Go For Zucker!  directed by Dani Levi, Germany 2004, 91 min., 35 mm, German w/ subtitles.

By Donald H. Harrison 

This is shtick-German style about a Jewish family that was divided by the Berlin Wall. Jaecke Zucker,  formerly Jacob Zuckerman ( Henry Hübchel), was  trapped on the Communist side of the wall and became quite secular.  Samuel (Udo Samuel), the brother on the Western side of the wall, became quite religious. Years later, Germany reunified, but the brothers didn't, differing life styles and old resentments keeping them apart.

When the mother of the two brothers dies, the instructions in her will are quite explicit.  The two brothers must together sit shiva for her and they must reconcile.  Otherwise, they will not receive any proceeds from the sale of her stocks, bonds and other holdings.  The entire amount will go to the German Jewish community.

You'd think for Jaecke, a pool shark who constantly is getting himself in and out of scrapes, this would be a piece of cake, or at least a piece of kugel.  However,  the news came at a time when to avoid being jailed for his debts, Jaecke had scraped up the entry fee for the European pool championships. But to compete, he will have to somehow slip out of the funeral and the shiva, without violating his dead mother's rules or the religious sensibilities of his brother and sister-in-law, not to mention his  ultra religious nephew who has been appointed by the kehilla to make sure everything about the shiva is kosher.  


Henry Hübchel (center) sits between his Orthodox brother and sister-in-law.

The comedy of this situation is Jaecke's inventiveness in trying to have it both ways.  He wants to win the pool tournament and his mother's inheritance. The secondary characters, meanwhile, provide a platform for some droller aspects of writer-director Dani Levi's sense of humor.  Jaecke's non-Jewish wife, who was on the verge of divorcing him, takes the death of her mother-in-law as a sign from God: that it's her duty to build a Jewish household for her wayward husband and children.  

Jaecke's son has become an uptight banker-automaton, a caricature of the all too proper German.  Jaecke's daughter is a single mother with a lesbian lover.  Meanwhile, Samuel also has his problems.  While his son is haredi, his daughter, in full revolt, is sexually liberated.  Although the members of the second generation are cousins, they feel obvious attraction to each other.  As for the third generation, Jaecke can never seem to remember that his granddaughter's name is Sarah, not Sandra.

There are some underlying concepts beneath all this comedy—for example, that the "family" is a moderating influence on our life-style choices, and that, without family, we may drift to the extremes. 

The buzz about this film deals with the social milieu in which it was made.  Ever since the Holocaust, there has been both awkwardness and heaviness  in any German movie dealing with Jews. That in Germany, Jews can now be portrayed light-heartedly as human beings with all the foibles of everybody else is taken by some viewers as movement toward real reconciliation.  From my point of view, the jury is still out on that question.

Go For Zucker will be presented twice during the 16th Annual San Diego Jewish Film Festival: At 8:30 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 18, in the AMC La Jolla Theatres and at 4 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 19, at the Poway UltraStar.