HOLLYWOOD -- Capitalizing on the triumph of "Schindler's List" at last month's Academy Awards, the Family Channel will broadcast the award-winning miniseries "Holocaust" next week.
Originally aired by NBC in 1979, "Holocaust" stars James Woods, Meryl Streep, Blanche Baker, Joseph Bottoms, Tovah Feldshuh, Michael Moriarty and Sam Wanamaker.
A work of fiction by screenwriter Gerald Green and directed by Marvin Chomsky, the 10-hour production is set in the decade from 1935 to 1945 tracing the tragedy of a Jewish family during the Nazi reign of terror.
"Holocaust," one of TV's earliest lengthy miniseries, won 14 Emmy nominations and eight Emmys.
Now, 15 years later, "Holocaust" is certain to be compared, perhaps unfavorably, with Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List," which demonstrated more theatrical restraint.
In many quarters voices are heard: "Enough with the Holocaust already." "Why don't we put the Holocaust behind us?" "Why doesn't Hollywood quit beating a dead horse?"
Actress Feldshuh, an American of Austrian heritage who played a Czech freedom fighter in "Holocaust," has her own reply.
A New Yorker and a Jew, Feldshuh believes the Holocaust is an event historians will mark as the great catastrophe of the 20th century.
"Nothing like this genocide has happened before in history," Feldshuh said. "Only Stalin killing 8 million of his own people can compare with it.
"So, no, I don't think it should be forgotten. But the lessons of the Holocaust obviously have not been learned. Look what is happening in what was Czechoslovakia and in other parts of the world."
Feldshuh, now married to attorney Andrew Levy, has appeared in such movies as "The Idolmaker," "Daniel," "Brewster's Millions" and "A Day in October." She currently stars in her own one-woman show, "Tovah: Cross Ovah! -- From Broadway to Cabaret."
A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and a veteran of stage, film and TV, Feldshuh has often played Jewish roles. She won an Obie award for "Yentl," and starred in "Sarah and Abraham" and "Dreyfus in Rehearsal" on stage.
But it was "Holocaust" that brought her to international attention.
"The great advantage of being a Feldshuh is knowing I'm related to every other American by that name," she said the other day. "In German it means field boot. Tovah means good in Hebrew, so I guess that makes me a goody-two-shoes.
"It wasn't until after I did 'Holocaust' that I learned some of my relatives were lost in the death camps. My father was a GI and was assigned to General Eisenhower's intelligence staff.
"My father never mentioned what happened to my cousins in Austria. But we didn't have close ties there. My grandparents came to America in 1905 from Vienna.
"I had uncles and aunts who arrived in 1938, but I didn't know the significance of that. They had fled the Nazis.
"When I was in Israel in 1982, after I did the movie 'Daniel,' Andrew and I walked through Jerusalem to the Holocaust museum, which included a hall of records.NEWLN: $(TEXT OMITTED FROM SOURCE$)
