Europa, Europa

Considered as a subset of the road movie, the post-Holocaust, return-to-Poland documentary has been a dismayingly static genre. Most of these films are journeys in only the physical sense. Finding what they'd intended to find, experiencing what they'd always felt, the protagonists typically undergo so little intellectual or spiritual movement that you wonder why they traveled at all.

This is not a complaint you can make against the new documentary by Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky, Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust. Granted, you once again have the Jewish family in a van with their Polish driver, rolling up to the place where this synagogue was gutted or that gallows put up. The difference, though--the great, indispensable difference--is that with Rudavsky's help, Daum conceived of this trip as a true journey: a spiritual expedition for his two grown sons, and perhaps for the audience as well.

Profoundly concerned that his children's Judaism, like "all religions today," was "in danger of being hijacked by extremists," Daum took his black-hat sons to Poland in the hope of expanding the circle of their concern by a few inches, so that it might include at least some of the non-Jewish world. His project succeeded so unexpectedly, and spectacularly, that Hiding and Seeking is arguably unique among Holocaust documentaries. Although it's perhaps too warm, earnest and insistently personal to be a great movie, it's also far too important--and too moving--for anyone with a conscience to ignore.

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