A Real Pain (English version)

  

The Echo of a Fictional Film and a Real Version. A Journey Through Ukraine…

 

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness…” — Mark Twain

 

A Real Pain (2024) is a film written, directed, and starred in by Jesse Eisenberg. It has been widely praised for its original approach in dealing with complex themes such as grief, identity, and historical memory. The story follows two American cousins, both in their thirties, who embark on a trip to Poland after the recent death of their grandmother. Their goal is to reconnect with their Jewish roots and honor their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. The two characters are stark opposites. Both surnamed Kaplan, David (played by Eisenberg) is married, has a child, works a steady job, and lives in New York City; Benji (Kieran Culkin), on the other hand, is bohemian, extroverted, chaotic, unemployed, and lives in his parents’ basement in a small industrial town.

 

The film received over 90 nominations within the film industry, including one—despite the seriousness of its subject matter—for Best Comedy of the Year. Imagine that! Eisenberg earned several awards for Best Screenplay, including the Oscar, and was honored at both the Sundance Film Festival and the 2025 BAFTAs. Kieran Culkin swept all awards in his category for Best Supporting Actor for his brilliant performance.

 

The talented Jesse Eisenberg is 41 years old and was born in Queens, NY. His grandparents (I don’t know if they are still alive) were also born in the U.S. and are or were Ashkenazi Jews originally from Poland and Ukraine. It was his paternal great-grandfather who emigrated from Poland to the United States before World War II. Although the film was inspired by the story of a great-aunt who escaped Nazi persecution, the script is entirely fictional. Eisenberg aimed to create a film based on scenarios that could feel real—both dramatic and humorous at the same time.

 

While watching it recently, I thought to myself: “I lived a very similar story—only mine was real” (and very serious), from six years ago when I traveled to Ukraine with my cousin. I remembered how, just like the American cousins in the film, we diluted some of our own “miseries” along the way—except they smoked marijuana, and we drank Johnnie Walker Black…

 

We were two 67-year-old men with parallel pasts and shared memories, visiting the village where our grandparents lived—where, among nine siblings, our respective mothers were born. One of them managed to escape Europe just before the outbreak of the war; the other survived a concentration camp…

 

A Real Pain (without going into too much detail, so others can still watch it)

 

David and Benji meet at JFK Airport in New York City and fly to Poland (presumably Warsaw), where they join a small group of tourists on a Holocaust-related Jewish heritage tour. The guide is a young British man, not Jewish, “neutral,” trying to maintain order and balance among the emotionally invested participants.

 

The tour begins at the Warsaw Ghetto, the site and symbol of the confinement and dehumanization of over 400,000 Polish Jews. They visit the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, which honors the April 1943 uprising—one of the most heroic acts of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. Then they tour the former ghetto itself and the Warsaw Uprising Monument, dedicated to the Polish resistance fighters, both civilian and military, who fell during the 1944 revolt against the German army.

 

The tourists continue on to Lublin, known as the “Jewish Oxford,” where they visit the Jewish cemetery and the tomb of Rabbi Jacob Kopelman Levi (1541), the oldest known Jewish grave in Poland. And then the obligatory stop at the nearest concentration camp: Majdanek—a site that never fails to shake its visitors with its history of overcrowding, forced labor, starvation, and the extermination of over 235,000 Jews in gas chambers between 1941 and 1944.

 

Throughout the journey, tensions arise between the cousins. David is responsible and emotionally reserved; Benji is hypersensitive, impulsive, struggles with mental health, and exhibits erratic behavior that makes others uncomfortable. He becomes a “real pain in the…” David tries to manage the fallout, while Benji increasingly spirals into an emotional and existential crisis—culminating in an act of defiance when he refuses to take photographs at Majdanek, unwilling to trivialize the horror.

 

Eventually, after visiting a number of villages and synagogues in the region, they reach the grandmother’s former home somewhere in eastern Poland (the film does not specify the location). They observe it only from the outside. It now has non-Jewish local residents, unrelated to them. At that moment, they come to realize that there is a boundary between memory and reality.

 

They return to New York. David invites his cousin to his home. Benji declines and remains at the airport, silently watching the travelers around him…

 

Memory is not inherited, it is retraced — A journey through Ukraine

 

“Travel is a remedy against ignorance” … I don’t know who said it.

 

I have a maternal first cousin—one of several—who was born three months before me, in Bucharest. He left at age 21 for Paris, where he completed his engineering studies and shortly afterward moved to the U.S. We met in Paris in 1972, just after he had emigrated. I, born in Caracas, a thoroughly irreverent Latin American, was backpacking through Europe and nearly done with my medical studies. Despite our cultural differences—those unrelated to our shared Jewish heritage—we managed to connect and stay in touch as the years went by.

 

Six years ago, we took a trip together that, quite surprisingly, mirrored the journey of David and Benji (from A Real Pain).

 

On May 5, 2019, we met at JFK Airport in New York (he flew in from Miami, I from Caracas) and boarded a Ukrainian International Airlines flight to Kyiv. We were well taken care of during the 10-hour flight and landed at Boryspil—a large, modern airport bustling with people (now closed for obvious reasons), with fast, free Wi-Fi typical of technologically advanced countries (as the Ukrainians have recently demonstrated with their drones in the war against Russia—and now they’re working on armed robotic vehicles!).

 

Kyiv turned out to be a surprise: an ancient city with wide highways and modern buildings alongside Soviet-era blocks, all interspersed with numerous Orthodox churches and their golden domes. The Dnieper River runs through it from north to south. On its western bank stand St. Sophia’s Cathedral, the blue-domed St. Michael’s Monastery, and nearby, the statue of the great national hero Bohdan Khmelnytsky—to whom I’ll return later…

 

We visited Independence Square with its towering 60-meter obelisk and the small memorials around it, commemorating the Orange Revolution of 2004 and the pro-European uprising of 2013, which ended in February 2014 and left over 100 dead. Naturally, we also took the Jewish heritage tour. We visited the home of Golda Mayerson (Golda Meir) and that of Sholem Rabinovich (Sholem Aleichem)—two emblematic figures: one in politics and Zionism, the other in Yiddish culture and literature. Both fled to the U.S.—she with her family in 1906, he in 1905—always escaping the ever-present antisemitism and pogroms in Ukraine. And of course, Babyn Yar, where the Nazi Holocaust began (more on that later)…

 

Our main destination was the Chernivtsi oblast, specifically its capital of the same name and a nearby small town, an old shtetl (Jewish village), called Stanesti. After a 45-minute flight southwest of Kyiv, we landed at a rather rustic airport.

 

Chernivtsi, a city of 250,000 people, still retains the atmosphere of its Austro-Hungarian past (its borders shifted several times). It wasn’t Oxford, but it was known as the “Vienna of the East,” the “Jerusalem on the Prut River.” Before WWII, it had 190,000 inhabitants, 90,000 of whom were Jews—mostly intellectuals, professionals, businesspeople, doctors, writers, musicians, lawyers, etc. During the war, 50,000 were crammed into a ghetto, then deported to a larger camp in Transnistria, where most died of starvation (a polite euphemism for hunger).

 

We visited what remained of the city’s Jewish presence (as of our visit, there were about 900 Jews left, most of them Israelis who had returned). We saw the Great Synagogue, now converted into a cinema locally known as the Cinemagogue, and the Jewish cemetery (incidentally, my cousin is president of a foundation that restored 65,000 graves there—but that’s another story).

 

We then drove south, crossing the Prut River and the lush green steppes, heading toward the misty Carpathian Mountains. We stopped in Sadagura to visit the synagogue of Israel Friedman, a direct disciple of Hasidism’s founder Israel Ben Eliezer, the “Baal Shem Tov.” Then we continued to Vizhnitz, where Friedman’s grandsons founded a Hasidic dynasty that still thrives today in Israel, New York, and Canada. And finally, we reached our main destination.

 

Stanesti was just one of over 50 shtetls that once dotted the outskirts of Chernivtsi before the war—but it suffered a particular tragedy. In early 1941, with the imminent German invasion, the Soviets retreated and deported many prominent members of the Jewish community. Our grandfather Aizic was a deeply religious and prosperous man. Following a long tradition of Jews from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, he sold liquor. The Soviets took him to Siberia along with the few remaining relatives he had there. Most of his nine children were scattered: two sons in Palestine, one daughter in Poland, another deported to Transnistria, and my mother, who in early 1939, at age 20, fleeing a “romantic entanglement” (long story), left for Cuba, where her eldest brother lived. Not long after, in June 1941, 137 Jewish members of the village were murdered. The perpetrators were their own Ukrainian neighbors—who used their tools of daily life to kill them: hammers, shovels, rakes, and machetes…

 

Stanesti today is a rural agricultural community of about 5,000 residents. It has a single paved main street; the others are dirt roads, flanked by expansive green cultivated fields. In the middle of one of them, we found a Jewish cemetery with 3,000 tombstones, clearly demarcated but overgrown with wild vegetation that made it impossible to walk through. We circled it. On its edge, we found a gravestone bearing our maternal family name: Karpel…

 

We found “our house” on the main street—a rectangular two-story building now owned by the municipality. On the ground floor, there was a public library and a pharmacy, located where our grandfather’s tavern once stood. We had the coordinates, handed down through family stories. We entered. The upper floor was abandoned. There, on the fifth day after Yom Kippur each year—until 1941—the roof was removed and covered with tree branches to transform the house into a sukkah, celebrating the Feast of Tabernacles…

 

On our way back, as we left Ukraine, we made one last stop in Krakow. We visited the city, the Jewish quarter, and Schindler’s factory. On one of its walls, among many photographs, we saw the image of a prominent member of our Jewish community in Caracas. There was one more stop—an obligatory one—just a 45-minute drive away: Auschwitz…

 

I must say my cousin was reluctant to go. But in the end, we signed up for one of those conventional tours offered by local travel agencies—turns out it’s the most popular and visited tourist attraction in all of Poland (in Ukraine, it’s Chernobyl). Such is human nature: dark tourism, morbid fascination, tragedy—it’s what draws people in the most. Auschwitz receives over two million visitors from all over the world every year. Our guide, a young local woman, repeatedly reminded us that the camp was not operated by Poles, and that—though not in the same numbers—they too were victims of the Nazis. (I wonder why she insisted so much on that point…)

“Work Sets You Free” — Infamous!

 

That’s the phrase, wrought in iron, perched atop the gate to the camp. We saw the barracks, thousands of original suitcases with the names of their former owners, display cases with two tons of human hair that had been sold, the gas chambers, empty Zyklon B cans, the crematoria, the Wall of Executions, and austere monuments woven into the landscape of horror. A silent, emotional visit…

 

Between 1942 and 1944, at Auschwitz, the Nazis murdered 15,000 Soviet prisoners, 23,000 Roma, 140,000 Poles, and 1.1 million Jews from all over Europe…

 

My cousin didn’t want to take photos or appear in the few that I took…

 

Some (only some) historical milestones

 

“Man is the greatest enemy of man.” — David Hume

 

Around the year 900, Finno-Ugric and Slavic tribes founded the powerful state of Kievan Rus, a rectangle of one million square kilometers, crossed vertically from north to south by the Dnieper River, flowing from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Between the Crusades and the Mongol cavalry, it fell in 1240. It split into three Slavic states: the Republic of Novgorod (Belarus), the Principality of Moscow, and the Kingdom of Ruthenia (Ukraine). A century later, Novgorod came under Moscow’s control, and Ruthenia joined the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Poles had emerged as a nation in 1025 and converted early to Christianity. In 1385, a Polish queen married a Lithuanian grand duke, solidifying the Commonwealth, also known as the Republic of the Two Nations. Jews had lived in Poland and Kievan Rus since the 10th century, and more continued arriving, fleeing persecution in Western Europe. They lived through a period of splendor. But beginning in the 15th century, local attacks began, and “blood libels” emerged…

 

In 1648, a popular uprising began in the Kingdom of Ruthenia, leading to its independence. It was led by a Cossack nobleman named Bohdan Khmelnytsky, a follower of the Byzantine Church. Under the banner of resistance against despotism, he raised an army of 60,000 men and attacked Polish Catholic forces and Jews, seen as their natural allies. The devastation was brutal. In addition to looting, rape, and beheadings, Jews were subjected to particular cruelty — they were flayed, disemboweled, and left to be devoured by wild dogs, among other atrocities that could rival the Nazi Holocaust in cruelty. Tens of thousands perished.

 

Bohdan Khmelnytsky, perpetrator of the first genocidal catastrophe in modern Jewish history, is still regarded today as the Father of the Ukrainian Nation and a great defender of the Orthodox Church. His image appears on local coins and 5-hryvnia bills. Ruthenia’s independence lasted ten years until it voluntarily submitted to the Principality of Moscow. The Republic of the Two Nations gradually dissolved, disappearing from the European map in 1795. Its lands were divided among the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In these territories, stereotypes intensified, and modern forms of antisemitism emerged. Conspiracy theories (“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”) gained traction, Jews were excluded from certain professions, and pogroms became widespread…

 

Poland reappeared on the map after World War I. Antisemitism intensified. There was both complicity and indifference in the face of Nazi extermination. On July 10, 1941, in the town of Jedwabne, under occupation, about 1,500 Jews were tortured and burned alive in a barn by the local population. In 2001, the then-president of Poland, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, issued an official apology. There were also many Poles who helped save Jews, recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations” at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem…

 

On September 26, 1941, the Nazis occupied Kyiv. Among the 800,000 inhabitants were 200,000 Jews. At the edge of a ravine called Babyn Yar, 33,000 Jews were executed in the first 48 hours, marking the start of the Holocaust. The bodies fell into the natural chasm. In the two years that followed, another 70,000 were killed, always with civilian collaboration or, at minimum, indifference…

 

On April 19, 1943, young Mordechai Anielewicz, under the slogan “We will not go like sheep to the slaughter,” led the heroic uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto. There were 55,000 Jewish victims, between those killed and deported to Nazi camps. Anielewicz died with 120 other fighters on May 8 in a bunker at 18 Mila Street…

 

Before World War II, despite the ongoing pogroms, Ukraine had a Jewish population of 2.1 million. One and a half million — 70% — were murdered in the Holocaust. In Poland, there were close to 3 million Jews; only 300,000 survived…

 

On July 4, 1946 — and this is staggering — a mob of Polish civilians, along with police and soldiers, killed 42 Jews in Kielce, Eastern Poland. They were publicly lynched — beaten to death — after returning home following the end of the war, under the pretext that they had kidnapped a Christian Polish boy for a “ritual murder”… (Unbelievable)

 

A 2019 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found that 5% of Ukrainians rejected Jews as fellow citizens (which is odd, considering they also elected a Jewish president), compared to 23% of Lithuanians, 22% of Romanians, 19% of Czechs, 18% of Poles, and 14% of Russians and Hungarians.

 

In the end…

 

On the January 24 episode of Real Time with Bill Maher this year, Jesse Eisenberg—a young idealist engaged in social causes for the underprivileged—expressed gratitude toward the people in Poland who preserve the “memorials” of his own family. He said it was a shame that so many Polish-American Jews hold a negative view of Poles because of their antisemitism, and that he “wanted to reconnect with his family’s country of origin and help mend Jewish-Polish diaspora relations.”

 

On March 5 of this year, the President of Poland, Andrzej Duda, granted Jesse Eisenberg Polish citizenship, recognizing both his family roots and his efforts to promote reconciliation between Poland and the Jewish community.

 

I can’t help but feel sympathy for the Ukrainian people today as they’re being invaded and bombed by Russia for no reason, since February 2022. But if, at the end of my journey, President Zelensky had offered me Ukrainian citizenship, I would have said, “No no, thank you…”

 

A Real Pain is a film that moves from the personal to the collective. Bill Maher—and, I believe, much of the American audience—“loved” the dynamic between the cousins and the respectful handling of the Holocaust within what can still be called a comedy.

 

And where is the real pain? Because it can be hidden. Is it in mourning the grandmother? In the depressive, erratic, and tormented cousin who disrupts the trip? In the family’s collective memory? In the Holocaust? Possibly in all of them…

 

Our journey was a shared, mature experience. Like Eisenberg’s protagonists, we walked where our ancestors walked—we retraced our own history, which is inseparable from the recent memory of the Jewish diaspora. It was a deeply enriching experience, and beyond a tear or two along the way, we had a great time…

 

Alberto Salinas Karpel, writer (and retired surgeon)

Miami, June 8, 2025

 

For Sasha, my cousin…

 

P.S. A Real Pain is available on Amazon Prime, Disney, and other platforms. On a related note about Holocaust survivors returning home, there’s a Hungarian film called 1945. It’s moving, poetic, brutally good—you’ll find it on one of the streaming platforms out there.

 

In May 2022, while the Russian invasion was still hot, I wrote—in my own way—the story “The Jews, Ukraine, and My Family”, where I narrate the historical events behind Putin’s claims over that territory, along with more detailed accounts of my trip to Ukraine. My editor (yes, I now have an editor) insisted I include it in my book The Noble Profession, even though it touches on nothing medical. The book should be published in the coming days. In the meantime, I posted the essay on my blog, for anyone who might want to read it:

 

https://albertosalinasescritor.blogspot.com/2025/06/the-jews-ukraine-and-my-family-english.html

 

Since moving to Miami in 2020, I’ve walked religiously every Sunday morning with my cousin. There’s no doubt that our bond deepened after that journey. His daughter recently asked which one of us was the real pain in the… Without hesitation, we both pointed at each other…

 

Ahhh… and maybe Benji wasn’t so crazy after all.