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(More customer reviews)This 60-minute movie originally appeared on American Playhouse (PBS) in 1984. It's an adaptation of a short story of the same title by the Yiddish writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The tale centers on a Yiddish writer named Aaron (based on Singer himself) who likes to eat and kibbitz at a certain cafeteria on the Upper West Side of Manhattan during the 1960's. There he meets a woman named Esther, and a romance soon develops. But all is not as it seems. The story moves from the mundane to the mystical when Esther has a strange experience. She sees Hitler and his cronies meeting in the cafeteria at night. Madness? Hallucination? Maybe. But that same very night, the cafeteria burns down. So nu, maybe there's more to this than meets the eye?
The film moves a bit slowly at first, but pay close attention to the opening scenes and savor the dialogue. Not only do these scenes establish the various characters who hang out at the cafeteria (all of them Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe), they also do a good job of giving the "feel" of Yiddish conversation in English. (Avoid hearing them as "stereotypical Jews" - that's not the point!) The seemingly mundane discussions in the cafeteria provide clues to the unfolding story, as well as insight into the wounded psyches of the Holocaust survivors who meet there, trying to make a life for themselves. On the surface, the cafeteria-niks laugh, joke, gossip, complain about the food. But just beneath the surface is a deep, deep pain, an emptiness that permeates their very souls. Which is why Esther's father inappropriately laughs when speaking of his traumatic experiences during the war, cynically stating that "there is no such thing as love" anymore. Ah, but there is... Time and space do strange things in this little tale. To say more would spoil the ending!
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