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Lost in America
Verloren in AmerikaStory
The elevated railway rattles along on iron stilts above the main road and bathes the asphalt in a grid of light and shadows. Between the 1920s brick houses glimpses of the nearby beach washed by the Atlantic can be seen.
Brighton Beach is tucked away at the south-eastern tip of Brooklyn, beyond Coney Island’s roller-coasters; it's just an hour by subway from Manhattan and everyone calls it Little Odessa.
It's a thoroughly European and Jewish area, a neighbourhood of recent and older immigrants. The film presents a portrait of three of them: a young Russian family that has just arrived from Ukraine, Irvine Lancart, a Jew from Hamburg who survived the war in Shanghai and stands on the boardwalk every evening »looking« across the Atlantic at Europe, and Abraham Herzhaft from Yeszow in Poland. At 75, he's still riding along Brighton Beach Avenue on his racing bike and cooking »gefillte« fish in his kitchen. A film about the absence of a homeland.
Moshe and Isaac in Bye Bye America are modelled on the two characters whose portrait is sketched here.
