Page 163 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

144 A FACE TO THE SHTETL: SOVIET YIDDISH CINEMA, 1924—36
contest intently, as do the other bearded Jews. Inspecting the walls between rounds
offers another excuse for clowning. By the seventh hour, Nathan is exhausted: as
the unflustered Russian forges ahead, he vainly remembers the class in
mechanical movements. Humiliated by his defeat, Nathan decides to return to
America. His wife reminds him of the unemployed fighting for soup, but he is
determined to leave until Mikulich confronts him: ‘You’re not in America. We’re not
going to fire you. We’re going to learn from you. But you should learn from us too.’
The chief of operations praises Nathan’s work–he was working more efficiently
but tired sooner than his rival–and suggests combining the systems. The synthesis
of American and Soviet techniques will increase production.
This conclusion not only sent a fraternal message to American Jewish
communists and fellow-travellers, it also smacks of applied Eccentrism. In their
admiration for the dynamism and unpretentious populism of American mass
culture, FEKS theorists had issued the ultimatum: ‘Either Americanisation or the
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undertaker’. Proletarian poets like Alexei Gastev also imagined adding ‘the pulse
of America’ to ‘the hurricane of revolution’, and the notion acquired an official
pedigree when, in the late 1920s, Stalin spoke of fusing ‘American efficiency with
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Russian revolutionary scope’. Markish’s novelisation of the film, published in
1934, is somewhat sterner: Nathan gradually comes to understand that, despite
hardships and inefficiency, the new Soviet way of life is, on the whole, superior to
that of America.
Despite the absence of a harsh moral or strong positive hero, however, The
Return of Nathan Becker fulfils the Zhdanov capsule formula for Socialist Realism
(‘a combination of the most matter-of-fact, everyday reality with the most heroic
prospects’). True to its genre, the movie ends with a hymn to labour. ‘We must win.
We will win,’ the workers’ chorus sings. ‘Long live the day of victory!’ Meanwhile,
the camera peers up at happy Nathan perched on the scaffolding beside old
Becker and Jim. ‘Here the workers work not only with their hands but also with
their hearts,’ the American rhapsodises. (‘And also with their heads,’ his father adds.)
In a final gag that recalls the exercises of the Institute with its own blend of folk
Taylorism, old Becker instructs Jim in the fine points of his ubiquitous nign,
complete with appropriate hand gestures.
As the Stalinist cultural revolution gathered momentum, the anti-Soviet, petty-
bourgeois Jews found in the novels of the 1920s vanished. In Russian as well as
Yiddish literature, there remained only two types of Jewish characters: the
dispirited ‘little’ Jews of the shtetl and their children, the optimistic, ‘productivised’
zealots of the Komsomol or kolkhoz. 43
The lone cinematic example of the latter appears as the indomitable hero of
Soyuzkino’s The Rout [Razgrom, 1931] directed by N.Beresnev from Alexander
Fadeyev’s much-praised 1926 novel. Other Jewish film protagonists were an
ambiguous mixture of the little and the heroic. The same year as Nathan Becker,
Lev Kuleshov took a similar theme for his first talkie, Gorizont [1932], released in
the USA as Horizon, the Wandering Jew. Drafted into the tsar’s army when the
First World War breaks out and deserting soon after, Leo Gorizont (Nikolai