SHOWTIMES: 2:45p - SUN 2/21
PART OF THE 2010 ATHENS JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL
GUEST SPEAKER: MICHAL GOLDMAN, founder of Filmmakers' Cooperative and also founder of the Boston Jewish Film Festival will introduce her documentary and lead discussion afterwards.
Guided by memory after nearly four years away, Michal Goldman last week walked through the courtyard of a block-square apartment house in the Bronx. Past the planters, past the fountain, she came to the doorway that was her destination. She pointed to its lintel, adorned with a bas-relief of a hammer and sickle, the stonework split by cracks.
The portal that held Ms. Goldman’s attention was one particularly revealing part of the United Workers Cooperative Colony, a housing complex created and populated 80 years ago by American Communists and their sympathizers. Commonly known as “the Coops,” the project has been privately owned for decades and includes only a handful of its original 2,000 residents.
Goldman's film traces the Coops from their founding through the heydays of American Communist activism (the Scottsboro Boys case, Paul Robeson’s Peekskill concert) and the contortions required by Moscow’s ideology (the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Khrushchev’s “secret speech”).
She also captures the vigor of daily life in the Coops. The residents maintained a 20,000-volume library, cooperative stores, youth clubs; they welcomed, indeed recruited, black families, leading to interracial dating and marriage. Yet even internally the Coops fell victim to dogmatic rigidity. With the housing complex in debt in the early 1940s and at risk of defaulting on its mortgage, residents refused to increase their monthly rents by $1 a room. Sure enough, the Coops were sold to a private owner in 1943.
Now the tenants tend to be Cambodian and West Indian. The library is now a laundry room, the cafeteria is a management office. But the gardens, part of the pride of the radical founders, are still being tended.
nytimes
