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Alexander Isaakovich Gelman is a Actor and Scriptwriter Russe born on 25 october 1933

Alexander Isaakovich Gelman

Alexander Isaakovich Gelman
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Nationality Russie
Birth 25 october 1933 (90 years)
Awards USSR State Prize

Alexander Isaakovich Gelman (Russian: Алекса́ндр Исаа́кович Ге́льман; born 25 October 1933, Donduşeni), original given name Shunya (Russian: Шу́ня), is a Bessarabian-born Soviet and Russian playwright, writer, and screenwriter.

A survivor of the Holocaust during childhood, Gelman became a playwright and screenwriter after working as a newspaper journalist in Leningrad in the 1960s, winning the USSR State Prize in 1976. He has resided in Moscow since 1978.

A supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, Gelman was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1989 and to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union upon Mikhail Gorbachev's recommendation in 1990, before leaving the Communist Party of the Soviet Union less than a year later.

Biography

Early years
Shunya (later renamed Alexander) Gelman was born in Donduşeni (now in Moldova), a Bessarabian village that had been part of the Russian Empire before its Romanian annexation during the Russian Civil War and Soviet annexation in 1940. His parents were Isaak Davydovich Gelman (1904—1981) and Manya Shayevna Gelman (1910—1942). After the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, the occupying German forces deported the Gelman family to the Bershad ghetto in Transnistria, where his mother died. Only Alexander Gelman and his father (from 14 deported members) survived a death march upon leaving the camp near the end of the war.

Gelman graduated from a vocational school in Chernovtsy, Ukrainian SSR in 1951 and attended a naval school in Lvov (Lviv) in 1952-1954 and became an officer in the Soviet Navy, serving between 1954 and 1960 in the Black Sea Fleet's coastal defense and on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Soviet Far East. He also worked in factories and in construction.

In 1966 he moved to Leningrad, where he worked as a journalist for the municipal newspapers Smena (The Work Shift) and Stroitelny Rabochy (Construction Worker). During this period he started learning and working on screenwriting.


Theatrical and movie career
In 1970 he co-authored a screenplay (with his future wife Tatyana Pavlovna Kaletskaya). It was later filmed as Night Shift. The next screenplay, also together with Tatiana, led to the movie Xenia, Wife of Fyodor (Lenfilm, 1974), which won an award in a USSR-wide competition.

His career reached an early peak with the 1974 play Protokol odnogo zasedaniya (Minutes of a Meeting, also translated as A Party Committee Meeting) and staged in Leningrad at the Gorky Bolshoi Drama Theater by Georgy Tovstonogov and a year later at the Moscow Art Theatre by Oleg Yefremov; it was filmed in 1975 as Premiya (Salary Bonus). It depicted a construction crew's rejection of a salary bonus on the grounds that they felt cheated by bad management and poor workplace organization. Acclaimed as a sociological drama, the film won director Sergey Mikaelyan and screenwriter Gelman the USSR State Prize in 1976. Many people called Protokol odnogo zasedaniya prophetic, "presaging the strikes of summer 1980 and the workers' movement in Poland."


Other plays are Obratnaya svyaz' [Feedback] (1976), My, nizhepodpisavshiesya [We, the undersigned] (1979), Skameika [The bench] (1983), Zinulya (1984), and Poslednee budushchee [The most recent future] (2010). Boris Kagarlitsky writes of his plays (through the late 1980s):
Gel'man is free from naïve technocratic illusions; he knows economic reality other than by hearsay.... Real people appear on the stage. Instead of Shatrov's faceless technocrats we see live production-workers who turn out to be very different, unlike each other, complex, unexpected.... Gel'man's most recent plays ... localize the conflict, so to speak - confine it to a small group of people. More and more attention is paid to the conduct of particular individuals. ... There are no workers here. This is the world of lower and middle-ranking 'chiefs'. Bureaucracy. A milieu in which honesty is impossible, unattainable, having been eradicated. Love for one's job and confidence in one's rightness are also unattainable.... We behold the anatomy of the bureaucratic world, its mechanisms, the Mafia-like bonds among the bureaucratic cliques, the formation of a 'clientage', and all the relationships that result.

Political career
Elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1989, Gelman was an outspoken supporter of liberal changes and of General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost package in the 1980s, but in a 1989 interview with David Remnick of the Washington Post characterized the idea of the liberal politician Boris Yeltsin taking the place of Gorbachev was "a bit ridiculous". Supporting Gorbachev's new course against its critics, Gelman opined that "If the processes of democratization are halted, if perestroika is thrown out, a moral death awaits our party, the party of Lenin."

In 1990, Gorbachev personally recommended Gelman to become a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, but left the party months afterward without stepping down from the Committee, prompting his fellow members to take the step of expelling him from the Central Committee afterward. An October 1991 Washington Times article described him as a "vocal anti-communist".

Gelman was a signer of the 1993 Letter of Forty-Two, an Izvestiya-published open letter containing a collective appeal by forty-two prominent literati calling on Russian President Boris Yeltsin to ban the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and nationalist organizations in the wake of the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis, a political stand-off between the communist- and nationalist-dominated legislature and the Russian president.

Since 2001 he is a member of public council of the Russian Jewish Congress.

On October 25, 2008, he received a birthday greeting from Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

Usually with

Source : Wikidata

Filmography of Alexander Isaakovich Gelman (2 films)

Display filmography as list

Actor

Arje
Arje (2004)
, 1h29
Directed by Roman Romanovich Kachanov
Genres Drama, Romance
Themes Films about religion, Films about Jews and Judaism
Actors Jerzy Stuhr, Juozas Budraitis, Alexander Isaakovich Gelman, Angelina Chernova, Vera Ivanko
Rating59% 2.954972.954972.954972.954972.95497
Izrael (Izia) Arie, a Lithuanian Jew and a world-renowned Moscow heart surgeon, learns that he has only six months to live because of pancreatic cancer. He retires immediately and sets out to find his first love, Sonia Schworz, with whom he shared an attic on a Lithuanian farm while hiding from the Nazis for a large part of World War Two. Their re-union takes place in Israel, where Sonia settled after the war. Although the couple has not seen each other for sixty years, it turns out that in the meantime they have been following similar life paths, not unlike twins separated at birth. Both have achieved enviable prosperity and enjoy the company of much younger bedfellows. To get these youngsters out of the way, Sonia unceremoniously dumps her lover Chaim, while Izia's pregnant wife Olga is quickly persuaded to marry Sonia's grandson Yossi.

Scriptwriter

Arje
Arje (2004)
, 1h29
Directed by Roman Romanovich Kachanov
Genres Drama, Romance
Themes Films about religion, Films about Jews and Judaism
Actors Jerzy Stuhr, Juozas Budraitis, Alexander Isaakovich Gelman, Angelina Chernova, Vera Ivanko
Rating59% 2.954972.954972.954972.954972.95497
Izrael (Izia) Arie, a Lithuanian Jew and a world-renowned Moscow heart surgeon, learns that he has only six months to live because of pancreatic cancer. He retires immediately and sets out to find his first love, Sonia Schworz, with whom he shared an attic on a Lithuanian farm while hiding from the Nazis for a large part of World War Two. Their re-union takes place in Israel, where Sonia settled after the war. Although the couple has not seen each other for sixty years, it turns out that in the meantime they have been following similar life paths, not unlike twins separated at birth. Both have achieved enviable prosperity and enjoy the company of much younger bedfellows. To get these youngsters out of the way, Sonia unceremoniously dumps her lover Chaim, while Izia's pregnant wife Olga is quickly persuaded to marry Sonia's grandson Yossi.
The Bonus
The Bonus (1974)
, 1h23
Directed by Sergueï Mikaelian
Origin Russie
Genres Drama
Themes Politique, Films about the labor movement, Political films
Actors Oleg Yankovsky, Evgueni Leonov, Mikhaïl Glouzski, Armen Djigarkhanian, Nina Ourgant, Svetlana Krutchkova
Rating73% 3.669613.669613.669613.669613.66961
At a meeting of the Communist Party committee of building trust, taskman Potapov makes a surprise announcement. He and his team refuse to receive the bonus money issued for overfulfillment of plan targets. According to Potapov, the management of the trust regularly artificially lowers targets, due to which the trust can easily overfulfill plan targets. Potapov proves his words with serious economic calculation.