Page 165 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

146 A FACE TO THE SHTETL: SOVIET YIDDISH CINEMA, 1924—36
The film ends with Zuskin humming that wordless yet affirmative ‘Jewish song’ he
learned at the kolkhoz. In the final moments, his Belorussian comrade (Nikolai
Cherkasov), previously described as one of ‘those strange strong people who drink
vodka and hate Jews’, joins fraternally in the revolutionary nign, drawing deeply on
his hearty baritone, jaunty cigarette, and proletarian smile.
Written and directed by 36-year-old Mikhail Dubson–who, as a diplomatic
attaché, had made his first movie seven years before in Berlin–The Border, which
is leavened with much incidental Yiddish, is at once comically anti-clerical and
subversively nostalgic. Both attitudes are immediately evident in the lengthy
opening scene, set in a wooden synagogue. The cantor chanting throughout,
Dubson cuts back and forth between gossiping (or wailing) women and mumbling
men. The synagogue, while satirised, exudes vitality even as the cantor’s prayer is
presented as a virtuoso performance. When the khazn glances out of the window
and catches a peasant woman’s eye, he flirtatiously redoubles his effort. Although
ostensibly meant to ridicule, the sequence is as powerfully imagined as a child’s
first memory.
Deliberately paced, shot mainly in close-up, and accompanied by Lev Pulver’s
spare, eloquent score (the source of many innovative sound bridges), The Border
achieves a kind of voluptuous stasis. The compositions are strong; the figures
skilfully modelled by light. The stark and misty Black Crown sequence, much of it
framed by the Mogen David in the cemetery gate, is a lyrical grotesque worthy of
Granovsky. GOSET-like as well is another synagogue scene in which the deaf
shoemaker and the rabbi converse in superbly laconic gestures, the latter praying
all the while. Variety’s Moscow correspondent found The Border reminiscent of
Humoresque but ‘more genuine and less sentimental’, predicting this
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‘unpretentious’ picture ‘should enjoy a world-wide Jewish nabe market’. (Indeed,
there does seem to be a line for the international audience. When one worker
wonders why a Jewish kolkhoz has been named for Lenin, another explains that
‘for a Jew, he’s a Jew. For a Russian, he’s Russian. For Americans…’)
Nevertheless, although listed in Amkino’s catalogue, the film seems never to have
enjoyed an American theatrical release.
At home, The Border was praised in Kino as ‘an event in our art’ and ‘a lesson
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in revolutionary vigilance’. Still, so far as Soviet film-makers were concerned, the
shtetl was obsolete, if not the issue of Jewish resettlement. In 1926, one year after
the first Jewish agricultural colonies were established in the southern Ukraine and
the Crimea, the undeveloped, sparsely populated region of Birobidzhan, bordering
China in the Soviet Far East, was offered as a national homeland. Despite
concerted recruitment, the remoteness of the region–not to mention its primitive
conditions–discouraged immigration. By 1933, a year when more settlers left than
arrived, there were only 8,000 Jews in the region; the original timetable called for
six times as many.
Jews formed less than 20 per cent of the total population when, in May 1934,
Birobidzhan was declared a Jewish autonomous oblast with Yiddish its official
language. That year, the distinguished Yiddish novelist David Bergelson published