Between 1922 and 1929 the Soviet Union did not only promote the cinematic production of non-Russian republics such as Ukraine, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, but was also the only country in the world to support Yiddish culture. Alexis Granowsky’s Yiddish State Theatre in Moscow (GOSET) was one of the most internationally renowned avant-garde theatres of the time: it was radically anti-religious and anti-naturalist and, at the same time, revolutionary and ethno-exotic. In this film, which was based on Sholem Aleichem’s epistolary novel Menahem- Mendl, shot in Berdychiv and Odesa in 1925 by GOSET and directed by Granowsky, the Yiddish and Soviet avant-gardes got together at the culmination of their respective creative arcs. It was an unrepeatable historical moment featuring a constellation of great talents – Isaak Babel wrote the humorous intertitles, Eduard Tissé was the director of photography, and GOSET’s biggest star Solomon Mikhoels played the role of Menahem-Mendl. Their contributions enabled the visual quality and formal freedom of a film that alternates modernist stylisation with documentary- style detail, while narrating Menahem’s vain attempts to settle down through corsets, life insurance policies and marriage agencies. The film contains few elements of ideological propaganda, instead making time and space for the observation of people and landscapes, as well as directorial flourishes such as Menahem’s waking dream about the mass export of Jewish brides to America: surreal group of women dressed in white and wearing veils are loaded onto transatlantic linersby cranes and winches in a scene staged with a machinist aesthetic. In the humorous discrepancy between the balanced tone of the story and the devastating content being narrated, the film remains faithful to the spirit of Sholem Aleichem’s novel. That said, while the source text offers a biting satire of the pre-revolutionary period, this post-revolutionary film bathes the past in a luminous summer light. It is the light of a journey undertaken with friends towards open spaces, a relaxed and careful gaze. There must have been a great sense of freedom, faith and hope in the Soviet Union in the summer of 1925.

Mariann Lewinsky