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Nov. 4, 2011
Explorer of identities
Film explores Sholem Aleichem’s broad influence.
MICHAEL FOX
The pioneering Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem was born in a shtetl in the middle of the 19th century and, even today, his name is synonymous with the Old Country and a vanished way of life.
Blame Fiddler on the Roof, which was adapted from a handful of Aleichem’s bittersweet Tevye stories. The musical introduced the once-hugely popular author to new generations of American Jews, but also cast him as a quaint (albeit extraordinarily insightful) observer of a changing world.
“It’s about time that the larger mass of people outside of Yiddish aficionados understood who Sholem Aleichem was,” said filmmaker Joseph Dorman. “I think he’s been hidden from view, the real Sholem Aleichem, for years and years and years.”
Dorman’s erudite documentary, Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness, screens Nov. 18 at the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival, co-sponsored by the Jewish Independent with the Kirman Memorial Foundation for Yiddish Culture.
“He created a kind of myth around himself because he was trying to reach a not illiterate but uneducated eastern European Jewish audience,” Dorman explained during an interview on a recent visit to San Francisco. “And, in order to reach that audience, much like Mark Twain did, he created this kind of folksy persona. And that folksy persona ultimately was so successful that people mistook the persona as the man.
“Even Jewish critics at the time,” Dorman continued, “perceived him as someone who was kind of a stenographer for poor Jews, who wrote what he heard, and they didn’t realize that he was, in fact, an extremely canny, sophisticated, brilliant modern writer.”
Solomon Naumovitch Rabinovitch, pen name Sholem Aleichem, came to prominence at the moment when Jews were leaving the shtetl and migrating to big cities, both in eastern Europe and the Diaspora, Adapting, assimilating and refashioning themselves, they embraced various utopian movements, including socialism, Bundism and Zionism.
“Sholem Aleichem is so relevant now because he was dealing with the mysteries of modern Jewish identity,” Dorman explained further. “Marx said, in the modern world, everything that’s solid melts into air. And it’s true today. Our generation may be more adept because we’ve experienced the rapidity of change much more than previous generations, but we still have to deal with it; we’re still in that flux of things. So I think we’re all Tevyes.”
Dorman was born in Detroit to parents who read the New York Times every weekend. It seemed inevitable that he would move to New York, where he would become a writer and producer.
It was a professor pal who pointed Dorman toward Sholem Aleichem, about whom he, he said, he was essentially ignorant. “I thought this was a way station for me,” the 53-year-old filmmaker said. “I didn’t think it was a destination. I thought it was a film I would do while I figured out what I really wanted to do. And I spent 10 years on it, and it took up everything. It infused me.”
Aleichem’s stories of fathers and daughters, and of the challenge of balancing tradition with the modern world, have the power to speak to every culture and every people, but they have ongoing resonance, specifically, it seems, for American Jews, who redefine their identity with every generation.
“Unless you are an absolute Orthodox Jew and follow the traditional path,” Dorman asserted, “no matter how Jewish we feel and how much we [find] certain Jewish identities ... I don’t think they can ever be as stable or solid as they once were, or once appeared to be. That’s a very powerful and poignant thing that we all live with. It’s the fact that you’re assimilating and trying to hold on to something, and that confusion that somehow you feel a bit damned either way. At least I do.”
For a full festival schedule or for tickets and passes, visit vjff.org.
Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.
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