Page 151 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

132 A FACE TO THE SHTETL: SOVIET YIDDISH CINEMA, 1924—36

Figure 16 Through Tears [1928], Gricher-Cherikover’s second Sholom Aleichem
adaptation, showed the shtetl as a ‘backwater where…young people attempt. . foredoomed
get-rich-quick schemes’.

As a child of the shtetl bound for the Lower East Side, Motl embodies the
transitional generation of East European Jews. It is scarcely coincidental that he is
introduced as his father, the cantor, lies dying. But if Motl is the most resilient of
Sholom Aleichem characters, ‘The Enchanted Tailor’ is an absurdist nightmare of
non-adaptation. The tailor Shimen-Elye buys a she-goat which mysteriously
changes sex every time its new owner stops for a drink at the inn between the
shtetl Kozodoyevka, where he purchased the creature, and the shtetl Zlodyevke,
where he lives. That the story, one of the author’s darkest, has strong intimations
of the collapse of the religious world-view doubtless recommended it to the film-
makers, who raise the level of class consciousness by having the ‘pauper’ Shimen-
Elye persecuted by the bourgeois adherents of a rabbinical court.
Shot, like Jewish Luck, with near-documentary verisimilitude and demonstrating
an even more pronounced graphic flare, Through Tears is less concerned with