‘Defiance’ hits close to home
The legacy of the Bielski brothers lives on in Woodmere
By Yaffi Spodek
Issue of Feb. 20 2009 / 26 Shevat 5769
Jordan Bielsky of Woodmere can now add actor to the growing list of credentials on his resume. The law school-bound 22-year-old recently played a Polish collaborator who is killed by Zus Bielski (Liev Schreiber) in the movie “Defiance.”
Based on the book by Nechama Tec, “Defiance” tells the true story of the Bielski partisans, a group of brothers who fought the Nazis in the Belarussian forests near Novogrudok, saving 1,237 Jews during the Holocaust.
“They wanted a Bielski neshama [soul] in the movie,” Jordan’s father, Robert, said about his son’s role, “even though he was playing on the wrong team.”
In the summer of 2007, Robert and Jordan traveled to the “Defiance” set in Lithuania with other Bielski relatives. They spoke with the movie’s actors and director, watched several scenes being filmed, and visited the places where their ancestors made history.
“My father killed 67 people, anybody who turned in Jews, and he had no respect for any Germans. I told the director I wanted to see high body counts for my father in the movie.” — Jakow Bielski of Woodmere
“I went with my wife and brought my whole family back a second time,” said Robert, whose father Tuvia Bielski (Daniel Craig) was a leader of the partisans. “We went to the actual place where my father was born and hid in the woods.”
In the movie, Zus and Tuvia are portrayed as having strong but opposing personalities. Zus’s impulsive nature and his desire to seek revenge on the Germans is balanced by Tuvia’s patience and wisdom to plan for the future. Those true-to-life traits have been inherited by the next generation as well.
Robert, a commercial real estate broker, believes that he takes after his father.
“I’m very diplomatic, I’m a good negotiator and I’m a big strong guy just like him,” he admits.
“Tuvia’s kids are different and my kids are different,” says Dr. Jakow Bielski, Zus’s son. “They’re wise like Tuvia and political, and we are just as impulsive as my father. I was in the army and my kids were... None of their kids were in the army but they all speak for Jewish causes, and it carries on like a genetic marker, the two traits of impulsivity and wisdom.”
Jakow lives in North Woodmere with his wife Margo, and works as psychologist for the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services’ Mishkan division. Late last year, he and several relatives attended a preview screening of an unedited version of “Defiance” at Paramount Studios in Hollywood, California.
“When I walked out of the movie, I thought that Liev Schreiber [playing his father, Zus] stole the show,” he recounted. “Zus was impulsive and wanted to get revenge and to kill as many Germans as possible, while Tuvia thought they couldn’t defeat the German killing machine and should try to save as many Jews as possible... He [Schreiber] really got Zus’s personality correct and portrayed him well.”
Jakow believes that his father’s experience as a partisan can be summed up in a line found in his parents’ Yad Vashem testimony, recorded in 1979. When asked to describe his daily life, Zus responded: “It consisted of eating, drinking and planning how to kill Germans.”
Jakow is certainly a proud fighter like his father, a trait he has passed down to his children — he served in the U.S. Marine Corps and also fought for Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. His two grown sons, Matthew and Elan, both made aliyah and live in Israel; Matthew served as a special forces paratrooper for the Israel Defense Forces; Elan is currently a paratrooper in the IDF.
According to Jakow, the movie’s portrayal is remarkably accurate, except for some small details — names of characters, ages and other minor variations — which were changed with the permission of family members. If anything was distorted, it is the fact that “the movie is not one thousandth as brutal as what actually happened in real life,” he says proudly. “My father killed 67 people, anybody who turned in Jews, and he had no respect for any Germans. I told the director I wanted to see high body counts for my father in the movie.”
“Defiance” Director and Producer Edward Zwick met with family members and consulted with them several times during the making of the movie and long before he began filming.
“I was very happy with how it came out,” Jakow said. “It also just opened in Israel about a week ago and it is being sold out.”
After the movie was released in New York, he made T-shirts for his extended family that read ‘I am Bielski,’ — one of his favorite lines from the movie — on one side, and ‘Defiance’ on the other.
Robert estimates that he has seen the movie close to 40 times and is impressed with the finished product.
“I was born into the story and my father made sure we knew it well... We were very happy with the outcome of the movie,” he said. “My favorite part is when the movie ends and the partisans continue to walk toward their liberation, even though you can’t see it...and also when they relaxed for five minutes and they didn’t have Germans chasing them.”
Robert, who is in the process of publishing his father’s memoirs, has also received feedback from others who have seen “Defiance,” some who even experienced its events firsthand and objected to the director’s casting choices.
“One of the partisans called me up after they saw it and said, ‘It was very good and brought back memories, but your father is much more handsome than Daniel Craig.’”
Many of the families who lived together in the forest remain in close contact, as do all the Bielskis.
“My father and Tuvia lived next to each other all their lives, no more than 10 blocks apart, first in Chulin, then Ramat Gan and then Brooklyn,” Jakow noted. “Everybody was like that. All those forest marriages [between partisans during the war] lasted a lifetime. Among all the people, there was one divorce.”
As depicted in the movie, many relationships were formed in the forest among the Jews, including Zus and Tuvia whose wives were fellow partisans they met in the woods. Sonia Bielski — Jakow’s mother and Zus’s wife — is 86 and lives in Brooklyn with one of her sons, Zvi. Though it is not portrayed in the film, there were 11 Bielski children in all, nine sons and two daughters.
In addition to Jordan Bielski, another actor in “Defiance” also had a personal connection to the story he helped film. According to Jakow, Daniel Craig’s grandfather liberated Jews from concentration camps while serving in the British army.
Dr. Jakow Bielski is scheduled to speak at the Young Israel of North Woodmere, 634 Hungry Harbor Road, on Sunday March 1 at 7:00 p.m. He will conduct a question-and-answer session after the screening of a video about the Bielski Partisans, which was first aired on the History Channel.
