Holy Redeemer Lutheran Church
1948 The Alameda
San Jose, CA 95126
San Jose, CA 95126
[This year I am reading selections from Rumi for my morning devotions. Rumi is a 13th century Sufi mystic and poet, and is the most widely sold poet in North America today.]
| KUSF | 90.3FM | alternative music |
| KQKE | 960 AM | Air America - Talk Radio from the Left |
937 Jewish Germans are offered safe haven in Havana, Cuba, in 1939. They depart Hamburg in high spirits, looking forward to their new life. However, the whole voyage is actually a Nazi propaganda scheme and the passengers are never really intended to be allowed ashore once they reach their destination. After weeks of unsuccessful pleas they are forced to return back to Europe.
This is a phenomenal and grossly under-rated film dealing with Jewish people allowed to flee the terror of Nazi Germany and the Nazi propaganda machine that used this trip to show that no one wanted the Jews and therefore when they would destroy them, no one would care or have the right to care.
The picture has a terrific cast in this ill-fated adventure. For a second time, Oskar Werner, so memorable as the Dr. Willie in "Ship of Fools," plays another doctor, but this time a Jewish one. Along with his wife, Faye Dunaway, they are passengers. Of course, it's hard to fathom Miss Dunaway as Jewish. Sam Wanamaker and Lee Grant are a couple fleeing from persecution by the Gestapo. Grant's acting in a pivotal scene by cutting off her hair was Oscar made, and while she received the only acting nomination in the film, she lost to Beatrice Straight's "Network." It should also be noted that Straight's time on the screen was even more brief that Grant. Grant's brief performance was probably her best, even better than in "Shampoo," the film that gave her the supporting Oscar the year before.
While the boat is drifting along, we see the players in Cuba either desperately trying to help the unfortunate Jews or corrupt officials in the Cuban government who played along with the Nazis for their own selfish economic interests.
Wendy Hiller and Luther Adler have their moments as an elderly Jewish couple. It's also hard to conceive Hiller as Jewish until she rips her garment in the traditional way when a death occurs. Hard to envision a Jewish funeral at sea with the Nazi swastika swerving on the ship.
Ben Gazzara is brilliant as a Jewish operative desperately trying to free the passengers. He goes all over the world and uncovers nothing more than frustration. Only a last minute reprieve saved the passengers from returning to Germany. Many of those however wound up perishing in countries invaded by Germany during the war.
This brilliant film serves as a reminder to the moral decay of the 1930s and that nations did little to stop the Nazi menace from the killing of 6 million innocents. It is amazing that this film does not rank up there with "Ship of Fools," or even "Schindler's List."
From the intellectual heart of the African American churches comes a pathbreaking commentary that provides biblical interpretation grounded in African American experience and concern. Cutting-edge scholarship calls into question many of the canons of traditional biblical research and highlights the role of the Bible in African American history, accenting themes of ethnicity, class, slavery, and African heritage as these play a role in the Christian odyssey of an emancipated people. True to Our Native Land includes full-color galleries that offer windows into African American art and Africa in the New Testament period.
This is an excellent modern commentary, not only for the theology that it offers, but also for the background and the history of black America that it offers.