Page 144 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema
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INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 125
Figure 15 Jewish Luck: ‘semi-documentary in its representation of a dilapidated …Berdichev,
the Ukraine’s archetypal Jewish town’, with Mikhoels pointing and Moishe Goldblatt behind.
tickets and, significantly, two-thirds of the audience required Russian-language
6
synopses. This appeal to non-Jews is reminiscent of the slumming parties that
visited Harlem during the Jazz Age: like the Cotton Club, the GOSET seemed the
cultural expression of an exotic race. Before the Revolution, as the academic B.
Gorev observed in a 1922 essay,
authentic Jewish life remained a book behind seven seals for the Russian
intelligentsia, which had neither its Livingstones capable and desirous of
penetrating this domestic Africa, nor even its Captain Golovnins, who by
accident might have dwelt for a substantial time in this alien world. 7
Understandably, the reaction to the GOSET within the Jewish community was
mixed and not only because of the theatre’s hard-line anti-clericalism. The Yiddish-
speaking audience had barely entered the secular realm of art and was scarcely
prepared to see its naturalistic precepts inverted. Moreover, Granovsky and his
