Singer’s Novel Becomes Mazursky’s Finest Hour : Movies: In ‘Enemies, A Love Story,’ the director finds a framework in a return to his roots.

The wall of Paul Mazursky’s Beverly Hills office is crowded with mementos from his 20-year career as a film director. Posters of “Blume in Love” and “Harry and Tonto.” Photos from “Next Stop, Greenwich Village,” “Moscow on the Hudson” and “Down and Out in Beverly Hills.”

But the picture that catches your eye is one of Mazursky, decked out in a baggy suit, loud tie and wide-brimmed fedora. It’s the 1949-era outfit he wears in his role as a nasty character from “Enemies, A Love Story,” his new tragicomedy about a quartet of Holocaust survivors intertwined by passion, compassion and despair.

To film “Enemies,” which stars Ron Silver, Anjelica Huston and Lena Olin, Mazursky returned to his childhood turf, re-creating the crowded neighborhoods of New York’s Lower East Side, the Bronx and Coney Island.

It was a tumultuous journey, stirring deep memories. “I was 19 in 1949 and I’d lived in Brownsville (an immigrant neighborhood in Brooklyn) all my life,” said Mazursky, eyeing his picture on the wall. “And you really lived in Brooklyn--you never ventured out.

“If you wanted to go to a ballgame, you went to Ebbets Field. If you wanted to go to the movies, you went to the Pitkin Theatre, which was a movie palace like we don’t have movie palaces anymore. The only time you went to Manhattan was to see Frank Sinatra at the Paramount Theatre.

“Brownsville was tough--we had gangsters and Murder Inc. But you didn’t see the kind of violence you see now. Only looking back do you realize what a great experience it was. We were innocent and naive. The war was over and we all had a lot of hope about getting jobs and having a good life.”

Mazursky’s grandparents ran a candy store. “It was the neighborhood social center,” he said. “Everyone would come in there to get an egg cream, pretzels or penny candy and see what was going on. We weren’t very religious, not my mother or father. My grandmother was the one who kept the Sabbath. She’d go to synagogue while my grandfather stayed home and read Turgenev and ate pickled herring.

“We had a rabbi on the block who’d chase us down the street when we’d break his window playing punch ball. I even remember kissing the rabbi’s daughter in a hallway one day and getting a shiver, because it was such forbidden territory.

“The whole neighborhood was very closely knit. So to go back there and make ‘Enemies’ was a real trip down memory lane. I tried to capture a lot of those experiences, to show what it was like when you’d come home and all the ladies on the street--the yentas--would tell me, ‘Your mother’s looking for you’ or ask where you’d been.”

Mazursky’s father had been a day laborer for the Works Progress Administration. His mother played piano and introduced him to opera, movies and plays.

“She was a frustrated, artistic woman who wanted me to get it all. I’d go with her to Wednesday night amateur hour at the Apollo, where I saw Ella Fitzgerald and Cab Calloway. And she’d take me down the back alley at the theater after a play and push me at Eddie Cantor or whoever was coming out and she’d say, ‘Here’s my boy. He wants to be an actor!’

“I remember meeting Walter Huston that way one night and he patted my head and said, ‘Acting is a wonderful profession, my boy. But always back it up with another profession.’ ”

Mazursky did land work as an actor (portrayed in “Next Stop, Greenwich Village”) but soon turned to comedy writing for TV and films, graduating to film directing with “Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice.”

In the early ‘70s, he discovered “Enemies” and tried to option it but couldn’t get the rights. Several years ago, when the rights finally became available, Mazursky grabbed them. He had just directed “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” a hit for Disney/Touchstone, and said the studio happily paid for the script.

“But Disney was very nervous about doing it--they were willing to put up some money, but not enough. I just don’t think it fit the kind of image they were trying to project in the early days of Touchstone. I guess all they saw was, ‘Oh my God, these are Holocaust victims.’ ”

Instead of taking it personally (Mazursky in fact is doing his next film at Disney), the director went looking for money elsewhere--and got turned down everywhere.

“I’m sure that the studio people wouldn’t jump up and down for joy even if Warren Beatty or Dustin Hoffman came in and said, ‘I want to make a movie about Jewish refugees.’

“But when Joe Roth and Jim Robinson at Morgan Creek finally saw it, they said, ‘We love it--we’ll give you the money.’ ”

Oddly enough, after all the years it took Mazursky to make “Enemies,” the film is now being released almost simultaneously with two other movies with Holocaust themes, “Music Box” and “Triumph of the Spirit.”

“I think it’s a wonderful coincidence,” he said. “It doesn’t get me nervous, because I’m not really competing with anybody. But there’s obviously a certain synchronicity to it. I suppose we’re forever fascinated by the Holocaust. Not to denigrate the killings in Cambodia or anywhere else, but it is the most vivid and horrifying experience of the 20th Century. It has a complexity that continues to puzzle and outrage us. There’s been ‘Shoah’ and ‘Hotel Terminus’ and now ‘Lodz Ghetto.’ It’s a story with a drama that doesn’t die.”