Part of Berkeley Opening Night

At the Castro only! Director Jan Schütte in an on-stage conversation.

Berkeley Opening Night screening followed by reception in the Roda courtyard.

“Literature has neglected the old and their emotions,” the Yiddish writer and Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote. “The novelists never told us that in love, as in other matters, the young are just beginners and that the art of loving matures with age and experience.” Love Comes Lately evokes Singer in word, spirit and deed in an utterly winning film by Jan Schütte. It revolves around a quintessential Singer character, Max Kohn, the elderly, self-centered but gentlemanly writer from his story “The Briefcase,” and weaves in two other Singer stories, “Old Lov” and “Alone,” as products of Kohn’s merciless pen.

At the stage of his career when the lecture circuit consists of college literary clubs and synagogues, Max lives “in a state of permanent confusion,” enhanced by a vivid imagination that has his dream life merging with his waking, and both with his fictions. But this is not an old man we can write off as the sum of his foibles. As portrayed by the Viennese actor Otto Tausig, Max is haimish and sophisticated, and, despite his prostate worries, vital. Hence, the magnetism he holds for his “invisible harem,” the women, real or imagined, who gravitate toward him, even as he enters his dotage. There is his steady girlfriend and enabler Reisel (Rhea Perlman); a former student, Rosalie (Barbara Hershey), who threw him over for Kafka; and the fictional Ethel (Tovah Feldshuh) and Esperanza (Elizabeth Peña), women who carry a complex of bizarre fears into Max’s comical world.

Many of Berlin-based director Jan Schütte’s award-winning films—including Bye Bye America (SFJFF 1995)—have explored the territory of exile. Here, Schütte’s direction and a superb cast honor an ineffable quality of Singer’s writing—Yiddish translated into its American idiom, where it will never be quite at home. Therefore, no one here is particularly concerned with realism, but rather with expressiveness, and the character(s) it creates. If you were thinking early Woody Allen, you’d be on to something.

—Judy Bloch

The Centerpiece screening is sponsored by a generous grant from the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture

Additional support provided by the Goethe-Institut
Berkeley Opening Night is co-sponsored by Saul's Restaurant & Delicatessen


Co-presented by BJE Jewish Community Library and Hadassah, San Francisco Chapter