- Studio: International Film Circuit
- Release Date: Jul 6, 2011
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100It is a rich, beautifully organized and illustrated modern history of Eastern European Jewry examined through the life and work of the author, born Sholem Rabinovich in Pereyaslav (near Kiev) in 1859.
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88Both the man and his times resist a compact 93 minutes. This much anguished history, and Aleichem's inspired literary response to that history, has difficulties being confined to conventional documentary feature length. Yet Dorman's touch is sure, his pacing fleet and his chorus of voices marvelous.
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80He's often called the Yiddish Mark Twain; supposedly Twain, upon hearing this, said to tell Aleichem that Twain was the American Sholem Aleichem.
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80This absorbing PBS-style documentary by Joseph Dorman follows Aleichem from his early years in the Russian shtetl of Voronko through the pogroms that would drive the Jewish diaspora of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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75Not often does a film double as a literary critic, but this is the Northrop Frye of docs. Essentially, it revises and sharpens the blunted reputation of a great writer.
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75In recording the timeless traditions of Jewry, he created a new one: the identity crisis that rides on the back of laughter.
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75To borrow just a few of Aleichem's words that are ingrained in Jewish culture: "It could be worse."
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75This is a person you'd enjoy spending time with and learning from. That's certainly the case with Dorman's film.
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75There are many scholars and critics here, most of them useful and pleasant, who obviously love him. Most remarkably, there is his granddaughter, Bel Kaufman, still looking terrific at 100, who had writing in her blood and wrote "Up the Down Staircase."
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Aug 18, 201175What makes the movie succeed is that Dorman doesn't only focus on the life of Aleichem (who had a tendency to build fortunes and then lose them), but a look at a society long gone and the legacy and traditions they and Aleichem left to Jews around the world today.
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75Offers well-chosen selections from Aleichem's darkly humorous work.
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75Not only sets up the writer's life as representative of the transitions of early modern Jewish life, but posits his oeuvre as an ongoing chronicle of the shift from a vibrant, unified Yiddish culture to a fractured world-in-exile.
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70Additional substance comes from Dorman's ongoing use of period photos and newsreel footage. In the spirit of the Sholem Aleichem oeuvre, Laughing in the Darkness is a collective family album.
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70Joseph Dorman's intelligent if conventional bio-doc of Sholem Aleichem proves particularly revealing, since the famed, dandyish Yiddish writer led a life as full of colorful ironies as the motormouth schlemiels that populate his stories.
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Jul 18, 201160The author's texts are used as biographical inventory, and they're not simply read, they're performed, sometimes to the detriment of the prose.