Jewish Luck was among the first
Soviet Yiddish films to be released in the US during the
1920s. Based on Sholem Aleichem's series of stories
featuring the character Menakhem Mendl (played by the famous
actor Solomon Mikhoels) the film revolves around the
daydreaming entrepreneur Menakhem Mendl who specializes in
doomed strike-it-rich schemes.
Despite Jewish oppression by Tsarist
Russia, Menakhem Mendl continues to pursue his dreams and
his continued persistence transforms him from schlemiel to
hero as the film uncovers the tragic underpinnings of Sholem
Aleichem's comic tales.
Notes Village Voice critic Georgia
Brown, "The movie's best intertitle translated from Isaac
Babel's Russian: `What can you do when there is nothing to
do?'" A dramatized version of the Menkhem Mendl stories was
first staged by the Moscow Yiddish State Theater, under the
direction of Alexander Granovsky, who later made this silent
film.
Jewish Luck features some of the finest
artistic talents of Soviet Jewry during this period. It has
been speculated that the cinematography done by Eduard Tissé
inspired the filming of certain scenes in one of his later
projects, Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin
(Particularly the famous "Odessa steps" scene of that film,
the same setting as the Jewish Luck finale).
The original Russian intertitles were
written by Soviet Jewish writer Isaac Babel, who later
became a victim of the Stalinist purges in the late 1930s.
-- The National Center for Jewish Films |