Page 167 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

148 A FACE TO THE SHTETL: SOVIET YIDDISH CINEMA, 1924—36
relatives have already settled on the Royte Feld (Red Field) kolkhoz. (Birobidzhan
was officially opened to foreign settlers in 1936; by the end of the year, according to
the Vilner Tog, newcomers included Jews from Poland, Latvia and Lithuania, as well
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as America and even Palestine. )
Despite the Yiddish poster of heroic Jewish peasants that dominates the
Leningrad office where the Kopman family apply for their permits, Pinya imagines
Birobidzhan as one shtetl get-rich-quick scheme. After nearly dying in his obsessive
attempt to find gold, however, he comes to his senses and, encouraged by his
Party-identified brother-in-law, learns that ‘honest collective work’ is worth more
than money. Assimilation too is part of the programme. As part of the happy
ending, Rosa marries the young Russian hunter who has saved Pinya’s life and the
film ends with a lengthy wedding scene in which individuals representing a variety
of nationalities (including Mongolian, Korean, Siberian, Cossack) present the
couple with gifts and serenade them in Yiddish. 54
Seekers of Happiness received an extraordinary amount of publicity in the
English-language Moscow Daily News. Although Mikhoels–who, earlier that year
had sung a Yiddish lullaby in Grigori Alexandrov’s The Circus [Tsirk, 1936]–was
listed as ‘acting consultant’, Korsh-Sablin took credit for the film’s transformations:
‘I have straightened up the stooping Jews, shaved off the beards and cut their hair
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and have shown them as healthy, good-looking people, full of life and energy.’ On
that hygienic note, the shtetl Jew vanished utterly from the Soviet screen. 56
As befits a national cinema without a national republic, the dozen years of Soviet
Jewish movies were dominated by the search for a satisfactory homeland.
Compelled by poverty or the tsar to leave their backward shtetlekh, protagonists
set out upon the ‘crooked path of Jewish luck’ that led from booming Odessa to
decadent Europe and false America back to Magnitogorsk, the Lenin Kolkhoz and
beyond–past Siberia to the Chinese border. This was truly the end of the line. In
1937, within a year of the release of Seekers of Happiness, the People’s
Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) became responsible for transportation
of Jewish settlers to Birobidzhan, while the oblast’s entire leadership was purged in
the Great Terror.