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Documentary explores the ‘Talmudic’ relationship between writer Robert Caro and his famous longtime editor
(New York Jewish Week) — Bob Gottlieb, who as editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker ushered into print some of the 20th-century’s most accomplished writers — Nora Ephron, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, John Cheever and Ray Bradbury, to name a few — believes editing is a service job, one that should go unnoticed by the reader.
And yet, it is the relationship between editor and writer that his daughter Lizzie Gottlieb, a documentary filmmaker, explores in her latest film, “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2022 and is now screening at theaters across the country.
Lizzie’s documentary sets out to explore the sometimes tense but ultimately caring relationship between her father, Bob, and one of his longest running authors, Robert Caro, who over the course of 50 years has produced “only” five major books: “The Power Broker,” a classic biography of urban planner Robert Moses, and four volumes of “The Years of Lyndon B. Johnson.”
Jews born and raised in Manhattan, Caro and Gottlieb have worked together since Gottlieb helped cut 350,000 words out of the first draft of “The Power Broker,” bringing it down to a book that ultimately ran 1,338 pages when it was published in 1974.
The thing they squabble over most often? Semicolons, still. Or, maybe, Caro’s overuse of the word “looms.”
The film, seven years in the making, takes on the ways Moses shaped New York City, the mysteries of LBJ’s political power, the sausage-making of bestselling books and the idiosyncrasies of two workaholics. It is also a story of two now elderly men — Caro is 87, Gottlieb is 91 — in what Bob Gottlieb calls an “actuarial” contest to finish Caro’s highly anticipated fifth volume of his Johnson biography.
“My dad and I are very close. We’re in constant contact with each other. If something funny happens, I call my dad. If something sad or confusing happens, I’ll call him. We’re just in each other’s lives all the time, so I didn’t feel that there was a secret I needed to uncover or something unexamined in our relationship,” said director Lizzie Gottlieb, who also teaches documentary filmmaking at the New York Film Academy.
“But the one thing I really knew nothing about in his life was his relationship with Bob Caro,” she said. “Because it was so different from anything else, and it was so kind of private. So really, the whole movie is the process of me understanding something that I didn’t understand before.”
The New York Jewish Week recently caught up with Gottlieb to talk about the making of the film, what it was like growing up in a high-profile family and how Jewishness impacts the work of the two men.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Lizzie Gottlieb is a documentary filmmaker who previously directed “Today’s Man” (2008) and “Romeo Romeo” (2012).
New York Jewish Week: You’ve been working on this movie for seven years. When did you realize you needed to make this movie and how did it get from start to finish?
For a long time, people would say to me, “You should make a film about your father.” I have an incredible father. He’s done a lot of great things. He’s interesting and funny. But I just thought, a film whose message is “look how great my dad is” is not a movie that anybody wants to see.
And then my father was given some award and Bob Caro was presenting the award. Bob Caro gave a speech about working with my dad over what was then 45 years. He talked about how he needs him, and he respects him and how they’re so productive. Then he started talking about their arguments. Somebody in the audience asked what they fought about and he said, “We have very different feelings about the semicolon.” Everybody erupted into laughs and it just hit me like a bolt of lightning. I thought, “This is the movie, this is the story.”
I wanted a story that had forward momentum and had something big at stake. A film about two men in their 60s who had done a lot of great stuff is not that interesting. But a film about two men who are hovering around 90 and are still in it, and engaged in their work, who have a dedication and passion and are in a race against time to finish their life’s work, felt really, really compelling to me.
People say, “Are you sure you should be wasting [Caro’s] time with a movie? He needs to be writing.” My producer Jen Small said we should put on the poster, “No Lyndon Johnson books were harmed in the making of this film.”
Do you think you had a perspective that made you the best person to try and talk about their relationship and document it, or was it challenging to make the leap of them being willing to open up to you?
There was definitely a pursuit of them. I called my father and I was like, “I have the best idea ever. I’m going to make a film about you and Robert Caro.” He said, “No way. Absolutely not. Never. It would not be good for our relationship.”
I just kept pestering and pestering and pestering him. Finally, he said I could call Bob Caro but he would say no and of course Bob Caro did initially say no. Then he said that he’d seen another film of mine and I could come and speak to him. Eventually, Caro said, “I’ve never seen a film about a writer and an editor, and I think this could be meaningful. I don’t think anyone’s ever seen this before.” So he let me start, but he had this kind of hilarious condition, which was that he didn’t want to ever appear in the same room as my father. That seemed funny and a little maddening and sort of endearing. It also seemed like an irresistible challenge to try to make a buddy film where they don’t appear in the same room as each other. A woman came to a screening recently and she said, “It’s a love story, and they don’t get together until the last scene.”
They both say that somehow the making of this movie has brought them closer together and that they have developed a real friendship after 50 years. Maybe just having to articulate what their relationship has meant to each other has made them appreciate it more.
What was it like to grow up in your household, with your father as this major editor and your mother (actress Maria Tucci) on Broadway?
I grew up in a really incredible household. My mother’s an actress, my father’s a publisher and editor. Our house was this kind of vibrant, boisterous household that was always filled with eccentric, incredible people — actors and writers. My dad’s writers would come for dinner and then my mother would go off and do a play on Broadway and then come back at midnight and make another dinner. It was incredible. So I feel that both of their work was kind of integrated into our life and into our family. All of his writers were really like family members, except for Bob Caro, who never came over and who I never met. I think that there’s something particular and peculiar about their relationship that they needed to stay apart and only come together over work. I guess that was something that intrigued me and that’s part of why I wanted to make the movie.
“Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb” (Courtesy Tribeca Film Festival)
The Jewishness in the film is a bit more implicit, though you discuss it when talking about their upbringings. How do you think their Jewish identities have impacted their work?
I don’t want to presume to speak for either of them about their Jewishness. I know they both very strongly identify as New York Jews, which probably means something slightly different to each of them, but I think it’s essential to their definitions of themselves. Their humor may be particularly Jewish as well. David Remnick uses a word at the end of the movie, where he says Caro needs to have “sitzfleisch” in order to finish the book. It’s this Yiddish [and German] word that means the ability to sit for long, long periods of time and apply yourself to something. I think that that is something that these two guys have: It’s almost a Talmudic focus on their craft, and without that they wouldn’t be who they are. So to the extent that that’s a Jewish quality, I think that’s essential to their being, to their achievements. There’s something like a Talmudic scholar in going over all these things, the industriousness and the empathy as well, this sort of looking at a thing from all sides and dedicating yourself to this pursuit.
Bonus question: You briefly show the various eccentric collections your dad has, including plastic handbags and kitschy Israeli record albums from the ’60s and ’70s. What is that about?
Yes, he has a lot of collections. He also has a collection of macramé owls. There are many that are not in the movie. Maybe that’s a Talmudic thing as well, like a deep dive into whatever it is that is interesting to him. He says that every subject gets more interesting the deeper you get into it. When something strikes him as charming or funny or curious, he goes all the way with it. My mother doesn’t love them. There’s a little bit of a power struggle there, but he wins. You grow up with something and you don’t really think about it. But I knew I had to find a way to put this in the movie. People kept saying it’s irrelevant, it’s to the side, but I knew I had to because it’s so weird and says so much about him.
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‘I felt I couldn’t talk about the war’: Jewish and Muslim teens make space for tough conversations
For Jewish student Maxanne Wallace-Segall and Muslim student Nabila Rahman, the months after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel were filled with a tense quiet.
Then freshmen at Stuyvesant High School, a public school on Manhattan’s southern tip, the two girls had only been friends for a few weeks. As their social media feeds became inundated with polarizing content from across the spectrum, neither of them knew how to bring up what had happened.
“I felt like I couldn’t talk about the war with one of my closest friends in the world, just because I was terrified about what I would say and what she would say,” Wallace-Segall said.
That tension ended when Wallace-Segall interviewed Rahman for an article in their high school paper about the pain many students were experiencing in the first months of the Israel Hamas War. Broaching the subject for the first time, they realized that — despite coming from different perspectives — both were primarily concerned that their friends were OK.
“It wasn’t a question of ‘do you support Israel or Palestine?’. It was a question of [if you were] OK; if your family was OK. That was what mattered at the moment; her opinion didn’t matter, even if it differed from mine,” Rahman told Wallace-Segall for the article.
Now rising high school seniors, the duo runs The Together Project, a citywide organization dedicated to dialogue between Muslim and Jewish teens — Zionists and anti-Zionists alike. This summer, that dialogue has deepened and the reach has widened with the launch of a twice-weekly program called the Ohel/Ahl Fellowship, named after Hebrew and Arabic words for friendship. Since June, Jewish and Muslim teens from public, private, religious, and secular schools in the New York area have come together around sacred texts, swapped stories, consulted experts and explored each other’s neighborhoods and perspectives.
Emboldened by their first conversation, Wallace-Segall and Rahman began speaking about the conflict with Muslim and Israeli friends. But, when starting the organization, those friends opted not to participate. The Muslim friend’s family refused to let them talk to people who supported Israel, while the Israeli friend wasn’t allowed to talk to anti-Zionists. The organization continues to face this challenge, with some criticizing its inclusive nature. On one Instagram reel posted by the project, a user commended the concept, but pointed out the number of Palestinian deaths and disagreed with participants working alongside Zionists.
“i was like yessss this is what we need!!” they wrote at first. “only for u to include zionists 💀absolutely not. none of you are truly anti-zionists if you agree to work closely with zionists, especially at this time.”
But that misses the point, Wallace-Segall said. “To exclude the Zionist narrative would be to exclude the issue itself.” That widespread opposition toward dialogue highlights “the necessity and urgency of starting it even more,” she added.
To expand citywide, the girls drew upon their previous connections — someone with whom Wallace-Segall often debated about the subject, another who had written poetry about her religious identity. Currently, the organization has branches at four public high schools in three of the city’s five boroughs.
The Together Project also established a partnership with the New York Society for Ethical Culture, a social activism organization that offers meeting space for several grassroots organizations and hosts all branches of the Together Project, and other interested students, for a citywide conference three times a year in winter, spring and summer.
At those seasonal meetings, students go over historical timelines, read books, articles, sacred texts, and poetry and push themselves to grapple with hard topics. The conversation subjects range from comparisons of the Torah and Quran to what Muslim and Jewish teachings say about queerness, and how being a member of the LGBTQ community informs support for Israel, given its comparatively tolerant culture, and support for Palestinians in Gaza, given the nature of their collective struggle.
Wallace-Segall’s favorite conversations are those that question “why do you believe what you believe?”
“It really gets everyone to think about the specific moments with their families and their friends and reading the news in which different aspects of their opinions have been shaped,” she said.
Last November, members of the group attended a United Nations conference on establishing a Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction. As she listened, Wallace-Segall was inspired by those “dedicating their lives to committing to peace.” At the end, four of The Together Project members were given the opportunity to speak about their organization and share their thoughts on the solutions that had been presented.
“So often in the UN, when we see discussions of rebuilding communities … it’s decades or years after the conflict happened,” Wallace-Segall said in her speech. “I think the time to start rebuilding communities is now.”
At Ramaz Upper School, a Jewish day school in Manhattan, now rising senior Gabriel Flatto-Katz found himself in a Jewish bubble. Amidst the tensions of the New York City mayoral election, he realized that he “didn’t have any Muslim person that I could call a friend,” and sought to start an interfaith student organization.
Despite reaching out to many Muslim organizations, however, he wasn’t able to find any interested partners. Then he discovered the Together Project and helped Wallace-Segall and Rahman develop this summer’s Ohel/Ahl Fellowship.
The fellowship has enabled students who were already involved, along with many new ones like Flatto-Katz, to engage more deeply with meetings twice a week. So far, the fellows have hosted speakers from the Rose Castle Foundation, which helps equip leaders to navigate conflict; explored the Islamic wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and analyzed poetry by Israeli and Palestinian writers.
Rather than jump right into sensitive political discussions, students explored each other’s religious identities and established trust in initial meetings, so they have felt more comfortable sharing sensitive opinions in the latter half of the fellowship.
According to Gershon Rozenberg, a rising senior at SAR High School, a co-ed modern Orthodox yeshiva in Manhattan, that turning point arrived during a recent discussion the students had about war. Participants shared conflicts that felt most personal to them and their families and how this might impact their thoughts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some mentioned the Vietnam War, the Bangladesh Civil War and the Holocaust.
Rozenberg called it “the most vulnerable conversation we’ve had among fellows.”
For Rahman, this conversation helped her realize just how personal the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is for Jews. “For people like Gabi who literally have family in Israel, there was so much more at stake,” said Rahman, who doesn’t know anyone who is Palestinian.
Along with speakers, the fellowship has a board of mentors from Jewish and Muslim organizations, including Rose Castle, the Tannenbaum Foundation, Jewish Theological Seminary, and a Palestinian representative from Debate for Peace.
“We’re still kids running a kids’ program,” Flatto-Katz said. Mentors provide necessary guidance on how to run an interfaith organization, advise on ground rules during sessions and recommend texts to study. To build a consistent base of students at each meeting, mentors also have helped recruit teenagers they had worked with previously.
Flatto-Katz recruited Rozenberg after reading Rozenberg’s piece in SAR’s campus newspaper arguing that the school “should do a better job of understanding the Palestinian perspective.”
To complement the students from private Jewish day schools, leaders have been reaching out to private Muslim schools. But they’ve encountered difficulty.
“A lot of the kids have never met a Jewish person before, so it’s hard for them to make that first step,” Rahman said.
Many of the students from private Jewish schools say they have been moved by the contributions of Muslim participants, including rituals like chanting from the Qur’an or talking about their religion. “People have enjoyed the ability to hear something so different than what they’re used to,” Flatto-Katz said.
Within Jewish youth spaces, Flatto-Katz said students strongly support Zionism, but also crave hearing new perspectives. It’s not always easy for Flatto-Katz to “have really hard conversations,” as he has family in the region, but he senses and shares a “hunger for understanding.” Agreement or consensus is not required, he said.
“This is my friend Nabila who doesn’t agree with me on 99% of things, and I think it’s really cool that we get frozen yogurt together,” Flatto-Katz said.
To Rahman, the diversity of high school environments and the formative teenage years are what makes the work they are doing now so significant.
“Making sure younger people are involved in this kind of things is so important,” she said, “because they are the ones who are going to be shaping the future.”
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In the history of a family’s pianos, a glimpse of a disappearing New York history
Not that long ago, many homes had pianos. Few do now, and a sad sight is a piano left out on the street. Two years ago we moved a Steinway into our home, and until recently, we had two grands in our living room, the Steinway and the Chickering, which I grew up with. There is also a mini Schoenhut, along with a full-size Casio keyboard upstairs.
The Chickering first resided at my grandparents’ apartment on Central Park West. Under it sat a Schroederesque Schoenhut grand. I would sit on the bench in front of the Schoenhut and tinkle the keys while my grandmother Anna played above. The Chickering, a five-foot, seven-inch quarter grand, came to my childhood home in Forest Hills after she died in 1966. There my brother David and I took lessons from our teacher Fred Kahn. Mr. Kahn was easily in his 70s, and a former student of the concert virtuoso Arthur Friedheim who had studied with Franz Liszt. He performed at Carnegie Hall when he was just eight, and later Steinway Hall had him play at their showroom across 57th St. as a way to attract customers. I fondly recall my lessons with him, especially his improvisations, how he effortlessly switched tempo and rhythm so a piece by Bach morphed into a country & western or klezmer tune.
I first heard my wife Lillie play on the Chickering. It was Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 10. Lillie studied at Queens College’s Aaron Copland School of Music when we lived in Kew Gardens, and we had her Sargent grand in our apartment. She also had a Baldwin spinet at her mom’s in Manhattan. We moved the Sargent to Lillie’s sister Yuri’s apartment when I had a fellowship at Northwestern in 1994. Then when my mom and dad sold the house the following year, Lillie and I had the Chickering hauled up a steep stoop in Park Slope. I remember it being so heavy that it cracked one of the brownstone risers, though the piano was thankfully not damaged. Even better, our landlord had been planning to restore the stoop, so we didn’t have to chip in for the chip.
Soon after, Lillie took a teacher-training program at the School for Strings in Manhattan to learn the Suzuki Method. In 2001, we moved to Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and in 2006 spent a summer in Chicago. One of the first things we did was buy the Casio. Early one morning we were awakened by the sound of Chopin coming from the front room. Lillie and I rushed out to find our four-year-old Emma at the keyboard. Alas, we quickly realized that she was not the reincarnation of Clara Schumann after whom her older sister was named. Instead she had somehow pressed the right series of keys, and it played the programed piece.
Back home, Emma had cello lessons in nearby Montclair, and while Lillie taught in our living room, Clara, Emma and I would drive to Manhattan where Clara would spend up to two hours with her piano teacher, Barbara Herman. During Clara’s lesson, Emma and I would roam the halls of the nearby Natural History Museum. We all would then go to Ottomanelli and have chicken pot pies and then ice cream next door at Emack & Bolio’s.
The Chickering filled our home with much music. Clara practiced on it, and Lillie would go over music with her. I enjoyed it when they played together, especially a duet from Schubert’s “Trout Quintet.”Lillie would also help Emma prepare for her cello recitals, and later went over pieces with her when she took up the clarinet and joined the high school marching band.
Since the early ‘90s, Lillie has been studying on the Upper West Side with her teacher Denise Kahn. She and Denise’s other students regularly gather at their various Manhattan apartments to perform their pieces for each other, and as Lillie practices at home she is always amazed that I can soundly nap on the couch just a few feet away during her most fortissimo playing.
The Steinway made it to our home from the country house of one of those pianist friends. In 2024, Lillie and I spent a cool spring afternoon at her place in Stockbridge, Mass. so Lillie could test out the piano; while there she Zoomed her piano technician back in New Jersey to ask questions. The Steinway is a rebuilt six-foot, model O from 1910. Until it arrived, it was on the Chickering that Lillie’s students had their lessons for the past two decades.
Four days a week, our home is filled with the sounds of a wide variety of pieces, from “Frog on Logs” to sonatinas by Friedrich Kuhlau, rags by Scott Joplin, even the “Linus and Lucy” Peanuts tune by Vince Guaraldi. Some of the younger ones can’t sit still, but it is always satisfying to see those who stick with it and then one day start to see their lesson as more than a chore imposed on them by their parents, and come to love playing music. Each June, they all perform in a recital at the Congregational Church up the street.
Hundreds of piano makers once thrived in New York and Boston. Chickering started in Boston in 1823, became one of the nation’s finest manufacturers, and had a hall on 57th St. that rivaled Steinway’s just a block to the west. The firm moved to East Rochester, NY in 1927 and stopped producing instruments in 1983. Sadly, most American piano makers are now gone. On bulk days in our town, we have seen a few pianos sitting on the curb, and Lillie has alerted others of their presence in the hope that someone would rescue them.
Two years ago, I was out for a walk. Along the curb sat a diminutive Schoenhut upright. I have no idea what happened to my grandmother’s Schoenhut grand, and happily hoisted and adopted this homeless one. Not surprisingly, Lillie’s students have embraced the mini-me piano, and during their lessons, some of the younger ones like to hop over and play on it, with the instrument offering up its chime-like, glockenspiel sounding versions of their pieces while Lillie accompanies them on the piano.
We only need one main piano, though, and the last thing we were going to do was toss out the Chickering. I do realize that the piano is but an object, one fashioned from mahogany, rosewood, ebony, ivory, metal wires, and felt. But the Chickering had a real presence and voice in our home, one that brought joy. Quite simply, it was part of our family. I am therefore not surprised that I got teary eyed as we said goodbye to it on June 15. I am glad to say that movers ferried it to a new home up the road. And while the spot where it stood, one filled with much meaning, seems quite empty now, we do hope that the Chickering will create fond memories for another family.
Before it left our home, Lillie played on it that Beethoven sonata that she first performed for me.
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Lively Yiddish Forward columnist Miriam Hoffman has died
The Yiddish writer, Forverts columnist, playwright and Yiddish lecturer Miriam Hoffman passed away July 29 in Coral Springs, Florida. She was 90 years old.
Hoffman was a talented storyteller, as seen in the 2017 Forverts video about her, one of ten episodes in its documentary series, Yiddish Writers Monologues. In the 55-minute clip, she describes in dramatic detail her family’s journey from Siberia to a forced labor camp to a displaced persons camp and finally, to New York. The video is in Yiddish with English subtitles.
In a book, also published in 2017, A Breed Apart: A Miraculous Escape from Russia, she tells her life story again, this time in English.
For many years, Hoffman penned a lively column for the Forverts, where she commented, often with biting humor, on certain character types in Jewish society she disapproved of — like American-born Jews snubbing their noses at fellow Jews who had recently arrived from Europe, something she experienced first-hand.
She also wrote about the blatant sexism she encountered in the 1960s and ’70s among the leadership of Yiddish organizations like the Workmen’s Circle and the Congress for Jewish Culture.
But other essays had a serious, softer voice, like the one she told about her decision as a young teen to suddenly cut off her curly locks in order to look more “American” — and how her mother reacted to her daughter’s “rebellion.”
She also hosted a popular Yiddish radio program on the Forward station WEVD.
Hoffman loved the Yiddish theater and began writing plays herself. She and fellow playwright Rena Borow wrote the book for the musical, Songs of Paradise, based on the biblical poetry of Yiddish troubadour Itzik Manger. The show ran at NYC’s Public Theater and the Shakespeare Festival in 1989, drawing a rave review from The New York Times. Her plays were also staged in Montreal and in several European countries.
For 23 years, Hoffman was a popular Yiddish lecturer at Columbia University. In 2011, she published a Yiddish textbook, Key to Yiddish, that included not only lessons in grammar, but also passages on Eastern European Jewish history, customs, songs and holiday content.
I was personally most impressed with her dogged determination to preserve Yiddish as a spoken language with younger generations. In the 1960s, while teaching at the Sholem Aleichem Shul 21, an afternoon Yiddish school in the Bronx, she and three fellow Yiddish cultural activists — educator Gella Schweid Fishman, pianist-composer Malka Gottlieb and artist Tsirl Waletzky — published a series of Yiddish children’s books through a publishing house they created themselves, called Oyfgang (Sunrise).
As Hoffman and Schweid Fishman told me years later, the mood in the Yiddish world then was so pessimistic, and the attitude towards women so dismissive, that none of the Yiddish cultural organizations — including the Workers Circle and the Congress for Jewish Culture — showed any interest in publishing the books.
But Hoffman and her colleagues didn’t give up. An example of this concerned a musical Purim play they wrote and published in 1968, “Purim iz a shpil aza” (“Purim is a time to play”). On the book cover it gives the male name Gavriel Tolyes as the author. But this was a pseudonym; the real author was Hoffman.
“We understood that no one would take our book seriously if they found out that four women published it,” Hoffman told me. “So we took my mother’s name Tolye, and came up with the name Gavriel Tolyes.”
Years later, Hoffman translated the Purim play into English where it was performed and made into a video. This time, the author’s name was her own.
Hoffman was born Miriam Shmulevitsh in Tobolsk, Siberia in 1936. In 1950, her family immigrated to the United States where she studied Yiddish pedagogy at the Jewish Teachers Seminary until 1957. Years later, she finished her bachelor’s at the University of Miami and received a master’s from Columbia University in 1983.
During the 1970s she and her husband Mendl and two young sons, Avrom (Avi) and Binyomin, lived in Israel for several years where she hosted the first Yiddish television program in the Jewish state, together with the popular comedian Shimon Dzigan.
Hoffman often said that one of her main goals in life was to help instill Jewish pride among Jews of all ages in order to stem the tide of assimilation. In 2015 she, along with her son — the renowned Yiddish actor, director and producer, Avi Hoffman — launched the Yiddishkayt Initiative, an organization dedicated to bringing Jews back to their roots through lectures and performances that portray Jewish values and cultural traditions. For Hoffman, this was exactly what she had been waiting for.
Miriam Hoffman is survived by her two sons, Avi and Benjamin, four grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
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