Pt. I: The Runaway
When I was nine, I ran away from home. The reason? Treason. My dad had insisted I come inside to read because he was worried that the backyard weeds and thorny flowers I sat in would tear up my ankles.
I methodically grabbed my ugliest coat, a flashlight, my favorite book (Hope Was Here by Joan Bauer), a water bottle which I figured I could fill at my elementary school water fountain if things got rough, and a box of Kix cereal. I stuffed it all into a cumbersome drawstring bag that my grandmother had personalized by hand writing my name in looping Sharpie script. Shayna Maci — an Americanization of the Yiddish Shayna Maideleh — literally “beautiful girl,” over and over in its white stripes.
I wrote a note in big, purple block letters (I can’t remember what it read aside from “goodbye”), and waited just long enough for my mother and sister to arrive home. They stepped through the front door so I could look them in their utterly bewildered eyes, slap the note down on the banister without explanation, and run out the side door.
My mom would later tell me that when she found my dad, who was totally oblivious to my fury, she would mention that she was worried I might have forgotten to close the side gate (I did), and accidentally let the dog out (he took a nap in front of the house). Oh, and that my dad should probably go after me. I looked really determined.
As she often is, my mom was right. I didn’t look back until I was halfway to my best friend’s house. My plan was to hide in her basement, eat the Fritos forbidden by my own house, and exist indefinitely as a SEGA Sonic the Hedgehog-playing gremlin. Running toward an imagined freedom of PC games and junk food was a near-hyperventilating explosion of joy — until I twisted over my shoulder to see my dad slowly but surely summiting the slight incline I had just cleared.
What I like to imagine here is a cartoon-ified version of my younger self launching five feet vertically as a fat exclamation point appears over my head, and my tiny legs turning into Looney Tunes-ed wheels of indivisible motion. I abandoned all plans of making it to my final destination, and instead darted to crouch in the tree-lined rainfall gutter behind my school. My heart didn’t stop hammering until I saw my dad pass my hiding spot — the bank robber in a dark alley watching the refractions of lights and sirens speeding by.
Unlike my imagined counterpart, I stayed in the gutter, uneven stone cutting into my butt, until my dad wised up and doubled back. I remember his approaching like one would greet a frightened woodland creature; albeit, one far grumpier. When he asked me the anticipated question — why did I run — I fully expected to answer that he, tyrant and jailer, should really let me read wherever I wanted. Somehow, what blubbered out instead was an answer that I think about to this day; one that retrospectively legitimizes everything I know about my queerness, my relationship to my body, and my sense of self.
I think you wanted me to be a boy instead.
Pt. II: The Obvious
Hi, I’m Shayna. I use she and they pronouns, and recently I’ve started to sneak he pronouns into the public sphere. Last year, I asked my partner if they would start using the term “boyfriend” in addition to “girlfriend.”
I’m a bisexual, Jewish, genderqueer dyke, and I love occupying those neuroses. I also mine my identifying features to the high heavens, because I’m a film writer who obsesses over character and development. My fatal flaw is that I can be devastated by the slightest hint of homosexual text. On with the show.
Pt. III: The Film
When I was nine, Yentl lived in my periphery. The plot of the 1983 “movie with music” is simple: in 1900s Poland, a young Jewish woman desires to study the Talmud so greatly that she runs away from home after her father dies, disguises herself as a boy, becomes the best student of the yeshiva, and marries another woman (hooray!) in order to please the man she secretly loves (oh, well) before eventually setting sail for America.
It was a piece of cultural heritage whose name I was born knowing — not because of the story itself, but because of its star: the Barbra Streisand. The iconic American Jew that so many other secular American Jews could point to as a proof of cultural enrichment. Our contribution. My mom, for one, wrote herself notes on the Streisand-emblazoned Post-its she kept next to our landline.
However, other than automatic pride for the name and star of the film, and the vague certainty that I could sing its most famous songs if pressed, Yentl never really factored into my early movie memories. If we were going to watch a 2+ hour musical about our great-grandfamily’s lives in the somewhat ahistorical shtetl, Norman Jewison’s Fiddler on the Roof was always our go-to. And even if we weren’t in the mood for pogrom-era re-traumatization, but wanted a musical tied to thwarting eugenicists, we could always pop on The Sound of Music. Call it tradition.
But this year, I was exhausted by wearing out my old favorites for a drop of serotonin.
Perhaps looking for a momentary out from the internalized anti-Semitism and dread I feel when watching newsrooms blame Chassidic Jews (and not factor in the state’s initial refusal to translate public health materials into Yiddish) for COVID-19’s Brooklyn spread, I watched Yentl, maybe for the first time, in full.
To put it lightly and uncontroversially, Yentl is everything I’ve ever wanted. To just fucking go for it, Yentl is a nonbinary Jew’s film.
Before even entering the world of the film itself: Streisand developed, co-wrote, directed, and starred in the movie, and in 1983 became the first (the only! the fuck?) woman to win a Golden Globe for Best Director.
This triumph was not without an excruciatingly long pre-production backstory. After being considered for the titular role, Streisand bought the screen rights to noted storytelling icon and philanderer Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story Yentl the Yeshiva Boy in 1967. And after 15 years of protestation that she would be too old, too inexperienced, too she, too Jewish to helm and star in a major motion picture, Streisand made her — by most accounts successful — directorial debut.
It is easy to see why Streisand was so determined to play the role, even after years of directors dropping in and out, and executives cold shouldering or pushing her to make what she envisioned as a “small European film” into her more recognizable milieu of a musical. In a new interview for the Criterion Channel, Streisand relates that the first four words of the Singer story, “After her father’s death,” immediately grabbed her. One can almost hear Streisand’s agent give the requisite oy vey. “First you played a Jewish girl, and now you want to play a Jewish boy?”
But Streisand’s own father had passed when Streisand was an infant, and inhabiting the insatiable curiosity and tenacity of a young woman to do and be so much more than expected felt like a tribute to her father’s missed opportunities. No one’s no would do.
It is also almost too easy — to the point of some sheepish discomfort — to focus on the elements of Yentl that decry binary gender, both as it is portrayed in the film, and as it is currently decided.
From her first song, “Where is it Written?” Yentl displays a preoccupation with asking.
“And why have eyes that see, and arms that reach unless you’re meant to know there’s something more?” she sings as she secretly dons her father’s tallit, desperate to find the textual reason that robs her of studying that same text in broad daylight.
This asking, in many interpretations of the stories of Moses, Job, and Abraham, is a sacred commandment. In modern terms, arguing with God, whether it’s through demanding justice, abhorring divine or governmental inaction, or, more germanely, questioning your prescribed gender roles, is a rite of passage. Run up that hill! Make an ass of God, as long as you change your own life in the process!
In a shtetl that is so heavily reliant on gender confinement (Tradition! fairly scrawls across the shawls of the extras) that men call women who study the Talmud “demons,” and refuse to sell them academic texts unless they pretend they are purchasing on the behalf of their fathers, Yentl’s solace is in practices designated as male. She hates to go to market for anything other than books, she burns the baked apples and the silver carp “so beautiful, it’ll cook itself,” she can’t keep from one-upping her father’s students, and the thought of meeting with a prospective husband is laughable. Though the other matriarchs look at her with fondness, rumors of her deviancy swirl. In this cloistered village, the only one she has ever known, the traits that make “man” or “woman” are not only ill-fitting; they’re suffocating.
Yentl is so thoroughly trapped within the sepia-tinted pages of her life that her existential musings (“Where is it written what it is I’m meant to be?”) jettison her out of the shtetl as soon as her ailing father is buried. She doesn’t even think of continuing to study behind closed shutters, scarcely lowering the coffin before she cuts her hair with a “forgive me, Papa,” steals her father’s clothing, and runs.
A common analysis of the film is that Yentl hides her “true” identity as a woman in order to pursue what she loves — to get, as Streisand says in the same Criterion interview, into a “man’s world of study,” just as Streisand herself initially tried measures like removing her name from the script to get into the “man’s world of directing.” But this assumption of drag played for comedy or legibility, in which the woman returns as soon as her tits are unbound and possibly retreats further into the relief of womanhood for a “happy” ending, is too flippant for the film.
Streisand herself has spoken directly on this analysis of Yentl’s identity. In a gossipy, spirited interview with Ladies Home Journal to promote the film in 1983, she related her worries of Jewish audience discussions of her beloved character’s identity. “‘Jews like to complain, you know, like to have opinions. I’m sure they’ll disagree. But when the press says I’m disguising myself as a man in drag, that’s mean of them, because the movie’s not about whether I can look like a boy or how good the makeup is. What I was trying to do is explore the male and female within all of us, the androgyny of the mind and the soul.’”
Yes, Yentl does fall in love with her male mentor/friend Avigdor (the ever passionate Mandy Patinkin), and dutifully marries his promised bride Hadass (Amy Irving) after a revelation about Avigdor’s family leaves him an unsuitable match. Yes, there is the requisite bathing scene in which Yentl must create a panic attack to avoid being dragged into the water. And yes, there is an almost-kiss between Avigdor and Yentl when she finally has to convince him of their differences, in order to persuade him to finally marry Hadass.
All of these gender jukebox comedy tropes are complications of being assigned a Jewish woman’s work in 1900s Poland (at least within Streisand’s depiction of it), but none of them negate the core of Yentl’s being. None of them are resolved in slapstick jokes, and with Yentl’s physical, somewhat incremental transformation into “Anshel,” Yentl only unlocks a deeper appreciation for her autonomy.
In Singer’s original story, Avigdor commemorates the phenomenon of Yentl as “the soul of man and the body of a woman,” and the story concludes with Yentl continuing to live as a man, and finding another yeshiva at which to continue her study. But in Streisand’s version (one much maligned by Singer), Yentl decides to travel to America where, presumably, she does not have to fit into any mold in order to continue her pursuit of knowledge.
Yentl’s one true love is learning, and her identity, Eve-like as its association may be, is the neutrally-gendered pursuit of knowledge. Structurally and aesthetically, fluidity of gender is a tool, an exploration, and an evolving means to know the soul of the universe.
Part IV: Fathers and Blank Slates
Before his passing, Yentl’s father (Nehemiah Persoff) castigates himself for never having taught Yentl how to be a woman. Between his negligence and lenience in teaching her to discuss the Torah, and her mother’s absence, he says, she’ll never have a husband. Who will take care of her?
Later in the film, Yentl expresses a similar, explicit thought around teaching gender. In a combination of cheek and panic, she sings “Who’d have ever predicted the moment would come/That I’d find myself grateful they kept women dumb,” when contemplating a life with a wife who can never know her past. Yentl uses this assumption to her advantage, explaining to Hadass that the reason they cannot consummate their marriage is because sleeping with one man while having love for another is a sin.
In those moments of frantic anxiety and Shakespearean cross-dressing farce, Yentl slots Hadass into the misogynistic category of a brainless woman, but she later doubles back on it. She comes to respect Hadass’ care, and returns it in the form of teaching her Talmud. Yentl approaches everyone, including herself, like a blank slate, constricted only by what others teach them, and she desperately wants others to return the favor.
When she reveals herself to Avigdor, she uses this theory to reason with him. Wouldn’t it be absolutely ridiculous if it were decreed that all men with brown eyes were forbidden to study? Or all men named Avigdor? Doesn’t he need to study in order to survive?
Yes, yes, of course he does, but despite their shared months of study, homoerotic kinship, and sharing of the same wife, he still can’t quite understand the heart of Yentl. As soon as Yentl reveals her assigned gender, Avigdor is determined to make her his wife. But as much as Yentl loves Avigdor, she loves herself more, and if she were to ever be with someone, they would need to understand and support her identity as a scholar. And so, Avigdor reunites with Hadass, and Yentl reunites, euphorically, with her texts.
Part V: Running Toward
My roommate often jokes that they would rather not have anyone perceive them at all, much less assign them a value based on a perception of their gender. I wouldn’t go quite so far — as a Leo (I’m going to regret this), I fairly feed off being perceived. But I have come to realize something: no one will ever truly know my gender.
I could (and have) attempted to explain it to those that I love, but I fear I would fail even at that. How can I explain that my body, so obviously coded to a stranger, looks nothing like a man’s or a woman’s to me. When I look in the mirror, on a good day, I’m genuinely baffled that anyone could gender my face.
This, I think, somebody is definitely going to take one look at this and be totally confused. They’ll have no idea. They’ll have to ask me.
When I eventually have a longer talk about my own gender with my parents (none scheduled last I checked!), I suspect my mom will do a mental connecting of the dots similar to the one she completed years after I came out as bisexual. She’ll bring up retrospective evidence — for instance, when I was in kindergarten, I never let the boys chase me. I chased them.
For myself, the unneeded, but affirming evidence is that in fourth grade I counted the number of times I was mistaken as a boy. Like a panicked but smug Yentl in the tailor’s, getting fitted for her wedding to Hadass, I thought I was getting away with something.
Or another instance: when I ran away. Plopped in that gutter, gasping for breath, listening to my dad reassure me that I was fine the way I was, and that he would be proud of me whether I played sports or danced (the two genders). While that relieved my snotty flood of tears, it didn’t change the nagging that someone would rather that I was a boy. Or at least, that I was something other.
In Yentl’s Theory of Gender, men and women are only the way they are because they are taught what to be. What would Yentl be without the constrictions of having been taught womanhood. Would gender ever even occur to her?
When I watch the final scene of Yentl, with our hero traipsing about a ship bound for America in a knit beanie, short hair, a formless coat, and wide-legged pants, I choose to imagine that Yentl has already argued and applied this theory. As she weaves through traditionally-attired men and women, singing to the winds and her father, I imagine she is embracing, if only for a moment, freedom from any expectation of womanhood, or manhood, or any of the visual, ethical, or personal assumptions that come with them. I daydream that the America she sails toward is land of the free, home of the completely, genderlessly enfranchised.
The only perception of her identity that matters is her own, and she is choosing who she is meant to be. She’s had and won her argument with God, and she doesn’t care about the neighbors.
In the words of that immortal reprise: Papa, watch her fly.
