divan

• Director: Pearl Gluck
• AMG Rating:
• Genre: Culture & Society
• Movie Type: Biography, Religions & Belief Systems
• Themes: Journey of Self-Discovery, Discovering One's Heritage, Fathers and Daughters
• Release Year: 2003
• Country: HU/US/IL/UA
• Run Time: 77 minutes

Plot

A young woman who had previously forsaken the Orthodox lifestyle attempts to make amends with her father by acquiring a couch said to have been used by many famous Jewish figures in this humorous documentary from filmmaker Pearl Gluck. As a teenager, Gluck rebelled against her Orthodox upraising by moving to Manhattan to experience life on the secular side. When Gluck's father expresses a desire for his daughter to marry and return to Brooklyn, Gluck attempts to reach a compromise with her father by traveling to Hungary and retrieving a turn-of-the-century couch from her family's past that is said to have been slept upon by a series of esteemed rabbis. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

Cast

Pearl Gluck

Credit

Andras Suranyi - Associate Producer, Sarah Goodman - Associate Producer, Isaac Stein - Associate Producer, Pearl Gluck - Director, Zelda Greenstein - Editor, Frank London - Composer (Music Score), William Tyler Smith - Cinematographer, Pearl Gluck - Producer, Susan Korda - Screenwriter, Pearl Gluck - Screenwriter, Miklos Buk - Second Assistant Camera, Jeannie Allen - Assistant Editor, Adrienne Haspel - Assistant Editor

Similar Movies

Trembling Before G-d; My Architect: A Son's Journey; Los Rubios

n.

1. A long backless sofa, especially one set with pillows against a wall.
2. (also dī-văn')
   1. A counting room, tribunal, or public audience room in Muslim countries.
   2. The seat used by an administrator when holding audience.
   3. A government bureau or council chamber.
3. (also dī-văn') A coffeehouse or smoking room.
4. (also dī-văn') A book of poems, especially one written in Arabic or Persian by a single author.

[French, from Turkish, from Persian dīvān, place of assembly, roster, probably from Old Iranian *dipivahanam, document house : Old Persian dipī-, writing, document (from Akkadian ṭuppu, tablet, letter , from Sumerian dub) + Old Persian vahanam, house.]

from Turkish
This word originated in Turkey

Have a seat and make yourself comfortable. This explanation may take a while.

If the seat is a divan, you should be comfortable indeed. In fact, you might fall asleep, which would be easy enough to do on a divan; it's a name we use for a couch, usually without back or arms but furnished with pillows so that it can double as a bed. But a divan is no ordinary piece of furniture. It has connotations of romance, literature, and luxury, thanks to its Turkish and Persian heritage.

Divan can be traced back several thousand years to the Old Iranian language, where it probably began as a long word meaning "document house," a place to store written records. The Persians used a shorter version of the word to mean both a bundle of written material and a place where written documents were used, so it could mean a collection of poetry, a courtroom, or the activity that takes place in such a room. Speakers of Turkish got divan from the Persians and gave it the shape it now has in English. As early as 1586 a book in English describes a Turkish "council called divan."

But the Turks, and English travelers to Turkey, also used divan as the name of a cushioned bench, originally in a council room. A travel book published in 1702 explains: "Their greatest Magnificence consists in their Divans or Sofas." And a 1703 account of a journey to Jerusalem explains that divans "are a sort of low stages ... elevated about sixteen or eighteen inches or more above the floor, whereon the Turks eat, sleep, smoke, receive visits, say their prayers, etc."

That is the divan with which the English language has been furnished ever since. It has always been more than a mere couch, as William Makepeace Thackeray in the nineteenth century implied in a poem about his attic hideaway: "No better divan need the Sultan require / Than the creaking old sofa that basks by the fire." The welcoming divan is both subject and title of a recent song by Smudge (Tom Morgan) performed by Evan Dando of The Lemonheads with the refrain, "You can crash out on my divan."

The Internet is stuffed with virtual divans couched in poetic language. Consider Saundra Mitchell's Web page poem "Crimson Divan," which ends with

Or you can "Take a break from the fast-spinning light-flashing tyre-screaming chaos of the superhighway, and put your feet up with Divan, Australia's first national online poetry journal."

Divan is not the only Turkish delight in English. We have dozens of other delicious and exotic words imported from that language and culture, including coffee (1598), sherbet (1603), and yogurt (1625), tulip (1578) and turban (1588, related words), dervish (1585), kiosk (1625), and possibly even yarmulke (1903). Turkish is one of the world's major languages, spoken by about sixty-three million people in Turkey and another ten million or so in other countries. It belongs to the Altaic language family.

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This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Dansk (Danish)
n. - divan, lovgivende forsamling, tobaksbutik, rygeværelse i cigarbutik

Nederlands (Dutch)
divan, rookkamer, bundel gedichten van islamitisch dichter, oosterse rechtbank, Ottomaanse raadszaal

Français (French)
n. - divan

Deutsch (German)
n. - Diwan, Couch

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ανάκλιντρο, ντιβάνι

Italiano (Italian)
divano

Português (Portuguese)
n. - divã (m)

Русский (Russian)
тахта, софа

Español (Spanish)
n. - diván, otomana

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - divan

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
长沙发椅, 沙发床, 会议厅, 枢密院, 咖啡馆

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 長沙發椅, 沙發床, 會議廳, 樞密院, 咖啡館

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 긴 의자, 흡연실, 회의실

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 長いす

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) أريكه من غير ظهر أو أيدي, الديوان, غرفه للتدخين‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮ספה, דרגש, אולם המועצה, מועצת המדינה‬

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