If I were a Rothschild

Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness

Crit

Excellent documentary about the inventor of Yiddish literature, his life in the Pale of Russia and later in an America he loved that didn't seem to love him back--until his funeral in New York, attended by some 200,000 mourners, an event one of the film's talking heads calls a flashpoint in demonstrating the political force of the city's and the nation's Jews.

More important than his life, of course, has been his long literary afterlife, not just the popularization of his stories about Tevye the dairyman but the survival of a language once widely deemed too common to be literary and later turned too uncommon to be allowed to disappear.

Most bizarre fact I learned: Russian was the only language spoken in the adult Sholem Rabinovich's home; in other words, his many children could not read (or even have intelligibly read to them) his stories.