Portraits of two beloved icons — Sholom Aleichem and Theodore Bikel — are woven together in this enchanting new documentary. The two men have much in common: wit, wisdom and talent, all shot through with deep humanity and Yiddishkeit. Theodore Bikel, the unstoppable performer whose career spans more than 150 screen roles (including an Oscar-nominated turn in The Defiant Ones) and countless stage and musical productions, is also the foremost interpreter of Sholom Aleichem's work. Now 90, Bikel has played Tevye the Milkman on stage more than 2,000 times, and he has animated Aleichem's work through his creation of two celebrated musical plays about the great Russian author. The film combines Bikel's charismatic storytelling and masterful performances with a broader exploration of Aleichem's remarkable life and work. A pioneer of modern Jewish literature who championed and luxuriated in the Yiddish language, Sholom Aleichem created dozens of indelible characters. His Tevye the Milkman, Motl the Cantor's Son, and Menachem Mendl — "shtetl Jews" for whom humor and pathos were two sides of the same Yiddish coin — remain invaluable windows into pre-war Eastern European Jewish life, real and imagined.
Film provided by The National Center for Jewish Film, www.jewishfilm.org
Preceded by:
Moses on the Mesa
Moses on the Mesa is inspired by the real life of Solomon Bibo, a young Jewish man from Germany who came to the Wild West in the 1800s to join his brother in their mercantile business. He learned to ride a horse, to shoot a gun, to play poker with outlaws, and to make friends with the “Indians” from his grandfather’s tall tales. He married a beautiful Acoma woman, battled against crooked government agents, and became the governor of the indigenous Acoma Pueblo. Life threw him many curves after that: he fought for progress, but lost to tradition; his friends turned against him; great earthquakes and great depressions wiped him out—and he always fought back, always remained a Jew: a Moses on the Mesa.
Writer/director Paul Ratner is scheduled to join us for a Q&A after the film.