Why Marty Supreme’s chutzpah speaks to Holocaust survivors’ lived truth

One of my grandfather’s closest friends, a fellow survivor of the camps, was equally passionate about both his adopted country and sport. On the day of the 1966 World Cup final, after a couple of decades in England, he desperately wanted to be in attendance at Wembley but had no means of procuring a ticket. Why should the glory-hunting queen get to go but not someone who actually cared about the game? 

Utilising the kind of audacity that can only be developed through enduring the very worst of humanity as a youth, he rocked up at the ground with an expensive camera he’d just purchased and a homemade laminated press pass. This immaculate forgery allowed our hero to waltz past security and watch England’s greatest footballing moment from pitchside. I know only too well that once these people were out of the camps, they were intent on making every second of the rest of their lives count.

I thought of this while watching Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie’s exploration of a Jewish hustler-turned-champion table tennis player starring Timothée Chalamet in the title role. The eponymous Marty is chutzpah made flesh, a living embodiment of one of those bespoke Yiddish words we had no choice but to invent and yet was recognisable enough to catch on amongst the great unsnipped.

Somewhat predictably for 2026, much of the critical reaction to Marty Supreme has focused on dull notions of likability and whether or not we can root for a character who does questionable things (conveniently ignoring large swatches of culturally significant art on screen from film noir to Succession).

Understandably, less focus has been given to Marty’s Jewishness, perhaps because it is largely toiling away in the background like a referee doing a good enough job that you hardly notice their presence. Indeed, one scene late in the film seemed to have a different effect on my friends depending on whether or not they are Jewish.

Eschewing spoilers, the climactic match is notable since Marty is aware that if he loses, he will be forced to kiss a pig. This is directly linked to Judensau, a folk art image of Jews in obscene contact with pigs that dates back to 13th-century Germany. One does not need a PhD in mediaeval history, however, to be aware that Jews and pigs don’t mix, and the various shots of Marty’s Magen David necklace only serve to underline the point. The protagonist may well make crass jokes about Auschwitz, but he proudly displays the Star of David when performing in front of a crowd. He is a Jew and could easily have perished in the camps a decade earlier but for the happy accident of an American birth.

In the same scene, there is a moment where the predominantly Japanese spectators fail to recognise Marty, and he points at his cartoon depiction on a poster advertising the event. There he is, but he looks not like one of modern cinema’s great heartthrobs and instead like a Nazi caricature of a Jew. For the crowd, this identifier is enough. It is worth noting that the film is set in 1952, within spitting distance of Japan’s involvement in the Second World War as one of the Axis powers.

I think of my grandfather every day, but 18 January is his day, the date on which he was born and died. It was also impossible not to think of him during the most controversial scene in Marty Supreme, the one in which there is a flashback to Auschwitz. The sequence, based on a true story, sees Marty’s friend Béla Kletzki come across a honeycomb in the woods, smear himself with honey and return to the camp where he allows fellow prisoners to lick it off his body. There was laughter at the screening I attended, but it didn’t come from me.

My grandfather spoke about friends as though they were family, repeatedly insisting they were closer to him than any siblings could have been. That scene in Marty Supreme struck me not as offensive but rather as the most moving moment in the film. While the protagonist’s behaviour is dictated by ego and therefore consistently selfish, his friend looked to help others even while starving in an extermination camp. Kletzki might not be as accomplished a table tennis player, but he is a better man, almost certainly because he had the misfortune to be born in a different place and time. My grandfather was similarly unlucky, and he too would have done anything to help his friends and family, the two things synonymous in his view. Like Marty, he had chutzpah, but, unlike Marty, he was unambiguously a hero.

• Darren Richman is a journalist