Hagai Levi’s new miniseries, Etty, which is not being shown on television here but is playing in two parts at Lev Cinemas, is both fascinating and frustrating. It is based on the diaries of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch-Jewish writer who chronicled her spiritual journey as the Nazis occupied Holland and eventually murdered her and her family in Auschwitz. Those who want a traditional biographical depiction of Hillesum will be disappointed. Etty is not the story of her life so much as an attempt to dramatize her diaries and the ideas that fueled her writing.
Levi is a born storyteller, and he is best known as one of the creators of BeTipul, a groundbreaking Israeli series about a psychologist and his patients that premiered 20 years ago and was remade in the US as In Treatment, as well as in dozens of countries around the world, including nearly every country in Europe and Latin America, along with Japan.
The series is rightly credited with starting the Israeli television boom and pushing Israeli creators into the forefront of the industry around the world. It showed that an ingenious concept could speak to audiences everywhere, and what the Israeli industry lacked in cash, it made up for in creativity.
Levi's international career
He has gone on to an international career in the United States with such series as the remake of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage and The Affair. He also returned to Israel to make Our Boys, about the Jewish terrorists who killed Mohammed Abu Khdeir following the murders of three Jewish teens by Hamas in 2014.
Etty, which was produced by Les Films du Poisson, Komplizen Serien, Topkapi Series, Quiddity, Sheleg, Arte FRANCE, and SIPUR, had its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival earlier this year.
In his director’s statement for the festival, Levi wrote, “Around 10 years ago, during a spell of confusion and helplessness, I came across a small book in Hebrew called The Sky within Me – The Diaries of Etty Hillesum. After breathless reading, I felt I had found something I could talk about for the rest of my life.”
He went on to write that, having grown up Orthodox and then abandoned his faith, he struggled to find a sense of purpose in life: “Hillesum offered another option: a different religiosity, a new sense of faith, beyond institutional religion.” Her diaries were published in the 1980s after the son of one of her mentors, Dutch writer Klaas Smelik (Gijs Naber), to whom she entrusted her diaries when the Nazis were closing in, had searched for a publisher for years.
Levi clearly created the series meticulously, with great love for the work, and Julia Windischbauer, an Austrian actress, brings all of Hillesum’s contradictions and intensity to life brilliantly.
But watching the six-episode series in two approximately three-hour chunks is difficult, and a viewer who does not share Levi’s fascination with Hillesum may not make it to the end.
As she revealed in her diaries, and as the series portrays, she struggled, as Levi said that he did, to find a spiritual path, fighting suicidal urges. Born into a secular family, as the Nazis took over, she both embraced a mysticism that she tried to explain in detail and accepted a position with the Jewish Council in Amsterdam, trying to find a way to help Jews as they faced deportation and death.
Eventually, refusing offers from gentile friends to hide her, she volunteered to work for the council in the Westerbork transit camp and in 1943, was killed in Auschwitz at the age of 29.
In the 18 months that she wrote these diaries, she found solace with Julius Spier (Sebastian Koch), an unconventional psychologist who trained with Carl Jung and combined psychotherapy with reading palms.
Spier, also Jewish, was decades older than Hillesum but eventually became her lover, a wildly inappropriate relationship by today’s standards, but less scandalous at the time.
Hillesum felt her life was enriched immeasurably by his treatment and companionship. Sebastian Koch, who is best known for The Lives of Others, radiates charisma, and the scenes between them are the most engaging in the series.
Koch portrays Spier as a man consumed with insight, wisdom, and arrogance, and it’s clear why Hillesum was drawn to him and the promise he held of salvation through his brand of therapy.
The series shows that, through Spier’s intervention, Hillesum was able to overcome her attraction to death and embrace life, just as the Nazis began killing Dutch Jews en masse.
In a conversation with Smelik in the fifth episode, she tries to explain why she chooses not to save her own life and is heading for almost certain death, which she sees as an affirmation of life that brings her closer to the divine. It’s a level of mysticism that is almost impossible to explain but which she details in this scene, and it’s a tribute to Levi and Windischbauer that the dialogue brings Hillesum’s complex, internal logic to life.
The series stops just as she arrives at Westerbork, after the end of her diaries.
The deepest problem with Etty is the choice that Levi made to update it – sort of. In his director’s statement, he wrote, “I believe one cannot tell another Holocaust story, nowadays, without charging it with universal, contemporary relevance – and telling it in a new language. Hillesum’s ideas are too urgent for today’s world to stay bound to history; they must break into our lived reality, especially after the horrors that shake the world of so many, over the past two years,” and extolled her rejection of hatred.
While this statement might make sense on paper, when you watch the series, which is set in a kind of contemporary netherworld that looks vaguely like the 1980s, it’s extremely distracting. The clothes, buildings, and cars look modern, although there are no cellphones, computers, or even electric typewriters. No Jew wears the yellow star, and when Hillesum and Spier enter their favorite café, which has a sign saying “No Jews are allowed,” they are permitted to sit and order.
I kept trying to think how it could possibly enhance her story to set it in an unspecified timeline and to wipe out the most devastating and clear evidence of Nazi persecution.
Couldn’t viewers all over the world be trusted to put themselves in the shoes of a Dutch-Jewish woman killed in the Holocaust? Why would featuring such historically accurate symbols as the yellow star and swastikas destroy a chance for “universal, contemporary relevance”?
Shouldn’t it have been enough that Hillesum’s words and actions cried out for compassion for all suffering, and that she firmly rejected the idea of revenge and hatred? Denying the true context of Hillesum’s life and writing diminishes the power of the story.