Page 145 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

126 A FACE TO THE SHTETL: SOVIET YIDDISH CINEMA, 1924—36
troupe were clearly turning the idiom of the shtetl against the shtetl. Still, as the
Soviet Union’s premier Yiddish theatre, the Moscow GOSET exerted considerable
influence on Jewish culture. Each summer the company toured the Yiddish
heartland of Belorussia and the Ukraine, and it was in that ‘domestic Africa’ that
Granovsky set his first film.
Shot mainly in exterior, Jewish Luck is almost semi-documentary in its
representation of a dilapidated shtot–evidently a tumble-down section of Berdichev,
the Ukraine’s archetypal Jewish town. Natan Altman’s naturalistic production
design is virtually ethnographic in its concern for detail; although Jewish Luck is
pointedly a critique of life before the Revolution, much of it is underscored by a
preservationist spirit. Unsentimental but affectionate, the film tempers the savage
parody of Granovsky’s stage work. Despite Mikhoels’s delicately exaggerated
performance as the feckless Menakhem Mendl, Jewish Luck eschews the
grotesque make-up, gymnastic cavorting and percussive tempo that had been the
GOSET’s hallmark. Yakov Protazanov’s Aelita, which was partly designed by
GOSET associate Isaak Rabinovich, had already brought such theatrical avant-
gardism to the Soviet film. Granovsky’s strategy was precisely the opposite.
More than any subsequent Soviet film, Jewish Luck celebrates the heritage of the
shtetl. If religious ritual is conspicuously absent, the lengthy open-air wedding that
ends the movie is a veritable précis of traditional elements, including a chanting
badkhn (wedding jester), a band of itinerant klezmerim (musicians) and a variety of
Hasidic dances. The Jewish folk are rich in culture, poor in opportunity. As an
impoverished dreamer, the archetypal luftmensh drifting from one failed scheme to
the next, Menakhem Mendl was a useful emblem for the Jewish plight under the
tsars. In Jewish Luck, this hapless optimist is shown as an instrument of the
bourgeoisie and a victim of the ancien regime. The scenario–credited to
Granovsky’s assistant director Grigori Gricher-Cherikover, Boris Leonidov (a
specialist in action dramas) and the pre-Revolutionary Odessa director I. Teneremo
–passes over Menakhem Mendl’s misadventures as a speculator to focus on his
difficulty in eking out a living of any kind.
Jewish Luck opens amidst the chaos of its hero’s large and underfed family.
Together with his young and equally marginal friend Zalman (Moishe Goldblatt,
who later directed Moscow’s Gypsy Theatre), Menakhem Mendl leaves Berdichev
for Odessa where he hopes to sell corsets. After the comic failure of even this
modest enterprise, he stumbles upon a book which contains a list of prospective
brides and decides to become a matchmaker: ‘Shadkhn–that’s a real profession!’
In the film’s climax, this new career goes spectacularly awry when the would-be
‘king of the shadkhonim’ inadvertently arranges a match between two girls.
Although his blunder ultimately brings together the film’s two young lovers,
Menakhem Mendl is betrayed by his employer and left to wander off alone.
Bucolic in spite of itself, Jewish Luck has marked affinities with the American
comedies which successfully infiltrated the Soviet market during the mid-1920s.
The diminutive Mikhoels gives Menakhem Mendl a Chaplinesque aura of shabby
gentility and scurrilous pathos. Obsequious yet irrepressible, he cuts an endearing