On Media / Pop Culcha

Jewish World Review August 16, 2001 /27 Menachem-Av, 5761


The two protaganists

Elliot B. Gertel


State of Grace has quite a bit of its own

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- THERE is no question that, currently and maybe for all time, the brightest, sweetest, most knowing, and most humorous and heart-warming spot on television is the new Fox Family Channel summer series, State of Grace . There is just nothing like it anywhere on TV, and one can argue that even the wholesome series of the Fifties lacked the ability to induce both the belly laughs and the tears that this one elicits with ease and, yes, grace.

Each episode is a model of clever and thoughtful, yet engaging and effective writing, crafted with remarkable, even exquisite attention to relationships and thoughts.

State of Grace tells the story of eleven-year-old Hannah Rayburn (Alia Shawkat), who moves in 1965 with her parents, grandmother and young, unmarried uncle from Evanston, Illinois to North Carolina, where her father has purchased a furniture store. Both the father and his mother-in-law have Yiddish accents, call Hannah "Chaneh," and reflect Old World Jewish experiences. Hannah's mom (Dinah Manoff, in her best role) and mom's brother also have strong Jewish identities.

The beautifully acted show utilizes well the device of an older, 47-year-old Hannah narrating her childhood experiences. (Frances McDormand is very gifted at voicing Hannah's recollections.) Enrolled by her parents in the best private school, which also happens to be Catholic ("I am Jewish," narrates the mature Hannah, "and, yes, this was a Catholic school"), Hannah meets Grace McGee (Mae Whitman), a rich girl orphaned of her father and separated from her jaunting mother, who is wonderfully free-spirited, fun-loving, perceptive and good-natured. After some initial clashes, they quickly bond and Hannah is catapulted into Grace's charmingly mischievous adventures and into her world, the center of which is her glamorous mother, Taddie. Hannah is dazzled by the McGee's, whose lives the narrator describes as "a Noel Coward play, written by Tennessee Williams, and I couldn't wait to see what the next act would bring."

In depicting the two households, the writers have offered memorable and meaningful explorations of such issues as race, social justice, women's concerns about aging, the mother-daughter and husband-wife bonds, socializing of individuals, particularly women, of different educational and economic levels, etc. It is hard to choose particular episodes as standouts, as each half hour has many merits. But one that I particularly liked was Sy Rosen's program about how Hannah and her mother learn together to live with making mistakes, even when others have reason to laugh, and to maintain confidence in one's abilities.

One of the most moving episodes was the one in which Grace invited herself to sleep over Hannah's home and got Mr. Rayburn to talk about his Holocaust experiences. This is, to my recollection, the best television treatment to date of a Holocaust survivor opening up to his own children.

"In my family," Hannah narrates, emotional issues were a non-topic. If it couldn't be yelled down the stairs, it simply wasn't worth discussing." It is obvious to both girls that dad is up tight about their handling old family photos. Yet at the dinner table, Grace is totally uninhibited about discussing her father's death when she was six, and her decision in subsequent months to look at his picture each morning so that she would not forget what he looks like.

When dad starts talking about his loss, Hannah is shocked, and deeply envious, that her father has opened up to Grace and said, "We're glad you're here." This leads to Hannah's making quite a scene, but not before Grace's questions about Mr. Rayburn's tattooed numbers elicit remembrances of the dangers of being a Jew in Poland, the ghetto, and his separation from his family in the concentration camps.

Hannah's dad tells Grace, "It is good to ask." Later, Hannah, restless and remorseful about her jealousy (which she insightfully and endearingly confesses to Grace), finds her father looking at the old photographs in the kitchen and has the privilege, for the first time, of having him identify members of the family in Europe.

Hannah, who had been jealous that her grandmother referred to Grace with her special praise for Hannah, as a "sheine maidl," a beautiful girl, realizes that Grace was beautiful in the way that that she paved the way for this precious dialogue between father and daughter.

To be sure, the show's creators and most frequent writers, Brenda Lilly and Hollis Rich, have provided a powerful and absorbing episode, and a most engaging way to relate aspects of the Holocaust. But something at the beginning bothers me.

It was a good enough gag, but was strangely handled, I think. When Grace enters the house for the first time, she hands the Rayburn's the mezuzah, apologizing that it came off in her hands while she was trying to "straighten" it out. Dad "reassures" the butter-fingered, first time guest, "It's just our mezuzah. It's supposed to protect our house from evil." Hannah muses, "O.K. I admit it. I was flipped out. We were mezuzah-less. Grace had unknowingly disarmed our Jewish security system." As if rushing to ward off evil, Hannah's dad reaffixes the mezuzah, and Grace opines that it is "still crooked."

It seems to me that in the mezuzah sequence, an opportunity was missed. True, the writers are not only entitled, but correct to present Hannah's feelings about it. But the mezuzah came across as a superstition and even as a bit of a rebuke of Grace as-perhaps bringing evil? Could the mature Hannah, as narrator, not have used some of the hindsight that she often invokes about people, places and things to emphasize that according to the Torah, the mezuzah is not an amulet against evil but a sign of loyalty to G-d's teachings and commandments, and that it is "crooked" because two schools of Rabbis compromised on their concepts of how it was to be placed? Couldn't the mezuzah segment have been more effectively utilized in a program on compromise?

Sometimes the writers are not so explicit in their implications, but a mixed signal gets across nevertheless. In the aforementioned episode, for example, the Rayburns are, at first, reluctant to let Hannah invite Grace. The reason is never communicated. Is it because they feel self-conscious about guests in the new situation, especially about guests from the old gentility? Or is it an uneasiness with Gentiles in general? It's not clear.

Similarly unclear is the episode about a lunch "date" that Bubbe (grandma) has with the town's Gentile butcher. Though ostensibly aware that she is "interdating," Bubbe's true awareness that he is "not Jewish" seems to come when he says, "I praise the L-rd every day for the time I had with my [deceased] wife."

Does writer Mike Martineau suggest that the butcher's reference to "praising the L-rd" was a dead giveaway that he must be Christian? Doesn't Martineau know of Jews who speak that way, especially since "praise the L-rd" is a direct translation from the Hebrew?

What will be the tone of the show, insofar as Jewish topics are concerned? In that first episode about Hannah meeting Grace at Catholic school, Hannah is weighted down with notes from her parents regarding restrictions on diet and physical (gym) activity, etc., etc. She describes the cafeteria menu as a "treif [non-kosher]still-life." Yet wanting to fit in with Grace and her other new friends, Hannah says, "I picked up my fork and turned my back on 4000 years of history." In the next scene we see Hannah emerging from the girls room after heaving her lunch, with vomit all over her shirt. Grace jokes that she "flunked lunch," and the implication of the scene is that Hannah really has to let go of old inhibitions, which will only make her look and feel silly.

As if to reinforce that impression, writers Rich and Lilli have Hannah jumping fully clothed into a swimming pool, at Grace's urging, of course, and reflecting with her mother's notes swirling around her: "As I floated downward, oddly I felt no fear. In fact I felt reborn, as if all my history, all my family's restrictions, were floating up and away, and I was becoming something else, something new, something free, and yet something very important was missing: a little thing called air. And that was the day I learned how to swim."

While, again, it is perfectly legitimate to portray Hannah as feeling that way at the time, or even since, is a good "family show" about Jews to perpetuate canards about Jewish traditions being mere "restrictions"? Isn't there a need to depict what religious observances mean to traditional Jews? It does not seem that Bubbe can provide this insight. She seems to be patterned after the grandmother on Brooklyn Bridge, who relegated all religious experiences to the idyllic shtetl, though Grandma here does not stand so much for religious experiences as for the earthy blintzes that contrast with "lobster at the club" with Grace's family.

There are major opportunities in this sure-to-be-classic show to relate different kinds of Jewish loyalties and to explore the spiritual sources of Jewish ethical actions. The episode about the swimming pool began with Bubbe's being visited by a local Jewish matron, Rachel Gold, coming over with a "Happy Yom Kippur y'all" (pre-fast?) cake. It is clear that these women have few experiences in common when it comes to Judaism.

Rachel can't relate to Bubbe's reminiscences about Kiev, and Bubbe is taken aback by Rachel's being a product of the Catholic school who fondly recalls, "Those nuns really know how to cook." In a very fine episode about the Rayburn's choice to hire an African American worker as foreman, Hannah's folks stand up to strike threats by their workers and a ring-leader, Bob, who demands the position, reasoning that they like the black man's qualifications, his experience and the fact that he's "not Bob." "But," they muse, "this is the South. We're trying to do business in the South." Could writers Steven Peterman and Gary Dontzig not have given voice to any Jewish values that gave the Rayburns the courage to take the chance that they did? I'm not talking about ponderous preachments, but about just the adept and astute touch that distinguishes this series in so many other ways. Shouldn't Jewish traditions have the benefit of that?


Contributing writer Elliot B. Gertel, JWR's resident media maven, is a
Conservative rabbi based in Chicago. To comment, please click here.




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© 2001, Elliot B. Gertel