Movies: His son killed Hitler.

I knew the murder of Adolf Hitler as a fact.

Sheldon Roth is the father of director and actor Eli Roth. Over at Patheos, an online religious journal, Roth has an interesting post about what it felt like to see his son assassinate Adolf Hitler in the spelling-challenged film Inglourious Basterds.

From the post:

What I scarcely expected were the overwhelming feelings that flooded me as I witnessed the scene in the film, Inglourious Basterds. I watched my son, in his character of "The Bear Jew," machine-gun the Fuhrer's face to a bloody pulp. In that moment, I felt that my beloved boychik was carrying out wishes of mine from my Brownsville, Brooklyn childhood, wild longings from a lifetime of agonizing over the Holocaust. I felt a powerful mixture of rescue, revenge, redemption, relief, and a strange grief. My son was sacrificing himself for all of us. He was doing what I could not. And I cried.

And later:

It strikes me that what these questions fail to take into account is that there are two kinds of facts: historical facts and emotional ones. Emotional facts, or feelings, are a condensed, animal form of personal history; expanding them tells the story of one's life. Feelings are just as much reality as facts. Art, similarly, functions as a condensed statement about life. When art resonates with an audience, those emotions are real -- they cannot be dismissed because the story is "historically inaccurate."

Quentin Tarantino understood that it was more important to be emotionally accurate than to follow a story previously written by history. Art must resonate with a truthful emotion inside the viewer in order for it to survive, and, if not, it falls by the wayside, disregarded, and dies a forgotten work. So, where do Inglourious Basterds and my reactions fit into this picture?

At Passover we read of the sages who urge us to tell the tale of the Exodus tirelessly -- one cannot say enough to describe that devastation in the lives of the Hebrews. However, time has laid dust on the tongue's capacity to be fluent in those events. How historically accurate is the story most Jews repeat not once, but twice a year, for some of us even four times, every year of our lives? Reciting the plagues of Egypt is quaintly interesting, but watching Eli turn his armed fury on Hitler in a cinematic oven of burning Nazis is awesome and much closer to my own history.

The Holocaust provides anew an endless capacity to relate Jewish history. I am in my 70s, and all my life I have studied the Holocaust. But I am still startled by the unthought-of newness of stories. I cannot hear enough; it never ends. Inglourious Basterds partakes of the Passover injunction to tell our story. The feelings evoked while watching this film contain our history -- personal and group. The film, though not "factual," represents a psychological reality. This psychological reality is a fact, not empty fantasy. Uncannily, unbidden, a gift-giver, Eli was acting out my dreams, dreams based on my life -- through a film.