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Sunday August 7, 2011
7:00PM - - -
SHOLEM ALEICHEM: LAUGHING IN THE DARKNESS
Category :: Movie
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OPENING AUGUST 12TH AT THE WEST END CINEMA IN WASHINGTON, DC
SHOLEM ALEICHEM: LAUGHING IN THE DARKNESS
A Film by Joseph Dorman
A portrait of the world’s greatest Yiddish writer, Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916), the man whose stories became the basis of the beloved musical Fiddler on the Roof. Using Sholem Aleichem’s works and his life story, the film presents a riveting tale of a traditional Jewish world on the cusp of profound change. Laughing in the Darkness reveals Sholem Aleichem’s genius in capturing this world with brilliant humor as he explored the struggle to create a new modern Jewish identity.
Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness offers audiences the chance to explore the great author’s universe: the world of our grandparents and great grandparents whose immigration to the United States forged the present day American Jewish community. It’s a story with many parallels in the other great American immigration sagas, the Irish and the Italian, to name just two, but a story with its own peculiar flavors – both sweet and bitter.
Modern Jewish identity was forged in the cauldron of change and anti-Semitic violence that was 19th century Eastern Europe. Yiddish literature was the best witness to this Jewish transformation, what David Roskies calls a “portable homeland”. Nowhere was this more acutely true than in the stories of Sholem Aleichem. He portrayed shtetl life and struggle, and recorded the brilliance and depth of Jewish culture. And he did it all with incredible humor.
Using rarely seen photographs and archive footage, the voices of actors Peter Riegert and Rachel Dratch, and interviews with leading experts such as Columbia’s Dan Miron, Harvard’s Ruth Wisse, David Roskies of the Jewish Theological Seminary, author and Yiddish translator Hillel Halkin, Aaron Lansky, the founder of the National Yiddish Book Center, and Bel Kauffmann, Sholem Aleichem's own granddaughter, the film brings to life as never before Sholem Aleichem's world and his timeless stories.
Far from the folksy grandfather many people mistake him to be, Sholem Aleichem was a sophisticated modern writer and cosmopolitan intellectual, an artist the equal of Chekhov or Gogol or Isaac Babel. His work left lasting legacies in Israel and the Soviet Union, as well as in America to which Sholem Aleichem immigrated twice, and where he died in 1916. His funeral was attended by some 200,000 people. It was the largest public funeral the city had ever witnessed and announced the arrival of the American Jewish community as a force to be reckoned with. In the following decades, Sholem Aleichem’s work, especially his Teyve stories, would be interpreted time and again by an American Jewish community whose own identity was evolving over time.
As Dan Miron says of the Yiddish canon spearheaded by Sholem Aleichem: “This entire literature was exploring this one question. How to be Jews in a modern world. How to adopt to modernity and yet not lose the continuity of a civilization that was Jewish. Clearly the answers given by Sholem Aleichem 100 years ago cannot be the answers given today. But what you can learn from him is how to negotiate an answer. Or even how to ask the question.”
93 min. · Not Rated · Dir. Joseph Dorman
SHOLEM ALEICHEM: LAUGHING IN THE DARKNESS
A Film by Joseph Dorman
A portrait of the world’s greatest Yiddish writer, Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916), the man whose stories became the basis of the beloved musical Fiddler on the Roof. Using Sholem Aleichem’s works and his life story, the film presents a riveting tale of a traditional Jewish world on the cusp of profound change. Laughing in the Darkness reveals Sholem Aleichem’s genius in capturing this world with brilliant humor as he explored the struggle to create a new modern Jewish identity.
Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness offers audiences the chance to explore the great author’s universe: the world of our grandparents and great grandparents whose immigration to the United States forged the present day American Jewish community. It’s a story with many parallels in the other great American immigration sagas, the Irish and the Italian, to name just two, but a story with its own peculiar flavors – both sweet and bitter.
Modern Jewish identity was forged in the cauldron of change and anti-Semitic violence that was 19th century Eastern Europe. Yiddish literature was the best witness to this Jewish transformation, what David Roskies calls a “portable homeland”. Nowhere was this more acutely true than in the stories of Sholem Aleichem. He portrayed shtetl life and struggle, and recorded the brilliance and depth of Jewish culture. And he did it all with incredible humor.
Using rarely seen photographs and archive footage, the voices of actors Peter Riegert and Rachel Dratch, and interviews with leading experts such as Columbia’s Dan Miron, Harvard’s Ruth Wisse, David Roskies of the Jewish Theological Seminary, author and Yiddish translator Hillel Halkin, Aaron Lansky, the founder of the National Yiddish Book Center, and Bel Kauffmann, Sholem Aleichem's own granddaughter, the film brings to life as never before Sholem Aleichem's world and his timeless stories.
Far from the folksy grandfather many people mistake him to be, Sholem Aleichem was a sophisticated modern writer and cosmopolitan intellectual, an artist the equal of Chekhov or Gogol or Isaac Babel. His work left lasting legacies in Israel and the Soviet Union, as well as in America to which Sholem Aleichem immigrated twice, and where he died in 1916. His funeral was attended by some 200,000 people. It was the largest public funeral the city had ever witnessed and announced the arrival of the American Jewish community as a force to be reckoned with. In the following decades, Sholem Aleichem’s work, especially his Teyve stories, would be interpreted time and again by an American Jewish community whose own identity was evolving over time.
As Dan Miron says of the Yiddish canon spearheaded by Sholem Aleichem: “This entire literature was exploring this one question. How to be Jews in a modern world. How to adopt to modernity and yet not lose the continuity of a civilization that was Jewish. Clearly the answers given by Sholem Aleichem 100 years ago cannot be the answers given today. But what you can learn from him is how to negotiate an answer. Or even how to ask the question.”
93 min. · Not Rated · Dir. Joseph Dorman
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