It’s a tossup as to which was more remarkable, Samuel Ullman’s life or his legacy.
“So Long Are You Young: Samuel Ullman’s Poem and Passion,” the diligently researched documentary by Judith Schaefer, reaches back into the mists of history to introduce us to a pillar of two Jewish communities in the South in the decades following the Civil War.
Ullman’s influence transcended both his lifetime and his region. Incongruously, a poem he wrote in his late 70s, in 1917, became a beacon of inspiration 30 years later in postwar Japan. That ode, “Youth,” is still so widely revered that Japanese tourists make pilgrimages to Birmingham, Ala., to visit the museum where its author’s contributions are commemorated.
“So Long” marks the directorial debut of Schaefer, a longtime San Francisco Jewish Film Festival board member. The film, along with “No Umbrella — Election Day in the City,” a 26-minute short about a feisty 80-something Cleveland councilwoman’s frenetic 2004 election day, screens Oct. 8 and 14 in the upcoming Mill Valley Film Festival.
In the course of this curiously fascinating one-hour film, numerous Japanese — including the legendary industrialist Kounosuke Matsushita, founder of Panasonic Electronics — recite lines from the poem they committed to memory as children.
“Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years,” one passage goes. “People grow old only by deserting their ideals.”
More of a meditation or inspirational reading, strictly speaking, than a poem, “Youth” resonated with a nation shocked and depressed by its devastating defeat. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the respected provisional commander in postwar Japan, kept a framed copy displayed in his office, and it spread from there.
The phenomenon of a German Jew in the American South speaking so directly to Japanese children two generations later is as unexpected in its own way as Bronx Jewish schoolteacher Abel Meeropol’s ability to capture the horror of lynching in his lyrics to “Strange Fruit,” the song that Billie Holiday immortalized.
While the bond the Japanese feel toward Ullman is amazing, “So Long Are You Young” really finds its groove in its recounting of the merchant’s life.
Ullman was born in Germany in 1840, and was 10 when his family immigrated to the United States. They settled near an uncle in Mississippi, and when the Civil War erupted Ullman fought for the Confederacy.
Afterward, he married, opened a dry-goods store in Natchez, Miss., and raised six children. While no great success as a businessman, he was a respected conciliator who co-founded a Reform synagogue and served as alderman.
In 1884, Ullman moved the family to Birmingham, Ala., where he spent 16 years as a member and eventual head of the school board. He was instrumental in pushing through the first all-black public high school in the city in 1900, an institution that now bears his name.
Ullman didn’t glamorize his Civil War experience, attend regiment reunions or wax nostalgic for the Stars and Bars. To the contrary, one can view his reputation as a mediator between rival factions at synagogue and school board meetings as a kind of repudiation of the conflict he’d endured firsthand.
“So Long Are You Young” doesn’t offer any overt observations about the history of black-Jewish relations in the South. But one might surmise that the black-Jewish alliance during the civil rights movement in the ’60s would have been much more difficult to forge had it not been for the actions years earlier of Southern Jews such as Ullman.
As for the Japanese, it wasn’t Ullman’s life that proved inspiring, but the sage wisdom and gentle admonition that suffuses “Youth.”
“So Long Are You Young: Samuel Ullman’s Poem and Passion” screens 11 a.m. Sunday, Oct. 8 at the Sequoia Theater, 25 Throckmorton Ave., and 2 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 14 at 142 Throckmorton Theatre, both in Mill Valley. Tickets: $8-$10 at www.mvff.com or (925) 866-9559.