SHOLEM ALEICHEM: LAUGHING IN THE DARKNESS (Joseph Dorman). 93 minutes. Opens Friday (February 24). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NNNN
Joseph Dorman’s documentary about groundbreaking Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem – best known for penning the source material on which Fiddler On The Roof is based – is part bio, part journey through eastern European Jewish history from the 1850s through the 1930s.
Sholem Aleichem (one name’s never spoken without the other) was a pioneer of Yiddish literature who almost single-handedly elevated the language from vernacular to vehicle for artistic expression.
Tapping the expertise of Yiddishists and members of the writer’s family, Dorman traces the ways the writer’s tales – all of them tinged with humour – reflect the dramatic political and intellectual changes Jews living in the shtetl faced. Zionists vied with socialists, once closed and remote communities were forced to engage with the outside world, and eventually that world’s anti-Semitism forced them to leave their home countries, triggering a massive emigration to North America.
After his death in 1916, Russia – until Stalin – embraced him as a secular hero, while Israel scorned him and Yiddish as symbols of Jewish powerlessness. Americans proceeded to build their own Yiddish culture, even though they had ironically rejected two plays by Sholem Aleichem, launched there in 1906, as nostalgic and old-school.
Dorman has amassed a ton of archival images of Sholem Aleichem’s life and the world of the shtetl, as well as superb material documenting the first wave of Jewish immigrants in New York City, where the writer died. Though he was never a financial or critical success there, the mass outpouring of grief following his death was at the time the largest manifestation of mourning New York had ever witnessed. Photos of the mourners give the movie an unexpected emotional punch.
An important doc for anyone who cares about literature.
