The Quarrel

Montreal 1948. On Rosh Hashanah, Chaim (a Yiddish writer) is forced to think of his religion when he’s asked to be the tenth in a minyan. As he sits in the park, he suddenly sees an old friend whom he hasn’t seen since they quarrelled when they were yeshiva students together. Hersh, a rabbi, survived Auschwitz and his faith was strengthened by his ordeal, while Chaim escaped the Nazis, but had lost his faith long before. The two walk together, reminisce, and argue passionately about themselves, their actions, their lives, their religion, their old quarrel, and their friends.

The Quarrel brings to the screen one of the most powerful works of modern Yiddish literature – a haunting story by Chaim Grade that was written shortly after the second World War. Two survivors of the Holocaust, accidentally reunited in 1949, take up their argument just where they left it nine years earlier: one of the men is a pious Hasid who runs a yeshiva for Jewish orphans, the other a secular writer who has long since lost his religious faith. The war deprived them of everything, including all the members of their families, yet instead of deadening their appetite for life, the losses they suffered and the brutalities they witnessed have only reinforced the orthodox Jew’s trust in God and the secular sceptic’s trust in himself. As they spend the day together, the two men alternately cling together to recall their common past, and loce horns in debate over their opposing views of God and the world. For them and for the audience, the concentrated drama of their encounter passes too quickly.

The Quarrel is an exhilarating, literate confrontation between the secular and the religious, as we as a deeply affecting story of two men, alone in the world, who desperately try to reconcile their differences and make sense.