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Indians, Moroccans, camels and cricket

It’s a cricket game. In the desert. The Negev Desert. In Israel. On one side are the Indian Israeli Jews, more British than the British. On the other side are the Moroccan Israeli Jews, who don’t know what the hell they’re doing here or what cricket is all about.

All that’s missing is Peter O’Toole riding to the rescue atop a camel as Lawrence of Arabia.

But wait! What’s this? Here comes a herd, a horde, of camels — yes, camels — charging into the scene in panic, making shambles of the cricket game with wickets and cricket bats and would-be cricketeers flying this way and that.

Camels in Israel? Camels in the Negev?

“Of course there are camels in Israel,” says Avi Nesher. “Camels abounding. There are many, many Bedouins in the desert, and they all have camels.”

And yes, Avi Nesher says, there are Indians (from India) in Israel, and they bat a sticky wicket in more ways than one. So do the Moroccans and all other immigrants. Which is what his movie is all about.

“I know nothing of cricket,” says Israel-born, New York-based filmmaker Nesher, “but to this very day there’s a cricket league in the south of Israel.”

The camel stampede is just one of the things that have made “Turn Left at the End of the World” the highest grosser in Israeli motion-picture history, sufficient inspiration for Meir Fenigstein to bring it to this city’s Ziegfeld Theater on Oct. 28, opening the 20th annual Iraeli Film Festival.

Camels apart, and other laughs apart, this is a movie as quietly serious in its way as Nesher’s 1984 “Rage and Glory” — about a Jew who wanted to blow up the Dome of the Rock — was dangerously serious.

“Turn Left” centers on two families, down there in the Negev, immigrants, one household transplanted from Bombay, complete with Union Jack pillows; the other — including a mother who worships all things French and looks down her nose at the Indians — having arrived 10 years earlier from Morocco.

Jews in the sand? In nowheresville?

“Why not?” says the stoic who opened and runs the area’s only eating place. “Las Vegas got started like this.” Got started by a Jew, as a matter of fact. Fellow named Bugsy Siegel.

But the only work that exists for the able bodied in either of these families is boring, backbreaking, low-pay, exploited employment in the local bottle factory. A strike flares up and is easily crushed. Most battered, most depressed, by this is Isaac Shushan (Jean Benguigui), the father in the Moroccan family.

“Immigrants to Israel,” says Ari Nesher, whose parents were once two of them, “in these days get a raw deal. They are brought in as cheap labor, and are not called immigrants, which is part of the trickery. They are called ‘olim,’ a Hebrew word for ‘those who ascend,’ those who go to a higher place, the Holy Land. This movie speaks of a mythology that was unspoken.”

Each of the two families has a beautiful teenage daughter. “Time flies,” says wistful Sarah (Liraz Charchi), the Indian Israeli girl. “Only yesterday I was 6-years-old, and tomorrow I’m going into the army.”

Nicole (Neta Garty), the Moroccan Israeli girl, spends much of the movie putting Sarah down, then regretting it. At the same time, Nicole has the hots for the community’s new Indian schoolteacher, and acts upon it.

It is Nicole’s father, the desolate bottle worker at the fringes of the movie, who is also at its center, and there is a reason.

“I started writing this film,” says Ari Nesher, son of Dr. Aryeh Nesher, “shortly after the passing of my father. The father of the girl Nicole is a little bit like my father, an immigrant with a social conscience who knows he’s fighting a losing battle.

“My father was a man from many places. Born in Romania, went to school in Munich, emigrated to Israel in 1948 when Israel was born.”

How did he make it through the Holocaust?

Nesher shrugs.

“Part of the reason I made the movie,” he says. “is because I don’t know all that much about him. In Israel, it’s a sort of rule: You don’t ask, you don’t tell.

“He passed away the week after 9/11. I loved him very much. He came to the United States in 1965 on what some people called a diplomatic mission and some people called exile. He was one of Ben Gurion’s bright young men; the person who is supposed to have exiled him was Golda Meir.

“Aryeh Nesher was not his real name. Immigrants in Israel are forced to change their names. His real name was Leon Retter. He was one of the worst politicians of all time, a social scientist who could not dance the dance of the lying, the manipulating.

“ ‘Aryeh’ means lion and ‘Nesher’ means eagle, so Aryeh Nesher is king of the animals and the birds, but my father was neither a lion nor an eagle. He had this identity forced on him, but he was just Leon Retter from Romania.”

Ari Nesher’s mother, Lily Zonenshein, is alive and well in Israel. He has in the past described her as “a tough chick” from Russia who fought in the Red army and the Israeli army. The filmmaker’s wife is sculptress Iris Harel. Their daughter Tom (“Innocence”) is 8 now; their 3-year-old son Ari was born a week after his grandfather died.

Nesher takes a certain pleasure in the fact that “it took an American director [himself] to clobber every American-made blockbuster that played in Israel this year.”

By the way, where does Ari Nesher live, here or there?

“I don’t know,” he says. “This is a global village. My wife has an art show in Paris in January. I only know that satellite television has made my life bearable. I can watch American sports anywhere in the world.”

Even out there where you turn left and get trampled by a stampede of camels.