“Who ever heard of the Coen brothers anyway?” asked a Minneapolis woman with whom I was seated at a small party shortly after the opening of A Serious Man, in 2009. An accomplished and striking woman in her early seventies, Ms. S had lived in St. Louis Park, a first-ring suburb of Minneapolis, and the hometown of Joel and Ethan Coen. In fact, all of the women at the table where I was seated were likewise: affluent, politically and culturally active, philanthropic, and residents of St. Louis Park in the 1960s. On that December night, what they also shared was contempt for the film, and the filmmakers, whom they resented as inaccurate narrators of their shared place and time. Nothing could dissuade them from their conviction that the film was awful, not even the arguments of the Minneapolis Star Tribune film critic, Colin Colvert, who was also seated at our table.

Ms. S's dismissal of the Coen brothers revealed her dislike not only of the film, but also of their portrayal of St. Louis Park. Her claim that “no one had heard of the Coen brothers” until they achieved their fame was no more accurate than her assertion that “they didn't belong to a synagogue,” a type of proof text to bolster her assertion of their invisibility. They differed from another St. Louis Park native son of the Coens' generation, Tom Friedman, the New York Times journalist whose mother “everyone” knew. Ms. S dismissed the Coen family as unknown phantoms, strangers to her large network of St. Louis Park Jewish kin and friends.

Jews in this area identified one another in ways that many ethnic groups of the period certainly would. To which synagogue did they belong? What was a (almost always) man's business or profession? To what families did one belong as child, sibling, cousin, parent, or in-law, and from what neighborhoods did these families come before they migrated to St. Louis Park (variously called the Park, or less kindly, St. Jewish Park). The answers marked who were the insiders and who were not.

Whether Joel and Ethan Coen were “outsiders” or “native sons,” A Serious Man brought local Jews out by the thousands to see these auteurs' new film. Viewers appeared to be interested in one overriding question: Was the film mimetic; did it capture reality? How Jews from the Twin Cities answered that question revealed insights about their multigenerational sojourn in Minnesota. It also created a collision course between what the Coens described as a deeply personal film and what many of their viewers hoped to see. What is “representational” and what is “real” are not the same in film, but those differences had an impact on the viewer, and raised interesting questions for local Jews.

Who Speaks for the Jews of St. Louis Park?

When the Coen brothers grew up in St. Louis Park, in the late 1950s and 1960s, Jews were fairly recent arrivals to the suburb. In 1930, fewer than 1,000 Jews had lived in this suburban area. By 1957, the Jewish population was 38,200, constituting 13 percent of the suburb's population. A total of 28 percent of the Jews of Minneapolis area lived in St. Louis Park, making it the area of highest density of Jews in the state.Footnote ¹

St. Louis Park was a destination for upwardly mobile Jews breaking out of the confines of their prewar Minneapolis neighborhoods. The move constituted neither exile nor freedom, and could not be compared, for example, to second-generation Jews fleeing the Bronx for Manhattan. Rather, after World War II, St. Louis Park promised to be the endpoint of a journey that Jews had traveled together, relocating not only their homes, but—for those leaving both the North and South Sides of Minneapolis—ultimately their synagogues and communal Talmud Torah as well.

However, the Coens' parents, Edward and Rena, were not “insiders” with deep roots in Minneapolis's Jewish families, geography, or businesses. Their father, an economist originally from England, was recruited to the University of Minnesota. He and his wife arrived in the spring for the academic year 1953 with a young daughter. Joel and Ethan were born in Minnesota in 1954 and 1957. Like other local Jews, however, their first residence was in the city of Minneapolis itself, and they moved to a far north corner of St. Louis Park a few years later to live on Flagg Avenue.

Their mother, Rena Neumann Coen, an art historian, grew up in a family of Hebraists and intellectuals. Her grandfather, Zvi Hirsch (or Zundel) Neumann, was a Zionist and a maskil (a follower of the Haskalah). In the late nineteenth century, he established a day school in Brooklyn called Shaare Zion. Alexander Dushkin, a pioneer of Jewish education and the author of an important survey of early twentieth-century Jewish education in New York, noted that the school was advertised as “the first Jewish school fashioned in the spirit of new nationalism.” Neumann had embraced this pedagogy earlier in his native Latvia in a heder metukan.Footnote ² In both settings, Neumann was committed to teaching Hebrew as a “living language,” and hence used it as both the language of instruction and the object of learning. In Brooklyn, he taught his young pupils mathematics and English “at no extra charge,” to encourage parents to keep their sons in an intensive Jewish environment.Footnote ³ At the time of Dushkin's survey in 1918, the school still served as a supplementary school that taught middle- and high-school-aged children. The day school, in part, foundered on parents' demand that a Jewish education focus on learning prayers and not encourage the “unwelcome fad” of Hebrew as a national language.Footnote ⁴

Rena Coen's father, Joshua H. Neumann, was a professor of English at Brooklyn College and a scholar of British literature, including Coleridge and Shakespeare.Footnote ⁵ He maintained his father's passion for Hebrew, however, and edited and wrote the introduction and notes to Selected Essays of Ahad Ha-am, which remains in print.Footnote ⁶

Rena Coen continued a family tradition of scholarship. She received her doctorate from the University of Minnesota in art history in 1969 and was a member of the faculty of St. Cloud State University. In an era that hardly idealized the working mother, Rena Coen pursued a degree, and then commuted a 130-mile round trip in order to pursue her career.

The Coens were not, however, classic, “cosmopolitan” faculty members who were isolated from the local Jewish community. They belonged to a large Conservative synagogue, Adath Jeshurun, which remained in Minneapolis until 1992 when the synagogue relocated to a western suburb. In fact, contrary to typical Jewish patterns of suburbanization, Conservative synagogues moved to St. Louis Park decades after Jewish residents, who in the intervening years simply continued to drive to their old synagogues. The Coens, then, were urbanites and suburban dwellers.

In contrast to the norms of suburban Jewish life, the Coens did not simply join the synagogue for their children. Rena Coen taught Sunday school, and they attended Shabbat morning services. Ed and Rena Coen were active members of the Married Couple League. The synagogue's history notes that in the 1950s, shortly after the Coens arrived, its core members formed a monthly study group that became the forerunner of all the congregation's study groups.Footnote ⁷ The Married Couple League was in many ways the heart of the postwar Adath Jeshurun, a core of members and their young families. In this study group the Coens made a number of close friends with whom they shared family Shabbat dinners and other celebrations.

The Coens sometimes surprised, and even put off, members of their social group with the relative intensity of their Jewish identification. A friend of theirs from their social group of young faculty members at the University of Minnesota, raised as an assimilated German Jew and nonreligious after immigration to the United States, was shocked to learn that there were foods that the Coens would not eat because of Jewish dietary laws. Chagrined, now fifty years later, she could still recall her amazement that she could not use pork in a pâté that she was preparing for dinner with them one evening.

All three of the Coens' children attended the communal Talmud Torah of Minneapolis, an institution that also did not move to St. Louis Park until 1969. As A Serious Man portrays, Joel and Ethan took a bus from school four days a week to the Talmud Torah and attended on Sunday as well. They also went to Shabbat morning services and to summer camp for a period.Footnote ⁸ They discussed their upbringing in the many interviews they gave about A Serious Man, readily using words such as shul, gabbai, and Yiddishkeit, and described the hours spent at Talmud Torah.Footnote ⁹ If Joel Coen, as he explained to National Public Radio host Terri Gross, thought that becoming a bar mitzvah was “something you had to do,” and balked at any consideration of continuing to attend synagogue after his bar mitzvah, he and Ethan were nevertheless members of a committed Jewish family that lived within the world of Conservative Judaism.Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, their confidence in their Jewish education was unshakable enough that when asked by Gross if they felt the need to read the Bible again as they prepared to adapt the script for their 2010 film True Grit, Joel dismissed the question with the assertion that their more than forty-year-distant Hebrew education was more than sufficient.Footnote ¹¹

What best explained the fact that a good number of Minneapolis Jews may have viewed the Coens as marginal in 2009 is that their parents were not natives of the community and did not draw on dense and wide connections to family. In addition, though Minnesota Jews of Edward Coen's generation entered the professions far more frequently than their fathers had, they were more likely to be physicians and lawyers than academics. The Coens' lives revolved around academic and synagogue friends, and Joel and Ethan invoked their memories of some of those academics (though not synagogue members) as important (if unflattering) models for the characters in A Serious Man. Footnote ¹²

As young filmmakers, Joel and Ethan Coen were embedded deeply enough in this world that they turned to their family friends for help to finance their 1984 directorial debut film, Blood Simple, and its credits include a “thank you” to a long list of St. Louis Park and Minneapolis Jews who pitched in. One of their childhood friends explained that his father's estate receives a few hundred dollars each year from his small initial investment in that film.

A Serious Man cannot, then, be dismissed as the work of interlopers or mere residents of St. Louis Park. The filmmakers' memories shaped the most representational features of the film.

Setting the Stages

Joel and Ethan Coen invested tremendous resources into achieving the look, the feel, and the atmosphere of their childhood time and place in their film. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that advance people for the film knocked on the doors of suburban homes, checkbooks in hand, to ask if they could purchase from the residents their 1960s-era “scalloped aluminum window shades or filigreed screen doors.”Footnote ¹³

An article in the local newspaper revealed that the film could not actually be shot in St. Louis Park because its trees were too large and leafy to create the look of a newly minted postwar neighborhood. Instead, the filming of the neighborhood took place on two blocks in Bloomington, a bland Minneapolis suburb distinguished mostly by its proximity to the Mall of America. Its “vintage” rambler-style homes set back from the curbless street created the perfect look for the film. The thin trees were newly planted because straight-line winds had uprooted the original ones in 1998. This “perfect” block still required a complete relandscaping of eight houses, installation of new driveways, and many other changes to house façades, including the construction of a chimney.

Only the synagogue scenes brought the film crew the brief distance to St. Louis Park to work at B'nai Emet, a Conservative synagogue that retains its postwar look and feel. Other scenes were shot at a few colleges in the area and in the downtown law offices of a Jewish attorney.

Similarly, their designer created home interiors that meticulously recreated every detail of interiors of the period. Joel and Ethan Coen described seeking “totems of the Jewish middle class” of the time for the set, and what they had in mind went well beyond furnishings. They particularly thought about the books to be put in the bookcases. At the top of their list were Abba Eban's My People: The Story of the Jews and Yigal Yadin's Masada: Herod's Fortress and the Zealots' Last Stand, books that were found on the shelves of a great many American Jews in the late 1960s as Israel came increasingly to the center of American Jewish culture.Footnote ¹⁴ Joel Coen put his own “totemic” kiddush cup from his 1967 bar mitzvah in the hands of the film's bar mitzvah boy who celebrated this rite of passage in the cinematic world of 1967.

There was at least one character in the film, Mrs. Vivienne Samsky, who was based on a real person in the Coen brothers' life. At the December event I attended, I was seated next to the woman on whom the sunbathing neighbor was based. She explained to her friends at the table that she had repeatedly denied any connection to the character to those who asserted that she was that person. However, she reluctantly accepted her connection to Mrs. Samsky only after enough members of her dense network of St. Louis Park friends and relatives reported that their own sons had confessed to mowing her lawn at a heatstroke pace in order to gawk at her bikini-clad body. She was outraged by this forty-year-old indignity brought to light through fiction. Given that the Coen brothers bought their first camera from money earned mowing lawns in the neighborhood, a fact central to the tale of their precocious and singular devotion to filmmaking, they clearly were among the voyeurs who lingered over the chance for a glance at the sunbather.Footnote ¹⁵

Joel and Ethan Coen, then, were hardly averse to engaging “reality” in their film. Many local audiences erupted with the mention of two names in the film, Ron Meshbesher, a prominent Jewish attorney, and Ruth Brin, a close friend of Rena Coen's and member of the synagogue's Young Married League, who was a well-known Jewish writer, poet, and activist, and who died the week the film opened.

The Talmud Torah janitor Slim was portrayed by the Talmud Torah janitor Slim of the Coens' youth. The Talmud Torah principal's name in the film, Mr. Turchik, was actually the name of a reputedly feared and disliked teacher at the school when they were students there. Several of the extras were the adult sons of the Talmud Torah teachers of the Coens' youth.

These tiny details led some Minneapolis Jews to ask, “How can anyone appreciate this film who is not from here?” Some Minnesotans expressed amazement that people were laughing in New York or Chicago, where they had seen the film. More than one person commented about the film, “I knew those people,” but when asked to explain, they usually talked about how the interiors were precisely the ones that they remembered from childhood.

The mimetic was further enhanced by Joel and Ethan Coen's decision to employ local Jews for most of the speaking roles, and for all of the extras with no lines. They held a casting call at the local Minneapolis Jewish Community Center six months before making the film. The call for “Jewish-looking actors” spawned rumors that circulated in the Twin Cities that those who tried out had to have “noses of certain lengths,” and could not have blonde hair. A sixteen-year-old hopeful commented that “it was like the revenge of the brunettes: No blondes allowed.”Footnote ¹⁶

In an interview, Ethan Coen praised the Twin Cities' theater community as ideal for recruiting local actors. When asked what they were looking for, the Coens replied in unison, “Jews.” “It's like Martin Scorcese doing a Mafia movie,” Joel said. “You're casting certain kinds of people for most of the parts.”Footnote ¹⁷

The two synagogue scenes featured the pews of B'nai Emet Synagogue filled with Jews from the area—whole families, friends of some of the actors in the film, and others who applied to be extras. They were required to make a commitment to “look the part.” In the case of women, they had to promise not to cut their hair for several months, to wear girdles, cone bras, ratted hair, beehives, and, of course, period clothing that wardrobe people fitted to the extras. Those who played these minor roles gave up several days of work in November to hang around a set from early in the morning until evening, ultimately to appear on screen for a matter of seconds, usually in a blur.

The Coens' success in recreating this “authentic” Jewish world of 1967 appeared to take even them by surprise when they shot the bar mitzvah scene. One extra, who is a professor of German at the University of Minnesota, recounted the following story. After the Coens had filmed a take of the bar mitzvah scene on the synagogue's bimah, they once again shot the Torah being lifted. The “congregation” stood at that moment. Joel Coen shouted at the extras to sit down, that they were not cued to stand. The film's cantor, played by a local retired cantor, explained what on reflection must have been obvious to someone raised in a Conservative Jewish home: “Jews stand when the Torah is lifted.” Coen momentarily paused, and then forcefully told the extras to sit down and not to do anything without being directed again.

What was the greater illusion, then, in the confusion of reality for representation—the filmmaker who saw the Torah as a prop, or the extras who took a film scene for a Torah service? The colliding realities of filmmakers and local Jews circulated not only in the film's reception, but even in its fabrication.

Reality?

A Serious Man is an odd film on which to hang one's hopes for a reasonable depiction of reality. A film that included among other things an invented Yiddish tale, dream sequences about anti-Semites hunting Jews, a patriarchal rabbi listening to the Jefferson Airplane, a stoned bar mitzvah boy, a hate campaign waged against assistant professor Larry Gopnik by his wife's lover Sy Ableman, teeth examined by a dentist that turned out to bear a secret message, and the biblical conceit of injustice being rained down upon an innocent man, among many other twists and turns, hardly signaled a documentary, or realism.

However, precisely that slippage between what was real and what was portrayed engaged those who liked the film, those who were puzzled by it, and those who loathed it. Local Jews complained with remarkable consistency that, for example, “no one would get stoned at his own bar mitzvah.” “No Jew would have been a department chair at the University of Minnesota in 1967.” “The Talmud Torah [the communal school] did a great job of educating kids; it wasn't like that at all.” “There were no rabbis like that in the 1960s in St. Louis Park.”

If Minneapolis Jews rejected the “accuracy” of the film, nevertheless the Coen brothers asserted that they had made an unmistakably Jewish film. Joel Coen explained,

They describe an entirely Jewish world. Public school was the place from which the film's students left on the way to Talmud Torah, not where any action occurred. Teens, like adults, inhabited a nearly exclusively Jewish world. Their doctors, lawyers, teachers, drug dealers, and department chairs were all Jews, as were their sex objects and adulterous lovers. The Coens negotiate a similar terrain to that of Edgar Ulmer's 1940 Yiddish film Amerikaner shadkhn, in which a sophisticated American world of wealthy cosmopolitans, butlers, and high-society romance was cast as exclusively Jewish and negotiated through the Yiddish language.Footnote ¹⁹ Similarly, they portrayed the world of “a Midwestern suburb” (understood by Minnesotans as well as the Coens, as St. Louis Park ca. 1967), as an equally enclosed and contemporary world. Its borders were open to music, television, drugs, and illicit sex, but always mediated by and experienced with other Jews.

Non-Jews, that is, “goys,” were nevertheless ever-present. They were a menace, rendered as completely “other.”Footnote ²⁰ In a nod to Woody Allen, A Serious Man portrayed them as brutal hunters, physically active, and dangerous to Jews. At the same time they were irrelevant. Both Joel and Ethan Coen captured that irrelevancy in the scene about Larry Gopnik's encounter with Rabbi Nachtner, who retold the story of a dentist's patient whose teeth carried a secret message in Hebrew. When Larry inquired what became of the patient, he answered, “Who cares about the goy?” Joel Coen remarked that the line “always brings the house down,” and according to Ethan, “It's a classic line.”Footnote ²¹

Jewishness, then, inhered in the detailed recreation of both a neighborhood where Jews lived, and in the relationships, institutions, and rabbis that structured their social world. The Coens embedded questions of meaning, love, death, and life in that world. However, it was antisemitism, and the mutual “othering” of Jews and their neighbors, that might be read as both the film's background and foreground. The very social density of Jewish life was certainly seen by Minnesota viewers as linked to that antisemitism. Jews' attachments to one another as a bulwark against a hostile world might be read as the narrative's foreground, driving some of what happens in the film. The portrayal of the uneasiness created by the ubiquitous hostile world is clearly part of what made the film “personal” for the Coens.

I would suggest that the very Jewishness of the film was what was alienating to many of the Jews of St. Louis Park, Minneapolis, and Saint Paul who spoke to me about it. Jewishness was the matter to which they returned repeatedly. Of course, one did not have to grow up in St. Louis Park to be put off by the film's treatment of “locals,” whether they were rabbis or the film's central characters. Critical reception varied from raves and Academy Award nominations to judgments, such as that by David Denby, who described it as the work of the Coens “in their bleak, black, belittling mode, and it's hell to sit through.”Footnote ²² The reviewer for the local arts newspaper, Citypages, titled her review “Coen Brothers Take a Serious Man into a Truly Vicious Realm.”Footnote ²³ Surely, the Coens defensively anticipated that the film would evoke accusations of insensitivity to Jews in their oft-quoted disclaimer that appeared at the end of the film, “No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture.” In an interview for the bonus features on the DVD release, they lavishly praised the local Jewish community and commended its rabbis and leaders for accepting a script that had a stoned bar mitzvah boy at its center. Joel Coen opined that all groups would feel sensitive to their portrayal on film and would ask some version of the inevitable question, “Is it good for the Jews?” Ethan Coen added, “It's like we wouldn't laugh at anyone.”Footnote ²⁴

It is impossible to read Ethan Coen's remark as anything but ironic, given that this is precisely the Coen brothers' reputation as filmmakers; their films consistently distance the viewer from the screen. What makes many of their characters truly memorable is that the viewer would never empathize with them. For that reason, one of Ed and Rena Coen's friends recalled the local mood before the film was released as “fear and loathing in St. Louis Park about what it would be,” precisely because it was a Coen brothers' film.

Many Twin Cities Jews were simply dismissive of an unquestionably difficult film, one that was shaped by a complex narrative scheme and that was decidedly ambiguous as a purportedly moral tale. However, there was a consistent undercurrent expressed by many I spoke to about feeling either belittled by the film or that Judaism was treated with immaturity or “tone deafness,” and most distressing, that the film trivialized the pain of antisemitism.

Though there is some debate about the veracity of this claim, in 1948, Carey McWilliams dubbed Minneapolis “the capital of anti-Semitism in the United States.”Footnote ²⁵ From its attainment of statehood in the nineteenth century, Minnesota's dominant ethnic group consisted of German Americans. In the 1930s some of their descendants had unusually strong ties to the fascist Silver Shirt movement and made up an important element of the audience, which numbered in the millions, for Father Coughlin's Sunday radio broadcasts. Coughlin's unrelenting pro-Nazi, anti-New Deal, and antisemitic content led to the radio program being taken off the air in 1939 by the National Association of Broadcasters.Footnote ²⁶

In contrast to multiethnic and Catholic-dominated Saint Paul across the Mississippi River, Minneapolis had twice as many Lutherans as Catholics, and historians argue far more antisemitism, which cut across housing, education, labor unions, the professions, and a variety of other social institutions well into the postwar period. Most famously, Jews could not join the Automobile Club until 1948. In 1911 the Automobile Club of Minneapolis built the AAA Auto Club Country Club on the Minnesota River as a dinner and dancing club for its members. Jews were restricted from joining all such clubs, and as a result were not allowed to become members of the parent organization as well.Footnote ²⁷ Scholars associate the cultural and political tone of Minneapolis with its New England barons of industry and their descendants.Footnote ²⁸

Sociologists Seymour Leventman and Judith Kramer argued in their 1961 study Children of the Gilded Ghetto that those they labeled as second-generation Minneapolis (renamed North City) Jews engaged in a parallel social structure of organizations, clubs, and social life that kept them apart from the hostile Gentile world. It was only with their exodus to St. Louis Park (renamed Parricus in their study), and particularly with the coming of age of third-generation adults born and raised during the Depression, that Jews began to occupy a social space with Protestants.Footnote ²⁹ These patterns of Jewish association persisted in Minneapolis and its suburbs a decade or longer than in other urban Jewish communities in the United States.

Therefore, the era depicted in A Serious Man was still a defensive and intensively family- and community-oriented period for Jews in St. Louis Park, as they continued to live in a dense ethnic enclave where they had reason to suspect the motives of non-Jews. These Jews were easily cast as “provincials,” “small minded,” “clannish,” and disengaged from the broader culture of Minneapolis that was not easily negotiated by or open to Jews, who continued to be suspect as “different.” The risk of seeing themselves portrayed in that fashion was what led to an aura of anxiety about what would appear on the screen. For some the film realized that fear. Jews were cast in an unflattering light, according to many, and looked as their antisemitic detractors imagined them.

The fact that the Coens created a “hyper-reality” based on their own Midwestern Jewish past intensified the mistaken link between representation and reality in film, and the disappointing portrayal of Jews. The blinding lightness of suburbia in the film, and the perfectly rendered interiors, could not create the nostalgic cocoon that some may have longed to see, or a more flattering portrait of suburban life. Even the antisemitism portrayed in A Serious Man conveyed little satisfaction. The menacing goy embodied by Larry Gopnik's neighbor seemed dangerous both in dreams and reality. As the “moral” character at the film's center, Gopnik radiated a weakness and uncertainty that again reflected what many Jews feared others saw. Squabbling siblings, banal rabbis (whom Joel Coen characterized as “unhelpful, but not just laughable, not dismissible”), unctuous adulterers, and a stoned bar mitzvah boy could not assume the ballast or dignity that “natives” might have hoped for in a film about matters of meaning and consequence.

Instead, A Serious Man juxtaposed the incongruities of insider and outsider, morality and immorality, reward and punishment, and meaning and meaninglessness. It rendered the terrain of the past hyper-real, antic, illusory, hyperbolic, gothic, and tragic, in fact anything but an “accurate” reflection of the past. Rather than hometown heroes who returned the favor of a good communal upbringing in a film about suburban life, the Coens left many local Jews feeling trivialized and misunderstood.

Filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen were transparent about having made a personal film. They created a landscape, domestic scenes, interiors, characters, and even a weather pattern that were grounded in their own childhoods. Nevertheless, the remarkable recreations of the time and place of childhood did not alone constitute the film's central narrative, or the moral questions it posed but did not answer transparently.

The Coens were not surprised that local Jews (they never expressed concern about American Jews) might well take offense, or feared being harmed in their portrayals. They considered that anxiety the norm for all groups who are portrayed on film, and certainly minorities.

A “personal” film engages reality, but reality cannot be taken for documentation or mimesis. The world of the imagination is mediated by film to appear real, indeed more than real. The unwillingness to resolve moral questions, the central theme of A Serious Man, only heightens the complexity of how a viewer might experience the film and its portrayal of Jews. It would surprise no one, least of all the Coens, that in the slippage between reality and representation many local Jews found misrepresentation and distortions.