Tangled Roots

Fledgling documentary filmmaker Heidi Schmidt Emberling's (she's the daughter of an American Jewish mother and a German Lutheran father) Tangled Roots is, at least in part, a work of personal therapy--a search for answers to weighty questions about cultural identity, history and memory, and the bonds of family. Growing up in a thoroughly ecumenical household, Emberling learned about the rudiments of Jewish culture primarily in summer camps and from her maternal grandmother, while from her father and on visits to European relatives she learned about her German cultural heritage. Throughout her childhood, the one thing seldom spoken about by either side was the impact of WWII on the family. An intensely earnest attempt to break the silences of family history, Tangled Roots seems driven by an almost palpable desire on the part of the filmmaker to bring drama, urgency, and a sense of broader importance to this personal quest. And she does come up with an unsettling revelation of sorts: a paternal grandfather apparently joined the Nazi Party and served as a lowly truck driver, later becoming a POW on the Eastern Front (an experience from which he emerged a permanently broken man). But these kinds of “devastating secrets” (as the video press kit calls them) aren't really the most interesting or dramatic finds: in probing her paternal aunt Corola's past, Emberling reveals some of the isolation, frustration, and guilt inherited by the generation of Germans coming of age after the war (there's also a telling sequence in which Corola waffles on her views of Emberling's Jewishness). Despite the need for a more judicious editing hand and a tendency to melodrama, Tangled Roots is definitely a unique and worthwhile addition to collections with interests in Jewish or German studies. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (G. Handman)