“Exquisitely beautiful and astonishing; we wouldn’t expect such a film from director Granovsky and the GOSET ensemble, famous as an anti-naturalistic (and anti-religious) avant-garde theatre group. Who is gazing at what here, and how? It is a gaze at that which is one’s own, the native landscape, one’s own Jewish heritage, familiar and close; but it is also a glance from the distance, from this side of the Revolution, from a position outside. This is why the gaze is so clear and endows what is perceived with contour. No nostalgia for the past, no self-exotification, without disdain for the traditional. The old way of life is a given, and those who have an aural memory of the language, the idiomatic expressions and the cadence will add these resonances to the silent film’s images. Religiosity is not blended out, but is a casual part of life: a prayer before departure, ritual hand washing. The film Jewish Luck is the most peaceful Jewish voyage I know of, something entirely free which even manages to contain the quiet boredom of the waits and rides during journeys. […] Fictional shards are arranged in a sucession of views of the actual world which form the film’s intrinsic body and formal organisation: a mosaic of landscapes, settlements and interiors; waters, roads and vehicles. Vehicles: carts, coaches, trains, steamers, boats and ferries. Paths and plankways: monumental steps, station stairs, a garden step, a riverbank path, an alley, an open country road, a harbour jetty, a ship gangway. Waters: the glittering ocean of Odessa, a river, a pond, a puddle. And Solomon Mikhoels’ artistic physical gestures and mime are not accentuated, rather incorporated in the array of anonymous bodies and physiognomies such as the professional, empty gaze of the klezmer band’s bassist in the final scene. Jewish Luck is the one Yiddish film for which one does not need to invoke extenuating circumstances or, as for a squashed ladybird, to breathe love and interest upon to bring it back to life”.

(Mariann Lewinsky, Cinegrafie VI, n. 9, 1996)