As director Caroline Kaye peers past a foreground of boisterous family gatherings, she seeks to reconcile her family’s apparent joy with their tragic past. Filmed over 30 years, Left Lane Straight unravels the complex realities of WWII, and its aftermath. Post-war immigrants to the United States, this family is among the remnant of the Jewish population from Thrace which survived WWII—a mere 2% of the scarcely known, but once thriving community.
In the late 1930s, in the mountains of Northern Greece, overlooking the Aegean Sea, a community of Sephardic Jews lives in the prosperous “little Paris,” Kavala. Carolina Varon attends Jewish school, dreams of becoming a nurse, and hopes to be the first girl in her family to graduate high school. As the European political climate shifts towards fascism, her course is dramatically altered. Carolina leaves behind her beloved family and undertakes a harrowing journey south, through Bulgarian- and German-occupied Greece to join her fiancé. This impossible decision—whether or not to leave her family—is the first of many pivotal choices explored throughout this film.
After thirty years of collecting her family’s tales, the director is able to reflect on such choices with a nuanced perspective—one in which bedrock assumptions must be questioned, and in which the price of survival is paid over multiple lifetimes. The beginning of the film focuses on circumstances and choices that lead to the family’s physical survival and then continues into an exploration of coping mechanisms that lead to their emotional survival.
LLS shares not only an un-told story in the Holocaust canon—that of Bulgarian-occupied Greece—it seeks to do so while discussing migration and its impact on personal identity. This story begins in the expansive Ottoman Empire, when, as professor Dina Danon explains, diversity was both expected and normal, and Jews thrived. With the rise of the nation-state, they became a minority, defined by the Christian majority. In that narrowing of national identity, the richness of Sephardic culture was diminished. Hitler then sought to eradicate this Jewish population, nearly erasing the entire culture. On this family’s arrival to America, the very identifier that caused them so much trouble in Greece—their Judaism—was questioned by the Yiddish-speaking, “Ashkenormative” community. Today, the topic of national identity is part of our national debate.
Through this family portrait, we delve into crucial moments in both family and world history, focusing beyond what was lost through war and changing occupation, on to what was reclaimed, generated and grown.