1972

I had come up with a number of stories in this makeshift “office,” although I don’t recall spinning them off quite so easily, and certainly not in the two hours it took me that night to complete this story. “Change of Plan” deals with a young Jewish man named Leonard Cantrow who gets married, drives to Miami with his bride, and on the second day of his honeymoon sees and falls in love with a blonde, shiksa goddess. Rather than let this remain a fantasy (as the author did in real life) Cantrow declares that his marriage is over, and pursues (successfully) his golden-haired princess to freezing Minnesota.

When I got back to the bedroom, my wife was asleep. Rather than wake her, I put the story in an envelope, and mailed it the next morning to my agent, the soon-to-become iconic Candida Donadio. (Her clients at the time included the relatively unknown Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, Mario Puzo, and Peter Mathiessen.) We’d had some victories before, among them a good many stories and the novels Stern and A Mother’s Kisses. Donadio sent the new piece to Esquire, which bought it immediately. The fiction editor—Robert Brown, by nature a timid man—told me later that he had stormed into the office of the editor in chief, Harold Hayes, flung the story down on his desk, and said, “If you don’t buy this story, I quit.”

“Change of Plan” was published in 1966 without a word changed. Generally, when a story appears, the author might hear from a nephew in Fort Lauderdale, who says he enjoyed it—and it quietly disappears. With great luck, it might turn up in a collection of the author’s stories or, in some cases, an anthology of related pieces. Once in a while, there is a happier scenario. It doesn’t mean the story is better or worse than others—only that it’s hit a nerve. Such was the case with “Change of Plan.” I can’t say that I was immediately “deluged” with film offers, but there were three or four within days of publication, which was deluge enough for me.

The one I found most appealing came from Max Rosenberg, a producer of horror films and Harold Pinter’s Birthday Party. His plan was to do a three-segment film, combining my piece with one by the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien and another by Pinter. Very good company indeed, for the snobbish likes of me. I wrote a screenplay for my story. For the part of Cantrow, the producer had in mind Elliott Gould, who was married to Barbra Streisand at the time. The Rosenberg film was never made, there being a traditional resistance in Hollywood to “anthology films.” Neil Simon and Palomar Pictures (and the director Elaine May) came into the picture then. By then Simon had written a dizzying string of Broadway successes, including Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple. To do the screenplay, Simon went off to Majorca, which is where all screenwriters should be fortunate enough to do their film work. Some years later, Edgar Scherick, who produced the movie, told me that Simon had phoned him and said: “I can’t write this. The main character does not have a single redeeming quality.”

“Did he return the money?” I asked.

“No.”

“Then you had nothing to worry about.”

The film was released in 1972 and starred Charles Grodin, Cybill Shepherd, Jeannie Berlin (Elaine May’s daughter) as the rejected bride, and Eddie Albert as Shepherd’s father—a memorable performance for which he received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. It was the first story of mine to be adapted. My feeling about having work adapted, generally, is that once the check is cashed it’s best to cross your fingers and hope for the best. Richard Pryor told me that a writer once complained to him that his novel had been mangled on the screen. Pryor listened patiently, then asked, “Did you get paid?”

But there is no other way to put this—I absolutely loved The Heartbreak Kid. It’s as if I’d sketched out a floor plan and May and Simon had used it to construct a dream house. My story had a different ending. The “hero” becomes enraptured by his new bride’s mother. There is a hint that he will run off with her. In the film version, Grodin, having secured his blonde goddess, sits beside some children at a wedding reception and wonders what he’s accomplished—and what he’s going to do next. I liked my ending and I liked Simon’s. There are others that might have worked as well.

The reception of the film was enthusiastic and became even more so as the years rolled along. Though never a monster at the box office, The Heartbreak Kid settled in comfortably as a “cult classic.” Pauline Kael adored it. Neil Simon considered it his favorite among his movies. Several women’s groups demurred (my first and inevitable “demurred”), feeling that the main character was a bit swinish and his wife treated shabbily. My response to such criticism is to brandish the word “satire”—and to walk away quickly.

After the film’s release, I met Simon for the first time and asked him how he could have gotten into the mind of the main character.

“I pretended I was you.”

“But you’ve just met me.”

“Didn’t matter. I’d read your books. And for God’s sakes, couldn’t you have made the story a bit longer?” (and, by implication, made his job easier).

I could have written more, of course, but it was stuffy in the attic and I was racing to go downstairs before my wife fell asleep.

Despite his quibble about the story’s length, Simon was more than kind to me in the future. A decade later, he turned my book The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life into the Steve Martin film The Lonely Guy. (Alert: self-serving anecdote coming up.)

At a speaking engagement in East Hampton, an audience member asked Simon why, in the way of other playwrights, he hadn’t done more adaptations.

“I only adapt Friedman,” he said.

I’d sold the rights for a modest sum—“found money,” I felt—and cheerfully went about my business. But one morning I received in the mail an envelope from Bristol/Myers Squibb. Probably a toothpaste sample, I thought, and tossed it into the wastepaper basket. Then I realized that I really enjoy trying out new toothpastes, not to mention that I was a bit down at the heels at the moment. I retrieved the envelope. Inside was a royalty check for $25,000 (the company had been an unlikely backer of the film), a princely sum at the time and hardly a disgraceful one now.

Simon thought, at one point, that the movie would be a good basis for a Broadway musical. I’m told that he auditioned several composers (one of them, Edward Kleban, the poor man who wrote the lyrics and co-wrote the score for Chorus Line) none of whom quite worked out. Among the rejected ones was Dorothy Fields, who had written 400 songs, among them one of my favorites, “The Way You Look Tonight.” Fields sought me out and insisted on my giving her a second opinion. I agreed to meet her at a steakhouse called Nickels on the Upper East Side. She was a large, 60ish woman with an operatic style, who appeared not to be as robust as she might have been some years before. We took a corner banquette in the crowded restaurant. Before I could take a sip of my drink, she burst into “Lila’s Lament”—a song she had composed for the rejected wife. With a packed restaurant of stunned diners looking on, she sang full-throatedly, looking directly at me, and making a variety of faces to match the sentiments of the lyrics. Since I’d never been sung at publicly, and at such great volume, I wasn’t quite sure of how to react and tried a variety of expressions, mostly soulful, in response to hers. I understood why it hadn’t worked out for Simon, but I did feel awful for Fields, who died soon afterward.

Thinking back, I suppose those days were heady ones for me, though they didn’t seem so at the time. I thought this was the way things were supposed to be. After struggling for a decade, I’d published two successful novels. My short stories were being snapped up as fast as I could write them—or so it seemed—and the first two plays I tried (Scuba Duba and Steambath) were hits, a term that my British friends find offensive. In the great tradition, I was “flown out to the Coast” to write the Lenny Bruce story. When I backed away, I was offered a substantial sum to “stay interested” for another month—money that I earned, incidentally, by reading truckloads of Bruce correspondence and depositions. Soon afterward, I was “flown out” once again to write the screenplay version of the play Owl and the Pussycat, which eventually starred Barbra Streisand and George Segal. The most notable part of that experience was having the actress Natalie Wood assigned to me as a secretary. I didn’t think I needed a secretary, but Ray Stark, the producer, insisted that I have one and sent over the star of Splendor in the Grass. She was good at the job, although, perhaps understandably, I tensed up a bit during our sessions. (It’s my understanding that her psychiatrist recommended she take a job away from acting to help her with her depression.)

My feelings about Hollywood have always been ambivalent. Generationally, as a novelist, my heroes were the usual suspects: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. Scribner’s—not Warner Brothers—was the temple, and the editor Maxwell Perkins was the High Priest. Screenwriting, at the time, was considered sort of down market. There were women in Greenwich Village—trust me on this—who wouldn’t consider you as a lover if you worked on films, or if you “sold out” and “allowed” your novel to be bought by the movies (which is what we called them until “film” took over.) After I’d written Stir Crazy, which was released to much success in 1980, the starry-eyed young attorney who handled the contract told me that I was “the hottest writer in Hollywood.” The thought so horrified me that I disappeared for a year and wrote a novel, Tokyo Woes—a “purifying” effort that doubled back on me when the rights were sold to a film producer.

Having said all this (a favorite term used by producers who are preparing to give an inch—and no more) the film world has always treated me generously. My efforts were professional, but I always felt, often correctly, that I was being rewritten as I wrote. Others, as usually happens, were called in—sometimes by the dozen—to “improve” my work. And improve it they occasionally did. Mario Puzo was paid a million dollars for the screenplay of The Cotton Club—and there is not a single line of his dialogue in the film. It’s the nature of the beast, and on occasion it can be a handsome beast indeed. But it requires that the writer be a team player, and in that sense I never entirely measured up. It’s fun to see your name on the Big Screen. But I’ve never felt that pride of authorship that comes along with the publication of a novel, or short story, or, for the most part, a play. There are so many hands, many of them gifted, that touch the great machine that becomes a movie—even an awful one. And no one needs me to point out that it’s the director who “writes” the movie—although honorable men (and alright, women) have come to blows on this point.

My involvement in The Heartbreak Kid was the most pleasurable of my Hollywood adventures. I enjoyed the subsequent success of Stir Crazy and Splash—both written directly for the screen—and how could I not? But to the extent that I have a sensibility, it was the Neil Simon adaptation that picked up on it. And apart from the two hours in the attic, all I had do was sit back and enjoy the ride. No meetings, no huge sheaves of the dreaded “notes” that eventually drove me away from what is now called The Industry. All I had to do was show up at a theatre and enjoy the movie. It was certainly far better than anything I could have achieved on my own.

Ben Stiller and Malin Akerman in The Heartbreak Kid, 2007

The Heartbreak Kid has been remade, this time by the Farrelly Brothers, starring Ben Stiller, and will be released this Friday. I haven’t seen the script or the film, although I’m told by an agent that it is “vulgar and hilarious.” (The very words used to describe the plays of Aristophanes, incidentally.) Once again, there is very little for me to do except to watch the movie, take full credit for anything that‘s exceptional, and to deny involvement with any parts that aren’t.

There are some who feel more possessive about The Heartbreak Kid than I do. Why do it again? Why fool around with a classic comedy? For one thing—small matter—I don’t control the rights. And even if I did, my allegiance is always to the original story. There have been more than a hundred productions of my play Steambath. I’ve never felt it would be useful to run around the country and try to oversee the all-lesbian or all-black approaches to the play. Didn’t my grandmother have a Yiddish expression for my feelings? Luzhem spielen—“Let them play”?

Nothing much more of any note came out of that momentarily magical attic. We sold the house soon afterward. But though the story “Change of Plan” flourished, the marriage, alas, did not. A divorce followed a few years later—not, I would hope, as a by-product of the story. I’m told that a psychiatrist moved in at one point and may be sitting in the attic now, hard at work on a screenplay.

Peter Sarsgaard will play Cleveland, which I’m excited about—not that I’ll have any contact with him. There’s no chance producers will spot me, gasp and cry, “That look! We must give you a screen test!” This casting call is for those who aspire to become, as they put it, “background.” This is where they cobble together the bodies that will provide visual texture in the film, like people sitting at distant tables in a restaurant.

Ever since I decided to move here for grad school this spring, people had been telling me I had to read The Mysteries of Pittsburgh—which I did, finally, last week. It seemed serendipitous that it would begin filming in town shortly after I got here; fateful, even, that the film was looking for extras for a “punk club scene” and my hair is pure fire-engine red. Plus I’m a bit homesick for Los Angeles, and figured being around a film crew might feel comfortingly familiar. For this mishmash of reasons, I happily caked on the eyeliner.

There are, from what I can tell, three types of people striving for this extra gig:

1. The idle. A handful of senior citizens who demonstrate no understanding of the casting process, if not general befuddlement, but what the heck, they’ve got time on their hands. And a middle-aged woman sporting a could-be-from-any-decade outfit that’s distinguished by its lack of waist and yards of fabric, crows about how exciting unemployment is—yesterday she passed the first audition to be on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and now this!

2. People who’ve held onto those 80s fashions all these years and are just dying for a chance to wear their slouchy red suede boots and fingerless lace gloves again. Why, exactly, some of these things never got thrown out is another mystery of Pittsburgh.

3. Genuine actors. The side-ponytail girl makes a point of greeting the casting agent. A pretty blonde Pitt student has her 8×10 headshot in hand. A Mama Rose-style stagemother hustles her two crimped-haired preteen daughters up to the registration table. They know the drill.

What’s missing (myself excepted) are the bookish types who’ve actually read the novel. I was kind of hoping we’d sit around jawing about the mysteries of the movie version of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Like…

- Why is it set in the 1980s? The book was written then, but nothing places the story specifically in that era. Is it because bisexuality comes up but AIDS doesn’t? Could it just be because 80s retro is hot?

- Would anyone besides me be saddened that fabulous Arthur won’t be in the movie at all? Would they know which “important parts of his character” will be “folded in” to Cleveland? Mysteries adapter/director Rawson Marshall Thurber (the auteur behind Dodgeball) isn’t spilling.

- Considering a crucial Seder scene in Chabon’s previous novel-turned-movie Wonder Boys never made it to the screen, will the fact that the protagonist’s dad in Mysteries is not only a mobster but a Jewish mobster get any play?

Maybe the people who might debate these questions will show up later. It’s still early; most students are wisely sleeping in.

Meanwhile, we wanna-be extras obediently fill out forms, get photographed and have our measurements checked by assistants who themselves have dressed up in 80s regalia for the occasion. “Are you really a size 42?” they ask the man in front of me, who shrugs as he clocks in at just 38. Me, I worry: My hair might be a perfect fit, but they want “college age”—and while I’m honestly and truly a graduate student, I’m not sure that my 30-something self will pass muster.

And what I realize is that I desperately want to make the cut. Sure, I’d like to be a blurry head in the back of a scene, but what I really want is to see from the inside out how this book becomes a movie. The adaptation doesn’t end when the screenplay is done: every person on set, every prop man and wardrobe assistant and grip is adding to what the story will be on screen. Will any of the cast and crew care about Chabon’s novel, or will they all just be doing their jobs lighting and pushing the dolly and pretending to eat on cue?

Whether I get to see for myself is uncertain. As they told me at the casting session, We’ll be in touch.

Of course, there’s no reason Gere and Binoche couldn’t inhabit Jewish characters. Gene Kelly and Natalie Wood did it in Marjorie Morningstar half a century ago, when American-Jewish life was much more of a mystery to mainstream America. But in the screen adaptation of Bee Season, out tomorrow, the characters themselves are no longer very Jewish.

Myla Goldberg’s 2000 novel was mainly about families, their myths of harmony, and what happens when those fantasies unravel. In the book, Eliza, the family underachiever, wins her school spelling bee, revealing an aptitude for a heightened experience of language described by Jewish mystics as a path to God. Saul, a lifelong student of mysticism who never discovered such a capacity within himself, begins to train her, unwittingly neglecting his once-favored son Aaron. Meanwhile, Miriam, who steals trinkets from random homes in an abstract effort to restore a world shattered by her parents’ early deaths, begins to lose interest in concealing her habit. Saul is as oblivious to her deterioration as he is to his son’s resentment.

The context for this story of family dysfunction was explicitly Jewish. Saul was a slightly disheveled hippie-turned-cantor at a suburban synagogue, his congregation consisting of the Mr. and Mrs. Schwartzes who rush the oneg tables at such places. Saul, we learned, had had a convoluted journey to his calling, from early years as the son of a deracinated Jewish father to college experiments with acid to the rejection of drugs for the levitations of Jewish mysticism.

In the film, Saul becomes a polished religious-studies professor and Miriam a convert from Catholicism. Though screenwriter Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal and the directing team of Scott McGehee and David Siegel retain the book’s enchantment with Jewish mysticism, they have leached it almost entirely of its context. “We didn’t want the religious side of Judaism to overwhelm the spiritual side of the story,” the directors told me before the film’s release. In the film’s production notes, they explain, “We wanted to explore a more universal and accessible vision of what an internal spiritual quest of any kind might be like.”

For those who have read Bee Season, the resulting film may recall an earlier era when Jewish source materials made for distinctly non-Jewish films, when Jewish writers and producers shied away from overtly Jewish content either as a bid for assimilation or to avoid antagonizing isolationists in the World War II era. This is how both The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) proceeded without references to the protagonist’s Jewish identity or to the fate of European Jewry, respectively; how The Life of Emile Zola (1937), which focuses on Alfred Dreyfus’ trial for treason, managed to fail to mention the Frenchman’s religion.

The directors of Bee Season suggest that this kind of cinematic departure may mean something different today. “Thirty years ago, you couldn’t tell this story this way,” Siegel says. “You couldn’t call attention to Judaism without being focused on the Jewish identity of the characters.” For Siegel and McGehee, America’s acceptance of Jews has turned them into such an unexceptional ingredients in the melting pot that artistic works no longer carry the obligation to double as referenda on what it means to be Jewish in America.

Indeed, the Jewish relationship with America has never seemed as symbiotic as it has in recent years, and the only seeming challenge to Jewish films these days is how busy Steven Spielberg and Mel Brooks are. On the other hand, when was the last time Hollywood gave us a film that truly engaged with what it means to be an American Jew today, a “Jewish” film that is neither a Holocaust drama nor a coy, loving send-up of ethnic stereotype? When Peter Riegert, the respected actor who appeared in Crossing Delancey, adapted a short story from Gerald Shapiro’s collection Bad Jews into the 2004 film King of the Corner (featuring Isabellla Rossellini, Eli Wallach, and Eric Bogosian), the film garnered more attention for Riegert having to take it to theaters across the country himself rather than for its sensitive portrayal of a secular Jewish family.

Gyllenhaal, Siegel, and McGehee claim to have made changes for no reason other than to amplify the story, and many are imaginative. For instance, the novel comes to suggest that Saul never developed his daughter’s mystical gift because he perceives the world with his head instead of his heart. “Saul’s transformation into a professor—which was Naomi’s idea—made sense because he has this very intellectual relationship with religion,” Siegel says. For similar reasons, Miriam, who has restrained herself to allow Saul to feel like the leader of the family, has been made a convert. “It’s a nice shorthand for how she gave up something to be with Saul,” Siegel explains.

On the other hand, these alterations leave the Naumanns’ preoccupations without persuasive antecedents. When Aaron, who in the novel would “enter the synagogue at his father’s side feeling like a prince beholding the kingdom he stood to inherit,” rebels against his father, his defiance—a tour of other faiths that culminates in a fascination with Hare Krishna—makes sense only as a reaction to the communal Jewish life his cantor father had imposed. For viewers who haven’t read the book, Aaron’s spiritual sampling will seem like generic adolescent defiance.

Similarly, in the book, Saul’s stewardship of an ordinary congregation implicitly explained his obsession with mysticism; in the film, the avocation comes across as random and weird. These are certainly spiritual times in America, but it may be premature to assume that kabbalist aspirations require no more explanation than a gardening habit. A more specifically Jewish setting might have had a clarifying effect, making the material easier to relate to for non-Jews. Indeed, if Siegel and McGehee are right and Jews have become thoroughly integrated, non-Jews shouldn’t find that backstory too difficult to absorb.

The film does pose an intriguing, if inadvertent, question absent from Goldberg’s novel: Does anything indivisibly Jewish remain after the traditional markers of American “Jewishness”—the stock characters, the rituals of the shul—have been removed? Is there something uniquely Jewish about this story, or is the Jewish teaching it portrays so universally applicable because it’s so unspecific? As American culture performs on Jewish tradition the loving evisceration to which it subjects other cultures before they can join its mainstream, what remains?

A film hardly requires explicit Jewish content to become a compelling portrayal of the Jewish experience. The principals in King of the Corner are only nominally Jewish; their humorous but despairing preoccupations with family and death are not. Sometimes, there are no Jews in the film at all; arguably, one of the most “Jewish” films of recent years was Vadim Perelman’s House of Sand and Fog (based on the Andre Dubus III novel), about a family of Iranian immigrants destroyed by exile and family catastrophe.

This was the sense of what it meant to be Jewish that invisibly pollinated those early Hollywood films, films that Jewish studio heads assiduously kept free of explicit references to Jewishness. There is little of this diffuse, emotional sense in Bee Season. The argument has been made that early Hollywood birthed the very idea of the American dream by withholding ethnically specific context while imparting abstract Jewish values. Bee Season withholds both.

The cinematic version of the book, directed by the stage and film actor Liev Schreiber and out in theaters today, also wants to emphasize that, in the end, this is a Ukrainian story. Easily half the film is in Russian and Ukrainian, and Schreiber even takes care to distinguish among regional accents. He is fastidious in his efforts toward verisimilitude; the hand soap on a train and a flask of vodka in a rural restaurant are local brands. Schreiber pushes Ukraine (and the Eastern Europe for which it stands) to the forefront of the story, but the place he discovers is completely different from the Ukraine of Foer’s novel.

In addition to doing away with the magical-realist chronicle of a shtetl that consumed half of the book, the film makes another crucial departure. (Caveat lector: the following is a spoiler for those who haven’t seen the film.) In the book, Grandfather, a gentile, is an anti-Semite who turns out to have sent his best friend, a Jew, to his death during a Nazi raid on their village when forced to choose between him and his own family. His journey with the novel’s protagonist to what turns out to be the scene of his act of complicity forces his acknowledgment and repentance of his sins.

In the film, too, Grandfather begins as a virulent anti-Semite, but the identity concealed beneath the sting of his bigotry isn’t that of a gentile accomplice; Grandfather, it turns out, is a Jewish survivor. Having inadvertently survived an execution squad in his hometown, he casts off his yellow-starred jacket and absconds into a new life as a gentile. His transformation is so resolute that we meet him as someone who knows no way to refer to Jews except as “zhidy,” or “kikes.” (In fact, the film’s only failure of veracity comes when the American informs his guides that he knows very well what their constant references to him as a zhid mean—”Jew.” It’s worse. Much worse.)

What did Schreiber, who adapted the screenplay in addition to directing, intend by this single but tremendous transformation of a major character? Why turn the film’s main anti-Semite from a philo-Semitic gentile to an anti-Semitic Jew? Does the change hint at a possible reconciliation, a symbiosis of suffering of the we-are-all-Jews variety? Or is Schreiber letting Ukrainians off the hook when he allows his camera to focus on a Jew instead of a gentile accomplice?

Schreiber claims to have had something else in mind. “Whenever we memorialize the Jews who died in the Holocaust as heroes, I believe we overlook the impact that it has on those who have survived,” Schreiber told me in an email. “At the very least, they were required to deny their identity and faith…. For me making the most vehemently anti-Semitic character in the film Jewish was a way to articulate the burden of guilt and shame that so many survivors live with today.”

What Schreiber, the grandson of a 1916 refugee from Eastern European pogroms, seems to be saying is that only a second-generation descendant of Holocaust survivors could dare to re-imagine Jewish death—and life—during World War II through such a complicated, nuanced, eminently unheroic perspective on survival. Their elders are inclined either to put the tragedy behind them or to insist on an unadulterated worship of survivors as heroes. Cleverly, Schreiber is using a youth-oriented film—Everything Is Iluminated was wildly popular among younger readers, and the film works to feel kinetic and hip—to press its youthful viewers to think in less preconceived ways about what it means to have survived the Holocaust. This way, Schreiber appears to be arguing, is a more difficult confrontation with the legacy of that tragedy, but for all that also a more sincere veneration. True empathy, after all, comes from appropriation and identification, not bequeathed dogma.

There is a chuckling commonplace in the literary world that Jonathan Safran Foer, who was 25 when he published his novel, which brims with sagelike inquiries into and pronouncements on the meaning of it all, writes like an old man. The film only underscores this. The novel’s notion of Eastern Europe, after all, was a fairly traditionalist American Jewish view: the Ukrainian gentiles were the killers and the Jews were the victims. Foer’s wishful, personal innovation was that it took the visit of a young American Jew named Jonathan Safran Foer to call out the hibernating guilt and shame of the former.

Schreiber offers an entirely different picture. He hardly avoids the Holocaust, but he wants to expand our notion of what it meant to survive it. Survival, after all, takes place mostly after the tragedy. And the great tragedy of Eastern Europe was not only that it helped to kill Jews during the Holocaust, but also that it refused to acknowledge their suffering and honor their true identities after it.

It’s hard to blame Grandfather for his self-denial during the war, but it’s more difficult to exculpate him for his postwar self-rejections and devolution into an anti-Semite, Ukraine’s inhospitable postwar terrain for Jews notwithstanding. The unpleasant aftertaste of Schreiber’s film is that survivors were not only heroes.

It’s not an argument Schreiber could have advanced with an American Jewish character. If Grandfather had emigrated to America instead of remaining in Ukraine, of course, he would have become a “hero.” And by choosing to focus on an anti-Semitic Jew rather than a philo-Semitic gentile, Schreiber returns a kind of agency to Jews themselves—an agency missing from Foer’s novel—although at the enormous cost of complicating their wartime and postwar identities.