Page 153 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

134 A FACE TO THE SHTETL: SOVIET YIDDISH CINEMA, 1924—36
While Ukrainian cinema may boast a number of worthy films on working-class
life and revolutionary struggle in the Ukraine, the national minority sector
cannot do the same.
And there happens to be much to say….
More than anyone else, we Yiddish writers are in a position to hear the
complaints of workers at literary evenings.
The workers ask, ‘Why do you only write about Jewish Luck? About
Benya Krik and Wandering Stars? Why don’t you write about us?’
They ask, ‘Is Benya Krik more interesting than we are?’
The working class wants to see itself, its struggle and its life in the new
art.
The working class is right. 26

But, even as Fefer advised VUFKU to ‘involve itself with the Jewish literary
community and, with its help, create the film for which the Jewish worker has
waited so long’, that community was itself divided. Prolit, the official organ of the
Yiddish members of the All-Ukrainian Association of Proletarian Writers, attacked
a number of prominent Yiddish authors for variously ‘cutting themselves off from
real life’, ‘moving towards individualism’, indulging in the ‘idealisation of gradually
disappearing classes’, exhibiting ‘lack of self-definition’, or demonstrating ‘a passive
27
attitude towards our reality ’. Indeed, during the summer of 1928, a similar attack
would be directed against the Soviet movie industry as a whole.
The first film to prefigure the new line, emphasising class struggle and
revolutionary heroism on the Jewish street, was Grigori Roshal’s His Excellency
[Ego prevoskhoditel’stvo, 1927], released in the United States as Seeds of
Freedom and known alternatively in the Soviet Union as The Jew [Evrei]. Roshal,
who studied with Meyerhold, began his career as a stage manager. In the early
1920s he was associated with Moscow’s Theatre of Youth (along with Ilya
Ehrenburg) and Habima; in 1926 he made his first film, The Skotinins [Gospoda
Skotininy], a caricature of the stupid and depraved gentry, loosely based on a
comedy by the eighteenth-century satirist Denis Fonvizin and edited by no less an
eminence than Anatoli Lunacharsky, the Soviet People’s Commissar for
Enlightenment.
His Excellency was shot the following year at the newly established
Belgoskino’s Leningrad studio. The cast was distinguished by the presence of
Leonid Leonidov, a star of the Moscow Art Theatre, and, in a small part, Nikolai
Cherkasov. According to Roshal, his subject-matter was so delicate that
28
Lunacharsky oversaw the production personally. One reason, doubtless, was
that His Excellency took as its protagonist the Jewish shoemaker Hirsh Lekert,
executed in 1902 for his attempted assassination of the Vilna governor-general,
Viktor von Wahl. While Lekert was an authentic proletarian hero, he was also the
most celebrated martyr of the Jewish Labour Bund, an organisation officially
identified with ‘petty-bourgeois nationalism’. Expelled from the Russian Social-
Democratic Labour Party in 1903 for its insistence on organisational autonomy,