It seems odd at first, that the story of an Eastern European Jewish family forced into diaspora, should be directed by Tomoko Fujiwara and DigiBeta-screened at Japan Society. But there are connections for The Sirota Family and the 20th Century/Shirota-ke no nijyu seiki. One branch gravitated through Harbin on to Japan and, thinking themselves integrated, remained for seventeen years. Introducing the ninety-three minutes and answering questions afterwards, spry octogenarian Beate Sirota (pronounced Shirota) Gordon discussed that family, particularly her father, and her own fifty-year secret of being the only woman on General Macarthur’s Assembly to draft the defeated enemy’s postwar constitution, her assignment being the revolutionary gender-equality clause and, in Article Nine, the once-bellicose nation’s commitment to world peace that concludes this documentary in, of all places, the Canary Islands.

Of a musical and music-impresarial background, they were forced from Kiev to Kamyanets-Podilsky, Ukraine; thence, fascism on the gallop, various members arrived in, often only to move through, Vienna, Warsaw, Paris, Drancy to Auschwitz-Birkenau, even to the in-exile Polish 10th Mounted Rifles in North Africa and at Normandy and, in her case, to Tokyo, California and New York.

That the film found financing, Beate -- “BG” -- revealed, was miraculous, from its director’s chance metro encounter with the trustee of half the estate of a student of Beate’s father Leo, himself the lynchpin around which all revolves and to whom in essence all is love-letter homage. “Except where otherwise indicated,” the score is restoration of Leo’s recordings from thirty hours’ reel-to-reels which the daughter had not even known she had, largely of his radio performances when in the ‘50s he taught at the St. Louis Institute of Music.

“A requiem to people who have been persecuted and died in war, the family tale reads like a miniature history of the 20th century.” In ways, it does indeed, although the assertion must be taken as symbolic, for the hundred years encompassed so much. Lenne Hardt’s narration is pious and, with a feeling of distance in overall point of view, contributes to a bloodlessness about these years and events, arguably too uncomfortable to confront in any other way.

It was actually outside the film itself, afterwards, that Beate acknowledged that Judaism was something so foreign, so unique in Tokyo of the ‘30s and ‘40s that they could neither practice nor be aware of it until, as the screen points out, Goebbels’ interest and influence isolated her at the German Lutheran School, from which she transferred to the American School. Nor does her mother figure much, a lonely woman after the intellectual headiness of Austria’s “most exciting city in the world.”

Multilingual speaking about “Papa,” Beate is not the sole interviewee, familial and otherwise. Siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles scattered in different directions, Leo and his brood took to Japan, where they imagined themselves accepted into that closed society and where he taught piano at the Imperial Music Academy, performed concerts “with tremendous individuality in playing,” and introduced modern composers, while Beate aspired to be a dancer. The distancing of emotion may come from a lack of archival moving images, substituted for by still sepias, school applications, and report cards from the Old Country. An under-recognized interpreter in the West but a successful beloved teacher in the East, he and his immediate family were bundled off to a foreign-internee cabin during the war, where the greatest privation was lack of fuel and Papa risked his musician’s hands gathering firewood.

Beate had already left for private Mills College, in Oakland. It would be four years before she could return “home” to her parents, at twenty-two the first foreign civilian female to arrive after V-J Day, and subsequently worked at Allied HQ and participated in drafting the Potsdam-mandated constitution (not recounted until nearly a half-century afterwards, in her The Only Woman in the Room). Embittered and offended, Leo Sirota declined a renewal at his former post and instead brought them all to Missouri. Not until 1963, two years before his death at seventy-nine, were former pupils able to talk him into returning to give a recital in Tokyo.

SF20C spreads itself thin in following sets of scattered relatives and venturing into a Polish Catholic cemetery in Normandy and a Hiroshima-Nagasaki Square in the Atlantic. Lecturing widely, Beate Sirota Gordon is herself a more eloquent spokesperson for tolerance. “From more or less when it started,” from 1954 until 1981, she worked partly at Japan Society and at Asia Society, because “if you understand a culture well, you could not go to war with it.”