Page 142 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

7

A face to the shtetl: Soviet Yiddish
cinema, 1924—36
J.Hoberman

A directive to a propagandist lay next to the notebooks of a Jewish
poet. The portraits of Lenin and Maimonides were neighbours–the
gnarled iron of Lenin’s skull and the dim silkiness of Maimonides’
picture. A lock of woman’s hair marked a page in a bound volume of
the Resolutions of the Sixth Party Congress, and crooked lines of
Hebrew verse were crowded into the margin of political pamphlets.
Isaak Babel, ‘The Rabbi’s Son’ 1

Given the conflict that characterised its transitory existence, it is scarcely surprising
that the Soviet Yiddish cinema has been largely forgotten, despite a number of
2
impressive achievements. This national cinema had no national base, it was
founded on dislocation and ambivalence. Like the rucksack of the rabbi’s son,
those films that remain bespeak an impossible synthesis. For some Russian Jews,
the Revolution meant the violent super-imposition of one religion over another. For
others, it represented the complete destruction of the past. For all, it precipitated a
crisis of national identity. The cinema which arose from this crisis was a battlefield
upon which a powerful desire for collective representation struggled with numerous
proscriptions against it.
The pre-Revolutionary economy had restricted Russian Jews to the Pale of
Settlement, forbidden them to own land, and compelled most to eke out a living as
small traders, artisans and middlemen, exchanging goods with the neighbouring
peasants in the Pale’s hundreds of shtetlekh (market towns). Even before the
Revolution, these activities were regarded by Jewish radicals as ‘unproductive’.
But, if the shtetl had been a subject of satire for pre-Revolutionary Yiddish writers,
for post-Revolutionary Jewish Bolsheviks it was, as Zvi Gitelman has observed,
something akin to ‘a leper colony’. It was in these backward hamlets, which had
been devastated by the First World War, the Civil War and the implementation of
War Communism, ‘that Jewish traditional life seemed to hang on most tenaciously
and where the least desirable social elements–traders, luftmenshn (literally ‘air
men’), clerics–seemed to dominate’. 3
In April 1923, the Twelfth Party Congress created a Council of National ities
and proposed legislation that would implement the use of indigenous languages by