A Quote by Francois Englert
My parents emigrated from Poland in 1924 with my brother, who was a few months old. They were from a simple family of Polish Jews. They were looking, I suppose, for a better economic life and were escaping from an anti-Semitic environment.
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Oddly enough, most of the books written about the subject aren't very good because they just focus on the more hateful movies that they did very early, early on when they were trying to, you know, get Germany into the war, whether it be anti-Semitic movies like "Jud Suss," or "The Eternal Jew," or movies made against the Polish to help, you know, create sympathy for them to invade Poland. You know, there'd be movies where there would be some German girl living in Poland who's raped by the Polish or something.
Looking back now, I can see that my dad was a real fighter. A lot of people thought, 'Why don't you keep the Jewish stuff quiet?' They were anti-Semitic Jews. People who were afraid. People who came here and made it and anglicized themselves and didn't want to associate with their past.
My family reached the United States before the Holocaust. Both of my parents emigrated from Russia as young children. My grandparents were fleeing religious persecution and came to America seeking a better life for their family.
I'm not anti-Semitic. My Gospels are not anti-Semitic. I've shown it to many Jews and they're like, it's not anti-Semitic. It's interesting that the people who say it's anti-Semitic say that before they saw the film, and they said the same thing after they saw the film.
When I was a boy, we were the only Jewish family in a terribly anti-Semitic neighborhood. Those streets weren't any fun for us but our parents never found that out. In a way, you avoid telling your parents what happened to you during those days.
Anyone who expresses anti-Semitic ideas in Poland is like a person who steps on a grave - a despicable act in Polish culture.
But at the same time, my parents always encouraged my brother and me to be happy with what we were doing. My parents were athletes in high school; my mom and my dad were the stars of the basketball team, but they never pushed my brother and me to be anything we didn't want to be.
I was brought up to look after my parents. My family were Polish Jews, and we lived with my grandmother, with uncles and aunts and cousins all around, and I thought everybody lived like that.
We were an underprivileged family. My parents were both tailors. We got by. But we only had a few important things in our life.
I have always lived in Amsterdam. During the war, we inhabited the Rivieren neighborhood where many Jews lived at the time. Our downstairs neighbors were Jews, and there were also Jews a few houses from us. We saw how they were rounded up and taken away. That made a very great impression on me.
Anti-Semitism is best understood as a virus. It has no logic. Jews were hated because they were rich and because they were poor; because they were capitalists and because they were communists; because they held tenaciously to an ancient faith and because they were rootless cosmopolitans, believing nothing. Hate needs no logic. It is a sickness of the soul.
There was also a national policy, which as a child I didn't know anything about. In 1924 the first major immigration law was passed. Before that, there was an Oriental Exclusion Act, but other than that, European immigrants like my parents were generally admitted in the early years of the twentieth century. But that ended in 1924 with an immigration law that was largely directed against Jews and Italians.
The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.
It seemed ironic that Lowell Levine and I, who were both Jewish, were going over to identify the remains of a man who was so anti-Semitic.
As a kid, I heard elders in my family say in passing that Jewish people were consumed with making money, and that they 'owned everything.' My relatives never dwelled on the subject, and nothing about their tone indicated that they thought anything they were saying was anti-Semitic - not that a lack of awareness would be any excuse.
A lot of people think that I and Debina met while filming for 'Ramayan,' and then we got married in 2011. Very few know that when we were nothing, we weren't actors, we were only looking for work - we were just 19 and 20 years old, we eloped and got married, in 2006. We did not tell our parents.
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