“The explosion of the Hiroshima bomb in 1945 opened the crust of the earth and created an entry into the Underworld for all of humanity. The anxiety provoked by this event - a mythic occurrence- has profoundly disturbed ordinary consciousness. It has completely separated human beings from past spiritual meaning and brought irresolvable unrest, leading to indifference and to a pre-occupation with comfort. That is to say, since this event, ordinary consciousness has lost its meaning. What is the soul’s response? It is the quality of stillness. The soul becomes completely quiet, for it has entered into the realm of death…there to begin the task of learning how to be awake and fully conscious. It is a test. The aim of this test is to find whether the force of love, no longer arising from attachment to things in the day-world, can be born out of the soul itself. In other words, can love arise where there is nothing to love?” - Robert Sardello
At the center of Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse district stands a quaint, rickety but foundational, lovely little film theater called “The Roxy.” One can literally feel the time edge back, clock fingers inching counter-clockwise and transporting one to the forties as one sits on the decades-old, marginally broken metal seating within, complete with no drink holders. There is paint flecking and peeling, and seat movement with hip movement. Yet the aura, though a cultural anachronism amidst 2011 Philadelphia, remains a bittersweet, nostalgic comfort. It is a wholly old experience to experience this theater for the first time.
Now playing here is a biographical documentary exploring the life and timeless works of Sholem Aleichem (pen name), born Sholem Rabinowitz, often referred to as the “Jewish Mark Twain.” Equally as popular and far-reaching, it is from Aleichem’s colloquial stories the perennially popular “Fiddler on the Roof” musical (and countless film adaptations) was derived. He wrote a prolific body of literature, including short stories, countless novels, and a few plays.
Entitled “Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness”, this film is one of the shortest (93 minutes) yet most effective documentaries I have ever seen. The writers examine how Aleichem’s work surrounded the cultural movement of Eastern European Jewry away from the Russian-induced “Pale” of stettles, ghettoes and general poverty, hoping to integrate more with mainstream gentility and secular education. Despite these efforts, Russian scapegoating and systemic violence against Jews created a psychological incubation from whence Aleichem’s mind and work simmered as he wrote of the dramatic interplay between Jewish identity, encroaching anti-Semitism, emigration to America and the concept of doubting God with continual artistic philosophical and religious questioning.
We learn how the characters and narrative arc of his “Tevya the Milkman” short stories were the basis of what would become the beloved “Fiddler on the Roof” musical. Exploring themes of social justice and revolutionary economic change, inter-faith marriage, declining agricultural ways of life in the midst of industrialization and the idea of universalism (Aleichem writes, and I paraphrase, “Why are their Gentiles and Jews, even? Why do we distinguish?), Aleichem created a body of work that spoke directly to the everyday, ordinary merchant, farmer or laborer, especially since he wrote in Yiddish, the common language of eastern European Jews (Hebrew was the language of the rabbinical intelligentsia.) Indeed, it is fascinating to learn how different classes and political movements vacillated from embracing, to denouncing, to finally venerating his canon.
Throughout the documentary, there is beautiful movement between old photos and daguerreotypes, a kinetic and free-wheeling shifting through relevant piles of old images. It works well with the continued interviews with various Yiddish scholars and actors’ voiceovers. The old archival video footage is surprisingly well-preserved and effective, too- one truly understands, when this documentary ends, how Aleichem gave voice to a whole way of life that has been lost to what Alan Dershowitz describes as “the vanishing American Jew.”
Because it is about the past as much as about Israel and Jewish identity’s future, this documentary identifies Aleichem’s last work as “pre-Holocaust” literature, citing the brutal examples of Russian anti-Semitism as a dark shadow of what was to come. However, Aleichem would always use humor, even amidst the most intensely tragic and heart-rending situations, to lighten life. He was able to find love amidst a complete lack of anything. He was able to illumine light within the blackness of oblivion.
For the seconds and hours of our lives cascade into the past, in every moment, and our lives change in completely out-of-control ways day to day. Technology unbends space and time, flash-freezing our memories and lightning-jumping our communication across continents, miles, turbulence and static. Joseph Dorman, the film’s director, allows us to remember what has been lost even as we crave the vision of peaceful religious universalism Aleichem tried so hard with which to wrestle. Hopefully technology will enable such a vision to manifest, instead of the dark nightmare all too simple and repetitive in human history.
Comments