Oy Vey, Not Another Yiddish Movie Quiz!

Answer: Clothing

The movie is based on Sholem Asch's novel of the same name which originally was published as a serial in the Yiddish paper "Forverts" and even though written in 1918, also reflected the problems faced by people during the Great Depression. In the USA, Moses (Maurice Schwartz), a former butcher, becomes the wealthy owner of a clothing factory - one of the notorious sweatshops of the period - who hires fellow Jewish immigrants as workers with the intention to also recreate the lost shtetl community with himself as patriarch. Like very often in Jewish films, one of the major themes in "Uncle Moses" is transition, the changes and natural development between two generations, and the incompatibility of two diametrical worlds. So the sometimes ruthless would-be patriarch Moses, who himself wallows in his wealth while his workers are underpaid and overworked, meets his nemesis in the labor organizer Charlie, who eventually succeeds in forming a union, leading Moses to abdicate as his world and understanding is replaced by a new philosophy.

Though "Uncle Moses", directed by Sidney Goldin and Aubrey Scotto, certainly displays some lighter moments, it mostly stays true to a melodramatic, maybe even cumbersome style, which can be considered a characteristic of a majority of the Yiddish cinema. Besides its more or less political content, the movie's significance also lies in the language used: What can be heard is not only the traditional Yiddish, but also a variation augmented with terms derived from the English language - spoken by many first generation immigrants - called "Yinglish".

Answer: Yidl mitn Fidl (Yiddle with his Fiddle)

Joseph Green, originally an actor connected to the Central European Art Theater movement, brought with this film a sense of lightheartedness and optimism to Yiddish cinema that was in some way missing from the American branch of productions. Realizing the many advantages when filming in Europe (decreased production costs and more opportunities for exterior shots), Green chose to shoot this film in Poland. "Yidl mitn Fidl" (1936), directed by Green and Jan Nowina-Przybylski, was filmed in and around Kazimierz, home of a predominantly Jewish community from the 14th century until WWII. Despite the fascinating exteriors, the film pointed out the extreme poverty of the town's inhabitants, many of whom can be seen in the film as extras.

American-born Molly Picon, who had already been a Star of Second Avenue (the "Jewish Broadway" in NYC), took on the role of Yidl, who poses as a boy to travel with her father, Arie, who's worried about the "bad things" that could happen to a girl out there on the road. On a town square they join forces with another male "klezmorim" duo and eventually are hired for a wedding during which the bride elopes with the musicians. After a lot of funny trials and tribulations, including a love triangle, Yidl - as a girl - ends up starring on the Warsaw stage before heading for New York.

The songs with music by Abraham Ellstein and lyrics by Itzik Manger (a prominent Yiddish poet in his own right) are appealing and effectively accompany the plot: especially the upbeat title song and the love ballad "Oy Mame, Bin Ikh Farlibt" ("Oh Mama, Am I in Love"), which gained immediate popularity. "Yidl mitn Fidl" was one of the three most successful Polish movies of 1936 and the first Yiddish film to garner considerable international fame.

Answer: Purim

Even though "Der Purimshpiler" (lit. "The Purimplayer", 1937)), again a combined directorial effort of Joseph Green and Jan Nowina-Przybylski, certainly has its comic moments, especially connected to the Purimshpil, the story is more of a drama. In a Galician shtetl before WWI the vagabond Getsl hears a girl sing while she's picking apples and immediately falls in love with her. He takes on a job with the resident shoemaker (her father) in order to be close to Esther, who on the other hand is in love with a circus performer. In a pre-arranged marriage, though, she is entitled to marry a rich suitor, whom Getsl is able to drive off with the pranks he plays in his performances. But in the end, he is left alone when his love interest elopes with and marries the circus performer.

The melancholy musical movie with music by Nicholaus Brodsky is stylistically more an operetta than a lighthearted musical comedy, which might also have contributed to its failure, especially as follow-up to "Yidl mitn Fidl". The depiction of the carnival of Purim provided the most fascinating and memorable scenes of the movie. Unbelievably, parts of these scenes would later be used in a "documentary" sense, as illustration of Jewish rites in the repulsive and detestable Nazi-documentary "Der ewige Jude".

Answer: An angry spirit

Michal Waszynski's movie adaptation of S. Ansky's famous 1914 play "Der dibuk oder tsvishn tsvey veltn" ("The Dybbuk or Between Two Worlds") not only preserves the uncanny atmosphere of the play (a style often referred to as "Chasidic Gothic"), it amplifies it through the opportunities provided by the cinematic medium.

The Dybbuk of the title is the ghost of Hannan, once a practitioner of mysticism, who is in love with Leah, but dies after her father refuses to bless their alliance and instead demands her to marry someone else. On the day of the wedding, Hannan's spirit takes possession of the woman "rightfully his", speaks through her mouth and causes a trancelike state with Leah not being herself anymore. The reason for these occurrences lies in the past, when Sender (Leah's father) and Nisn (Hannan's father) were young men and close friends and made a pact that in the future two of their children shall be wed. With Nisn dying soon after this, the covenant was forgotten by Sender and at the attempt to marry Leah off to a rich suitor, the Dybbuk takes possession of her soul. The Rabbi's exorcistic fight for the release of Leah's body and soul remains ineffective and after Sender repents, her spirit unites with Hannan's in death.

With its supernatural theme and the depiction of Jewish mysticism, "Der Dibek" can nearly be considered as horror film. The images Waszynski captured, the artificial acting, a stranger (like a pending reminder of doom) suddenly appearing and disappearing into thin air, but especially the creepy "Dance of Death" performed at the wedding conjure up an uncanny and frightening atmosphere unequalled in Yiddish films.

Answer: Edgar G. Ulmer

Based on Peretz Hirschbein's 1910 play of the same name, which at that time was considered a classic of the Yiddish stage, "Grine Felder" was filmed on farmland in New Jersey in only five days (after an extensive rehearsal period) as director Ulmer claims.

One of the first scenes shows the protagonist Levi (Michael Gorrin), a Talmudic scholar, eager to find a meaning in life, opening the doors of the dark synagogue and wandering out into the fields bathed in brilliant sunlight. It is here already that it becomes apparent that this movie advocates the "simple" farm life and depicts a part of Jewish life usually unnoticed by the "goyim". Levi then finds a home on a farm, where he is hired to teach the children of the farmers around, and at the same time falls for the cheeky and charming Tzineh (Helen Beverly). The encounter with the humble yet more carefree and balanced life of the farmers as opposed to the dark and musty atmosphere of the synagogue lets Levi alter his opinions and he chooses a life rooted in the soil of the land. Significant in this presentation is the pantheistic view offered by the movie's overall message: rather than finding God in the scriptures, it is nature, the land and the human heart which provide access to a new understanding.

Together with Green's "Yidl mitn Fidl", "Grine Felder" was the commercially most successful of Yiddish films and, also similar to the former, the most lighthearted.

Answer: New York City

"Dem Khazns Zundl", directed by Ilya Motyleff and Sidney Goldin and shot in the USA, marks the first screen appearance of the radio star and actual cantor Moishe Oysher in the leading part of Saul "Shloimele" Reichman.

Shloimele, the son of the cantor, yearns for adventure and fame and so not only leaves his hometown, the Shtetl Belz, but also his sweetheart, Rivke, behind when he joins a troupe of wandering players. Eventually he ends up in New York City, trying to make a living with menial work when the young singer, Helen (Florence Weiss, Oysher's wife in real life), hears him sing and convinces the nightclub owner to hire this great talent. As he does so, Shloimele rises to stardom with a rendition of "Mayn Shtetele Belz" sung with Helen, with whom he also takes up a relationship. But still, his soul is unable to find a place to belong and when he returns to Belz to celebrate his parents' golden wedding anniversary, he decides to stay. Realizing that he cannot leave his cultural roots, he takes on the position of the cantor and reunites with Rivke, whom he, as he explains to Helen, has loved for a longer time already.

Due to the diaspora, the religious and cultural roots and the place to belong has been a central issue in Jewish culture for a long time, but gained even more poignant importance through the events in Nazi-Germany. This is why many American Yiddish films of the late '30s would rely on a somewhat unrealistically idealized depiction of the shtetl-life in Eastern Europe.
J. Hoberman, a film critic and expert on Yiddish Cinema, termed "Dem Khazns Zundl" as "anti-Jazz Singer" (referring to the famous Al Jolson vehicle), because despite the somewhat similar story, Shloimele, unlike Jakie Rabinowitz, chooses the religious over the secular and resists the disconnection from his own cultural and religious heritage.

Answer: The Singing Blacksmith

Edgar G. Ulmer directed this more or less comedy, which in its contents is vastly different from Oysher's earlier movie. Where his Shloimele is torn between religion and secular life, religion is not only no central issue in "Yankl der Shmid", it is of nearly no importance for the plot at all. Set in an Eastern European shtetl, the story revolves around Yankl, who as a boy - due to his reluctance to study in the "kheyder" (a Jewish school) - becomes a blacksmith's apprentice. He grows up to be a womanizer with a boisterous manner and rather egoistical in character, but then falls for the quiet orphaned Tamara. Despite earnestly trying to be faithful and true, Yankl cannot help but succumb to the temptation posed by Rivke (Florence Weiss), the neighbor's wife trapped in her unhappy marriage. But it's Tamara's conniving strength and the baby they have together that eventually transform the once philandering rogue into a mature man able to take over responsibilities, finally becoming a "mentsh".

"Yankl der Shmid" focuses on an elaborate psychological portrayal of its protagonists and deals with the, particularly for Yiddish films, unlikely topic of desire, temptation, and physical passion.

While movies like "Yidl mitn Fidl" or "Der Dibek" were completely or at least partly shot on location in Europe, the Russian shtetl depicted in "Yankl der Shmid" was specifically built by Ulmer in New Jersey, on land owned by a Roman Catholic Monastery.

Answer: Cholera

By many considered the greatest of Ulmer's shtetl films, "Fishke der Krumer" tells the story of a Fishke (David Opatoshu), a lame man, and his love, Hodel (Helen Beverly, who also played the lead in "Grine Felder"), a blind girl who he intends to marry. With poverty preventing their marriage, they yearn for an escape to the big city, Odessa, but are trapped in the little village, Glubsk, with its inhabitants so steeped in superstition. Fishke especially is an outsider in his own town, laughed at and looked down upon, with Mendele Mocher Sforim, a peddling bookseller, as the only friend. When cholera strikes, it is the superstition so prevalent in the villagers that allows the couple to get married, as "tradition" states that the epidemic can only come to a halt when the poorest boy and the poorest girl get married at midnight on a cemetery. Even though reluctant at first to be used in this ridiculous scheme, they agree to the ceremony and in the end as a wedded couple accompany Mendele to Odessa, constantly dreaming and hoping for a better future.

"Fishke der Krumer" is one of the most "artful" films of the Yiddish oeuvre with the set designs heavily influenced by German expressionism. The shtetl recreated seems to alienate with its narrow streets and crooked houses, eerily intensifying the superstitious atmosphere that forms the world and community it accommodates.

Even though it is set in the 19th century, the pending doom of the horrors of WWII is obvious and, like an underlying threat, perceptible throughout the whole movie. Therefore at the time of its release with its questioning depiction of the shtetl life, it wasn't overly successful and hardly 10 years later it was believed that every existing print of "Fishke der Krumer" had been destroyed. Only in the early '70s a collector and admirer of the film located a copy in Amsterdam, most likely the last remaining one, and donated it to the National Center for Jewish Film (housed on the campus of Brandeis University), which restored it and made it accessible to a wider audience.

Answer: Sholem Aleichem

With his first one being published in 1894, Sholem Aleichem would continue to write stories about Tevye for the following decades. Taking the form of monologues, Tevye's narrations predominantly centre on his struggles to accept a new generation's values, opinions and understandings as opposed to what he has come to view as tradition. Incessantly quoting the scriptures (very often not quite correctly, which provides the majority of the humor inherent in the original texts), he has to come to terms with his daughters, who one after the other rebel against him.

Maurice Schwartz directed and starred in his film version of "Tevye der Milkhiker" (USA, 1939), which not only drew from Aleichem's originals, but also from a stage adaptation of the material in which Schwartz played the lead in 1919. Unlike the better known "Fiddler on the Roof", which highly distorted and "Americanized" the Yiddish world, Schwartz's movie stays true to Aleichem's creation. The focal point of the plot is the milkman's intricate relationship with his daughter, Chava, who chooses a way of life that Tevye is unable to acquiesce as it is incompatible with his own beliefs. She reads secular books and is interested in the Non-Jewish world, but when she falls for a Russian Non-Jew and even converts to Christianity in order to marry him, the helpless Tevye banishes her from the family and mourns her as if she had died. Still, when in the last scenes, the Jewish population of the shtetl is expelled and forced to leave, Chava realizes her true home and ruefully returns to her father to join him on his way to Eretz Israel.

While "Tevye der Mikhiker" was shot in the USA in 1939, Nazi-Germany invaded Poland cast a shadow over the production, because many members of staff and cast still had family and friends in Poland.

Answer: A Letter to Mother

Shot in 1938, but not released in the USA until September 1939 (two weeks after Poland was taken over by Nazi-Germany), "A Brivele der Mamen" was Joseph Green's final movie and also one of the last Yiddish films to be produced in Poland. It took its title from the Yiddish tearjerker song by Solomon Smulewitz, first published in 1907, which enjoyed ongoing popularity, because it mirrored the situation of many immigrants, who had left parts of their families behind when moving to the New World.

The movie "A Brivele der Mamen" is a highly melodramatic story beginning shortly before WWI, when David, a daydreamer who enjoys composing music but is unable to feed his family in pre WWI Ukraine, leaves his children and his wife, Dobrish, for America. Determined to make enough money to send for them, he starts working as a pushcart salesman in NYC and eventually earns enough to mail a ship ticket and some money home. With the ticket, Dobrish now sends her young son Arele to the USA, but asks him while his train leaves the station not to forget to write "a Brivele der Mamen". With poverty and WWI, Dobrish faces a multitude of misfortunes and calamities (played out to tear jerking excess) and naturally never hears from her husband and son in the USA. After years she finally is able to sail to the States as well, where she is informed that her husband had died. Desperate, but unable to find her now grown son, she attends a concert and hears a young artist vocalize the song written by David that he had sung with Arele in the beginning of the movie. Through this song she realizes that the famous singer on stage is indeed Arele and the two reunite in an overly sentimental ending.

The movie had its fair share of sentimentality and melodrama and was one of the most successful of Yiddish films when it opened in the USA in 1939. It is one of the last cinematic examples of the rich and remarkable Eastern European Yiddish culture.