‘Strange Fruit’ Takes Strange Twist

In Joel Katz’s intriguing new documentary about theanti-lynching ballad, “Strange Fruit,” an African American poet says she alwaysassumed the songwriter was black.

Katz shared the same misconception before making his film,also titled “Strange Fruit,” in the late 1990s. After all, the haunting 1938tune was first performed by jazz diva Billie Holiday and soon became the anthemof the anti-lynching movement.

A pioneering infusion of social protest into pop music, thesong conjured such gruesome images that it was promptly shunned by recordcompanies and radio stations. The poetic but grotesque lyrics include areference to the smell of magnolias mingling with the scent of burning flesh.

While the song’s author, Lewis Allan, was listed inanthologies of black composers, he remained an enigmatic figure for Katz andothers until a fascinating letter to the editor appeared in The New York TimesBook Review in 1995. The letter, written by Robert and Michael Meeropol, aimedto clear up questions of authorship raised by a review of a Holiday biography.It also revealed a bombshell about Lewis Allan: He was actually a Bronx Jewishschoolteacher and union activist named Abel Meeropol.

Meeropol and his wife had adopted Robert and Michael aftertheir birth parents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, were executed on spyingcharges in 1953, the letter revealed.

 “It was a classic case of truth is stranger than fiction,”Katz said by telephone from his office at New Jersey City University, where heis a media arts professor. “This letter was only three or four paragraphs long,but it read like a riveting little film script.”

Katz’s film, which at times unfolds like a thriller, mergesinterviews with the Meeropols and black scholars with photographs of lynchingvictims and footage of 1930s union strikes. One centerpiece is a gaunt Holidayperforming “Strange Fruit” on the BBC in 1959, not long before her death at age44.

The song has since been recorded by artists as diverse asTori Amos and Sting and is now featured in a David Margolick book, “StrangeFruit: The Biography of a Song” (Ecco Press, 2001), as well as in a nationallytouring exhibit of lynching photography. Meanwhile, Katz’s documentary — fundedin part by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture — is appearing at Jewishfilm festivals (it comes to Orange County and the Skirball Cultural Center thismonth) and will air on PBS in April. “This is ‘Strange Fruit’s moment,” saidthe writer-director, 44.

Katz was drawn to the subject because of his childhoodexperience with the black community. His liberal Jewish father, who had marchedfor open housing on Long Island, accepted a teaching job at all-black Howard Universityin Washington, D.C., in the 1960s. But his idealism soured for a time when hefelt what he perceived to be reverse discrimination during the Black Powermovement, his son said.

“That was my experience of black-Jewish relations,” Katzsaid. “Working on ‘Strange Fruit’ was a way for me to heal.”

As research, he studied the history of Jews in jazz andbooks on some 5,000 lynchings that took place in the South from the 1880s tothe 1960s. He perused photographs of the victims — who were often hung from atree, set afire and mutilated — taken as souvenirs by white observers. He alsocontacted Meeropol’s sons by looking them up in the telephone directory inSpringfield, Mass., where they were reported to live.

From the Meeropols, Katz learned that the author of “StrangeFruit” was actually a jaunty fellow with a thin mustache and a keen sense ofhumor. He discovered that “Lewis Allan” was a combination of the names Meeropoland his wife had chosen for their two stillborn sons. He also learned that thesongwriter had an almost visceral aversion to racism.

Meeropol apparently penned “Strange Fruit” after viewing aphotograph of a lynching victim in a civil rights magazine. “I wrote [it]because I hate lynching and I hate injustice and I hate the people whoperpetrate it,” he once said.

According to Michael Meeropol, his father was prouder of”Strange Fruit” than “of all the things he ever did.” He often played the songfor his father when he was an Alzheimer’s patient in a nursing home before hisdeath in 1986. “It was the last thing he recognized,” Michael Meeropol says inthe film.

While the response to the movie on the Jewish festivalcircuit has been positive, some viewers made complaints such as saying “whilethe blacks have suffered, let’s not forget how much we Jews have suffered,too.”

Katz takes issue with that point of view. “It’s amisunderstanding of who Abel Meeropol was,” he told The Journal.

“What’s remarkable about Meeropol was his ability to reachbeyond Jewish suffering, because let’s not forget he wrote the song just as theHolocaust was getting underway in 1938,” Katz said. “He reached past his ownpain and tried to empathize with another beleagured group. To me, that’s onesolution to black-Jewish tensions, because today it seems that everyone is justinterested in their own pain.”

Joel Katz will speak after the screening on Feb. 10 at 7:30 p.m. at the Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles. Fortickets and more information, call (323) 655-8587.