Movie Review: The Shop on Main Street

Next up on Blatt + Blue, the Synagogue’s ongoing series, is The Shop on Main Street, one of the earliest Holocaust films from the post-war period. Blatt + Blue tries to sample the whole of Jewish filmdom, from early classics to current Jewish cinema. This film will be discussed on Thursday, April 10. Please join us on Zoom at 7:00 p.m. The access number is 918 583 7121.

—

One of the essential characters in The Shop on Main Street is a crude wooden monolith in the center of town. At first, it is hard to discern its purpose. Is it some Eiffel Tower for rural Slovakia? A commemorative monument to stir the conscience of the town? It’s closer to the latter, but something far more sinister. Slovakia has just joined forces with Germany, and It bears the logo of the Slovak People’s Party. The monolith here is a rallying cry for fascism. That is one of the signature moves of a budding autocracy: relentless branding, red hats, and parades. MAGA may be new, but its strategies are not. The monolith is meant to command the attention of the townspeople and, more than that, its goose-stepping allegiance. You are either for it and help to raise the banner of collaboration, or you begin to make sure that your papers are in order.

It’s hard to tell where our hero, Tono, stands. You could reasonably argue that he is against the monolith, but he’s really more irritated that he’s been cheated of his inheritance. The perpetrator is his loutish brother-in-law, Markus, who has somehow insinuated himself into small-town nazism. Things crest in a scene of temporary resolution when the scheming brother-in-law offers a prize: if he puts aside his legal complaint, Tono can ascend to the status of Aryan guardian. That gives him the right to a Jewish-owned store and, presumably, most of its profits.

But this is only the beginning of a more complicated story. One of the very first masterpieces of Holocaust cinema, The Shop on Main Street is a kind of moral stewpot where judgment is defeated by circumstance and complexity. Tono, the protagonist, embraces his new authority but seems to have no special animus toward the Jewish woman he displaces. He is simply a hen-pecked husband who craves his wife’s esteem. Other townspeople are even more sympathetic. A local “Jew-lover,” Imrich, seems to truly love the Jews and conspires to defeat the Aryan takeover. He almost succeeds, until he is bloodied by Markus and the hooligans he sends to impose fascist discipline.

But not even this mobilizes poor Tono. When Rozalia, the shopkeeper, does not recognize the approaching danger, he erupts in an enfeebled, angry protectiveness. He hurls her into a closet of the shop and then, defeated, hangs himself in the doorway. Czech-Jewish screenwriter Ladislav Grosman seems to argue that, faced with the force of history, itself, individual heroism is no longer possible.

And that, perhaps, is the real achievement of the film. Holocaust filmmaking frequently fails in selective storytelling and false happy endings. Schindler’s List is the classic case. Despite the triumphant swelling of the score, the sufferings of the Jews were never redeemed. The State of Israel was not the karmic offset of their tragedy. Spielberg’s film is the confounding example of a deeply moving film with a feel-good climax that somehow compromises what comes before it.

Not so with Grosman’s Shop on Main Street. Barely twenty years after the event it commemorates, it delivered a much more nuanced picture of catastrophe.