‘Carpati’ a Poignant Look at a Vanishing Culture

Yale Strom’s “Carpati: 50 Miles, 50 Years” is every bit as irresistible and poignant as “The Last Klezmer,” his portrait of Leopold Kozlowski, Eastern Europe’s last remaining prewar master of klezmer, Jewish folk music. Strom and his cinematographer-editor and co-producer David Notowitz traveled to the Ukraine’s Carpathian Mountains, once the cradle of the Hasidim and home to nearly a quarter of a million Jews, whose population has dwindled to less than 1,500 due to the Holocaust and subsequent emigration.

Once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the region became part of Czechoslovakia after World War I, and Jewish culture flourished between the wars. After World War II it became part of the Soviet Union, ushering in a long period of hardship, hostility and injustice for Holocaust survivors, and is now part of the Ukraine. Sadly, in the long run, it seems that Hitler and Stalin will have succeeded in eradicating Jewish life from the Carpathian Mountains.

In the shabby, picturesque town of Beregova in 1994 they met Zev Godinger, then 66 and much-beloved as “Uncle Zev,” hearty, outgoing ice cream merchant. They also meet a clan of Gypsies, who play ancient Jewish music as part of their repertoire. One Gypsy musician recalls that once a Gypsy family could eat a whole week from earnings from playing at a single Jewish wedding.

As “Carpati” overflows with camaraderie and intoxicating music, Strom ever so gently persuades Godinger to start talking about his tragic past as an Auschwitz survivor, and even to travel 50 miles to his birthplace, Vinogradov, which he had not visited in 50 years. He does discover one classmate from grade school, but much has vanished, including his home. The few surviving Jews do not even own a Torah for his boyhood synagogue, just as Beregova no longer has a mohel to conduct a bris.

As he did when he got Kozlowski to visit his Ukrainian hometown for the first time in 40 years, Strom avoids the aura of contrivance and exploitation through sensitivity, respect and affection for Zev and his friends. Strom makes sure that audiences realize that Gypsies were also sent to Auschwitz and today survive in often severe poverty, and he celebrates their own music as much as the Jewish music they have preserved. What Strom, a musician himself, and Notowitz are doing so lovingly--and so entrancing--is to record remnants of a culture on the brink of extinction. As Godinger remarks, “In 10, 15 years you’ll need a candle to find a Jew here in Carpati.”

* Unrated. Times guidelines: The film includes some descriptions of Auschwitz and the Holocaust too harrowing for children.

‘Carpati: 50 Miles, 50 Years’

An Artistic License Films presentation. Writer-director Yale Strom. Producers David Notowitz, Strom. Executive producers Rusty Jacobs, Steven Posen. Cinematographer-editor Notowitz. Music Strom. In Russian and Yiddish, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

* Exclusively at the Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869.