All About Jewish Theatre - Yidl Mitn Fidl, the most commercially successful musical in Yiddish cinema history

On a fall Sunday afternoon, Jewish history professor Benny Kraut was surprised by the large numbers of people who appeared in the 489-seat Lefrak Concert Hall at Queens College. It turned out that they were eager to see the screening of a 1936 film about a cross-dressing Yiddish fiddler in Poland.

Perhaps the crowd overflowed because the day's presentation was "Yidl Mitn Fidl," the most commercially successful musical in Yiddish cinema history. Or was the draw the wildly popular Molly Picon playing the fiddler? Or was it just a longing to hear the language spoken again?

Whatever the specific reason, he sensed a craving for more.

"There is a substantial number of people interested in Yiddish culture, with the desire to keep Yiddish going," said Kraut, referring to the vernacular spoken for a thousand years by Eastern European Jews. Yiddish was also the language of the majority of those Jews who perished during the Holocaust.

As director of the Queens Center for Jewish Studies, Kraut, with Manhattan' s Museum of Jewish Heritage, inaugurated the "Cinema on Sundays" Jewish film series at Queens College in the fall. The series attracted viewers from around the city, Long Island and New Jersey. Sunday at 2 p.m., the series resumes with "Uncle Moses," a 1932 Yiddish film with English subtitles based on a 1936 novel by Sholem Asch.

The story takes place among Eastern European immigrants on the Lower East Side, and includes the struggles of the garment workers' union and the nature of the relationship between the immigrants and American culture. It stars Maurice Schwartz, the "Olivier of the Yiddish stage, " and the founder and director of the Yiddish Art Theater in New York, a leading Yiddish theater.

In the first half of the 20th Century, Sholem Asch was the most popular Yiddish writer in the world, with bestsellers in many languages, said Emanuel S. Goldsmith, Queens College professor of Yiddish and Hebrew. Goldsmith will introduce the film and answer questions. Goldsmith, who just published an anthology of 48 Yiddish authors who lived in America, the first of its kind, also introduced the opening program, "Yidl Mitn Fidl," to the packed house.

Asch was born in Poland, settled in the United States, and spent his last years in Israel, where his house is now a museum. He started writing in Hebrew, Goldsmith said, until Y.L. Peretz, the great Yiddish storyteller, convinced him that to write about a living people, he had to write in their language.

The series will continue March 5, with "Jacob the Liar," a 1974 East German film based on a novel by Holocaust survivor Jurek Becker. The movie has English subtitles.

Stuart E. Liebman, chair of the college's media studies department, said the film was produced during a brief period of candor addressing the issue of German anti-Semitism when East Germany desired foreign prestige and currency. It was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign film.

The story tells of Jacob, a Jew starving in the Warsaw Ghetto, who fabricates news that the Russians are advancing to rescue them in order to sustain his friends' courage to survive. A remake of the film, also titled "Jacob the Liar," starring Robin Williams, was released last year, after the somewhat similar film, "Life is Beautiful," was a hit.

But Liebman, a scholar of post-war German cinema and Soviet film history, raises questions about the role of humor in Holocaust presentations.

"In my view," he said, "'Life is Beautiful' trivializes what happened and inverts the truth of what went on."

But Sheba Skirball, curator of the Bess Myerson Film and Video Collection of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, who selected the films on the program with Professor Kraut, said she believed that the controversy surrounding "Life is Beautiful" sparked considerable interest in the subject of the Holocaust. "One of the public missions of our museum is education on the Holocaust, " she said.

Skirball said the selected films would especially appeal to some of the communities in Queens, such as the Russian and Sephardic neighborhoods. Sephardic Jews are those descendants of Jews who lived in Spain and Portugal before their expulsion in the 15th Century, when many migrated to Islamic lands. The Queens film series concludes April 9 with a 1973 Israeli musical film about Sephardic Jews. Sometimes billed as an Israeli "West Side Story," "Kazablan" portrays a Moroccan Jewish immigrant in Israel who courts a girl from an Ashkenazi or European Jewish family with different cultural traditions.

Source: Newsday 2000