JANUARY 14 • 2021 | 35

FILMS

continued on page 36

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