3 Movies | December 5, 8 p.m.
On the final night of Hanukkah, TCM debuts three classics of Yiddish cinema, which flourished in America and abroad from roughly 1911 to 1940.
The Polish-made The Dybbuk (1937) is centered on the Jewish myth of possession by a malicious spirit believed to be the soul of a dead person. Generally considered one of the best Yiddish films of all time, it is based on a 1914 play, a tale of ill-fated love, betrayal and untimely deaths. Daniel Bird in Sight and Sound magazine said the highlight of the film, directed by Michal Waszynski (born Mosze Waks), is the second-act musical number, “an expressionist tour de force which blends the darker moments of Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948) with Andrzej Wajda's phantasmagoric The Wedding (1973).” (Wajda mounted a stage production of the play in the late 1980s.) Several of the featured actors died not long after in the Holocaust.
Another landmark Yiddish film, Tevya (1939), is the first talkie version of Sholom Aleichem’s classic stories, which became the basis of the stage musical and 1971 big screen adaptation Fiddler on the Roof. Long thought to be a lost film, a print was discovered in 1978. It stars Ukraine-born actor-director Maurice Schwartz, who came to the U.S. as a boy and founded New York’s famed Yiddish Art Theatre in 1926. After Aleichem’s own theatrical version was turned down by Jacob Adler, one the greats of Yiddish theater, Schwartz bought the rights from the writer’s widow and staged it himself. Two decades later, Schwartz cast himself in the lead and recreated 19th century Ukraine on a potato farm on Long Island. The picture was added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 1991.
Mir kumen on (aka We Are on Our Way/Children Must Laugh, 1938) is one of the few surviving documentaries (albeit dramatically staged) of Jewish life in Poland before World War II. It was produced as a fundraiser for the Medem Sanatorium near Warsaw, described by the Israel Film Archive as “a clinic sponsored by the General Union of Jewish Workers that provided care and an escape from urban poverty for some 10,000 children between 1926 and 1939.” The film, restored in recent years, follows three children newly arrived from the city who overcome their initial fears and learn to participate wholeheartedly in the communal life of the institution.
