DI KLIATSHE
(Fishke the Lame/The Light Ahead)
Directed by Henry Felt and
Edgar G. Ulmer
Written by Chaver Paver, Mendele Mokher Sforim (novel),
Edgar G. Ulmer and Shirley Ulmer.
Music by Dean Cole.
The film was shot in Newton, New Jersey.
This film was released in the U.S. on September 22, 1939.
94 minutes, B & W
|
|
Ascot Theatre, Grand
Concourse and 183rd Street |
David Opatoshu (Exodus, Torn Curtain)
made his film debut as Fishke, a lame young man hopelessly in love
with a blind orphan girl (Helen Beverley) in cholera-obsessed Glubsk
(e.g. Foolstown). The impoverished couple dream of life in the big
city of Odessa free from the shtetl’s poverty and stifling old-world
prejudices. The benevolent and enlightened bookseller Mendele (Isidore
Cashier as Mendele Mokher Sforim) helps them, turning small-town
superstitions to their advantage.
This 1939 Yiddish film classic, made on the eve of World War II, is
at once romantic, expressionist, and painfully conscious of the
danger about to engulf European Jews. Audaciously adapted from the
work of novelist S. Y. Abramovitch (1836-1917), whom Sholem Aleichem
dubbed the grandfather of Yiddish literature, this luminous allegory
of escape marries Edgar Ulmer's masterful direction (and set design)
with superb acting by members of New York's Artef and Yiddish Art
Theaters. Film historian J. Hoberman calls Beverley and Opatoshu
"perhaps the most beautiful couple in the history of Yiddish
cinema...their scenes have a touching erotic chemistry.”
One of the most important films in NCJF’s archive collection,
The Light Ahead is arguably the finest of the four Yiddish
films directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. Here, the director counterpoints
his pastoral Green Fields to criticize the poverty and superstition
that oppress a pair of star-crossed lovers. The script was written
by Edgar and Shirley Ulmer and Chaver Paver, adapting the stories of
Mendele Mokher Sforim.
The shtetl denizens’ embrace of superstition over science and
modernity amidst a cholera outbreak makes The Light Ahead
especially poignant for contemporary audiences. The film’s climax is
a shvartse khasene (black wedding) or mageyfe khasene
(plague wedding), a folk ritual believed to ward off disease when
two of a town’s most marginal residents are married in a Jewish
cemetery.
-- The National Center for Jewish
Film
