Tevya
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Tevya |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | Yiddish |
| Publishing year | 1939 |
| length | 93 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Maurice Schwartz |
| script | Maurice Schwartz |
| production | Henry Ziskin |
| music | Sholom Secunda |
| camera | Larry Williams |
| cut | Sam Citron |
| occupation | |
| |
Tevya is a Yiddish feature film from the USA from 1939. The plot is inspired by stories by Scholem Alejchem and his character Tevye the milkman and thematizes anti-Semitism . In 1991 it was the first non-English language film to be selected for preservation by the US National Film Registry .
Maurice Schwartz , the director and screenwriter came from Jewish Eastern Europe and had emigrated to the USA. The actors came from his Yiddish Art Theater in New York . Schwarzt himself played the main role. The film was made in New York at the beginning of the Second World War.
action
The plot takes up threads from Aleichem's stories Chava and Lekh-Lekho and provides them with a clear ending: When the Jews are expelled from their shtetl, Chava, who had previously converted to Christianity in order to get married, leaves her husband and returns to hers Family and back to Judaism.
criticism
There is great ambivalence in contemporary reception . In Forverts , L. Fogelman hailed Tevya as "one of the best Yiddish films that has been made so far", but also noted that "only a shadow of Sholom Aleichem has remained in the few external features of Tevye". This position was elaborated in the newspaper Morgen Freiheit : "Schwartz himself is even better in film than on stage," wrote critic Nathaniel Buchwald there. As long as it was only about Schwartz's work, Tevye should, in his opinion , be "considered the best Yiddish film of all time". Unfortunately, however, the film "in no way agrees with the spirit and essence of the writings of Sholem Aleichem." According to Buchwald, the film contains scenes that "offend the dignity of a Yiddish film and Jewish artist." “We should leave the art of slandering entire peoples to the Nazis.” Buchwald concluded that it was “a powerful film that keeps you in suspense and moves you to tears”. But even if it is a film "in which the title role is played with deep understanding", it is not about the well-known Tevye, the milkman, but about "something different and something worse."
The film critic J. Hoberman, on the other hand, noted that the Tevje material was designed very differently over the years and served different ideologies, such as a Zionist one in Menachem Golan and a pro-American one in the film adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof . Tevya, on the other hand, offers “the portrait of a folksmentsh - an ordinary person - more lame than the character of Mendele in Schwartz's early film Di Klyastshe , but also more calming”.
Web links
- Tevya in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Marat Grinberg, Rolling in dust: Maurice Schwartz's Tevye (1939) and its ambiguities online