TV Masterpiece Shtisel: Season One, Episode one

This is a sample of my episode-by-episode analysis of the Israeli TV drama Shtisel. Reading Shtisel covers the first two seasons. After Shtisel analyzes Season 3 and also the writers' intervening TV drama, Autonomies. Both Shtisel books are available at  lulu.com.

Episode I, 1

The opening episode establishes the series’ major themes and devices, the Shtisel family members and their imminent arcs. The family/series name comes from a popular Mea She’arim restaurant. It evokes community, nourishment, perhaps the suggestion of a menu. Here is a range of family relationships and a range of restraints on the self — take your pick. Spoiler alert: The opening scene restaurant will, like the characters, reappear but transformed by the end. The end is latent in the beginning.

In the opening shot a ladle of food is dumped in a dish at Anshin’s cafe. This scene is revealed to be a dream when Anshin denies Akiva a pickle, it starts to snow inside the cafe and Akiva finds his dead mother Dvora eating near an eskimo. Dvora complains about the lack of pickles and the cold (common irritations in the afterlife). 

Starting the series with a dream is significant. After that first shot, we’ll have to question our bearings in every scene. This drama will shift between four levels of reality. Everything will be equally real and equally unreal. The characters’ daily lives will interweave with three alternative realities: their dreams, their memories (flashbacks) and their reunions with the dead. These four levels of reality within the drama point to two outside: (i) However realistic the characters and setting, the story itself is a fiction, unreal, but metaphoric. Everything embodies a larger truth. (ii) In the Jewish tradition, even our “real life” this side of that fiction is itself an illusion. Our real reality awaits us in our afterlife with God. 

Then, too, for these ultra-orthodox Jews, every feed or drink is introduced with a blessing, every doorway has a mezuzah to be kissed, and the conversation constantly acknowledges God’s power. Their material life is integrally connected to the spiritual. For these believers divinity pervades and magnifies the mundane. 

The initial dreamer Akiva will prove the drama’s central figure, bounded by the dynamics of the Shtisel family. Though Shulem dismisses Akiva’s dream as meaningless, he is troubled by it and reports it as his own — the first in his constant stream of lies — when he visits secretary Aliza Gvili for a free dinner. She can’t explain his dream about his dead wife: “It’s between you and her. Why are you asking me?” Aliza has a romantic interest in Shulem, to which he remains insensitive. 

In an early indication of how loving a father Shulem will prove, he consistently diminishes Akiva — even shrinking his name to Kiva, the childhood diminutive. In front of the students on the school trip to the zoo he scolds him: “If you want to draw the animals do it on your own time.” Later: “What can I say? I’ve totally given up on you.” In return, Akiva repels his arranged date by claiming that once married they would have to live with his spry father until he dies.  

Shulem treats his daughter Giti even worse. Her husband Lippe is again leaving her with their five children for six months, for his job in the Argentina branch of a Jerusalem slaughterhouse. He has been offered an alternative: a local electronics partnership. But when Giti seeks Shulem’s help she gets his silent dismissal. Then: “Why all the fantasies all of a sudden?” “Fine. I tried.” As we’ll see, Shulem considers any off-spring’s ambition a “fantasy.”

Ominously, when she returns home Lippe is furtively browsing through sporty car ads. (As we later learn, Shulem made giving up his share in a car one of the conditions Lippe had to meet to marry Giti.) To keep the peace, she tells Lippe “He loves you.”

Shulem compounds this harshness with hypocrisy. When Aliza describes how the eskimos send their elderly off — in furs and with an embrace — to die on an ice floe, he recoils: “Those gentiles. Not an ounce of compassion.” 

This moment is rich in irony. It was set up by the surreal inclusion of an eskimo in the opening dream. In a rare cross-cultural moment, that eskimo leaves his usual fare, raw fish, on the table and eats Anshin’s deli. Of course, the eskimos are no more representative of all the gentiles than these Haredim are of all Jews. The remark confirms Shulem’s insularity. 

Moreover, as a culture the eskimos—nowadays more properly identified as the Inuit — are remarkably respectful of their aged. They treat them with deference in life and with a compassionate ritual for their death. They send them off with dignity and care. Given Shulem’s disdain for his mother’s enjoyment of her TV and his callous treatment of his children, i.e., his own lack of compassion, he compounds his hypocrisy with self-unawareness. 

This ironic moment — among many others — could be considered the heart of this episode and a driving theme for the entire series: How can any religion excuse inhumanity?  

Unlike Shulem, Akiva is warm and sensitive, albeit crude with his unaccustomed authority in the classroom. When the students finally laugh at his obscure joke, he sternly silences them. He sends Israel Rotstein to the principal for drawing flip-book cartoons on his Gemarah. Akiva lacks his father’s classroom polish, but lapses into his domestic authoritarianism. Shulem is kind in the class, rough at home. Akiva, the reverse. 

Akiva has two contrasting meetings with women here. He begins the arranged date with playful concern about “the rules” that govern these meetings. Cheekily he jokes that his ambition is to become “an assistant attendant” at a mikvah (the Jewish ritual bath for women). But the attractive young woman agrees that his drawings — ostensibly by “a friend” — are “no big deal.” In contrast, when widow Elisheva Rotstein, Israel’s mother, sees his sketchbook she tells her son “The rabbi draws very well” and clearly engages with the art. 

When Akiva floats the possibility of arranging a meeting with the widow, Shulem rejects it out of hand. His NIMBY stand — Not in My Meshpukhe — flies in the face of the Jewish special commitment to the orphan and the widow. Forbidden the arranged meeting, Akiva goes to the bank where she works and invites her to a meeting. She does not appear. 

Akiva’s opening dream has two effects on him. At lunch he orders Anshin not to forget his pickle, as if his denial had been in life not dream. More constructively, he decides to honour his mother’s memory by establishing a free lending service— a gemach — specifically for space heaters. When a soaked Elisheva comes to borrow one, she and Akiva exchange increasingly warm looks as they wait for the heater to warm up. Testing the heater proves their warmth. As Akiva responds to his dream, the spiritual world can bring fear to the waking reality or it can prompt humanitarianism.

The last scene recalls the opening dream of frigidity. The Shtisels have gathered for a dinner to mark the end of their mourning period for mother Dvora. They will listen to music for the first time in a year — the cassette of a boys’ choir, Pirchei Yerushalaim singing The Bird's Nest. From that family warmth we cut to Shulem’s mother Malka in her seniors’ residence room, alone. 

Shulem objected to his mother getting a TV, which the Haredim reject as a secular danger. Indeed she does change, from initial shock to fascination with the outside world. She becomes invested in the life of an American TV family with — also forbidden in this sect — a pet dog. On The Bold and the Beautiful she learns their children’s strange names and worries about them. 

Shulem’s older son Zvi Arye, sharing his father’s rigour, disconnects Malka’s set, sabotaging her pleasure. He leaves her to watch her screen — of snow. Like Dvora in the first scene, the grandmother in the last is left with the snow, cut off from family warmth. Not just those gentiles are caught sans compassion. For all Shulem’s spirituality, his summary effect is cold dis-connection.