Page 160 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 141
during the first years after October. Houses that look like dovecots, brick
buildings that look worn out by age. The brick does not at all resemble brick,
it looks so rotten and chipped. And the people still breathe the pre-October
air.

Years go by. Into the life of the townlet there breaks in the fresh wind from
far-away Magnitogorsk, where grand industrial construction is in progress.
Old Becker and his son Nathan, just returned from America, go out to work
there…. Magnitogorsk opens up a new world to both the father and the son,
but they conceive it differently. The regenerated townlet after the Revolution
has re-educated the old man Becker.

(Re-educated in some respects, that is: as Jay Leyda notes in Kino, Mikhoels
speaks a markedly purer Yiddish than Gutman, whose command of the
mameloshn has been corrupted by America.) ‘There are beautiful and fascinating
passages in this picture,’ Dinamov concludes. ‘The language is succulent, the
words sinewy and precise. The author of the scenario, the well-known Yiddish
writer Peretz Markish, has splendidly coped with his task.’ 33
Markish, the only Soviet Yiddish writer to receive the Lenin Prize (awarded to
him in 1939, the year Dinamov was arrested and executed), was born in 1895 in a
Volhynian shtetl, received a traditional kheyder education, rebelled at an early age,
and ran away from home to become an itinerant child cantor. A flamboyant,
Byronic personality, he started writing poetry at 15 and established a precocious
reputation as one of the ‘Kiev group’ of Yiddish modernists. In 1921, he left the
Soviet Union for Warsaw where he remained long enough to collaborate with
I.J.Singer on an avant-garde anthology, before departing on a whirlwind
international tour. The poet had not, however, lost his faith in the Revolution and,
after five years abroad, he returned to the Soviet Union.
With no political irregularities in his past for which to atone, the charismatic
Markish became a literary hero for radical Jewish youth. His two-volume novel A
Generation Goes, A Generation Arrives, published in 1929, is proudly anti-
traditional. (A wooden synagogue in a Ukrainian shtetl is described as looking ‘as if
it were wearing shingle rags and sinking into the earth…its crooked back carrying
the women’s section with the tiny windows the way you carry a paralytic.’ 34
Despite his anti-clerical attitudes, Markish was targeted for criticism. After his novel
was published, he was publicly rebuked by Der emes’s editor Moyshe Litvakov
(himself trying to establish his credentials with the ‘proletarian’ militants) for
exhibiting a ‘national apologetic point of view’ in making his revolutionary
protagonists all Jews and ignoring class divisions in the shtetl.
As though consigning the misery of the Diaspora to the dustbin of history,
Nathan Becker gives less authority to tradition–even as an adversary–than any
previous Soviet Yiddish film. The movie opens in a miserable tumble-down shtetl
populated mainly by old men, stray dogs and ragged urchins. Unlike the Ukrainian
settings of Jewish Luck or Through Tears, this dilapidated Belorussian village is