Page 143 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

124 A FACE TO THE SHTETL: SOVIET YIDDISH CINEMA, 1924—36
those state agencies serving the national minorities. The next few years saw the
creation of numerous such cultural and political institutions. In the Ukraine and
Belorussia, the two republics which encompassed the former Pale, Yiddish-
language schools, courts, and theatres were established–as well as a number of
Jewish municipal Soviets. In 1923, as well, in a conciliatory attempt to
‘productivise’ the tens of thousands of ‘declassed’ Jews and persuade surviving
petty-bourgeois elements to participate more fully in socialist construction, the
party’s Yevsektsiya (Jewish section) announced its own version of the New
Economic Policy (NEP)–a ‘face to the shtetl’.
Like the Yevsektsiya, the new Soviet Yiddish culture laboured under a double
burden. ‘That Yiddish literature has always been a literature of the poor, the
untutored, the lowly, inclines the Communists to be respectful to the earliest Jewish
authors,’ Avraham Yarmolinsky wrote in the late 1920s. ‘But although the past is
reverenced, there is a strong feeling that literature, together with the other arts,
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stands on the threshold of a new era.’ But where Soviet Russian literature might
simply direct Russian workers and peasants across the threshold of the new era, a
Soviet Yiddish literature or cinema would have first to transform the Jewish
masses into workers and peasants.
When, in 1924, Alexander Granovsky–founder and director of Moscow’s State
Yiddish Theatre (GOSET)–wrote to a New York-based colleague that he hoped to
make ‘a grandiose Jewish film’, he was hardly the only Soviet theatrical director
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who was drawn to the new medium. Les Kurbas, head of the Ukrainian ensemble
Berezil, had directed two films for VUFKU (the All-Ukrainian Photo-Cinema
Administration) during the summer of 1924, the youngsters of the Leningrad-based
Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS) were preparing their first short film, while
Eisenstein (who had already incorporated a brief movie in his Proletkult
production of Ostrovsky’s Enough Simplicity for Every Wise Man) was
completing The Strike [Stachka, 1924].
Nor was Granovsky’s the only Jewish theatre poised to enter the movies. In the
spring of 1925, when his Jewish Luck [Evreiskoe schast’e] finally went into
production, eighteen members of the Hebrew-language Habima theatre were set to
appear in an elaborate adaptation of Sholom Aleichem’s The Deluge. First
serialised in 1907, this was the Yiddish writer’s most overtly political work–the
story of three Jewish families, all with radical children, caught up in the tumultuous
events of 1905. Jewish Luck, Granovsky’s more modest production, was also
adapted from Sholom Aleichem, drawing on the same ‘Menakhem Mendl’ stories
that had inspired one of the skits in A Sholom Aleichem Evening, the 1921
production which, designed by Marc Chagall and starring Solomon Mikhoels, had
effectively launched his theatre in Moscow.
Hardly restricted to the Yiddish-speaking community, the GOSET’s popularity
had the aspects of a craze. After Granovsky’s 1924 production of Sholom
Aleichem’s 200,000, with a modernistic score by the former Bolshoi violinist Lev
Pulver, Mikhoels and his co-star Venyamin Zuskin were so famous that they
attracted crowds in the street. Muscovites vied with foreign dignitaries to book