Sholem Aleichem: Laughing In The Darkness

The wide world knows Sholem Aleichem best for providing the source material for what would become ‘Fiddler On The Roof’. But remembering Sholem Aleichem for ‘Fiddler’ would be like remembering Shakespeare for ‘West Side Story’.

Masters of fiction on the page can also be masters of fiction on the face. But Joseph Dorman’s excellent documentary Sholem Aleichem: Laughing In The Darkness offers such an abundance of photographic portraits of its subject that a reliable composite image emerges.

The wide-set eyes betray keenness and merriment. The man dresses well and has a touch of the dandy, thanks to his longish wavy hair and the droopy mustache of his Van Dyke beard. He also evinces an air of slight melancholy, as of someone who knows how often we laugh in lieu of sighing. It’s easy to understand why Sholem Aleichem was referred to as ‘the Jewish Mark Twain’. This is a person you’d enjoy spending time with and learning from. That’s certainly the case with Dorman’s film.

In a way, the documentary is a kind of prequel to Dorman’s previous one, Arguing The World (1998). The New York intellectual milieu that he chronicled there can be traced back to the Eastern European shtetls Sholem Aleichem made his subject matter. What Dorman presents, really, is a portrait of the world as well as the man who so famously recorded it.

‘His genius was he saw where Jews were going, but he also knew where they came from,’ says Aaron Lansky, of the National Yiddish Book Center, in Amherst. ‘He gave us the literature which could bridge a gap at exactly that moment in history where we were shifting not from one generation to the next but one epoch to the next.’

– Mark Feeney, The Boston Globe