Filmmaker Sharon Karp describes her upbringing in suburban Evanston as being "more formal" than that of her friends.
Her parents, both of them immigrants, were strict, and did not let her spend the night at friends' houses, for example. It was almost always impossible for strangers to win her family's trust. But Karp's parents, George and Gisela, never hid the reason why. They, along with Karp's oldest sister, had to spend five years crossing from Austria to the western coast of Europe in order to escape Nazi persecution.
The stories of that escape formed the basis of Karp's film "A Song for You," which the filmmaker, who is a lesbian, compiled from interviews with Gisela as well as a published manuscript by George, home movies and artifacts her parents kept from their journey. She and her sisters also made trips, which Karp filmed, to some of the same locations George and Gisela passed through.
"It was pretty awful growing up with those stories," Karp recalled. Her parents would profess not to wish to speak about those times, she said, but could rarely stop once their memories were sparked. But once Karp grew older, she admitted, "I couldn't not tell those stories either."
George, who was Hungarian, studied medicine in Vienna and counted Sigmund Freud among his instructors. It was there that he met and married Gisela, who worked in a shop. But once they Nazis came to power in Austria, George—a Jew in the professional classes—knew he would be among the first targets of the Third Reich. The couple left Austria with their daughter, eventually making their way across the Pyrenees with the aid of the French resistance. They later settled in the Chicago area, where George ran a West Rogers Park medical practice.
Silvia Malagrino, a filmmaking partner, insisted that Karp begin filming Gisela's reminiscences in the mid-2000s.
"You can see it in the film, the tension in [Gisela's] body, as she's taken back there" telling the stories, Karp said. "She still relives the horror of what happened to her. ... Their story became our family's story at the beginning, because they did have such a dramatic story. Our friends at school had families who didn't have stories like that. I realized from the beginning that it captured people's thoughts and attention, and would inspire debates, dialogues and all sorts of emotion, because of how obscene and horrific that experience was."
Karp first showed the film at the Gene Siskel Film Center in January, 2014. She's been trying to get it seen in as many festivals and other venues as she can since. Gisela passed away in 2008, but Karp said having "Mama there on my computer" as she assembled the film helped ease her grief.
She did not mention her lesbianism in "A Song for You" because she did not want viewers to infer that she saw any connection between her sexual orientation and the family's traumatic memories. George and Gisela were largely supportive of her coming out, though Karp's father did not know what to make of it when he compiled his memoirs, she said.
"He didn't mention my birth, even though he delivered me—I'm born early in the parking lot of Frank Cuneo Hospital, and he doesn't mention it," she said. "He didn't know where to go with me [in the book], or to explain the fact that I wore Army jackets and combat boots, and was a hippie, and rebel, and all the things he'd call me. I was a dyke, commie, leftie—not any of the things a successful, middle-class doctor in Evanston [aspires for in a daughter]."
Nevertheless, George was mostly amused when she actually came out. "He laughed and said, 'Sharon, what will you get into next?'"
Gisela, Karp thought, was kind of relieved. "She liked that a lot better. She was so afraid for us. My sisters and I were watched like hawks. Boys could do anything and we would be unable to stop them. Any possible thing that could happen, my parents feared would happen to us. So when she found out I was a lesbian, it was, 'Oh, that's nice.' She always liked my girlfriends. She always accepted my partner Nicole, and treated her like a daughter."
"A Song for You" will next be shown Thursday, March 3, at North Suburban Synagogue Beth El, 1175 Sheridan Rd., Highland Park, at 12:30 p.m. For more information, see asongforyoumovie.com .
