In these "American Stories," inspired by the writings of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Chantal Akerman explores her Jewish roots. But the Belgian director takes a typically indirect route to her European heritage-via New York-so that Histoires d'Amérique, ipso facto, captures the experience of displacement of its Holocaust-ravaged characters. The film, featuring a cast of wonderful Jewish actors from New York, consists entirely of stories, anecdotes and jokes, as if to literalize that quality in Singer's characters that implies that, after the Holocaust, all life is just play-acting. In a sense their humor derives from being the (very) animated walking dead. There is the tragedy of the woman who was rescued from poverty by a wealthy couple who then demanded one child in payment; the anxiety of a woman in love with two men; the monologue of a cynic who became hooked on the Talmud; the men in a cafe who play get-the-waiter. For them, New York is a way-station, a point of transit before another incarnation; it is a New York tethered to the past but resolutely existing in the present. And Akerman's camera makes the real setting appear to be an artificial set. She explains: "Instead of learning my family's story directly from my parents, I had to turn to literature-Singer, for example. But his memories weren't exactly mine, so I made up my own; this film is about memory, but an invented one. I'm part of the postwar generation whose parents wanted to forget..." In Memoriam: Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991)