Sholom Aleichem, who proved that Yiddish could be a language of literature as well as of the streets, made and lost many fortunes as a market investor in the days before insider trading. He created a character named Menachem Mendl who echoed his, and his father’s, roller-coaster financial lives, even as he later created Tevye, the dairyman who talks to God while he delivers milk and cheese, and seeks husbands for his four daughters.
“Sholom Aleichem: Laughing in the Dark,” is a charming, fascinating documentary film, written and directed by Joseph Dorman, and opening here today. With musty old newsreel footage, engaging narration by Alan Rosenberg and character-creation by such as Peter Riegert and Rachel Dratch, it’s a fascinating tale of a man whose newspaper fiction was nearly as popular as the serials written by Charles Dickens a half-century earlier.
Born Sholom Rabinovich in 1859, he adopted the pen-name Sholom Aleichem, which can translate as “peace be with you” or just a simple greeting. He lived within the Pale (an area in Russia reserved for Jews). He experienced pogroms as a child and as a man, and he defused problems with humor. Menachem Mendel (Jason Kravitz), a man patterned after both Aleichem and his father, obsessed with get-rich-quick schemes that turned to dust, became the subject of many stories, some told in exchanges of correspondence with his down-to-earth wife, Shayna Sheyndl (Dratch).
Riegert portrays Tevye, a character/narrator of family stories and later the hero of “Fiddler on the Roof,” a story that became a 1939 movie and the classic 1964 musical. When Dorman brings in some scenes from the 1971 movie, Topol is in the role, though the great Zero Mostel developed the character on stage.
Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist of “Fiddler,” tells of using Aleichem’s own words, sometimes adapted, as when he changed “If I were a Rothschild,” to “If I were a rich man.”
Aleichem emigrated to the United States in 1905 after living through one-too many pogroms, writing for the Yiddish newspapers in New York. Scholars also are interviewed on the writer’s literary accomplishments and stories about his life, like the night two of his plays opened in New York, only for both receive scathing newspaper reviews the next day. Also interviewed is his grand-daughter, writer/teacher Bel Kaufman, author of “Up the Down Staircase,” and now 100 years old. Aleichem died in 1916, and 200,000 people reportedly lined the New York streets in one of the largest-ever assemblages of mourners.
The movie is a labor of love for Dorman, but also a tribute to the man who kept the dying language of Yiddish alive for several extra generations.
Sholom Aleichem: Laughing in the Dark opens today at the Plaza Frontenac
— Joe