Scarlett Johansson’s directorial feature debut, “Eleanor the Great,” is not about her family’s Holocaust history; it was written by Tory Kamen, as an ode of sorts to her Jewish grandmother. And yet, there are definitely echoes of Johansson’s family story in the movie, which is coming to theaters next week.
“A lot of my family history was lost and it wasn’t until many years later that I was actually able to connect with my family heritage,” Johansson said in a red carpet interview at TIFF, where the film screened earlier this month. “I think because of that, this story really resonated with me. These survivors’ stories are lost, there are organizations like Shoah that are committed to documenting them for future generations and their work is so important. I hope that this film really encourages people to ask questions of their relatives and to keep their stories alive.”
@tiff_net “I hope this film encourages people to ask questions of their living relatives and keep their stories alive.” Scarlett Johansson reflects on the heart of her directorial debut ELEANOR THE GREAT and the power of preserving stories at its North American Premiere at TIFF50. 💫 #ShotonPixel #ScarlettJohansson #EleanortheGreat
Johansson worked with the USC Shoah Foundation to get actual Holocaust survivors into the film.
The movie tells the story of Eleanor, played by June Squibb, who moves to New York in her 90s to live with her daughter (Jessica Hecht). The transition happens after her longtime Florida roommate and friend, Bessie, played by Israeli film and Yiddish theater star Rita Zohar, passes away.
Bessie was a Holocaust survivor who, like many of those who endured such horrors and lost loved ones, struggled to tell her story to her family. But later in life, still haunted by what happened to her, she confided in Eleanor, her best friend, about it.
In the midst of her grief and in an unfamiliar and cold urban terrain, Eleanor, who was born and raised in the U.S., wanders through a fictional Manhattan JCC and finds a support group for survivors. She joins and co-opts Bessie’s untold story as her own, as a way to keep the memory of the woman she loved so much alive.
Just like Bessie’s story, Johansson’s family Holocaust connection was unknown to her most of her life — until 2017, when she went on PBS’s “Finding Your Roots.” There, Henry Louis Gates Jr. surprised her with the story of her great-grandfather’s family, and brought the actress to tears.
In the episode, Gates shared records of the ship that brought her grandfather, Schlachne Schlamberg (who later changed his name to Saul) to America in 1910. Schlamberg, who was born in Grojec, Poland and left his entire family behind, settled on the Lower East Side’s Ludlow Street, where it’s believed he sold bananas at the market.
Gates then brought out records from Yad Vashem, through which Johansson discovered that Saul’s brother, Moishe, and two of his children perished in the Warsaw Ghetto. At the time of his death, Grojec’s Jewish population had all been killed or deported.
“I promised myself I wouldn’t cry,” Johansson said after reading the names of Moishe’s children, Mandil and Zlata, who died at age 17 and 15. She wiped tears from her eyes and continued: “But it’s hard not to.”
It was one of Moishe’s daughters who survived the Holocaust and shared these records with Yad Vashem. It seems that she and her family didn’t know that Moishe had any living family, and some of Johansson’s cousins, living in Israel and New Jersey, were surprised to discover that they were related to the A-lister when the show aired.
“We were overwhelmed that we had any relatives at all,” Michal Rozenfeld, the granddaughter of Moishe’s daughter Sara, told JTA back then.
“It’s crazy to imagine that Saul would be on the other side selling bananas on Ludlow Street and how different it would be being in America at that time,” Johansson said in the episode. “The fate of one brother versus the other. It makes me feel more deeply connected to that side of myself, that side of my family. I didn’t expect that.”
Now, she gets to connect with that side of her family through this movie.
