Interesting to see the Jewish Soul set. Tevye was the film that a 17 minute long excerpt was included from on the very first Treasures From American Film Archives set released all the way back in 2000. It will be good to finally have a chance to see the whole film! Here's the write up from the accompanying book of programme notes written by Scott Simmon:
Scott Simmon in the Treasures From American Film Archives book wrote:Tevye, a contentious masterwork within the little-known U.S. Yiddish-language cinema, re-created the nineteenth century Ukraine on a 130-acre potato farm near Jericho, Long Island in the summer of 1939. Produced by Harry Ziskin, co-owner of the largest kosher restuarant in Times Square, Tevye had a seventy-thousand dollar budget, tiny by Hollywood standards but lavish compared to the sixteen-thousand dollar average for Yiddish features in the thirties. With its professional look and full orchestration, Tevye had high aspirations.
The on-screen title awards possessive credit to the celebrated Russian Jewish author of the Teyve the Dairyman stories as: "Sholem Aleichem's Tevye." Father of seven troublesome daughters, Tevye was Aleichem's best known character, the much beset voice of eight monologues published between 1895 and 1914. The film's guiding auteur, however is director Maurice Schwartz (1890-1960), who also plays the title character and wrote the screenplay based on his 1919 stage success with his Yiddish Art Theater. Two of Tevye's daughters in the Aleichem stories - one who elopes to Siberia with a revolutionary and another who marries a Christian - are combined in the film's Khave (played by Schwartz's neice, Miriam Riselle). In the relatively self contained excerpt seen here - which begins about fifteen minutes into the film - the conflicts are generational (father versus daughter), political (tradition versus the thought of Tolstoy and Gorky), and religious. This last clash between Jews and Christians makes Tevye rare even in Yiddish cinema. While by convention the village priest and Khave's Christian sweetheart speak fluent Yiddish, the two characters' broad accents are part of the satire.
The film plays out - in scenes not included here - in a way to demolish Khave's youthful optimism about religious tolerance and ethnic harmony. Not long after her Christian wedding, the pogrom predicted by Tevye arrives: the now widowed Tevye has to flee the village; Khave abandons her husband and throws herself in front of her father's wagon. Reluctantly, he allows her to join him on the road to Palestine. One must wait for the Hollywood musical version, Fiddler on the Roof (1971), for an assimilationist ending, in which Tevye reluctantly blesses his daughter and her Christian husband before departing with his wife for America.
Tevye's Christian characters, all threatening or slightly dim-witted, provoked outcries in the U.S. Yiddish press: Morgn Frayhayt lamented the "cheap Jewish chauvinism" in scenes it called "insulting - not for the goyim but rather for the dignity of a Yiddish film and Jewish artists". Still, there's an uncompromising point of view here, possible only in American independent cinema. Back in 1936, Schwartz had proposed filming in Poland, but producer Joseph Green recognised that the intermarriage subject would be impossible given that country's rising anti-Semitism. There is also something prescient and chilling in the 1939 filming of the final scene excerpted here, when Tevye argues with his daughter about whether their Christian neighbours could ever join a persecution of the Jews. Because the production ran a few days over schedule, Leon Liebgold, who plays Khave's husband, Fedya, was forced to delay his Atlantic crossing to look into the situation of his Polish family. In the event he couldn't leave America at all. Before the film wrapped, Poland had been invaded by Hitler.
(I should note that Fiddler on the Roof's ending has never really struck me as being
truly 'assimilationist', as the daughter marrying out of the faith is still abandoned to the looming shadows of the Third Reich whilst the rest of the family escape to the new world. So she is implied to be on course to get the most extreme form of ironic comeuppance for committing her transgressions. Its the main reason why I am not too fond of that film but is an interesting twist on the ending of this earlier film as described in the write up above! I am not entirely sure which one sounds the worse of the two, but both do not appear to treat the daughter character very well)