Documentary a loving tribute to Denver's Jewish WestsideBy Tina Griego West Side Stories," a documentary about Denver's old Jewish neighborhood, premiered last week at the Hebrew Educational Alliance. At one time, the Alliance was an anchor of the Jewish Westside. Eventually, the synagogue followed its congregation to the east side, though around here they have a saying: "Once a Westsider, always a Westsider." Director and producer Steve Feld figured about 150 people would attend. Eight hundred showed up. About a third were Westsiders. After the movie, the rest wished they had been. "It was our Camelot and, later on, I called it — it really was — our Colfaxalot," Jerry Lande says as the film opens. In less mythical terms, the Jewish Westside existed about four blocks deep along both sides of West Colfax Avenue between the South Platte River and Sheridan Boulevard. So Jewish was the neighborhood with its synagogues and grocers and tradesmen, with its women singing on the front porches and bearded men and bathtub carp destined for gefilte fish, that a couple of people in the movie said it was like someone scooped up an Eastern Europeanshtetland plunked it down here. "How did Jews come to Denver?" asks Mike Zelinger, a former reporter for the Intermountain Jewish News, and we are back to the Cotopaxi agricultural colony of the 1880s. We are back to the first neighborhood, the place we know now as Sun Valley, south of Invesco Field. We are among the tuberculosis-stricken who sought a cure here. We are in the 1920s, '30s and '40s and their undisguised anti-Semitism. We are in a community far from the Jewish populations of the coasts and thought to be more cohesive because of that. "Being Jewish was our glue, and that kept us together our whole lives," Jerry Feld says in the movie. Steve Feld's grandparents lived in the neighborhood. His grandfather was a sofer — a scribe who could write and repair the Torah. But he also owned a hardware store. It might have been the only place in Denver where you could buy a hammer and a prayer shawl. Steve Feld moved back to Denver in 1993 after a successful career as a Hollywood writer, producer and director. "I was in the community doing a lot of work for Jewish organizations, and a lot of the elderly people would say, 'I remember your grandfather.' They said, 'You should do a movie about the Westside.' " His proposal then went nowhere, but about 18 months ago, his brother, Sandy, and eventual partners, Ron Bernstein and Marc Rosen, told him he had to do this movie. Together, the four raised $16,000. The plan was to film a few interviews and use them to raise more money. But six interviews became 45 and a nearly complete film. The four worked for free. When the money to pay the film crew ran out, Steve took over filming and Ron carried the equipment and rounded up old photos. Steve spent three and a half months editing. The partners are raising money to finish it in time for the Denver Film Festival. They also want to build a video archive of interviews with Jewish Westsiders. "We're not historians," Feld told the audience last week. "We're just four guys with a great appreciation of where we came from. This is not so much a documentary as it is a loving tribute." The Jewish Westside exists now only in the geography of memory. As Zelinger puts it in the movie: "Certainly you can drive down West Colfax and look at the houses, but without a story behind those houses, it really has no meaning." So, here's a story. It comes from Libby Rosen, Marc's mom. She and her husband owned Phil's Supermarket. "A lady came in and she says, 'Libby, I want a herring. So, I put my hand in the barrel and I only had one herring. I pulled it and she said — she talked to me in Yiddish — 'That's really, really very nice, but maybe you have a bigger one?' So, I put that same herring back into the barrel and I pulled it out and she said, in Yiddish, 'That's very nice. I think I'll take both of them.' " Tina Griego writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 ortgriego@denverpost.com. 'West Side Stories’: The movie that Denver Jews cannot stop talking aboutThursday, 14 April 2011 Andrea Jacobs, Intermountain Jewish News “WEST Side Stories,” an hour-long documentary about Denver’s Jewish shtetl of long ago, induces tears of nostalgia in those who grew up in its Yiddish arms. People like me who never lived on the West Side will also cry — because they never felt that soothing embrace. The documentary, directed by Steve Feld, premiered to 800 Denverites last week at the HEA. For days, hearts remained suspended in memory’s grip. “I must have gotten 650 kisses last night,” Libby Rosen, 89, tells the Intermountain Jewish News. Along with numerous Westsiders, she contributed her amazing recollections to the film. Libby attributes her immutable memories of her West Side youth to the family-centered nature of the community. “People didn’t have the money to go to movies or dinner parties,” she says. “Everything we did was built around the home or the synagogue or the park — for me, it was Rude Park. “We made our own good times, honey.” Feld first entertained doing a documentary on the close-knit neighborhood in 1993, when he moved back to Denver after a career as a writer, director and producer in Los Angeles. “I started doing videos for various Jewish organizations here, and every time I sat down to talk with people, they said I needed to make a film about the West Side,” he says. “I thought about it for years. “Then about a year-and-a-half ago, my brother Sandy and Ron Bernstein approached me within days of each other and said, ‘We have to do this because the history is fascinating.’” Most documentaries cost between $100,000 and $500,000 from start to completion. “We didn’t have that kind of money,” says Feld. “So we decided to select a handful of prominent Westsiders, interview them, and put together a 10-minute marketing video to try and obtain grants. “But when we began interviewing people, they said, ‘If you interview me, you’re going to have to interview this person, too.’” The list of six individuals grew to 50. “We couldn’t afford to pay crews to film, so I started running the camera and Ron was my assistant,” Feld says of the avalanche of work. “It was just the two of us. And when we finished, we realized we had enough material for the documentary.” The cost of the film, which took a year to make, was $16,000. Each interviewee shared his or her extraordinarily intact memories of the West Side “for over for an hour,” Feld says. “There were so many great stories that we couldn’t include them all.” Different people offered different perspectives of the West Side experience. Ida Strauss, who has since passed away, “was the oldest person we interviewed,” Feld says. “Steve Farber, representing the last of the great generations on the West Side, had a much different view.” While some elderly people can’t remember what they ate for breakfast, “those we spoke to remembered every minor detail from their childhood on the West Side,” he adds. “That was the strength of this community. Everyone had such vivid and wonderful memories of growing up there.” The historical photographs — family portraits, wooden shuls, grocery stores, athletic contests, kids in go-carts and playing dice games in alleys, unpaved streets, the ubiquitous Yiddish signs — were donated by individuals and Dr. Jeanne Abrams, head of the Rocky Mountain Jewish Historical Society and Beck Archives. Feldman Mortuary sponsored the premiere of “West Side Stories,” produced under the auspices of the HEA, on the occasion of the mortuary’s 75th anniversary. A WEEK before the premiere, Feld loaned me a rough cut of “West Side Stories” to view in the privacy of my home. After three sips of coffee, I slipped into those hospitable, welcoming West Side arms. Enchanting narratives, accompanied by ceaseless photographic images, breathed life into this transplanted Eastern European shtetl situated along the West Colfax viaduct that grew into the communal address for traditional Denver Jewry. The West Side began in the late 1800s after the Gold Rush. An influx of Jews from the ill-fated Cotopaxi colony contributed to the West Side’s growth. Jews sent to Denver by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the East Coast migration of Jews seeking treatment for TB at the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society (1904) cemented this self-identified traditional Jewish enclave. The Yiddish-speaking community was populated by peddlers, merchants, groceries, bakeries, dairy farmers, used furniture stores, Yiddish newspapers, saloons, Torah students and aspiring pugilists. In one store, you could buy tefilin and a 3-cent copy of The Forward. There were shuls on every corner — 27 synagogues to be exact — reflecting the Old World origins of their founders. For many years, Rabbi Solomon Shapiro led the services. He made everyone cry. Aliyahs were auctioned. (A West Side man who raised chickens for a living built his own shul because he disliked all 27 existing houses of worship.) All the boys had nicknames: Froggy, Governor, Boston, Shmaltzy, Kuku Vinegar (or something like that). The camera asks another man to divulge his distinctive moniker. “Don’t ask,” he warns. Nicknames were so integral to their identities that they didn’t always learn a contemporary’s given name. |