Detroit: In Black & White

Yale Strom is considered the world’s leading ethnographer-artist of Jewish culture. Since 1981, this filmmaker/musician/author/photographer has documented and explored the remnants of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. His more than 65 ethnographic research trips in the past 2 decades have yielded 6 documentary features, 10 books, 10 CD’s, hundreds of klezmer and classical compositions, and myriad group and solo photo exhibitions. Having painstakingly traced the vanished Jewish communities in those regions, Yale Strom now brings his camera, and his probing questions, closer to home.

“Even though my family moved away when I was 12, I still consider myself a Detroiter. This past fall, when I visited my aunt and uncle, they told me that their synagogue had just folded – the congregants had moved away. I grabbed my camera and began to shoot the abandoned building... Where was the Detroit of the 1960’s, the Detroit I remember from my own childhood?

“I’ve seen the broken shards of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, where the clear culprits were Nazism and Stalinism. But the culprit in Detroit was White Flight. It was voluntary. We abandoned our own communities. We changed Detroit. What happened?”

Project Description

Yale brings the point of view and practiced eye he honed in Eastern Europe back to Detroit, in particular, his memories of the 1960’s. Having endured 4 race riots from 1911 to 1967 and now demarcated by strict racial boundaries, Detroit is a paradigm for black-white race relations in the U.S.

Armed with his Nikon and an ethnographer’s burning questions, Yale begins retracing his steps with his uncle, Harold Strom. Uncle Harold stayed in Detroit, in the black neighborhoods, long after most other whites and Jews had fled. What was Jewish life like in the Detroit of Harold’s childhood, when the revered Stoliner Rebe would stay at his house whenever he came to Detroit? It is a source of considerable pride in the Strom family that the Stoliner Rebe actually died in their house.

But the Strom family left the heart of downtown Detroit. The old neighborhoods became increasingly African-American, the old synagogues became churches and Christian schools, and the Jewish infrastructure had left for the suburbs. Yale revisits these churches to take their portraits and re-imagine a vanished Jewish world, and ask the black community about white flight and how it affected them... and realizes that his own uncle Harold is himself a victim of white flight, as synagogue after synagogue is abandoned and uncle Harold is left with fewer and fewer options in his own neighborhood.

In Yale’s research universe, the Jews of Eastern Europe are the social outcasts, the discriminated against class, sharing many of the experiences of African-Americans. As Yale begins to explore African-American life in Detroit vis a vis the Jews, we learn some surprising facts about his own family.

In 1967, filmmaker Yale Strom was 10 years old. His recollections of his childhood in Detroit are idyllic. A white Jewish kid growing up in the heart of urban Detroit, his best friends were African-American, his family lived in a black-Jewish neighborhood. Yale’s most cherished memories are of playing with, and being protected by, the African-American kids in his neighborhood. But this was also the year of the Detroit Riots Yale now tracks down the people of his idealized youth (including Ray and Charles, his best friends, whom he called Ray Charles), his neighbor Renee, still living in the house across the street, Roland Anderson, and the two black girls Yale was close to who lived 2 doors down, his Jewish friends the Barats. Yale will interview his father, Dr. David Strom, who recorded black kids after the riots and was profiled in the New York Times, his uncle and aunt, who remained in their original neighborhood long after the other whites/Jews had fled, leaving only reluctantly when there was no longer any infrastructure (no shul, no kosher butcher) etc. He will also visit his cousin, Hugh Victor, who inherited the pawnshop begun by his parents – the family has become wealthy and while generous to the community, the pawnshop is a symbol of (often Jewish) oppression of blacks
In 1968, Yale’s parents became the first Jews in Michigan to be placed with a black child by a Catholic adoption agency. Yale has vivid memories of the day the social worker came to call on them – it was the day Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Yale’s little sister, Naomi, came to live with them the day Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Yale is the oldest of 8 children, 3 of whom are African-American, all of whom are practicing Jews. Yale’s father taped interviews with the African-American children of their own neighborhood during the Detroit Riots of July, 1967.

The once-Jewish neighborhoods of his childhood have vanished by attrition, by a crippled economy, by those choosing to leave and those forced to do so. Why did this happen, and is it still happening? Who is indictable? Given the tensions of black-white relations in present day Detroit, will Yale find the answers he’s looking for?

Subject Treatment

“Detroit: In Black and White” will be a multi-disciplinary project – combining film, still photography, music and ambient sound scapes - that views present-day reality through the prism of the artist’s eye and memories. We will explore the concept of the observer’s becoming the observed himself – in that regard, the director will be an on-camera presence, shifting from behind the camera to the screen organically. After a brief overview of Yale’s work in Eastern Europe, we will introduce our subject, the Detroit of Yale’s memories and present day. We will echo Yale’s archival European images with new still and moving images (as well as archival photos and footage of Detroit) that will be occasionally manipulated in the editing to blur the line between what is past and what is present, what is hard and real versus what might be colored by memory. Our new and archival moving footage will include portraiture – of the film’s informants, buildings and locations, building up to Yale himself. Yale’s black and white still portraits, home movies, archival footage and sound scapes of voices, music and events from both contemporary and past moments will create a bridge between the two disparate worlds in one city: Detroit.

The soundtrack will reflect the fluidity of the disparate subjects and images with the music of these former synagogues, Gospel music from these current churches, Detroit blues, Motown, and contemporary Hip-Hop. Music and sound will be laid over each other both synchronously and discordantly, depending on what is being suggested.

“Detroit in Black and White” will generate dialogue about historical, and contemporary, race relations in the U.S. Most specifically, the film will examine how institutionalized racism affects not only the victims, but those who have enabled, or contributed to, ongoing racism (however unintentionally) by showing how all have been adversely affected by it.

The finished film will be 90-120 minutes in length, designed for theatrical distribution both in the U.S. and abroad. Secondary markets will be both U.S. and international video and television distribution. A study guide will be prepared for distribution to schools and college humanities courses.