There isn’t a single pachyderm in “The Woman With the 5 Elephants.” Rather, that’s how Svetlana Geier — a stooped, gray-haired woman in her 80s — describes the five Dostoyevsky novels she translated into German. The press notes for Vadim Jendreyko’s documentary call Geier, who died last year at 87, “the world’s most masterful translator of Russian literature into German.”
Before Geier translated “Crime and Punishment,” it was known in German as “Guilt and Atonement.” She also did the honors for works by Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol and Solzhenitsyn.
Geier’s own life was filled with tragedy. Her father was tortured in a Stalin prison camp, and she was witness to the German invasion of the Ukraine, her homeland, and the cold-blooded massacre of 30,000 Jews at Babi Yar. In order to survive, Geier learned German at home. Before the war ended, she and her mother found themselves in a German labor camp for Eastern European prisoners.
Jendreyko’s cameras record Geier doing ordinary things in Germany, her adopted homeland — shopping in an outdoor market, ironing bed linens, cooking with the help of her grandchildren.
The film is most effective when Geier, accompanied by a granddaughter, goes to Ukraine to speak at a school. It’s the first time she set foot there in 65 years, and it elicits tears from her as she recalls her early years. Asked why she had stayed away for so long, she answers: “I had no reason to go.” Vintage newsreels and family photos add depth to this meditative film.