Early Yiddish "Talkies"

Caplan, Marvin

BOOKS Eariy Yiddish "Talkies" Almonds and ffiaisins A History of the Yiddish Cinema Written and produced by Russ Karel and David Elsiem • I We F rK Ifetfii. *>™ji vicJkl IW9S DMntulM br...

...but there's scarcely one that wont evoke memories or stir curiosity about a time, early in ttus century, when a Rood of newcomers made New York the biggest Jewish city m the world...
...If those films seem excessively melodramatic and sentimental to us today, narrator Orson Welles and other commentators who appear remind us that the films portrayed both the work) their viewers knew and the world to which they aspired...
...The points Welles makes are embellished in the reminiscences of a group of notables of the Yiddish stage and screen the actors Hersche) Bernard...
...2037...
...ji vicJkl IW9S DMntulM br Cr*> kO Bo...
...The Jau Singer...
...Celia Adler in Where Is My Child?, Maurice Schwartz in Uncle Moses...
...Zvee Scooter, Seymour Rechtzeit Leo Fuchs and Mi ham Kressyn...
...But Welles assures us that to the original audiences this was 'not soap opera but the very stuff of upward mobility' What they saw on the screen, he says, was a realization of their own hopes of a better life for their children The dangers of assmnilation were vividly portrayed...
...And in another of Oyster's films, Overture (0 Glory, his little son's death and his own result from his abandonment of his family and his post as cantor in the shfeffshu/to pursue an operatic career in Warsaw...
...That movie inspired the making of Yiddish talkies—films aimed at a largely immigrant audience...
...The video is subtitled "A History of the Yiddish Cinema,' and while it is not a history in any coherent or chronological sense, it does offer a striking impressionistic study of themes and symbols in the approximately 300 Yiddish talkies* produced between 1927 and the outbreak of World War II...
...Jotson...
...Nnr Mrvn 07W6 Tddpih segment* hjve LrgWk subtitle* Reviewed by Marvin Capian For anyone interested in Jewish immigrant life in America, the liim 'Almonds and Raisins' offers all the pleasures of browsing through a family photo album Not every picture is a gem...
...In 1927, a movie produced by Jews, starring a Jew and telling a Jewish story changed the whole course of filmmaking: Al Jorson in the first 100 percent talkie...
...Joseph Green who made some of the Yiddish cinema's greatest classics...
...and the producer...
...Now and then a bit of English pops out of the Yiddish to tickle the ear, like 'can opener* in a list of kitchen needs...
...when he achieves success as a singer, marries his Irish girlfriend...
...The Cantors Son, Welles suggests, was an implied rebuke to Hollywood and The Jazz Singer...
...as the film Mb UK It would be wrong to suggest, however, that these are simply screen snapshots...
...A curious aspect of this film, so oriented to the New York immigrant experience, is that it was made originally for British television...
...And the title is a little puzzling...
...Moyshe Oysher, when he achieves comparable celebrity, renounces the glitter of Broadway and his American girlfriend and sails back to the shtetl to marry, presumably, the girl next door...
...And there are two hilarious sequences One is a Yiddish western, with a barroom brawl and an intrepid heroine who holds the mob at bay with a shotgun while the hero escapes The other is a light-hearted interlude in which a man and woman plan an illicit tryst as they are pushed along the boardwalk in a wicker roller chair, they are chagrined to discover that the black attendant speaks Yiddish too, and understood every word they said...
...Timck...
...But ail is not sadness on the Yiddish screen We are treated to excerpts of Molly Picon fiddling, ciowmng and singing across the Polish countryside in Yidl Mitn Fidl lYidl with His Fiddle...
...It is the reverse of 'Raisins and Almonds,' the famous Yiddish lullaby composed by the father of the Yiddish theater, Abraham Goktfaden...
...Moyshe Oysher in The Cantor's Son and an unnamed actor in The Ballad of Motl the Sewing Machine Operator evoke the bitter tot of the immigrants who came here expecting Gan Eden—a Garden of Paradise—and found instead the drudgery of the sweatshops and the squalor of the ghettos Wild coincidence is commonplace in these films—the doctor who saved Celia Adlert life is the son her poverty forced her to give up for adoption, and the lawyer who defends Motl against a murder charge is his long-lost son...
...yet there is no reference in the film to him or the song But if the title is meant to suggest traditional Jewish delicacies (the equivalent in a Yiddish movie house of popcorn, perhaps) then it lives up to all the implications It is a delicious repast of people and pictures that linger on in the memories of many Jews Marvin Capian s a Yiddish translator and a member or the Board of YnW.Ul at Greater Washington Mis vkMO review of The Golden Age of Second Avenue appeared m the Ncnwmber [968 issue of moment...

Vol. 14 • December 1989 • No. 7


 
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