Page 152 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 133
folklore than propaganda in depicting the teeming gregariousness and bitter
marginality of shtetl life. Hardly a place of nostalgia, the Jewish hamlet is a dusty,
ramshackle backwater where, no less than Menakhem Mendl, young people
attempt a series of foredoomed get-rich-quick schemes. The two movies have
virtually identical openings, plunging the viewer into domestic disorder and
impoverishment but, here, there are neither community rituals nor fanciful dreams
–the plight of the luftmensh has been globalised into a universal principle.
Scoring political points wherever possible, however, Gricher-Cherikover and his
co-scenarist I.Skvirsky augment the original stories with scenes emphasising
Jewish powerlessness in the face of tsarist oppression–choosing, for example, to
end the movie with the cruel and arbitrary expulsion of Shimen-Elye and his family
from their home. But, if the film-makers render Sholom Aleichem melodramatic
and exaggerate his anti-clericalism, they are, for the most part, faithful to his spirit.
Even a chaotic sequence set in a kheyder (a traditional Jewish primary school)
reflects the author’s satirical view: the kheyder was a target of the nineteenth-
century Jewish Enlightenment no less than the twentieth-century Communist
Party. Indeed, some characterisations are actually softened in the film, which was
criticised by at least one Yiddish critic as sentimental: ‘We find here none of the
lyrical irony which is the essence of all Sholom Aleichem’s writings…. The screen-
writers have consciously or unconsciously killed his humour.’ 24
In a pattern that would repeat itself elsewhere (and with other national
minorities), the harshest critics of the new Yiddish culture were Jewish
communists. More self-conscious and less secure than their Russian comrades,
these cultural apparatchiks did not hesitate to attack those artists who diverged
from the official norms of their Sovetish heymland. When VUFKU’s monthly film
journal Kino published several articles on Jewish cinema in March 1928, the
Ukrainian critic M.Makotinsky praised Wandering Stars and, particularly, Through
Tears (as well as Jewish Luck and The Deluge) for helping the ‘village masses’
25
understand ‘the roots of anti-Semitism’; the bluntest criticism was offered (in
Yiddish, without Ukrainian translation) by the poet and ideologue Itzik Fefer.
As Fefer surveyed ‘the realm of Jewish creativity’, one field struck him as
particularly underdeveloped. This was the motion picture. Fefer scorned the ‘pre-
Revolutionary way of life’ dramatised in the three VUFKU features, Wandering
Stars, Through Tears and Benya Krik (‘if we can even consider this a Jewish
film’). Meanwhile:

The life of the Jewish working man and working woman, their struggle
against the wealthy and ‘charitable’, against the Jewish bourgeoisie, and the
great role they played in all aspects of the Revolutionary movement before
and after October have yet to be shown on film.

Sterner than Daytsherman, Fefer formulated the problem in class (rather than
national) terms.