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Closing the Circle

Brazilian Filmmaker Explores His Roots in Berlin

By Daniela Gerson in Berlin

Cao Hamburger came to Berlin to promote his film "The Year My Parents Went on Vacation" at the Berlin International Film Festival -- and to discover the city his father fled in 1936.

The Brazilian director Cao Hamburger arrived in Berlin last week to present a film about exile -- and to conclude his own.

"For me, the opportunity to premier this film in Berlin was very moving," says Hamburger, the son of a German Jew who fled Berlin in 1936 and an Italian Catholic. "With my ancestors coming from here, it's like closing a circle."

One of his objectives in creating his film "O Ano em que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias" ("The Year My Parents Went on Vacation") was to explore the intersection of exile and Jewish identity. The winner of audience awards in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and a contender in the official competition of the Berlin International Film Festival, the film is set in a Brazil caught between the euphoric road to a World Cup soccer victory and the tightening grasp of the military dictatorship.

Against this backdrop, the story of three generations in exile, both metaphoric and real, unfolds. Twelve-year old Mauro finds his world turned upside down when his parents, leftists targeted by the military dictatorship, take him from their assimilated home in the interior of Brazil and dump him in front of his grandfather's apartment in Sao Paulo.

As their car speeds off, Mauro, who has never met his grandfather, is left to fend for himself in a foreign world where men wear long black coats in tropical weather, Yiddish is as common as Portuguese, and pickled herring is eaten for breakfast.

The neighborhood is based on the actual community of Bom Retiro (the name means "good respite"). Today populated mainly with Korean, Chinese and Hispanic immigrants, it was once the center of Jewish Brazil. In the film, set in 1970, it is portrayed as a modern-day shtetl with a distinctly Brazilian flavor.

At the time, Bom Retiro's Jewish residents were mainly part of the wave of tens of thousands of Eastern European Jews driven by rising anti-Semitism to Brazil in the 1920s and 1930s. This influx followed in a long tradition of Jews seeking refuge in Brazil that dates back to Pedro Alvares Cabral's discovery voyage in 1500: Iberians fled the Inquisition, Dutch embraced trading opportunities in the 17th century, and Moroccans expelled from their homeland settled in the mouth of the Amazon. By 1969, about 140,000 Jews lived in Brazil, with the largest concentration in Sao Paulo, where the community numbered 55,000.

Hamburger, whose parents were professors at the University of Sao Paulo and were -- like Mauro's parents in the film -- arrested during the dictatorship, was raised as an atheist in a residential neighborhood near the school. But although foreign to his own experience, he chose to locate his film in Bom Retiro because for him it symbolized the religious and racial syncretism unique to Brazil. "I wanted to deal with this possibility of peaceful coexistence between different cultures," he says. "It's an example Brazil can give to the world."

To get a flavor for Bom Retiro, he relied on screenwriter Claudio Galperin, a native of the neighborhood, and amateur actors drawn from the current Jewish community. "Walking around Bom Retiro then, you could of course hear a lot of people speaking Yiddish, but at the same time you could hear Italian accents and Greek accents and Brazilian accents," says Galperin, recalling his youth. "It would be wrong to say there are no racial issues in Brazil, but the violence is not as explicit as it is in the US."

Germano Haiut, who plays Shlomo, an immigrant from Eastern Europe who cares for the young Mauro when his grandfather dies, is one of the few professional actors in the movie. He was born in Recife, a city in the northeast of Brazil that was home to the first synagogue in the Americas, and grew up speaking Yiddish. Most of the others are amateurs: The rabbi is actually an orthodontist, while the child stars Michel Joelsas and Daniela Piepszyk were found from casting calls in Sao Paulo's Jewish schools.

For Hamburger, growing up in cosmopolitan Sao Paulo, his Jewish heritage was found in a shadow of a German world left behind, reflected in the shelves of books in his uncles' home, the curves of the furniture, and the aromas of his grandmother's kitchen. His childhood, he says, was marked by "not feeling part of any one group, but at the same time belonging to many." He says he will never forget one Easter Sunday when he ate a pasta lunch at his Italian grandmother's home, then went to visit his German uncle Stefan, and ended the day practicing in a samba school.

But last week, the German past became real when he arrived in Berlin for the first time. Rather than feeling like a foreigner, he was surprised to find he felt "comfortable," he says.

After the premiere and the fetes for the film, Hamburger embarked on a personal mission. A few years after the Wall came down, the family -- along with 20 other relatives in seven countries -- received a surprise letter from the German government. The official document informed him that land which had been confiscated by the Nazis, and later taken over by the communists, was being returned to the family.

Last Monday, Hamburger set off to see the property. Always the filmmaker, he brought a camera along, thinking it might make a good documentary. "It was excellent, easy to find," he says, exhilarated by the experience. "It's a large property, with a garage."

This may be the only time that Hamburger will see the remnant of his German inheritance. The family decided the property will be sold, probably to become a shopping mall, and Hamburger will soon be on a plane home to Sao Paulo.

In Berlin, however, he feels he closed a door that started with the film. "I wanted to see," he says, "what there is in me, after one generation, of the European past."