Brooklyn

In Brooklyn a timid Irish girl blossoms into an Irish American woman. 

Yet it’s titled after the destination not the heroine. That points to a direct connection between this very Irish film and an essential principle of Jewish theology: Lech le-cha’. The phrase comes from Genesis, where Jehovah commands Abraham to depart his native land for an indeterminate destiny elsewhere. It is an exhortation to leave.

The common reading is: The Lord loves becoming. That is, our destiny is not to rest where we are but to move on. 

Heroine Eilis (Saorirse Ronan) leaves her mother, sister Rose and village community for the challenges, dangers and ultimately, self-realization of 1950s Brooklyn (2015 Montreal). So the film’s title emphasizes her destiny, not her initial self. 

The film begins and ends with Eilis leaving. In the first scene she leaves her home for the 7 o’clock Sunday Mass her stern employer expects her staff to attend. That is leaving as routine, going somewhere but always to the same place at the same time. That is movement as rut. There is no growth there, no risk. 

At the end she has left her solitary mother, a well-off suitor and her old world to return to America and the gentlemanly Italian plumber she has secretly married. Eilis may have been tempted to stay. But her malevolent old employer Mrs Kelly reminded her of the meanness of a self-absorbed life, our need to open out, to move on and to grow. In a phrase, Lech le-cha’. 

      One essential tension here is between solitude and community. Ellis’s mother survives her husband’s and daughter Rose’s deaths, now her last daughter’s departure, to find herself finally alone. In her abject solitude she can’t bear to give Eilis a second goodbye. 

Rose’s early death saved her from wasting her life on her mother’s care, as Mrs Kelly warned Eilis, to burden her with guilt. Later, with no clear motive other than to assert her empty power, Mrs Kelly shows she knows of Eilis’s marriage. 

The women form another community. Mrs Keough’s Brooklyn boarding house for Irish girls is a community far warmer and livelier than the home Eilis left. In their alliterative names and authority Mrs Keough and Mrs Kelly embody antithetical spirits of discipline and authority. Mrs Keough and the girls help and advise each other. On her first journey Eilis is bolstered by a cabin-mate’s advice, which she then passes on to another neophyte on her voyage back.

The Brooklyn priest is a model of Christian brotherhood and paternal care, as he registers and pays for Eilis’s evening course in bookkeeping.  When he invites her to help serve the parish’s Christmas dinner to the unemployed Irish men he brings her out of her self-consciousness into a new confidence and spirit. This event is the turning point in her adjustment to America. 

Even her romance is another departure. At the Irish parish dance she meets the Italian who likes Irish girls, i.e., who himself feels the spirit of moving out, Lech le-cha’. He has outgrown his kid brother’s flat statement that the family dislikes the Irish, “It’s a well-known fact.” Ellis’s best girlfriend back home didn’t feel that ambition to grow, so despite her spirit and beauty she’s happy to settle with one of the local rugby boys, despite the embarrassment of oily air and conformist blazer. Or blazing conformity. 

The Eilis who radiates on her return to Ireland is a far cry from the pallid, green mouse who moved away. She’s brighter than ever when her husband spots her on the street, having returned unannounced.
     The shared Jewish-Irish theme is after all not surprising. Abraham is an avatar of the immigrant experience, which is central to both the Irish and the Jewish in America.