Yiddish was the primary language of the Jews living in the Pale of Settlement in the contested territory on the border between Poland and Russia before World War II. While Jews all over eastern Europe typically spoke the language of the "host" country in which they lived, Yiddish was the connecting current of Jewish secular life, the mamaloshen (mother tongue) of the people. But it was more than a language, it was a thriving culture that produced a body of literature—novels, short stories, poetry, plays—and a veritable way of being in the world—a world marked by anti-Semitism, poverty, and hardship. As Jews emigrated in unprecedented numbers from eastern Europe beginning in the 1880s—primarily to the United States, but also to Canada, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa—they naturally took with them this culture of Yiddishkeit.
Primarily, the silent Yiddish cinema was concerned with documenting Jewish life in the shtetlach (small Jewish towns), and it was largely the product of Soviet and Polish Jews rather than US producers. The screen-writer Henryk Bojm created such films as Tkies Kaf ( The Vow or The Handshake , 1924), Der Lamedvovnik ( One of the Thirty-Six Just Men , 1925), and In Poylishe Velder ( In Polish Woods , 1928) that were set almost wholly in the Jewish villages in the Pale of Settlement and dealt variously with aspects of anti-Semitism, Jewish mysticism, and fading tradition. In the new Soviet Union after the Russian Civil War, things seemed very promising for Jews, and in this atmosphere the works of the gentle ironist Sholem Aleichem proved particularly popular for Yiddishkeit cinema in films like Der Mabul ( The Deluge , 1925) and the masterpiece of Soviet Yiddish cinema, Yidishe Glikn ( Jewish Luck , 1925), which brought to life the author's beloved Everyman, Menachem Mendl. "Jewish Luck" is an ironic title, for everything this hapless but good-hearted man tries ends in failure. J. Hoberman compares the character, as embodied by star Solomon Mikhoels (c. 1890–1948), to Charlie Chaplin's lovable Tramp figure—an interesting comparison considering how often through the years Chaplin himself was claimed as Jewish. Many more films would be made in the Soviet Union throughout the silent era and into the sound era before the iron curtain of Stalinism fell on the region.
If Edgar G. Ulmer is today the best-known of the Yiddish filmmakers, he notoriously did not speak Yiddish and his approach to the Yiddish cinema, polished and insightful though it is, lacks the raw power that one sees in the true masterpieces of Yiddish cinema, including Maurice Schwartz's Tevye der Milkhiker ( Tevye the Milkman , 1939). One of many adaptations of Sholem Aleichem's beloved novel of the bedraggled dairyman and his attempts to marry off his numerous daughters, Schwartz's version is regarded by many as superior even to the blockbuster Broadway musical adaptation and subsequent film version, Fiddler on the Roof (1971).
Schwartz was a major star of the Yiddish theater long before the Yiddish sound film appeared. A founder of New York City's Yiddish Art Theatre in 1918, he always managed to combine commercial appeal with artistic pretensions. Schwartz brought major works of theatrical art to the Yiddish stage, from The Dybbuk to an adaptation of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya . While on tour in Austria, Schwartz appeared in the film Yisker ( Remembrance , 1925), which was a flop. Despite his inexperience as a film actor, he took to both starring in and directing Tsekbrokhene Hertser ( Broken Hearts , 1926). An adaptation of a play already over twenty years old, Broken Hearts attempted to be both melodrama and social criticism. Perhaps it was too old-fashioned, despite its melting-pot ideology. When it was re-released with a dubbed Yiddish soundtrack some years later, the ending was changed to reflect a more downbeat and old-fashioned value system.
With Uncle Moses (1932), a film version of a novel by Sholem Asch, Schwartz helped usher in the prestigious Yiddish talkie. Updated from Asch's immigrant tale to a contemporary Depression-era setting, the film found Schwartz concentrating solely on his acting, bringing to life an anti-hero who is redeemed by love. If not a triumph, the film accomplished what its directors (Sidney Goldin and Aubrey Scotto) and star had intended. With his directing and starring role in Tevye , Schwartz found his greatest triumph, one for the ages. With a liberal use of location shooting on Long Island and a minimalist miseen-scène for the interiors, Schwartz accomplished something akin to the finest films of Oscar Micheaux—a film style that pays little heed to Hollywood norms, instead creating an approach that serves the material well on its own terms. A more downbeat (and scaled-back) version than the better-known Fiddler on the Roof the film holds on to its Yiddish roots with a passion that seems to foretell the events of the Holocaust.
In only its third year of existence, the National Film Registry in 1991 inducted Schwartz's Tevye . It was one of the very few non-English language films to be recognized by this Library of Congress board, which was established to preserve films deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically important."
Tsekbrokhene Hertser ( Broken Hearts , 1926), Uncle Moses (1932), Tevye der Milkhiker ( Tevye the Milkman , 1939)
Sandrow, Nahma. Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater . New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
David Desser
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