Finding himself with a free hour in Washington, D.C. not too long ago, Max Mayer visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He boarded the elevator with the crowd to go to the permanent exhibit, when something unexpected happened.
“The last thing, just before they close the doors, they ask, “˜Who here has lost family in the Holocaust?’” Mayer recalls. “I raised my hand. And I realized that I was the only one. I had this sense of shame, and a sense of pride, and a sense of otherness, which I hadn’t felt for a long time.”
As a red diaper baby growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mayer hardly felt like an anomaly. Looking back, the veteran theater and television director thinks being an only child had a larger effect. But there was something else that made him feel separate from the great swath of Americans.
“For my generation, the identification with the Holocaust made you understand that you were outside, in some way,” he says.
The experience of being an outsider deeply informs the central characters in Adam, Mayer’s altogether lovely and touching film about an unusual New York romance between two 20-somethings. Jewish elementary school teacher Beth Buchwald (Rose Byrne) is rebounding from a disappointing break-up, while Adam Raki (Hugh Dancy) has Asperger’s Syndrome, a type of high-functioning autism distinguished by extreme intelligence and extreme difficulty reaching beyond the internal world.
Despite her attorney father’s opposition to a relationship with a high-maintenance partner, Beth pursues her attraction to Adam. The film doesn’t emphasize her Jewishness, but it’s there if you look for it, and it was fully present for Mayer when he wrote the screenplay.
“I think that the sense of not being at the exact center of the society, for all of us [Jews], hopefully encourages a lot of us to be curious about others,” Mayer says in an interview in a downtown hotel the day before a packed screening of Adam in the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. “And have maybe a little bit more compassion or empathy for a sense of outsiderness, a sense of outsideness.”
Beth’s parents, played by Amy Irving (who’s Jewish) and Peter Gallagher (who’s played numerous Jewish characters, notably in “The O.C.” and Robert Altman’s The Player), are clearly Jewish, but you won’t see a menorah or any such bric-a-brac in their house. A key subplot involves a complaint brought against Beth’s father, and Mayer confides that — long before Bernie Madoff — he consciously avoided feeding into negative stereotypes.
“Honestly, I knew that Beth was Jewish and her family is Jewish, in terms of the outline, in terms of making up the story, long before there was a legal issue in the story,” Mayer explains. “I guess once there was a legal issue in the story, I didn’t really want to bring those things too close together.”
A slightly shy fellow in his mid-50s who picks his words carefully, Mayer allows that he may have inherited his artistic inclinations from his mother, an actress with the USO who entertained the troops in Italy and Germany during World War II.
“I got very ambivalent signals from her about that,” Mayer says. “She said that
theater was a dog’s life and I should stay away from it, and also that it was the only thing worth doing. So I was confused, essentially, until I went to college and got involved.”
Mayer confides that his mother, whose maiden name was Helen Waren, worked undercover for the Hagana, first while she was still in the USO and after the war when her cover was as a correspondent for the New York Star. She took a boatload of mostly illegal Jews from Genoa to Haifa, and was eventually arrested and held by the British. When she returned in the U.S., she wrote The Buried Are Screaming (1948), with the purpose of raising money for the state of Israel.
“She wrote about her experiences in Europe but she couldn’t write about anything that was secret, so it’s less interesting than it could be,” Mayer says. Waren also wrote Out of the Dust (1952), a novel about a kibbutz in the desert.
Mayer has his own connection with Israel, forged when he was 13. At the Wailing Wall with his parents, he met a Chassidic boy who was horrified to learn that Max hadn’t become a Bar Mitzvah.
“He wrapped me up [in tefillin] and very seriously had me go over the prayers after him, correcting me at essentially every word,” Mayer recalls. “So in some spiritual sense I was Bar Mitzvahed at the Wailing Wall.”
Love, the hard way
