Putting Yiddish film in the spotlicht

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This article was published 06/02/2024 (970 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For the cover photo on their new book about Yiddish cinema, local academics Jonah Corne and Monika Vrečar chose a shot from the 1937 film adaptation of The Dybbuk, with eight men straining their necks to hear what the righteous tzaddik is trying to say.

The men look perplexed, focused and a bit lost, doing their best not to miss any nuance or nugget of information coming from the head of the table.

If the disciples don’t hear the spiritual leader’s latest piece of talmudic wisdom then and there, it’s reasonable to assume they never will again.

“There is this inherent trouble to their communication,” says Corne, an associate professor at the University of Manitoba. “We thought, ‘That image pretty much sums up what we were writing about.’”

Over the course of the last five years, Corne and Vrečar attempted to survey about 40 surviving feature films produced in the Yiddish language, spanning from the silent era through to the late 1940s.

The result — Yiddish Cinema: The Drama of Troubled Communication (SUNY Press) — reveals the film subset as a “strikingly cohesive, Jewishly charged, dramatically embodied system of ideas about media and (ex)communication.”

Corne and Vrečar will launch the book at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at a free event at the Handsome Daughter — which itself sounds like it could be the title of a Yiddish matchmaking comedy — as part of the Rady Jewish Community Centre’s inaugural Put a Yid On It Festival of New Yiddish Culture.

Producer Shira Newman, co-ordinator of arts programming at the Rady JCC, says that the festival is a celebration and acknowledgment of the renewal of Yiddish language and culture.

“It’s all very intergenerational,” she says. In addition to the films, the festival will also have performances of Yiddish hip-hop and Yiddish infused folk rock, with a pair of concerts at the WECC.

“It’s really trying to acknowledge and celebrate this renewal of Yiddish language and culture that’s very intergenerational,” Newman says.

Once the dominant vernacular of eastern European Jewry, a recombinant language formed by building blocks of German, Hebrew and Aramaic, Yiddish is spoken today by an estimated 500,000 to one million people, according to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Language.

But before the language’s number of speakers dwindled — largely the result of the Holocaust and subsequent assimilation by European emigrés — Yiddish was preserved on film, a natural extension of the prominent world of Yiddish theatre, which served as the starting grounds for Hollywood stars such as John Garfield, Edward G. Robinson and Paul Muni.

Several of the most widely known Yiddish movies — including the 1936 folk comedy Yiddle With His Fiddle and 1939’s The Light Ahead, directed in the U.S. by Edgar G. Ulmer — will be screening as part of Put a Yid On It.

Corne, a film scholar born in Winnipeg, and Vrečar, a media scholar originally from Slovenia, found Yiddish films to be an understudied and somewhat underappreciated chapter in cinema history.

At university, Corne found his interest in Yiddish cinema was piqued, while Vrečar gravitated toward media philosophy, particularly that of the Czech Jewish scholar Vilem Flusser, whose prophetic writings on media and information dissemination are comparable to Marshall McCluhan’s.

“There was a fascinating interplay between the two where we realized we could merge our two interests and produce something neither one of us could have produced on their own,” Vrečar says.

For this book, the first monograph for the couple, Corne and Vrečar relied on Jewish theorists including Martin Buber, but mostly leaned on Flusser’s theories to drive their understanding of Yiddish cinema. Chief among those theories is Flusser’s concept of “groundlessness,” which manifests in many Yiddish films through a loss of connection, a destabilization of familiar surroundings and pressures to assimilate.

This experience is well documented in Joan Micklin Silver’s 1975 film Hester Street, showing at 2 p.m. on Feb. 11 at the Berney Theatre. Starring Carol Kane in an Oscar-nominated performance, the film is a masterful portrait of new and old worlds colliding, at heym and abroad.

Corne and Vrečar’s book, which clocks in at 300 pages before the acknowledgments, is extremely detailed, exploring films in the shund (trash) subgenre with the same academic rigour as classics such as The Dybbuk, The Living Orphan, Kol Nidre and Motel the Operator.

As a companion to films such as the ones being shown at Put a Yid On It, Corne and Vrečar’s book is hugely valuable, even if often weighed down by its extensive philosophical references.

But if readers are prepared to crane their necks, they’ll find a talmudic study of a genre that merits a second look.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com