No. He’s not Jewish, and that’s the first thing he tells me when we meet to discuss his latest release, Jakob the Liar. Williams has been known to take risks professionally, and Jakob (of which he is also the executive producer) is one of those once-in-a-lifetime gambles.  This subject is ghetto life during the Holocaust.

”God,” you think, “not another one! Not after Life is Beautiful.” But, because it is Robin Williams, one of the finest actors living today—and according to many the funniest man in the world—you make sure you see the film. You are blown away.  “Bravo!” you think. So many things from the Jewish past have now become clearer, including the Jewish sense of humor.

The two of us are sitting at a table in a conference room at The Mark on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. The room had just been vacated by the director, Peter Kassovitz, who had just finished a press conference of his own. He’d explained that he had fallen in love with the book Jakob the Liar eight years ago (1991) and had tracked down the writer, Jurek Becker, a survivor from East Germany, in order to get the rights to make a film. After finding Becker, Kassovitz, a hidden child survivor himself, rewrote the screenplay of the original German version with Didier Decoin. Though he tried for some years to raise money to make a new version in Europe, it wasn’t until three months after it came to Blue Wolf Productions, the company run by Marcia Garces Williams—Robin’s wife, that the film became a reality. Marcia had given Robin the script on a rainy day, while they were taking it easy at home.  After he read it, Robin climbed on his bicycle and went for a ride. When he came back, he decided he would produce and star in the film. Garces-Williams is responsible for a number of her husband’s successes. Since they founded their production company in 1992, they had worked together on Mrs. Doubtfire and Patch Adams. Jakob the Liar is their third collaboration.

So the question is, although Robin Williams can keep up with Billy Crystal’s shtick, how come he made a Holocaust movie? Kassovitz tells me that Robin thinks he’s Jewish and Robin himself has been attracted to Judaism since eighth grade. “It’s a weird thing,” he says, “But I have been tempted to become Jewish since high school,” and he’s serious when he says it.

Jakob was finished before Life is Beautiful, but then it was put on the shelf because of contractual commitments for release dates. What Dreams May Come and Patch Adams had to be released first.

Any resemblance of Jakob the Liar to Life is Beautiful therefore, is purely coincidental.  Comparing Jakob to Life is Beautiful is like comparing Shmurah Matzoh to Ritz Crackers, I crack wise, and Williams bursts into knowing laughter. “I want that in all the ads,” he crows.

**Robin Williams was born in Chicago in 1952, and spent his childhood in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Each of his parents had a grown son from a previous marriage. His father was an executive at the Ford Motor Company, and his mom was a former model who gave lots of her time to community work. Bloomfield Hills is a typical upper middle class suburban neighborhood. Robin was the only kid in a huge house, and legend has it he was shy, serious, and played with 2000 toy soldiers.

In 1989, he told Esquire that his was a sort of lonely childhood, that he was basically raised by a maid, and found that he could best relate to his mom via comedy. “She was wonderful and witty and it was my way of connecting to her. ‘I’ll make Monny laugh.’ That’s where it started.”

Robin called his father Sir, and it was his father who told him, that while he might well be a comedian, he’d better make sure he had a day job. The suburban life, however, wasn’t a total waste. Bloomfield Hills was filled with Jews, and Robin attended lots of bar mitzvahs. He found himself very taken by the ceremony to the point of memorizing the brochos his friends were making.  (He even recited them for me just like that!) Eventually he and his family moved to San Francisco, where Robin attended high school. Until he was finished with college, he was a self-described closet comedian who honed routines copied from Jonathan Winters’ television appearances.

Williams won a scholarship to Julliard in NYC, where he was known to make his classmates laugh so hard, they ached. After three years in NY, he left for Los Angeles to seek his fortune as a dramatic actor and morphed into a standup comic. He started on open mike nights and moved up to the Improv and the Comic Strip. His audiences plotzed at the quick pace of his intellectual, political and often insane riffs of comedic fury. Among his day jobs he tended bar and was a counterman at an ice cream parlor.

His wild humor was noticed, and soon he was getting roles on  TV comedy/variety shows. Then he won the title role in the Mork and Mindy sitcom by sitting on his head when asked to do something alien. It was 1978. Soon college lounges were filled with stoned students whose howls of laughter could be heard across campus. The unlikely sitcom led to so much media attention that Williams succumbed to the pitfalls of superstardom as did Freddy Prinz and Williams’ friend John Belushi. Both died from mishandling success and drugs. “They don’t train you for success,” Robin told a reporter.

Though he spent much of that decade under the influence of herbal essence, schedule 3 drugs and alcohol, Williams’ didn’t want to die. He kicked his habits. “Cocaine,” he told an interviewer recently, “is God’s way of letting you know you are making too much money.” Today he gets his highs from his family and friends, and riding his bike. “Sunday in Central Park is a killer,” he says, “riding through the roller bladers is like playing Pac-Man live.”

After Williams’ brilliant HBO Special, his film career began. There were a few busts, but he was always stretching himself as an actor. He was excellent as Dr. Oliver Sacks in the movie Awakenings. Williams’ role mimicked the pyscho-neurologist and author so well, Sacks was spooked and will never let anyone climb into his brain like that again.

Kids love William’s for the many films he makes just for them. Among others, he was the genie in Disney’s Aladdin. He is recognized by Hollywood as one of its finest actors, and was nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for a number of roles, winning the Oscar for Good Will Hunting.

Now comes Jakob the Liar.

**When you speak with Robin Williams, Yinglish flows naturally from his lips. His manager, David Steinberg, confides that Robin is the one who put the Yiddish into Jakob, and the Yiddish is right on the mark. (Director Kassovitz later told me he knew no Yiddish having been raised as a liberal Jew in Budapest.) In fact, Williams tells me that two religions have drawn him almost irresistibly—Judaism and Catholicism in the days of the Latin Mass. “Maybe it’s that sense of ritual, that sense of history,” he surmises, “There is so much power to it. I’ve been going to many Jewish weddings, and sadly a few Jewish funerals, and there is something so very powerful about the ceremonies.”

“It’s old,” I say.

“It’s old,” he echoes, and changes his accent, showing a flash of his “on” personality.  “It’s old, Robin, it’s  5759.” The cover of the Jewish magazine on the table reads 5760. “It’s 5760.”

Nu? So why did Episcopalian white bread turn to Jewish wry?

“Because I found the story very compelling. And if people have a problem with it, I can’t apologize. I tried to create a role in the secular tradition of those gentiles who have been playing Jews in movies for so many years.” The passion of the actor moves him as he speaks. He tenses his arms and leans toward me, drawing his fists to his chest, at time gesturing with his graceful hands.

“It comes down, basically, to the challenge of creating a character, by God.” He has said that creating a character is like running a marathon. He has been known to do takes for himself, but didn’t do that in Jakob, except in one scene, where he added a line about Stalin. Although he thought he went overboard, Kassovitz said to leave it in. It worked.

Being in Poland, shooting in the place where it happened, the level of authenticity is there as a boundary. “It’s not so much a line as the sensibility to know where you are,” Williams says.  “You get a father survivor who made it through Auschwitz, a death march and was liberated in Bergen Belsen, who is surrounded by his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Yes, that’s what it’s all about. Exactly that,” he exclaims.

“They were going to shoot a final scene after the ending that we have now, of Lena, the child in the movie played by Hannah Gordon Taylor, she’s a grown up in NY where she’s opened a restaurant. Is it a lie? Is it the truth?” he asks.

The answer is that it’s both. But you need to see the movie to understand. Is Jakob really a liar? Or do the characters in the film use Jakob’s words to create what they need to create in their own minds so that they could survive.

“When you talk to people from that time,” says Williams, “when you read the chronicles from Lodz and other places, the smallest thing, like in any small community, gets built up, picked and chewed, run over. That’s why Alan Arkin’s character is great. Alan is the cynic, the realist. Armand Meuller Stahl is the philosopher. It’s very powerful, and they treated it with such elegance and dignity. It needed to be authentic. The people, the cast, Alan, Bob Balaban and Liev Schrieber, they were just wonderful.  Liev is in reality, so informed, so intense, and he plays, this bulvan, you know, he just moves around like this bull (he switches to a Polish accent and moves his entire torso) ‘I’ll go this way, I’ll go this way,’ and we all had to walk the line. …

“A woman told me that the film now exists as another part of people’s memory of that time. If it is authentic enough to reach people who haven’t got a clue of what that time was like, if it gives them that much, (he brings his thumb and forefinger into the air about an inch apart) then that’s a good thing. It’s a memory. If it lets you remember people, then that’s a good thing. It’s not a statistic; it was people living their lives. If you remember that, then that’s a great thing. That’s why Jurek wrote the book. It is a piece of fiction. It is not truth. It is fiction written by a survivor. It is ironical, it is many things I hadn’t seen before. I hadn’t seen that sense of detail before.”

Which brings us to his friend, Steven Spielberg and Schindler’s List. Spielberg told James Lipton of Inside the Actor’s Studio, that Williams saved his sanity by talking to him on the phone while he was shooting in Poland. Did that experience have any influence on Williams’ decision to take a risk on Jakob?

The answer to that one is no. And Williams’ doesn’t remember much except this: Speilberg’s worst moments came when he was shooting outside the gates of Auschwitz. And that’s why Williams called him, to give him a sense of “Hey friend, I love you, here’s a laugh or two to help you get by.” They are close. And although they live on different ends of California, when they get together, they are like 12 year olds and play computer games with each other. The reason Williams did the movie, he reiterates, was because he was drawn to the characters.

Did Williams think that this film could become another Schindler’s List, a staple of Holocaust education programs? He said a man in London told him that the film would be shown in the schools there. But Williams doesn’t want the film forced down anyone’s throat. “The point is to learn that one person can make a difference. If we can get people to realize enough of this ‘I don’t know what to do, I can’t do anything’ business, we must make them understand that one person can make a difference,” says Williams, recalling the Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg, who saved Jewish lives in Budapest and disappeared during the Liberation.

“When you think of the statistics of those who survived when compared to that other number, it’s not a lot. The fact that there were any survivors is amazing. And that’s another reason we made this movie.”

It is dusk in the ghetto, a tired voice tells an old tired joke just as a sheet of newsprint lifts itself over the ghetto wall and draws us deeper and deeper into the lives, hearts and hopes, as well as the despair, of the ghetto’s remaining inhabitants. The broadsheet is chased by Jakob the latke maker, played by Williams, who used to have a café, who used to have a life like everyone else in the ghetto.

The story of Jakob is a tale of a man facing a moral dilemma spiced with fatalistic humor. See the movie and ask yourself, if you were Jakob, would you have done it differently?