The Pin

  Naomi Jaye’s The Pin (Die Shpilke) is the first Yiddish feature made in Quebec. It could have been made anywhere -- which proves that Quebec cinema has at last outgrown its regional concerns -- but it had to be in Yiddish. For the old European language of the Jews is threatened with disappearance as the last generation of immigrant Jews dies off and as the new Israel rejects it for Hebrew. As the film is about memory and responsibility its very themes are fleshed out in its language.

The Shomer (David Fox) stays overnight with a corpse before its burial. This particular corpse turns out to be the woman this Shomer met, loved and makeshift married when they were in hiding from the Nazis in WW II. We see his younger self, Jacob (Grisha Pasternak), meet and fall in love with the beautiful Leah (Milda Gecaite) decades earlier.

The first shot of the film is a forest, centered on a large tree with exposed roots. They’re an emblem for the whole narrative, which will reveal the roots of the old man’s present isolation. Leah married; Jacob probably didn't. At least he lives a solitary life now, free to spend his nights at the mortuary. An old tree with exposed roots suggests a past that wont stay buried. Young Jacob crawls out from under the roots, badly wounded, and finds refuge in an old barn. When he passes out he is tended to by the beautiful Leah, whom he will eventually meet and come to trust and love. In a climactic dream later he will emerge from another burial and try to unearth her too. 

The couple’s developing love is very touching, especially as it grows out of their life or death terror. Like a new Adam and Eve -- in a situation antithetic to Eden -- they live off apples that miraculously appear in the trunk of a tree. They appear without fertility. like the manna from heaven. This mystery casts a fable-like tone over the whole story.

The couple survive their initial mutual suspicion, their hunger, thirst, and the danger of passing soldiers. Having sworn fidelity they split over a threatening visit from a young Russian boy who is searching for his five-year-old sister. Leah talks him into lowering his pistol, but Jacob attacks him from behind and -- against her protests -- kills the lad. Jacob urges her to flee with him but she insists on staying behind to bury the boy. He’s an enemy threat but he’s human. The couple were planning to leap onto a train to the border together. But after this split, Leah makes it to the train but Jacob doesn’t. They don’t meet until she’s dead. That scene defines the difference between the life-giving Leah and the embittered Jacob.

That difference emerged earlier in perhaps the film’s central episode. Jacob tells her the story his mother used to tell him. It involves a prince about to marry a beautiful woman from whose heart three crows say they will steal her perfect happiness. To protect her the prince orders all the crows slaughtered, but one escapes to visit the wedding. When the crow alights on the woman’s heart the prince draws his saber and kills the crow -- mortally piercing his beloved as well. For there can be no perfect happiness. Leah changes the story. When the bride pats the crow it turns into a dove, for you can’t steal happiness. This foreshadows the disruption of the couple’s Eden.

Leah asks Jacob to promise that when she dies he will prick her with a pin before she’s buried. She fears being buried alive. The coincidence of her body appearing on his shift as Shomer enables him at last to meet his responsibility to her, to keep his promise. As her body lies there and he remembers their meeting and love she comes alive for him. But the pricked palm only proves she’s dead. The old man can leave her now, his promise kept after a lifetime tragically apart.  

But for a while Leah has come back to life for him. And so has Yiddish for us.