People everywhere have a basic need for connection and community.
That desire has helped create a global mosaic of diverse communities across New York City, and especially here in Queens.
A new screenplay published as a paperback – which looks at a movie before it becomes a movie – explores the close-knit immigrant community of Bukharian Jews, who live and raise their families in the “World’s Borough.”
Author/filmmaker Vilan Trub, a Forest Hills-born and raised, first-generation American son of Russian immigrant parents, had his Bukharian neighbors in mind when he decided to write “Eddie, Al and Fabian.” He said the book provided an opportunity to shed light on these folks from Uzbekistan and show his readers “how a community undergoes changes from one immigrant generation to another.”
The story unfolds against the backdrop of charming Forest Hills, a leafy enclave that seems removed from Gotham yet conveniently close to all the action. There you’ll find a mix of eye-catching homes, especially in the European-inspired beauty of Forest Hills Gardens, along with prewar and modern buildings scattered throughout the neighborhood. And still-bustling (despite the pandemic) Austin Street is where friends often like to meet for lunch or dinner and go shopping.
A bit farther away from the boutiques and Manhattan-like restaurants, is another popular shopping area that runs through Forest Hills’ Russian community. You’ll experience a different vibe when shopping for great deals on 108th Street, which offers authentic delicacies from the old country.
One immigrant community is replaced by another. The new settlers are Jews from Uzbekistan. Eddie and his brothers are Bukharian and the first members of their family born in America. Eddie, a recent college graduate; Al, a workaholic for a corrupt law firm; and Fabian, the most settled of the three, but with the least settled lifestyle. Follow their journey as they try to succeed and deal with the pressure of high expectations in the land of opportunity.
“I didn’t originally intend to publish the screenplay as a book. I’m a filmmaker and am always writing scripts,” said Trub, who’s part of the IMDb generation of filmmakers. “Some are written with the definite intention of being the next filmed project, and some are written with the expectation that the project will be developed further on down the line. This story started as the former, then grew and became the latter, then became something else entirely.”
“A screenplay is only one step in the filmmaking process,” he added. “It is intended as a blueprint for how to tell a visual story and is not meant as a stand-alone piece. This book is a look at a movie before actors offer their input, locations dictate how a scene will be blocked, and all the other factors that influence how the final production looks.”
What is that unique community like?
“There’s always that conflict between old culture and assimilation. The reality is the American culture is just bits and pieces of everything that doesn’t get totally shaken off after several generations,” Trub told QNS. “We eat pizza, drink at Irish pubs, so on and so forth to the point where we don’t even know the origin of what defines us most.”
The author said he very much wanted to showcase a modern Jewish immigrant community because people always think of the early 20th century Lower East Side immigrants.
“Jews are seen as established in this country, but the reality is that 108th Street is a working-class place,” Trub said. “While there are the famous mansions in Forest Hills, the amount of people that live in those handful of mansions are an extreme minority compared to the ones that populate the six-story red brick buildings,” he noted.
The backstory
“I’m not Bukharian. My family is a part of the ‘70s class of immigration from the former Soviet Union,” Trub explained. “I didn’t have any brothers, only a sister. The friends that I had since childhood became like brothers. It became an important concept for us to feel about someone as if they’re your blood brother.”
In the beginning of his script, the author — whose stories center around the types of people and problems that define the outskirts of a big city — describes his neighborhood’s history, and his family is right there in the middle of that. He saw firsthand, conflicts between those two immigrant groups.
“Like Mia says in the script, ‘everyone [craps] on everyone.’ It didn’t matter that both immigrant groups are Jews escaping religious persecution and both groups speak the same language,” Trub said. “There’s something very ‘high school’ about it. I don’t want to make it sound as if it’s the Jets and the Sharks. There was no violence because of it and everyone more or less got along. It’s just a culture’s prerogative to look down on another culture and every culture is guilty of it.”
He said part of what the story is also about is letting go of your elders’ baggage and not blindly taking in every lesson.
“Mama isn’t happy but feels confident that she knows best and needs to pass her knowledge down to her sons.”
What are some highlights?
“Some of the most fun I had was writing about the characters outside of the family, like Crazy Slava or Danny Gouda. No matter where you are in NYC, you’re always going to be in a far more diverse location than anywhere else on Earth, so it’s great to see how different people and cultures interact with each other,” Trub said. “Even the negative stuff is great because it’s only possible because of America and NYC.”
When you read the book, you’ll likely enjoy the graduation party scene. It seems that so much of this community, and others like it, is about family celebrations and parties in small apartments, where a folding table in the living room is always piled high with lots of home-cooked dishes.
“It gives me an opportunity to show the whole family and the different generations, grandpa and the uncles,” Trub shared. “Everyone has their own opinion, their own problems, and their own ambitions, successes and failures. For that evening though, they just eat good food and get drunk. Then blam! Everyone finds out Mama lost her job … no money; Eddie’s student loans; and where will they all stay? There’s always going to be some problem or some tragedy though, no?”
Trub recalled that as he was writing the script, it kept growing in scope and he knew he wouldn’t be able to film it in the near future. The scale was just too epic.
“Even though it’s a movie about three brothers, it’s a story that you need three hours to tell and a very long shooting schedule, etc.,” he said. “I actually see this as if Tennessee Williams wrote about 108th Street. It also becomes a great way to introduce a non-filmmaking audience to reading a screenplay.”
“For many filmmakers, there’s the desire to create a personal film, tell a personal story. What does that actually mean? It’s difficult to say because “The Godfather” is a big-budget Hollywood epic, yet the DNA of that movie is intrinsically tied to Francis Ford Coppola and his own understanding of America through the lens of a family with no roots in the country,” Trub added.
According to the author, diversity is an experiment and evolution has its growing pains.
“It also lets me pull from certain real-life stories. That’s how some characters or scenes or even single lines get put together,” he said. “Someone once said something or did something and it would work well in this spot right here.”
Take a funny true story about someone getting an Iguana and it falling off his shoulder as he went to the corner store. Someone from the neighborhood tells you a story about what happened to someone else, etc. “One brother tells another brother a story about someone on 99th Street. We get to be in that room and hear the story too … It’s neighborhood gossip and it’s how the neighborhood gets to be the main character in the movie,” Trub explained. “This is a story about 108th Street.”
Vilan Trub wrote and directed “The Dirty Kind,” a no-budget crime film that attracted Hollywood icon Michael Madsen (“Reservoir Dogs,” “Kill Bill”) to sign on as executive producer and champion the movie.
“Eddie, Al and Fabian” is now available on Amazon here.
