Page 154 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 135
the Bund was suppressed altogether after the Revolution. In 1921, its left wing
joined the Communist Party, contributing substantially to the leadership of the
Yevsektsiya.
There is no mention of the Bund in His Excellency. The film, which was co-
written by Roshal’s sister, Sofiya Roshal, and his wife Vera Stroyeva, shifts
Lekert’s act forward several years to the period of the 1905 Revolution and sets it
in an unspecified city. The protagonist, who here successfully kills the governor, is
identified only as ‘the Jewish fighter’. Openly anti-clerical, the film implicates a
Jewish religious leader in the reactionary status quo. Indeed, to make this
completely obvious, Leonidov plays a dual role–governor and rabbi. His
Excellency is further schematised as a generational melodrama: ‘suffocating’ under
her father’s rule, the rabbi’s adopted daughter (Tamara Adelheim, the ingénue in
Jewish Luck) joins a clandestine band of youthful socialists.
Thus, in finally putting forth a Jewish revolutionary hero, the film carefully
stresses the solidarity between Jewish and Russian political prisoners, while
making a programmatic comparison between honest Jewish workers and
cowardly Jewish reactionaries. The latter are stigmatised with a number of politically
incorrect, if contradictory, traits: they are not only bourgeois but seemingly
Germanised, they meet beneath a portrait of Theodor Herzl and yet are beholden
to a traditional-orthodox rabbi. Here, too, the battle lines are clearly drawn. Not
only does the rabbi curse his child for her involvement with a ‘goy’, he
excommunicates her Jewish comrades.
Almost in spite of itself, His Excellency explicates a Russian Jewish dilemma,
existing under the Soviets no less than the tsar. The bourgeois Jews are terrified
that they will be blamed for the disturbance created by their proletarian co-
religionists–‘We’re not revolutionaries, we’re Zionists,’ one protests in vain-and
they send a delegation to the governor to plead for protection from the anticipated
pogrom. As feared, these law-abiding Jewish leaders are held accountable and
ordered to punish revolutionaries themselves or else face the consequences. ‘The
law of Israel will be used to crush them,’ the rabbi promises, more like Fefer than
either he or that communist true believer might ever imagine. (If His Excellency
attempted to recuperate a Jewish hero for Bolshevism, however, it apparently
succeeded. The year after its release, Fefer’s ally Aron Kushnirov wrote a verse
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play on Lekert which premièred in Minsk at the Belorussian GOSET. )
The exigencies of the new climate may also be seen in VUFKU’s last three
Yiddish films. Although more pathetic and less militant than His Excellency, Vilner’s
Eyes That Saw [Glaza, kotorye videli, 1928], released in the USA as A Simple
Tailor, similarly emphasises class struggle on the Jewish street. While the idealistic
tailor Motl enlists in the tsar’s army, his sister is compelled to wed the odious son
of the factory owner Shklyansky. The rich Jews live in luxury; when the army
orders all Jews to evacuate the town on trumped-up charges of spying for the
Austrians, the capitalist and his property are afforded military protection.
Meanwhile, in a paroxysm of victimisation, Motl is killed at the front at precisely
the same moment that his wife and child are massacred in a pogrom.