Gilbert hatte den jüdischen Jungen aus Polen vor 14 Jahren in seinem Haus aufgenommen, um die musikalische Entwicklung des Ausnahmetalents zu fördern. Martin wuchs mit ihm auf und betrachtete ihn als Bruder. Er kann Dovidl, wie der Junge daheim genannt werden wollte, nicht vergessen. 35 Jahre später begibt er sich, einer vagen Spur folgend, auf eine Reise nach Polen und nach New York, um ihn zu finden. Es begleiten ihn die Erinnerungen an sein Aufwachsen während des Krieges mit dem rebellischen, von einer Aura der Einsamkeit umgebenen Jungen.
Based her grandfather’s boyhood in St. Louis, Yasmin Gorenberg tells a story of the pain passed from refugee parents to their children and the hope that can overcome it. “40 Nickels” captures the image of a generation of immigrants to the United States in the 1920’s and 1930’s and through that spotlights the effects of the 1919 pogroms in Eastern Europe. This is a film about parents and children: how trauma never leaves a family, and how hope and resilience is also passed down. It asks the question: Can a new generation look at the world with wonder rather than fear?
Set in Berlin and New York's Lower East Side, The Great Yiddish Love stars the self-exiled Marlene Dietrich and her Nazi-endorsed replacement, Zarah Leander. It is a melodrama of love, emigration, and betrayal reassembled from Hollywood, German Ufa and Yiddish films from the 1930s and 40s.
Only a handful of Yiddish poets remain alive. Chava Alberstein sets out to interview those last writers of Yiddish poetry, to hear their poems and stories. Along the way, she sings a collection of Yiddish folk songs.
East Side is a brand new yiddish DVD written and directed by Ari Abramowitz. Thrilling, exciting, dramatic and emotional, perfect for the entire family.
This film is the story of a man’s lifelong search for authentic Yiddish folk music and of his unique archive, which was presumed to be lost forever. Moyshe Beregovsky, a musician and scholar, crisscrossed Ukraine with phonograph in hand during the most dramatic years of Soviet history in order to record and study the traditional music of Ukrainian Jewry. His work began in the 1920’s and led to his arrest and imprisonment in a Stalinist labor camp in 1950. Most of those he recorded on hundreds of fragile wax cylinders were shot by the Nazis and tossed into countless mass graves. Ultimately, Beregovsky succeeded in saving the musical heritage of the centuries-old Yiddish civilization. He rescued the Living Voice of his people from the flames of the Holocaust but paid for it with his life. With this introduction, Yelena Yakovich one of the leading Russian documentary film-makers, begins her latest work, Song Searcher.
Every family has its own fictions: why are they invented, what social values do they reflect and how do later generations interpret them? How is political identity formed - passed down, integrated or rejected - within one family? The tale traverses the Pale, the New World and back to the Old World.