A noteworthy collection for cineastes and culture-watchers, and a truly monumental one for Judaica collections, this multi-disk set from Kino-Lorber assembles a variety of titles in specialty cinema filmed for Yiddish-speaking audiences, from the "talkies" era of the 1930s up to 1950, often drawing on popular Yiddish-language plays (Yiddish film and Yiddish theater are inextricably intertwined industries, says scholar Allan Lewish Rickman in one of his numerous commentaries).
While sometimes explicitly set in Jewish "shtetl" villages or Old World Europe, the majority were in fact, US-made. A major exception is its showcase entry, Poland's "The Dybbuk," from 1937. The original exorcism screen drama, adapted from a renowned play by S. Ansky, The Dybbuk—though highlighted by a macabre dance number with a skull-faced entity—will surprise (perhaps disappoint) horror hounds by being many things; variously, it is a comedy, musical, and anthro-accurate insight into Hasidic Jewish village life and thought, and finally a sort of pageant-like religious ritual, as young would-be lovers Khonen and Leah (played by real-life husband-and-wife thespians Leon Liebgold and Lili Liliana) are separated by the bride's father and his horse-trading to arrange a financially rewarding marriage to a weakling. Heartbroken Khonen beseeches Satan for help before he dies; the grieving Leah invites Khonen's unfulfilled soul into her body (this "dybbuk," is, therefore, not a malevolent demon but instead a poignantly hopeless ghostly possession). A rabbinical trial results. Once blurbed as "THE JEWISH TALKIE THAT WILL LIVE FOREVER," The Dybbuk has received a frame-by-frame 2K restoration.
The set also includes The Jewish King Lear (1935), an opus that mostly amounts to a filmed play. Based on material that had barnstormed around community centers and Yiddish theaters, it has wealthy old Dovid (Maurice Krohner) dividing his fortune among his grown children, reaping complaints and ingratitude from all but the pure-hearted daughter who wanted no money and thus found herself banished. A scholar friend informs Dovid he has followed the errors of Shakespeare's Lear. Though obvious and fairly artless, it was commercially successful enough among Jewish audiences to inspire a stream of Yiddish American films made on and outside the fringes of Hollywood.
American Matchmaker, the last of four Yiddish films by journeyman director Edgar Ulmer, is a rom-com of a successful Bronx Jew (Yiddish matinee idol Leo Fuchs) who, after eight broken engagements, sets himself up instead as a spiffy big-city matchmaker (more traditional Jewish matchmakers are outraged, but parlay their protest into getting hired by the hero as subcontractors). The light comedy attracted attention in recent years—as emphasized by Eve Sicular in her disc commentary track—due to film scholars such as Vito Russo detecting a sneaky subtext and clues in the Yiddish/Yinglish/Ameridish dialogue that this actually concerns a closeted homosexual "bachelor" passing in straight society. Perhaps even more so, however, modern viewers will sense the joi de vivre of its ethnic characters happily adapted to the NYC melting pot.
Tevye (1939), hyped at the time as "THE GREATEST YIDDISH PICTURE EVER MADE," was directed by its own leading man, Maurice Schwartz, based on the renowned tales of author Sholem Aleichem, and filmed lavishly with parts of Long Island substituting for the Ukrainian heartland. Viewers who mainly know this material from the musical-comedy mega-hit Fiddler on the Roof will find the non-singing version to be far more serious and tragic than Broadway's Zero Mostel/Nathan Lane turns, with peasant dairy farmer Tevye seeing his way of life crumble as his most bookish daughter Chava leaves home to marry a gentile, and anti-Semite directives force him off his land. Once again, Allen Lewis Rickman delivers a fine commentary.
Filmed by director Max Nosseck on the Paramount lot, Overture to Glory (1940) is a well-mounted melodrama-with-music based on the real-life Yoel-David Levenshteyn (whose life may have also influenced The Jazz Singer). Actor/vocalist Moyshe Osher plays a Lithuanian synagogue cantor of such prodigious talent that approving gentiles entice him to sing Beethoven and other classics in concert halls. But worldly fame gradually erodes his Jewish character, and long absences from his family lead to tragedy.
A handful of movies in the set—Motel the Operator, Three Daughters, Her Second Mother, Eli Eli—reflect some of the B-movie output of Joseph Seiden, treated most dismissively in the commentary tracks (the way snooty critics once wrote off Roger Corman) as a prolific hack using rudimentary, penny-pinching sets, even his own home, and unevenly talented actors in doing quickie Yiddish melodramas and sentimental dramedies for the Jewish-immigrant market. Their plots over aging parents, unhappy jobs, marriageable adult children, baby fever, unassimilated foreign bumpkins ("greenhorns"), and financial crises are rote stuff, yet seen in this context speak directly to the hot-topic issues and daily cares of a bygone era for Seiden's target audience—one immigrant newcomer in Eli Eli keeps talking about "refugees" but mispronounces it as "refrigerators," for instance. Eli Eli (a rare original script rather than an adapted stage piece) was also one of the scarce celluloid roles for popular radio entertainer Esther Fields, a crossover celebrity for non-Jewish listeners over her personification of "the Yiddishe Mama."
One documentary is in the set, a resurrection of Aleksandr Ford's historic cinema verite-like Mir Kumen On (1935) AKA Children Must Laugh (though the title can be translated as Here We Come or We're On Our Way). Designed as a fundraiser for a progressive Jewish tuberculosis sanitarium-cum-orphanage in suburban Warsaw, it depicts operations of the Medem Sanatorium under undisguised socialist/communist principles. The "comrade" children govern themselves, and (in clearly staged scenes) welcome a new Orthodox boy from the countryside, who weathers some bullying before fitting in. A school talent show finishes the one-hour feature, and one can only wonder what would become of the youngsters in the incipient Holocaust. Mir Kumen On would become banned at home. This edition has been re-assembled from two fragmentary prints, one located in Germany, the other in Poland.
With the inclusion of an illustrated booklet, the entire collection comes highly recommended, and may just inspire one to pick up the old copy of Leo Rosten's "The Joys of Yiddish" and start reading. I know it did me.