‘Fioretta’: A cinematic journey through five centuries of Jewish history

E. Randol (Randy) Schoenberg, a renowned Los Angeles attorney, has the magic touch for unraveling intricate genealogy threads. While many Jewish enthusiasts must be content with tracing their lineage to an 18th-century shtetl, Schoenberg dazzles with breathtaking feats. He unearths a 500-year-old manuscript that had once belonged to an ancestor, which now resides in the prestigious Austrian National Library.

With the finesse of a magician, he summons a 400-year-old gravestone from the depths of Vienna’s history, a time when a mere 71 Jews were allowed to reside there. In Prague’s 13th-century Altneu Synagogue, Europe’s oldest active synagogue, he points to the chair once occupied by the legendary rabbi of Golem fame, the Maharal. “That’s one of our ancestors,” he tells his 18-year-old son, Joey, who joins him on this odyssey.

“Pretty cool,” says Joey, whose initial enthusiasm seems muted. “I’m sure there will be cemeteries and archives, and I’ll be so bored,” he confesses at the beginning of the journey when he meets his father in Vienna. But he understands the stakes. “It’s not the story of a single family. It’s a people. We’re part of this larger mosaic.”

In the beautifully crafted, visually elegant documentary Fioretta, skillfully brought to life by award-winning Israeli-American filmmaker Matthew Mishory, we embark on a journey through five centuries of Jewish history, guided by the father and son duo.

Filmed in the Czech Republic, Italy, and Austria, the documentary has us travel with them from their home in Malibu, California, to Europe’s elegant cities, hunting traces that their ancestors left behind. Along the way, we encounter a colorful cast of characters who mentor them toward their goal: Fioretta, the family’s matriarch, buried five centuries ago in Venice’s Lido Jewish cemetery. Schoenberg learns that Fioretta’s husband, Rabbi Eliyahu Menachem Halfon, contributed an opinion for King Henry VIII’s famous divorce. A physician and son of an astronomer, Halfon wrote an extensive Torah commentary that survives in Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

Randy Schoenberg with Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds. (credit: Courtesy)

“To realize you are part of this continuum of history is eye-opening,” says Schoenberg.

The film was originally slated to premiere in Tel Aviv on October 8, but the debut was derailed by the eruption of war with Gaza. Seated in the elegant Tel Aviv Montefiori Hotel restaurant, normally bustling but now deserted and silent, Schoenberg and Mishory discuss the film.

The intergenerational transmission of heritage and history

“Fioretta touches on the intergenerational transmission of heritage and history, a core value in Jewish culture,” says Mishory. “I don’t see it as a film about genealogy. I see it as a journey through 500 years of history and Western civilization experienced through the prism of one Jewish family. It reveals interesting and surprising insights into how Jews lived and played a role in history – not just famous individuals but also ordinary people captured in these quotidian documents. We go into an archive where Randy pulls up mundane records, but they tell a rich story of how they lived.”

Schoenberg, 57, is famous for successfully suing the Austrian government to repatriate five Gustav Klimt paintings looted by the Nazis during the Holocaust. One of the works, the exquisite golden-flecked Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, which set a record price of $135 million when sold in 2006, was the subject of the motion picture Woman in Gold, starring Helen Mirren, with Ryan Reynolds playing the role of Schoenberg.

In third grade, Schoenberg was bitten by the genealogy bug when assigned to do a family tree. The task was child’s play, since both his grandfathers were well-known Austrian-Jewish composers. His paternal grandfather was the celebrated Arnold Schoenberg, an icon of 20th-century classical music; and his maternal grandfather was Eric Zeisl. (“Randol” is an anagram of his paternal grandfather’s name.)

The year of the school assignment was his paternal grandfather’s centennial, and a biography was published where the young Schoenberg found all the information needed to spark a lifelong passion.

Schoenberg is now spotted in Jewish genealogy conferences around the world. He founded the Facebook Jewish Genealogy Portal, which has grown to over 70,000 members. He is a curator on Geni.com, a platform with a collaborative, crowdsourcing approach that merges family trees with other trees with common relatives.

He created a unique phone app that enables visitors to ANU – Museum of the Jewish People, located in Tel Aviv, to discover if they are connected by blood or marriage to some famous Jews on display throughout the museum. Schoenberg is infinitely fascinated by the idea that all Jews are related; it’s just a question of figuring out how.

Over the years, Schoenberg had accumulated genealogy contacts throughout the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, which proved helpful in his quest.

“Everybody in the family thinks I’m nuts,” Schoenberg says in a voiceover at the film’s start. “Of course, I’m nuts. Two kinds of people go to genealogy conferences: those who know they’re crazy, and those who don’t know. At least I know I’m crazy.”

Jewish genealogy poses specific challenges. “It’s a reclamation project,” says Mishory. “Unlike many other people who have stayed in the same place forever unmolested, Jewish families have had to move around so many times due to persecution.”

Schoenberg says geography plays a vital role in the ability to go back in time. “If your roots are in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Prague, or Vienna, you’ve got a chance to zoom back,” he says.

Schoenberg admits to having bored his cousins on the subject for years, but at their last meeting, when he mentioned he might be able to trace the family back to the formation of the Venice ghetto, his Italian cousin Serena Nono, an artist and filmmaker, noted that it would make a fascinating documentary.

Schoenberg met Mishory when invited for an interview as an expert on German-Jewish culture on the set of another Mishory documentary, Who Are the Marcuses? The film unlocks the mystery of a Long Island couple. These Holocaust survivors had lived modest lives before leaving a $400 million fortune they quietly amassed (by being among the first investors with Warren Buffet) to fund water research at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University. It was the single largest donation ever made to the State of Israel.

“I was sure that Randy’s prowess in genealogy, plus a family history that goes back to the formation of the Venice ghetto, would make an interesting movie,” says Mishory. “And the more we looked, the more convinced we became.”

Initially intending to focus on genealogy, Mishory quickly shifted the film’s perspective.

“This was Joey’s last semester at school. It became clear that this was becoming a father-and-son story. It was an incredible opportunity to send a father and son on a journey catching a teenager at a pivotal moment in his life and his relationship with his father,” he says.

The movie’s poster shows the Schoenberg duo on a speedboat in the Venice lagoon, each looking in a different direction.

“I could have easily picked the next moment when they turn to each other, but this is a moment when they are experiencing history in different ways,” says Mishory. “In that particular frame, they are looking back while looking forward. We wanted to preserve the family history for the future so that they don’t have to start from scratch.”

Toward the end of the film, in the critical scene when they are in the ancient Venice cemetery searching for Fioretta’s gravestone, Joey uses his Hebrew school training to find it. It’s a moment of triumph. He twirls his open black umbrella above his head, a small, enigmatic smile on his face.

“It’s good to know where you come from,” says Joey. “Not many people can say that.”

For the elder Schoenberg, this is not the end of his search. He’s just warming up. His journey in Fioretta followed just one strand of his family: his grandfather Arnold Schoenberg’s maternal side.

“I still haven’t found a common ancestor for both my mother and my father’s side. Some 300 years ago, there was a connection, and they were from the same area. There is always something else to do; that’s why I love genealogy. It’s a puzzle that never ends,” he says.

Fioretta’s world premiere was on September 30, 2023, in Woodstock, New York. It was followed by a showing at the Zurich Film Festival; the Newport Beach Film Festival in California; and a limited theatrical release in Los Angeles. The Israeli premiere screening will take place in March at the ANU museum in Tel Aviv. ■