The Last Suit

When Abraham, the 88-year-old Jewish tailor from Buenos Aires, arrives in Madrid he reveals he’s living King Lear’s folly. Decades earlier, when his favourite daughter Claudia (i.e., Cordelia) wouldn’t match her two older sisters in describing her love for him he disowned her, gave them his estate and refused to speak to her again. Having now unhoused him, the sisters doom him to a Home. He’s also at risk of losing a leg. Hence his oedipal limp. Indeed, he has named his right leg Tsures (yiddish for "troubles.").

Helpless and freshly robbed, he now reluctantly turns to Claudia for help. He squeezes out a strained apology for having so abused her. 

She corrects his story in one respect. The other sisters paid her her fair share after all. She gives him the grand he needs to get to Poland, but makes no effort to admit him into her — and her little daughter’s — life. There is none of Cordelia’s forgiveness, nor Lear’s reconnection.

But here’s the question: What the hell is a Lear rehash doing in a Holocaust survivor saga? 

It must be the heart of the film. It’s such a prominent jarring intrusion that it must bear the point of the exercise. 

Maybe the point is that the Lear echo is a famous story. Story-telling is a prominent early motif in the film. Abraham’s delightful, doomed little sister was enchanting in her capacity to invent stories and to share them with audiences. Her own story ends when the Nazis snatch her from Abraham’s grip. Not for her the immortality of the stars that she kept afloat in the night. 

So the film is about living through stories. After all — as has been remarked — the Holocaust is such a monstrous occurrence, with such unimaginable cruelty and an unfathomable scale of evil and inhumanity, that approaching its reality beggars the imagination.   
     How else deal with the unimaginable than by sending out stories that may at least point to its implications, however incompletely. What cannot be fathomed can perhaps be outlined or pointed to.

So this film is not so much the story of one survivor’s experience but a demonstration of how the extremities of history can only be approached in discrete fictions. The power of stories makes a history possible. That’s why the hero is named Abraham, the father of the Jewish people (as well as of the recycled Lear’s daughters) and why he’s that most stereotypical of Jews, the tailor. And the wanderer.

Though Abraham is 88 this is still a bildungsroman, a sequence of episodes through which the hero moves toward self-realization. Typically, the episodes stand quite separate. In the first, the sly grandfather negotiates a bribe with his even craftier granddaughter, to get a family photo to impress the old folks at the looming home. He then has a Kafkaesque scene with a travel agent in some shadowy warehouse. 

Subsequent scenes advance his mission but probably mean even more to the people he engages with. In passing he gives them stories to tell: the young music student on the plane, the hotel clerk who sings in a club, the German woman anthropologist whose Jewish history studies led to her learning yiddish. As they variously help him their scenes become dramatic tales to enrichen their bios. And lives. They all take their leave with warm, lingering embraces.

The main story is the reunion of the two old friends, the two tailors, at the end. They were so close as boys that when Abraham escaped from the Nazis, Piotrek fought off his own father in order to save their benefactor’s son. 

Though they have not communicated for over 60 years, and neither knows the other has survived, both men have such a need to complete their story that they recognize each other on sight. This film is less about life than about our need for stories.  

So, too, Abraham’s flashbacks whether in his dreams or his delirium. Especially the train  scenes seem culled from film-lore as much as from personal history or experience. 
Perhaps this theme is especially pertinent to a Holocaust survival film coming from Argentina. That country, after all, welcomed so many Nazi officials after the war. Of course it has a significant Jewish population now, but the history remains problematic. Jews have been attacked there, including a serious attack on a synagogue. Argentina was recently embarrassed when it buckled to Palestinian pressure and cancelled its national soccer team’s planned exhibition match in Tel Aviv. So the history — like the best stories — keeps retelling.