My Mother's Lost Children

The director’s mother narrowly survived the Holocaust only to suffer another tragedy when her husband stole their first two children. 

The naive young Brit Lillian was seduced by the smooth, shallow Iranian Jew Raymond, who absconded with their child Andrew and infant Michelle. Over their 40-year separation neither mother nor child can overcome the void and pain their separation has caused them. 

Director Danny is Lillie’s son by her second marriage. His quest to find his half-siblings uncovers a maze of broken marriages, mothers and children. The men not so much. Lillie’s brother Manny still feels justified in not sharing with Lillian the letter informing her of Michelle’s quest to find her. Danny’s sister remains scarred by her mother’s emotional paralysis.

We look for whom to blame. Lillian may initially seem responsible because she made no effort to find the children. She entrusted the theft to the local Jewish Community Board instead of the police. She assumed Raymond had swept them off to Iran, out of her reach. In fact they were in a boarding school an hour away from her. Even when she met him to complete their divorce, she did not press to see her children again. She early resigned herself to their permanent loss.

But the true villain is Raymond. More generally, the problem is the power vested in the patriarchal family head. Male authority overrides humanity. Lillian’s immediate resignation was not just her own lack of will or spirit but her submission to the husband’s authority. 

Raymond’s second wife Amanda may have served the maternal role for the kids, but she too could not stand up to him. When he hits Michelle for her wanting to go to university in America, Amanda can’t intercede. So Michelle flees by herself, pained to lose another loving mother who couldn’t stand up to her man.

Raymond attempted the same theft with his two children by mistress Rosetta, but she fought him off with a knife. The woman outside the domestic system has the courage those in it lacked. The mothers needed the mistress’s courage.

Danny’s long-distance interview exposes Raymond as emptily righteous, arrogant, proud of his womanizing, unwilling to accept a father’s responsibility. He gave Andrew no help for his expensive cancer treatments. His last remark on Lillie confirms his callousness: “Tell her she was not a bad girl.” As he says, we can't redo the past. But a mensch would try to make amends.

  The family disruptions extend into another generation still. We don’t see or hear anything about the husband who left Michelle in her California estate. Her son lost his son to his absconding wife. Andrew’s daughter cut him out of her life after his divorce. The separations of the father are visited upon the children. 

One scene locates this family drama against its political background: the Iranian Revolution that implanted the harsh Ayatollahs. They are the theocratic, state version of the tyrannical father that ruined this film’s families.