Page 149 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

130 A FACE TO THE SHTETL: SOVIET YIDDISH CINEMA, 1924—36
ritual, Benya and his men commandeer a traditional funeral, sending the mourners
scrambling through the imposing monuments of Odessa’s Jewish cemetery.
In Eisenstein’s hands, Benya Krik might have presented (if not preserved) this
milieu with the sardonic brio of The Threepenny Opera. Even a less mediocre film
might have transcended its political deficiencies. As it was, Benya Krik presented
problems by portraying its flamboyant criminal subject as a victim of the Bolshevik
regime–as well as evoking the image of the Jew as criminal and profiteer. (In one
scene, the ‘king’ receives a bribe concealed in a torah scroll.) For all the official
campaigns against antiSemitism, Nepmen had, by the mid-1920s, become
synonymous with Jews in the popular imagination. Thus, if the film’s final
sequence offended Party ideologues, the picture of Odessa’s demi-monde proved
no less disturbing to image-conscious Jews. A letter to Der emes, the Yiddish-
language Party daily, written by S.Daytsherman in the name of the Sovetishe
Yidishe Gezelshaftlebkayt [Organisation of Soviet Jews], decries both the paucity
of appropriate Jewish nationality films and those few which are made, ‘especially
here in the Ukraine’, witness Benya Krik which suggests that ‘thieves, prostitutes
and speculators created the Revolution, fought for it, defended it and–took
advantage of it…. The poison and hatred such a film spreads is obvious to anyone
who sees it.’
While The Deluge and Wandering Stars ‘demonstrate that film companies act
like vandals with the work of Yiddish authors’, Daytsherman was more disturbed
by the presence of negative Jewish stereotypes in other VUFKU films, including
Gricher-Cherikover’s Sorochinski Fair [Sorochinskaya yar-marka, 1927]. Here,
orthodox-traditional Jews appeared in comic roles, as schemers or cowards. ‘This
may be a trifle,’ Daytsherman concludes, ‘but…it has a bad smell. Especially now,
during the struggle against anti-Semitism, one cannot remain indifferent. It is
absolutely necessary that the Yiddish press and Organisation of Soviet Jews use
their authority and speak out, so that VUFKU and the like are compelled to
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consider the Jewish masses.’
Released in January 1927, Benya Krik was banned almost immediately by the
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Ukrainian Office for Political Education. The movie was never shown in Moscow
–reputedly ‘so poor a fllm’ that Jay Leyda ‘never found anyone who could tell [him]
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about it’. Despite this fiasco, however, Vilner was subsequently entrusted with
bringing Fyodor Gladkov’s proto-socialist realist classic Cement to the screen
while, as recommended by Eisenstein, an English translation of Babel’s script was
published in London in 1935.
The sensitive nature of any Jewish material is reflected in Babel’s remarkably
apologetic introduction to Wandering Stars. ‘Sholom Aleichem’s novel was
absolutely alien to me, filled with bourgeois motifs and uncinematic elements’, the
author maintains, adding that it took him two months just to forget the book and
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begin work on the screenplay. The published scenario bears scant resemblance
to Sholom Aleichem’s good-naturedly barbed portrait of the itinerant Yiddish
theatre–Babel emphasises pre-Revolutionary Jewish persecution, in part by
transforming the novel’s heroine from an actress into an aspiring doctor and