1961 Hadera, Israel

Shoshana Hershenstraus
Born in 1952
Hadera, Israel
Interviewed on January 27th, 2019
by Shannon Sommers

All of the films I can remember seeing as a child were in color, but I know that my first must have been in black and white. I can tell you about my first musical, though. I watched West Side Story with my sister in the early 60’s.  The music was wonderful. It was in one of the last years before I left Israel. I remember being so affected by the tragedy, the love story. I was always such a romantic. It was a sad story, not sad like what we see in the movies these days, but for that time it felt quite traumatic, all of the deaths and violence between these two groups. It really affected me. I remember being in the theater and all of the people in the audience were laughing when the characters broke out in song, and I got so upset at their reaction. I couldn’t understand where they found the humor in it. I wanted to scream out, “Don’t you understand what’s happening? This isn’t funny.” It seemed to me like they didn’t get the seriousness of the situation. I thought that they weren’t understanding the movie.

As a child, I was the perfect audience for films because I was never restless. I never had a problem sitting still. I was always engaged and I had a great interest. I grew up in a small town named Hadera, and we didn’t just see movies from America. We saw films from all over the world, Indian films and Spanish films and English films and Greek films and Mexican films — I remember particularly loving this one Mexican comedian — as well as Russian and Soviet films, of course. By the time I got to America, as a teenager and in college, there were film festivals and beautiful theaters, one of which was designated for “foreign films,” but most Americans didn’t have the same exposure I did to different countries’ movies. I think it says a lot about American culture vis a vis the rest of the world and how they perceived their own entertainment.

There were two theaters in my little town, each positioned on opposite ends of the neighborhood, and everyone there knew each other. There was one big screen showing a film in each theater, with seats that were comfortable but nothing special. It didn’t have an organ or anything. My elementary school also showed us movies every other month, and I remember sitting on the floor in the gym when I was in third or fourth grade watching Tarzan in black and white. I can’t tell you why I remember that one specifically, but I do. I wish I remembered how much things cost back then, but my parents or older sister must have bought the movie tickets when we went to the theater. My sister was, and is, quite a film buff, especially because she was a few years older than me. We walked everywhere. I don’t remember drinking or eating anything, but if I did it certainly wasn’t the kind of food that they sell in American theaters today, with the big sodas and everything. That just wasn’t the world I grew up in.

Much of what I remember from the movies had to do with the war. I remember watching The Best Years of Our Lives and it affected me deeply, even though it was made before I was born, because of my family’s conversations about it. It was about three men returning home from the war having had very different experiences in it, and my parents would always talk about that movie and what it meant to them. They lived in Berlin, on the American side, so that also somewhat influenced how they saw it. Some of the movies we saw were also quite traumatic in their subject matter. I saw a lot of war films growing up. My parents belonged to a social club — that was also quite political, by the way — also with people who were affected by the war, and films were a big part of that as well. I’m sure you can picture the entirety of the town I lived in as a child just from what I’ve told you about the movies.

Well, a lot is coming back to me now. I don’t know if I can tell you the very first movie I saw, but I did see a lot of biblical movies in the theater. You know, that would make sense. A lot of the films I saw were religious, though not all of them. I saw The Ten Commandments. Oh, yes, and I saw Ben-Hur, which they just remade recently. Those were in the late 50’s.

I’m sorry that I can’t remember the name of the first film. I’ll have to get back to you on that. I watched a lot of movies, including some that were before my time, too, especially once we got a television. We didn’t have a remote for the T.V., but it didn’t matter. I watched Hatari! I loved Laurel and Hardy. They just made a movie about them. Abbott and Costello. I was not alive in the thirties, thank you very much, but I loved Charlie Chaplin. Not only did I see every movie and clip he ever made, but I saw them all multiple times. I always had to tell students in my history classes that I wasn’t alive when some of the films that I taught, and that I loved, were made. You know that Some Like it Hot is my favorite comedy of all time. No matter what I was doing, I would stop and watch the whole thing.

I have always loved film. It’s part of who I am. I’m very proud of that.