WORLD PREMIERE OF RESTORATION AND NEW TRANSLATION

“A little gem–melodrama, musical numbers, historic sweep, a woman seducing a fella not knowing he is betrothed to the daughter she abandoned!” (Yiddishist Mikhl Yashinsky)

Out of circulation for generations, Al Khet marks the film debut of comedy duo Shimon Dzigan and Israel Schumacher and one of the very first Yiddish sound films made in Poland. Set in a small Jewish town during World War I, the film follows a rabbi’s daughter who becomes pregnant by a German-Jewish officer. After his death in battle, she abandons the child and flees to America as the town is evacuated before the Russian advance. It is Dzigan and Schumacher who recover the baby and reunite mother and child in the last reel. Blending melodrama, comedy and music (including a song, “Shpil Mir a Yidishe Tango”), “Al Khet has the heavy chiaroscuro of a contemporary European art film [and the story] … is certainly less oblivious to historical events than comparable American melodramas, haunted as it is by the wartime destruction of Galicia.” (J. Hoberman, Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds)

Newly-restored by the National Center for Jewish Film in memory of Eda Zimler Schiff.

Part of the Tribute to Dzigan and Schumacher