JANUARY 14 • 2021 | 35

FILMS

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J

ews may have been
common fixtures of
the Golden Age of
Hollywood, with studio heads
like Louis B. Mayer and Irving
Thalberg calling the shots. But
it’s rare they got to make films
about what it actually meant to
be Jewish.
Meanwhile, during the same
time frame, Yiddish theater was
a strong and lively tradition. But
there was a brief moment when
these interests could overlap.
Arthouse film distributor
Kino Lorber’s new Blu-Ray col-
lection, The Jewish Soul: Ten
Classics of Yiddish Cinema,
gives a snapshot of a narrow
window of history from the
1930s to 1950, when Yiddish
films could actually get made —
not that it was easy. Many of the
around 100 Yiddish-language
films produced during that peri-
od, largely out of New York and
Eastern Europe, are now lost.
And the Yiddish film move-
ment largely died along with the
widespread assault on Jewry that
marked this dark time period in
history.

Though decentralized across
both geography and time, there’s
much that binds the range of
works contained here.
The headliner of The Jewish
Soul is, no doubt, The Dybbuk,
Michal Waszynski’s mournful,
expressionistic 1937 film, in
which a folkloric, vengeful spirit
wreaks havoc on the life of the
woman its forebear had planned
to marry. In most horror mov-
ies, the fears are faced by a lone
protagonist; by contrast, the
horrors in The Dybbuk are felt
by an entire community already
riven by historical tragedy and
facing new divides with chang-
ing times. Family problems
are also shtetl problems, and
matters of the spirit are broadly
understood.
With performances sliding
as called for between the eerie
and the lifelike, surreal touch-
es in lighting and design, and
an attentive eye for what feels
to this viewer like an accurate
showcase of its community’s life,
Waszynski’s film is a slow burn
that’s worth the wait, one of few
from the period that managed
to appeal internationally to
non-Jewish audiences.
Aleksander Ford’s qua-
si-documentary Children Must
Laugh (released in 1936) takes
us from a Jewish ghetto outside
Warsaw to a nearby coed san-
itorium filled with consump-
tive schoolkids — though you
wouldn’t know their condition
by looking. The film finds them

staging plays, getting into scuf-
fles, beekeeping and learning
to farm. They sing as merrily
as they do constantly (“
All
the fish there sing” is just one
lyric), eagerly eyeing a future
many of them will never see.
Accompanying notes tell us
that the Nazis sent many of the
children featured in the film to
Treblinka. Some who survived
would participate in the Warsaw
uprisings.

MUSICAL FOCUS
Throughout the 10 films in the
boxed set, there continues to
be a musical emphasis, often in
the face of turmoil. This has the
effect of deeply linking these
movies to traditions of Yiddish
theater.
This is especially true in Max
Nosseck’s Overture to Glory
(1940), which follows a cantor
lured from his local synagogue
to the Warsaw opera, outraging
his father-in-law and many
local peers in spite of his wife’s
unflagging support. The ten-
sions in the film, between rural
and urban, and between tradi-

tional ways and new temptations
that might create distance from
loved ones and familiar life, have
thematic resonance across all of
these Yiddish works.
Fiddler on the Roof fans
will find much of interest in
1939’s Tevya, director Maurice
Schwartz’s early effort to adapt
the Sholem Aleichem collection
that serves as shared source
material. Schwartz, a big fixture
of Yiddish theater, also stars as

the milkman, playing the iconic
role with considerable gravity.
As in Fiddler, the film tracks
changing ways in a small Jewish
community and the crossing
of cultural boundaries once
thought forbidden.
In place of Fiddler’s bouncy,
scat-like tunes is a considered
and steadily maintained air of
some solemnity, wry wit leaven-
ing its inquiries into religious,
traditional and communal
life in ways that sometimes
recall Bergman. (Also of note:
Schwartz changes the ending,
envisioning a different path for
daughter Chava.)

Exploring Yiddish
Film History

A new boxed set unearths 10 classics
from a forgotten era of fi
lmmaking.

GEORGE ELKIND
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

“THESE FILMS SHOWCASE
A BROADER RANGE OF WORKS
MADE BY AND ABOUT THE

AMERICAN JEWISH DIASPORA.”

— GEORGE ELKIND

KINO LORBER

KINO LORBER

The

Dybbuk

Children

Must Laugh