The movie begins with this announcement:
During World War II, the anti-Nazi resistance in Romania was mainly organized by the Communist party.
A number of young Jews joined the cause, believing their freedom would come from the Soviet Union.
The Red Army didn’t free, but enslaved the country, along with the whole Eastern and Central Europe. An iron-fist regime was installed.
Former Jewish partisans become part of the governing elite.
Their positions started to erode until, by the last years of the ’50s, they were being systematically removed from positions of power and influence.
Uh oh, this movie is daring to venture outside a de facto dramatic theme about Jews — that we are plucky underdogs. Instead, we seem to have become the top dogs in Romania until the system turned against us. As communism in Romania turns against the Jews, I expect the Jews will turn against communism.
For these particular Jews, turning against communism is not about communism being evil so much as communism becoming bad for them. When communism was good them, they embraced communism. When it turned against them, they turned against it. That sounds like the Germans who supported Hitler when times were good and then turned against Hitler when his actions ceased to be in their interests.
Every group has interests and they often conflict with the interests of other groups. The fancy names for this conflict are “racism,” “prejudice,” “anti-semitism,” and the like, but these terms are simply obfuscations of clashing group interests. What is good for whites, for instance, is often not good for Jews, blacks, latinos and gays. What’s good for gays is often bad for straights.
The movie begins with a group of plucky Jews robbing a bank while pretending to shoot a movie. The goyim are agog at their chutzpah.
The shaygetz protagonist lives as a tenant of Orthodox Jews who have him at their Shabbat table. The Yid of the house rises to make kiddish, saying: “Lord, in Thy great bounty, screw the Bolsheviks. Give them every disease in the world. Ruin them, burn their houses, and send them back to Moscow. Amen.”
That reminds me of the rabbi in the movie Fiddler on the Roof: “A blessing for the Tsar? Of course! May God bless and keep the Tsar… far away from us!”
Needless to say, growing up as a Seventh-Day Adventist, such blasphemies would never have passed our lips on religious occasions.
The old Yid at the Shabbos table says: “I bought my mentally handicapped certificate ten years ago. They can’t touch me.”
The old Yid listens regularly to Voice of America. What would he have in common with the Bolshevik-sympathizing Jews of America? Both are rebels. Some non-Jews rebel too, but belonging to a tribe, to a nation within a nation, makes it easier to have a different relationship, and often a more tenuous relationship, to the nation state.
The Jews inspire the shayg to get into the movie industry. He starts as an assistant and eventually becomes a cameraman.
The Jewish bank robbers are portrayed as smarter and funner than the goyim. Most movies and TV seem to portray Jews as smarter and funner than the goyim.
While the bank robbers are sentenced to death, they cheer and clap and look happy.
The goyim in this movie are generally stick-in-the-muds, clinging to their stupid national rituals and reciting their stupid national sayings, while the Jews are shown as smarter. The Jews in the movie have contempt for goyisha practices. They have their own Jewish practices. Why would they want to be a part of the nation they reside in except to exploit it?
This movie feels like it was written by Kevin MacDonald. It embodies many of his themes such as Jews being a hostile elite who shapeshift through various poses and allegiances depending on what is good for them.
The Jewish leader Max is married to the Minister of the Interior’s shiksa sister but Max wants a divorce. Judaism has the most generous attitude to divorce of any religion and traditional culture of which I am aware.
Max gets his wife arrested for slapping him so he can join his fellow Jews in a pub entertaining whores. Transgressive Jewish sexuality is a staple of anti-Semitism and statistics back up the notion that Jews have more sex partners, on average, than the goyim (University of Chicago sex survey of 1994) and fewer sexual hang-ups.
Max has a shiksa whore crawl to him. He grabs her roughly and pushes her down on the couch. “You’re a little revolution, you are,” he says, “and you screwed us, you bitch.”
Some classic eroticized Jewish rage at the shiksa goddess follows.
Max undresses her. “We were madly in love with you, ready to give our lives at a moment’s notice. You turn out to be nothing but a cheap slut. Now you’re going to see what a real uprising looks like.”
Everyone gathers around to watch and bangs their spoons.
The love of Max’s life, Alice, then walks in. She gave birth to his son 12 years previous and moved to Moscow to study Political Science.
The goyim provide food, drink, music and whores for the Jews’ amusement. The Jews have their fill and walk home in the early morning light. They are not bound by the goyim’s morality. They don’t have to be modest and responsible. They don’t give a damn about their host country.
The goyim are excited that Fidel Castro has taken Havana but the Jews couldn’t care less.
The secret service goy running the show says: “They are all Jews. We should highlight this aspect with great finesse. We are not anti-Semitic but we cannot be indifferent to the threat of Zionism either. We will have to use innuendo.”
Jews under communism became increasingly less enthusiastic about communism after WWII as their opportunities decreased and their loyalties consequently expanded to Zionism and to other interests.
Thirty four minutes into the film, the Jewish woman shows her expertise at manipulating the dumb goyim by throwing a fit to get her way. As a WASP growing up, I remember we didn’t throw many fits to get our way and we were intimidated and disgusted by those who did.
When the Jewess calms down, the goy protagonist asks her: “Are you all right?”
She replies: “Don’t be silly! I’m just marking my territory.”
Forty five minutes, the protagonist is taken away by the security police. His Jewish landlords insist that he dress warmly.
As a convert to Judaism, I’ve found Jews are much more concerned than the goyim are about comfort. Jews seem more sensitive to changes in temperature and circumstance.
The Jewess and the goy run away. The Jewess invites herself over to his place. He says, “I have to warn you that I live with a Jewish couple and they’re pretty religious. They might insist we join them for Sabbath dinner.”
At dinner, the host says: “In 1945, the [Communist] party [in Romania] had less than a thousand members and three quarters of them were Jews. Some say the Jews brought the Bolsheviks to power.”
After dinner, the Jewess initiates some hanky panky (taking the innocence of the shayg, who does not perform well). From what I understand in books, the Shabbat often has an erotic effect on a couple.
Why did the Jews in this movie choose to rob the bank? Because they had pre-traumatic syndrome. They saw things weren’t going their way, that they had nothing to lose, they had no reason to feel loyalty to their host nation, so they go for broke, like Jewish subprime bankers such as Roland Arnall.
Max, the Jewish gang leader, says: “We have to hit them where it hurts. Show them what fools they are.”
Another Jew says: “You boys have no class. If you want class, you have to rob a bank.”
A Jew scientist says: “When they cut my research grant, I almost slit my wrists.”
Max: “What else is there for us? If we pull it off, we’re laughing at them.”
The Jews drink a toast and then toss their glasses off the balcony.
Why did the Jews commit the bank robbery? According to one story, it was to get 10,000 Jews to Israel.
All of the Jewish gang is executed at the end by firing squad except for the mom. The goy arranges her son’s bar mitzvah and then the mom gets a political amnesty and moves with her child to Israel.
John DeFore of The Hollywood Reporter wrote, “Though based on a true story, the film discards some of its claim to authenticity right off the bat, casting Brits and Americans in all the leads and having them speak English instead of Romanian; later, it will have trouble establishing the gang’s motives for a crime they all but knew would lead to their execution.”
