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Film: Jewish Luck with WORLD PREMIERE Live Score
Sunday December 22, 2024 9:00pm - 11:30pm EST
Chapel - Hebrew Union College
PLEASE NOTE - THIS SHOWING WILL NOT INCLUDE A PANEL DISCUSSION

This showing of Jewish Luck, the famed 1925 Soviet Yiddish silent film by Alexy Granovsky will feature the WORLD PREMIERE of a specially-commissioned new score by Lori Goldston, performed by Goldston (cello) with multi-instrumentalist Ilya Shneyveys.


Jewish Luck, one of the most important Soviet Yiddish films, is based on Sholem Aleichem's series of ironically comic stories featuring the character Menakhem Mendl – a daydreaming entrepreneur who specializes in doomed strike-it-rich schemes. Lead actor Solomon (Shloyme) Mikhoels and director Alexey Granovsky were both key members of the sensationally modernist Moscow-based GOSET Soviet Yiddish Theater company, but unlike their legendary onstage creations together, this screen feature strives for ethnographic detail without experimental performance technique.

Likewise, production design here by Natan Altman, an avant garde painter, is esthetically faithful to traditional shtetl folk culture -- inspired by Jewish fieldwork studies of Sh. An-sky's expeditions into the late-Tsarist Pale of Settlement. Filmed on locations of quintessential shtetl Berditshev and cosmopolitan Odessa, Jewish Luck shared cinematographer Eduard Tisse with Sergei Eisenstein, whose epic Battleship Potemkin also staged scenes on the famous Odesa Steps during the same summer of 1925. Soviet Jewish author Isaac Babel wrote idiomatically sardonic intertitles for this silent Yiddish film, and its original live accompaniment was composed by GOSET musical director /conductor Lev (Leyb) Pulver, a conservatory-trained violinist who was raised playing weddings in a family of klezmorim.


"Bucolic in spite of itself, Jewish Luck is affectionate but unsentimental....Startlingly fresh and superbly controlled.... Briskly paced, skillfully alternating sight gags and character farce, Jewish Luck is dynamic rather than elegiac."
-- J. Hoberman, The Crooked Road of Jewish Luck [Art Forum]

This event is sponsored by a Humanities New York Action Grant and presented by 14Y and Yiddish New York with promotional support from YIVO and COJECO. 
Speakers
avatar for Lori Goldston

Lori Goldston

Classically trained and rigorously de-trained, possessor of a restless, semi-feral spirit, Lori Goldston is a cellist, composer, improvisor, producer, writer and teacher from  Seattle. Her voice as a cellist, amplified or acoustic, is full, textured, committed and original. A relentless... Read More →
avatar for Ilya Shneyveys

Ilya Shneyveys

Ilya Shneyveys (accordion/piano) is an international performer, accordionist and multi-instrumentalist, teacher, composer, arranger and producer of contemporary Jewish music, from klezmer and Yiddish folk song to fusion and experimental projects. A founding member of Berlin’s famous... Read More →

Sunday December 22, 2024 9:00pm - 11:30pm EST
Chapel - Hebrew Union College 1 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012
  Film (On-Site)

Attendees (6)


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