As film critic and cultural historian Neal Gabler writes in his introduction to Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular & the New Land (published by Abrams Comic Art), Yiddish, which has as many words for fools as the Eskimos have for snow, possesses a unique power “to rip through the formalities, the prevarications, the pretensions, and the dishonesty.” His definition describes cartoonist Harvey Pekar, whose final work before his death last year was a set of panels, illustrating aspects of European Jewish history and the immigration to the New World, comprising the heart of Yiddishkeit. Pekar's longtime collaborator, Madison, WI-based historian Paul Buhle, who added other material to this literary-visual potpourri, edited the book.
Among the items in the grab bag of contents are pages dedicated to Jewish-American filmmakers and an account of the little-remembered Yiddish movie industry, an anti-Hollywood that thrived on the East Coast in the years before World War II. One of its leading figures, director Edgar G. Ulmer, is best known to devotees of classic Hollywood for the horror film The Black Cat (1934) and the film noir Detour (1945). None of his Hollywood work had discernable Jewish content. He expressed his heritage through a series of Yiddish movies shot in New Jersey in the late '30s. Grine Felder (1937), seen by a million Jews worldwide by one estimate, was Ulmer's most successful film in that genre. Blending folklore and fantasy, Grine Felder (Green Fields) was steeped in Sholem Aleichem and Marc Chagall.
Yiddishkeit is by no means a comprehensive study of Yiddish film, Jews in Hollywood or the leavening effect of the Jewish sensibility on the dour culture of WASP America. But it's a fun and informed read—one that will make many of us search for more material on the various subjects it touches.
