Starring Boris Thomashefsky in his only film role!
FESTIVAL SCREENINGS
Pioneer Valley Jewish Film Festival (2012)
BAR MITZVAH is the 19th consecutive film restored by NCJF to premiere at the Jerusalem International Film Festival.
Believing his wife lost at sea, Israel remarries a scheming gold-digger. Shock, tears and laughs abound when his beloved wife returns on the eve of her son's bar mitzvah after a ten-year absence. Starring Yiddish theater superstar Boris Thomashefsky in his only film performance, this musical melodrama is a masterwork of shund, the bread and butter of the Yiddish theater.
- The New Yorker
- Village Voice
Israel (Boris Thomashefsky), a Polish widower whose wife Leah was lost at sea ten years earlier, is preparing his son Yudele for his bar mitzvah. Israel has remarried Rosalie (Anita Chayes), a schemer planning to rob him and run off with her lover. Leah (Regina Zuckerberg) survived the shipwreck and has recently regained her memory. She discovers from her in-laws that Israel has remarried and determines not to cause her family any more pain (“I can’t live anymore, I’m going back to the ocean”). She secretly attends Yudele’s bar mitzvah ceremony before leaving, but is revealed by her sobbing when Yudele chants the Kaddish (prayer for the dead) for his “dead” mother. Israel discovers Rosalie’s treacheries and her lover pulls a gun. All is set right, however, when Israel is saved by his daughter’s happy-go-lucky American suitor. In the end, the con artists are arrested and the family is reunited. The drama is punctuated with numerous songs typical of the vaudeville stage and the Lower East Side Yiddish theater. Highlights include the hit song “Erlekh Zayn” (“Be Virtuous”) sung by Thomashefsky and an entertaining song-and-dance number by Sam Colton as the young American suitor.
An actor, singer and producer, Boris Thomashefsky (1868-1939) was a pioneer of the American Yiddish Theater and one its central figures for nearly fifty years. Boris and his wife, Yiddish actress Bessie Thomashefsky, built a 2nd Avenue theater in 1912, published their own magazine and encouraged new generations of young artists. Enormously popular, with a flamboyant personality and a famously tumultuous personal life, Thomashefsky was the superstar of Yiddish theater. 30,000 people lined the streets of the Lower East Side on the occasion of his funeral in 1939.
An American-made feature film about Jewish Poland (and the Old Country more generally), Bar Mitzvah shows how American and Polish Jews caricaturized each other during this period.
Bar Mitzvah represents the pinnacle of low budget movie making. Aside from its unequivocal documentary and historical value, it is a great piece of kitsch. More accurately it is a masterwork of shund – popular Yiddish lowbrow theatrical fare that was the bread and butter of Yiddish theatrical productions. As critic J. Hoberman writes, after lamenting the film’s less then stellar production values, “And yet, one must be grateful that Bar Mitzvah was made, for, more than any other performer, its star was the popular Yiddish theater incarnate.”
Bar Mitzvah opened on March 15, 1935, at the Clinton Theater on the Lower East Side. It had a reasonable theatrical run in the US and remained in distribution for several years. It was a more substantial hit overseas.Produced in New York in 1935, Bar Mitzvah was written and directed by Henry Lynn based on a play of the same name written by Boris Thomashefsky. Thomashefsky was 67 years old when he starred in Bar Mitzvah; he died four years later. Bar Mitzvah features his only film performance.
The National Center for Jewish Film has restored and preserved the sole existing 35mm nitrate element of this film, which included the labor-intensive patching and repairing of damaged film materials. While the original Yiddish-language print contained a limited number of English subtitles, NCJF created over 200 new subtitles, including all of the songs. All of the film materials are owned by the National Center for Jewish Film.
Preservation and restoration of Bar Mitzvah was made possible by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Eastman Kodak Company, with support from Brandeis University, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and The National Center for Jewish Film’s Reel Funders.
Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony, is the grandson of Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky. A two-minute segment of Bar Mitzvah was preserved by The National Center for Jewish Film and showcased as part of the original theatrical production “The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater” written and performed by Michael Tilson Thomas at Carnegie Hall in New York City in April 2005. The production has since been performed in San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles and Tanglewood.
Village Voice & Huffington Post (PDF)
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