En route to a Purim celebration in the Hasidic neighborhood of Borough Park, Brooklyn, filmmaker Pearl Gluck announces that she is going in drag. “I’m already in costume,” says Gluck
as she ambles toward her father’s home, knees and elbows covered in deference to his Orthodoxy. Trussed up in her “Hasidic drag,” she needs no other Purim clothes.
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Raised Orthodox, Gluck left Borough Park during adolescence, after her parents’ divorce and her mother’s transition to a more secular lifestyle. But as an adult, she is haunted by her Hasidic past and, more pressingly, her father’s request that she “return.” While present-day Pearl has no intention of donning a sheitel and retreating behind the Borough Park mechitzah, her desire to reconcile Hungarian family heritage, filial obligation, and modern life is the driving force behind Divan.
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Creatively interpreting her father’s plea, Gluck decides\xe2\x80″in her own words\xe2\x80″to “go back. Farther back.” After winning a Fulbright grant to film Jewish Hungarian stories, she takes off in search of her family’s heirloom sofa–a talisman of Hungarian Hasidism and the focal point for her exploration of identity. Gluck describes the resulting film as “a visual parable that offers the possibility of personal reinvention and cultural reupholstery.”
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This is a brave goal, and in its service, Divan captures a wealth of striking and unusual footage. But as the film meanders through scenes of sofa reupholstery, Gluck’s search for her bashert, and a Borough Park tish shot from the women-only balcony, Divan’s bold premise becomes bogged down in personal trivia and belabored metaphor. Ultimately, Gluck compromises her own filmmaking by couching it in the limiting language of an identity quest. \t\t\t
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Admittedly, the titular divan seems worth chasing. Legend has it that three generations of Kossyne Rebbes–Hasidic saints from Gluck’s ancestral village\xe2\x80″slept on the famous couch. (Hasidic rebbes apparently sleep upright to better ignore the needs of the flesh.) But Gluck (and her audience) is allowed only a glimpse of the famous divan before its keeper–Cousin Baruch–ships it off to rival family members right under her nose.
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Arriving home without a loveseat, Gluck attempts to find herself through love. For it turns out that as much as he desired the divan, her father wants her to marry back into the fold even more. By turns wry and wistful at the thought that she could be “matched,” Gluck obligingly blunders through several unsuccessful consultations with a yenta. Finally, she joins her father on a second European pilgrimage–a lightning tour of twenty-one Hasidic holy sites at which she will presumably pray for a bashert. \t
Gluck’s “rebbe” tour allows her to capture marvelous footage–particularly memorable is a shot of Hasidic men streaming over a grassy graveyard like so many black-clad ghosts.But the pilgrimage also brings to the forefront the incompatibility of Orthodoxy and her own modern life. The only woman on board, she is forced to bind up her “untamed” hair, and at mealtime must wait for her father to bring her food from the male-only front of the bus. The journey results in neither a stronger personal identity nor a broader understanding of Hasidic tradition.\t\t
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To contextualize her search for intangibles, Gluck sprinkles the film with commentary from a panel of her peers: twenty- and thirty-somethings who were raised Hasidic and currently lead more secular lives. Perched on an embroidered divan in Gluck’s apartment, this chorus offers perspectives on Judaism, fetish objects, parental relations, and the community they left behind. Like Gluck, these former Hasidim have warm feelings toward their childhoods, yet hesitate to bring Orthodoxy into their adult lives. One man refers to his childhood as his “Eden time.” “It was a garden,” he says, “and once you fall you don’t go back, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t sweet. It was safe, it was community, it was whole.” But each of these “fallen Hasidim” could be another Pearl Gluck, and their commentary, while touching and humorous, fails to provide Divan with much-needed structure or clarity.
Tying up symbolic loose ends, Gluck purchases her own divan at a Hungarian flea market. This couch turns out to be the one whose re-upholstery we have witnessed and from which her chorus pontificates. And it gives concrete form to her assertion that religious identity can be constructed of history, memory, and the decision to create meaning: artifacts, she seems to say, have the life you infuse them with. Authenticity is just a word. \t\t\t
Reupholstery, according to Divan’s sections on couch rehabilitation, involves picking apart the old, discarding stuffing, inventing details, and vacuuming out the dust of years. Here, Gluck has begun to succeed: she has pulled her past apart and peeked inside. But she has not yet assembled the pieces into a renewed whole, not yet grappled with the possibilities of “re-upholstering” Hasidism to fit a modern, female life. Gluck has captured a mass of extraordinary material; if only it were not forced into the banal format of a personal identity quest. Divan deserves a structure as unusual as its content; within it lie several incisive films waiting to be made.
