Мы едем в Америку [My yédem v Amériku]/We Are Going to America/
אין פארן
מיר אמצריקצ [Mir forn in Amerike] 1992 Russia Lenfilm/UniRem
(81 minutes) directed by Yefim Gribov, co-written by Gribov and Arkadii Krasilshchikov,
cinematography by Pavel Barskii and Denis Shchiglovskii; music by Mikhail Gluz;
Tamara Lipartiya, editor.
This remarkable film tells the tale of a provincial Russian Jewish family’s
journey ‘to America’ in the second decade of the 20th century through the eyes
of an alert and sensitive adolescent boy.
Motl (Dima Davydov), who talks to birds, sees ghosts, and rides trains, brings
to mind a young Bob Dylan. It is easy to imagine Motl’s stories as the kind of tableau
vivant Dylan might concoct about himself or a forbear.
Inspired by Sholom Aleichem’s fiction and Marc Chagall’s paintings, the
movie gives an unsentimental and even corrective view to the cheerful,
cherry-cheeked cherubic images in such portrayals as Fiddler on the Roof
(1971) based on the same artists’ work. The people portrayed in this film are sympathetic
but rough and unsophisticated, highly religious and superstitious rural
bumpkins.
The film’s rich sepia tones alternate with muted colors which lend to a
sense of one’s clearing the cobwebs of memory. Its kaleidoscopic effects make
it feel like the recalling or retelling in an old man’s memory of events in his
faraway childhood, or his tales remembered and later retold by a younger
relative. The stories are rich in impression, sensation and sharp images, with telling
details that make them authentic.
Dima Davydov as Motl in Yefim Gribov's We Are Going to America. |
In fact, the most fanciful parts often feel as though to be the truest.
They would speak for what a narrator remembers it felt like to experience these
things, rather an attempt to make a documentary record. Characters float and
fade in and out like vapor; many of the factual details are long gone because
they were unimportant to the teller in the first place, even had they been
known. Images coined moments that stayed with the teller forever, and captivate
the viewer.
Motl, his widowed Mama (Lyubov Rumyantseva), Motl’s much older brother Elya
(Semyon Strugachev) and Elya’s wife Brokha (Danuta Slavgorodskaya) sell their
home and leave their native Kazeltse to travel by train to an unnamed ‘border
town.’ They take with them Pinya (Vadim Danilyevskii), a devout young neighbor.
In the border town they expect an ‘emigrant committee’ to clear them for
passage to America.
Motl and his family are shadowed by Korotyshka (Ivan Bashev), a malevolent Gentile
dwarf with close-cropped hair, a long overcoat and a high-pitched voice, ever
in the background when unsavory things invade their world. Korotyshka appears
to embody a pervasive Old World evil, particularly the anti-Semitism that preys
on them wherever they go.
On the train to the border town the family encounters others headed for
America. Motl meets Masha (Olya Maksimova), a Gentile girl his age also
travelling with her parents to America. Reb Leizer (Rafail Mishylovich), a
rabbi from Tul’chin (a Ukrainian town south of Vinnitsa where the film actually
was shot), introduces the family to Taibl (Baiba Kranats) and her brother Meyer
(Mikhail Maizel), orphans whose ‘father was killed in a pogrom, and mother died
of grief.’ Reb Leizer wants to broker a marriage between Taibl and Pinya,
purportedly to insure their success in the New World.
The family is robbed when the train arrives at its destination (Korotyshka
hobbles away into the station). After waiting in a long line, they make a rambling,
emotional appeal for help to an official (Yurii Reshetnikov). They each suppose
and prayerfully repeat throughout the film that a ‘better life’ awaits them in
America. Could life be worse than in the backward, pogrom-plagued shtetl? But
no one is clear as to exactly what this new life will be.
The official is too patient with these people to be a Russian Gentile. He
is presumably a Russia-based representative of the Jewish Colonization
Association, an international organization founded in the late nineteenth
century by wealthy British and French Jews to facilitate Jewish emigration from
Russia. He sends them to a doctor for eye examinations—another long line—on the
theory that it is best to know in advance whether anyone has a medical
condition that would cause U.S. Immigrations authorities to deny entry and deport
them back to Europe.
Meanwhile, Motl meets Kopl (Volodya Belinskii), an older Jewish boy travelling
on his own, who teases the adolescent about women. Motl and Kopl tumble into
Feigele (Tatyana Bubelnikova), a flaky, sexy young woman ‘mystic’ from Kopl’s
shtetl who Kopl says knows about devils, spirits and witches.
Feigele, whose name is from the Yiddish for ‘bird,’ entices Motl to lick
sugar from her hand the way Motl feeds his occasional bird companion.
There is a traditional wedding. One of the party fails the eye exam (trachoma,
a highly contagious infectious eye disease difficult to cure, was a cause for
denying entry to the United States). This means that all either will stay in
Russia—or devise an alternative route to cross the border to get to the
Promised Land.
The haunting cantor improvisations that comprise much of the soundtrack are
sung by Boris Finkelshtein, chief cantor of the Grand Choral Synagogue
of St. Petersburg. The English subtitles of the spoken Russian are good; however there are no subtitles for the occasional
Yiddish and liturgical Hebrew.
The only blemish noted in this otherwise meticulous work was Kopl’s parting
anachronism that he would meet Motl ‘in tails and a top hat, swinging a walking
stick,’ in Brighton Beach. It would take about twenty more years before this
Brooklyn neighborhood would begin to become a destination for Jewish
immigrants.
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