GEORGE ELKIND
Arts&Life movies
generation of Jewish entertainers, who would often canoe into town. Celebrities like Max Schmeling (who fought Joe Louis twice throughout the ’30s) and his wife, Jewish screen actress Anny Ondra, frequented the area — at a time where interfaith marriages like theirs seemed fairly common. As the godson of a local rabbi, Zydower was introduced to several such “big shots” and stars who attended Fürstenwalde’s synagogue (Bad Saarow, itself, lacked one). Around the same period, the Zydowers had a family friend who played often in the theater and would bring him props to play with. Though he was only free to see a few movies in his childhood, both due to his age and because of increasing restrictions under Hitler, the ones he caught and the aura that surrounded them combined to make an impression.
Movie Lover Extraordinaire This Holocaust survivor has seen more than 40,000 films … and counting. GEORGE ELKIND CONTRIBUTING WRITER
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lfred Zydower is no stranger to coping with trauma, and movies seem to help. Having escaped Nazi Germany with his family shortly after Krystallnacht, the 91-year old Madison Heights resident has followed a winding road before settling into retirement here. Over the years, he’s taken in an immense repertoire of more than 40,000 films — outpacing many a Netflix binger well before
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OCTOBER 8 • 2020
streaming was available. Speaking to the Jewish News on a balmy afternoon, he recalled an early fascination with movies before he’d even seen one — a relationship that dates back to his childhood in Fürstenwalde, Germany, which was near the lakeside community of Bad Saarow. Known for its healing waters, Bad Saarow proved a popular summer spot for a lost
LIFE IN SHANGHAI That all changed when he and his family fled to Shanghai, China, where he quickly became a regular moviegoer. At the time, he caught films like Black Friday (about the onset of the Great Depression), Snow White and Tarzan and the Green Goddess for about a dime a ticket. For Zydower, the experience of moviegoing itself — the feeling of a theater or of a star onscreen before him — often seems to make as much or more of an impression than the particulars of a certain story. He rhapsodized from his backyard about seeing Here Come the Waves in 1946, starring Bing Crosby and Betty Hutton, at the Cathay Theatre in Shanghai. The 1930s-era art deco movie palace boasted 12,000 seats but was largely empty — a space Zydower had mostly to himself. Zydower displays in conversation a special affinity for actresses, mourning Hutton’s early death (“she got a bit carried away in her life”) while expressing a longtime fondness for Barbara Stanwyck. Moviegoing for Zydower seems entwined deeply not just with the experience of seeing each work of art, but also has become wrapped up in the longer life films take on in memory — though he finds older films to be more durable. “Some of them, they stay with me for-
