Thursday, April 7, 7:30 pm
Filmmaker Present: Pearl Gluck
USA/Hungary/Ukraine/Israel, 2003, 77 min, English, Hungarian, &
Yiddish with English subtitles
Writer, director, producer: Pearl Gluck (Brandeis ‘93)

Documentary filmmaker Pearl Gluck left her Orthodox Jewish clan in Brooklyn for secular life in Manhattan as a teenager. Later, Gluck takes a creative approach to mend the breach. She travels to Hungary to retrieve a turn-of-the-century family heirloom: a couch upon which esteemed rabbis once slept. En route, she encounters a colorful cast of characters, including a couch exporter, her ex-communist cousin in Budapest, a pair of Hungarian-American matchmakers, and a renegade group of formerly ultra-Orthodox Jews.

"Pearl Gluck has made what may be the first movie to evoke in equal measure the attraction of Hasidic Judaism and the equally compelling reasons she abandoned it."
– Stephen Holden, New York Times

Sponsors:
Department of English and American Literature, Brandeis University,
The Edie and Lew Wasserman Fund, and The Brandeis Hillel Foundation