“A Real Pain” is Jesse Eisenberg’s love letter to Poland, the country his family left under duress.

In Jesse Eisenberg’s new film, a pair of Jewish-American cousins ​​on a heritage tour of Poland sneak back onto a train they already had tickets for after getting off at the wrong station.

“It’s the principle of the thing,” says Benji, played by Kieran Culkin. “We shouldn’t pay for tickets in Poland. This is our country.”

“No, it’s not,” says Eisenberg’s David. “That it was our country. They kicked us out because they thought we were cheap.”

It’s an exchange that encapsulates the mix of pathos, humor and quick banter that Eisenberg brings to “A Real Pain,” which he wrote and directed alongside the stars.

Eisenberg, 41, loosely based the script and characters on a composite of real people and experiences, including a 2008 visit with his now-wife to what was once his aunt’s home in Poland until 1939 — on back when the Eisenberg family was still “Ajzenberg”. .”

“I was at this house, I was standing in front of it, and I was expecting to feel something specific and revelatory, and nothing came,” Eisenberg said in a Zoom interview. “That feeling of emptiness stayed with me for a long time. I was trying to diagnose the emptiness and asking myself: Is it because I’m an insensitive person? Or because it’s really impossible to connect to the past in an easy way, in an external way?”

All these years later, “A Real Pain,” in theaters Friday, seeks to ask those questions, Eisenberg says: “How do we reconnect with the past? And how do our modern struggles relate to the struggles of our families?”

Eisenberg, best known for his cerebral, often neurotic turns on “The Social Network,” the FX limited series “Fleishman is in Trouble” and a string of Woody Allen films, has returned to the Holocaust as a subject in a number of projects. In 2013 wrote and starred in “The Revisionist, an off-Broadway play about a Polish survivor of the Holocaust..” In 2020, he participated in a staged reading at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York of “The Investigation,” Peter Weiss’ documentary play about the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of 1963-1965. In the same year, he played Marcel Marceau in “Resistance”, about the role of the famous mime in the French resistance.

As in “Treasure,” a film released this year starring Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry as a father and daughter who travel to Auschwitz, “A Real Pain” is about the characters’ evolving relationship and the legacy of the Holocaust on American Jews. now two generations removed from the genocide.

In Benji and David Kaplan, viewers are introduced to two very different expressions of trauma: Benji feels everything and has no filter and the ability to get people to open up, while David is overly cautious, analytical, and medicated for the disorder obsessive-compulsive.

They set out for Poland while reeling from the death of their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, joining a tour group of much older adults. The group is led by fact-obsessed guide James (Will Sharpe) and includes Marcia (Jennifer Grey), whose marriage has recently collapsed, as well as a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan).

Egyiawan’s character is based on a real person, Praise Buterawho converted to Judaism because, Eisenberg said, “the only people he felt connected to were older Jews who could relate to the experience.” Eisenberg and Butera have stayed in touch since meeting at a wedding years ago, and Eisenberg said he always thought Butera’s story made him an interesting model for a trip participant.

“As I was writing, of course, it occurred to me that it also does that, which is to allow the audience to expand their perspective,” said Eisenberg, of Indiana, wearing the same red Indiana University baseball cap that he he wears his character throughout the entire shoot. film. (Eisenberg dropped out of Hebrew school in his hometown of New York, but recently started attending a synagogue in Bloomington, Indiana, where he lives with his family.)

He added, “It allows me to bring other stories of trauma in a way that’s not kind of academic, but actually in the physical presence of this man who is a survivor.”

As the film’s characters come to terms with their personal and collective trauma, the differences between the main characters come into sharp relief. Benji navigates the fragile terrain while David grapples with guilt for always feeling his own problems were legitimate.

On a walk with the group, the cousins ​​briefly imagine what their lives would be like if the Holocaust had not happened. They would probably be religious Jews, Benji thinks, and would have beards and not touch women, according to traditional interpretations of Jewish law. Conclusion: He would probably still live in Poland.

This is a scenario with some appeal to Eisenberg, who developed such an affection for the country while filming there that he decided to seek citizenship, an option often available to descendants of Polish Holocaust survivors. He will become a citizen this month and will officially mark the occasion at the Polish embassy in Washington, DC, which will also screen the film.

“I consider myself a New Yorker through and through, because I go to Broadway shows and I was born here, but the reality of my ancestry is that I’ve been Polish for a lot longer,” Eisenberg said. “There is something so sad about the way things can end so suddenly and be forgotten so suddenly, because remembering was so painful, because of the war and because so many people were killed . And the way I think about it is that I’m trying to reconnect.”

Filming in Poland, Eisenberg said, allowed him to experience the generosity of the people living there who worked to tell his family’s story and preserve the memory of the Holocaust, challenging his expectations of contemporary Polish cultural attitudes toward the Holocaust.

In 2018, the Polish government, led by the far-right nationalist party, passed a the law criminalizing speech blaming Poland for Nazi crimespart of a broad effort to claim pride in Polish history. (The party was ousted from power last year.) The law has had a chilling effect on some administrators of Holocaust history, limiting a public assessment of the extent to which Poles collaborated with the Nazis.

The suppression of “unpatriotic” accounts of Polish history also provoked a change at the Polin Museum, Poland’s national Jewish museumwhere “A Real Pain” had its international premiere in May. A museum leader was fired when he tried to organize an exhibit about a wave of anti-Semitic persecution in 1968. When the museum recently marked its first decade, Eisenberg spoke virtually at the gala.

Eisenberg said the political tensions surrounding Holocaust memory did not affect him as he filmed on location, including inside the Majdanek concentration camp, which remains remarkably preserved.

“I’m aware of that in an intellectual way, but my experience there was just the opposite,” he said. “I was working with a crew of 150 people who were all eager and eager to try and make my personal family story come to life.”

In obtaining permission to film at Majdanek, Eisenberg said he benefited from telling a story firmly rooted in the present, even though the camp lends itself uniquely to making films set in the past because it remains roughly the same in who was then the Nazis operated on him.

“A couple of things went in our favor: most of the movies want to shoot in Majdanek and they want to turn it into 1942 Auschwitz and they want to have 100 extras in Nazi uniforms running around with guns. We tried to do the opposite,” Eisenberg said. “What we tried to do was to portray Majdanek as it is now as a tourist site, in an attempt to do exactly what Majdanek is trying to do himself, which is to try to bring awareness to this, to the horrors that took place on these grounds.”

He said he grew close to a number of the young scholars on staff at the camp memorial. “Our relationship began with suspicion,” Eisenberg recalled, “and ended as a beautiful meeting of the minds.”

Eisenberg said he believes that collaborating with others around his age — generations removed from a direct connection to the Holocaust — allowed “A Real Grief” to channel a new approach to dealing with the past.

“I’m in a younger generation,” he said. “I have enough distance to go to Poland… and not feel those visceral memories of pain, but to go there with an open heart and mind and meet people that I love and who are contemporaries and friends and who are working to make the world. a better place.”