Page 155 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

136 A FACE TO THE SHTETL: SOVIET YIDDISH CINEMA, 1924—36
Less apocalyptic but equally class-conscious, The Land is Calling [Zemlya
zovet, 1928], directed by Vladimir Ballyuzek (who, four years before, had made the
first Azerbaidzhani film) from a script by Moisei Zats and Boris Sharansky and co-
designed by Natan Altman, was a post-Revolutionary shtetl drama set in the
Crimea, in which a rabbi’s daughter spurns the son of a rich landowner for love of
the young blacksmith who has organised an agricultural co-operative to work the
kulak’s confiscated property.
Writing in Kino, M.Makotinsky considered The Land is Calling an elaboration
on Room’s Jews on the Land and a sequel to Through Tears. Praising its ‘bright
picture of determined work’, he called for a final section of the ‘trilogy’ which would
show the lives of those ‘sons and grandsons of Sholom Aleichem’ who work in the
ports and factories of ‘our socialist construction’. Gricher-Cherikover’s Suburban
Quarters [Kvartaly predmest’ya, 1930], from a script by Kino’s 25-year-old editor,
the Ukrainian Futurist Mykola Bazhan, loosely fits the description. A young Jewish
girl flouts her religious parents to marry a gentile Komsomol member, only to
encounter the anti-Semitism of his family. The film ends happily when a public
court criticises the husband’s behaviour, his wife defends him, and all recognise the
evil of petty-bourgeois religious prejudices.
In May 1928, the Ukrainian Communist Party held a special conference on anti-
Semitism. Among the resolutions was one that VUFKU would prepare an
‘appropriate moving picture’ to deal with the problem; Suburban Quarters may
well be that film. Around the same time, Sovkino and its successor Soyuzkino
produced three films critical of anti-Semitism: Pavel Petrov-Bytov’s Cain and
Artyom [Kain i Artem, 1929], from a story by Maxim Gorky, A.Galai’s Our Girls
[Nashi devushki, 1930], like Suburban Quarters an account of conflict arising from
a mixed Jewish-Russian marriage, and I.Mutanov’s Remember Their Faces
[Zapomnite ikh litsa, 1930]. All three emphasised the co-operation between
Russian and Jewish workers, the latter two consecrating it under Komsomol
auspices.
Roshal followed His Excellency with two films at VUFKU. The first, Two
Women [Dve zhenshchiny, 1929], attacked the now defunct NEP. The second, A
Man from the Shtetl [Chelovek iz mestechka, 1930], released in the USA, with
intertitles by the American proletarian writer Mike Gold, as A Jew at War, was
another evocation of Jewish revolutionary martyrdom. Venyamin Zuskin,
Mikhoels’s most celebrated colleague at the Moscow GOSET, played David
Gorelik, a poor Jewish youth drafted into the tsar’s army. The film offered a
uniquely Jewish perception of the First World War, the first conflict that ordinary
Jews had experienced both as combatants and antagonists: Gorelik struggles
against a German soldier on the battlefield, then realises his adversary is a Galician
whom he knew before the war.
Having thus met, the two friends desert their imperial masters and join the Red
Army. But friendship and ethnic solidarity go only so far. When the Galician, now a
commissar, is convicted of a capital crime, Gorelik is charged with carrying out the
sentence. As in His Excellency, albeit from a superficially different perspective,