Sidney M. Goldin and Ivan Abramson | Ost und West (East and West) (aka Good Luck) / 1923

the boxer becomes a married lady

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sidney M. Goldin and Eugen Preiß (screenplay), Sidney M. Goldin and Ivan Abramson (directors) Ost und West (East and West) (aka Good Luck) / 1923

 

This silent Austrian classic which appeared originally in Yiddish and German, according to The Women’s Jewish Center is the oldest surviving Yiddish film.

     The work centers around the return of Morris Brownstein (Sidney M. Goldin), known in the New World as Brown, and his daughter Mollie (Molly Picon) from their home in the US to the father’s native Galicia* to attend a family wedding.

     For most of the film, the young American female Mollie behaves like a roughhousing tomboy, causing havoc among the Galician family and the local yeshiva boys equally. On the holy Day of Atonement, where the family fasts while spending the entire day in the synagogue, Mollie, who has grown terribly hungry, sneaks out of the services, returns home, and eats almost the entire chicken and other ingredients that her uncle’s cook as pre-prepared for the evening’s breaking of the fast. Having left the others nothing to eat, she is severely spanked by her indulgent father.

     But before she’s even recovered from those pains in the ass, she is ready to box in the ears of the servants who reported her as the culprit. Mollie is a big fan of boxing and has brought along her own gloves.

      At an early pre-wedding celebration, the rabbi arrives with several yeshiva boys. Her father begs Mollie, as she proceeds into the room where the boys have gathered, don’t play rough, “these are nice boys” he pleads, knowing that she could easily out wrestle and corrupt the innocent students. But before any of the adults know what’s happened, Mollie has jumped upon a table top to teach the yeshiva boys, the cook, and the cook’s boyfriend how to dance Western style. Again she is spanked by a father who has evidently no success in controlling his spoiled American daughter.

      In another incident, Mollie is nowhere to be found, and the adults look everywhere in an attempt to stop whatever antics she may be up to. She is discovered dressed as a yeshiva boy, singing and drinking as one of their kind. 

      What no one realizes, meanwhile, is that the jeshiva bucher boy, Jacob (Jacob Kalich), a rabbinic student who lives in the house and, as a “freeloader” is maltreated by the cook and butler, has fallen in love with wild American Mollie.

 

      When Mollie sees the bride-to-be dressed in a trial run in her wedding dress, she begs to borrow the veil, pretending to be a bride herself. Everyone goes along with the idea, quickly creating a huppah and scooping up Jacob from the kitchen to participate in the mock wedding ceremony with Mollie as the imaginary bride. They go through the basic elements of the ceremony, ending with a ring which the bride-to-be loans her, the cook, the butler, and others egging Jacob on to put the ring on her finger. The yeshiva boys, however, try to warn him, but eventually after holding back for several moments, he drops the ring upon her finger.

      When the rabbi and adults finally appear, they are horrified by the fake ceremony, not just because of the mockery of a holy rite, but because by Jewish law once a man puts a ring on the finger of a young woman he is legally married to her.

     At this very moment, the film turns from a comic work centered upon the attempts of a wild Westerner to defy the fustian traditions and values of the East, to a far more serious exploration of the consequences of that attitude.

       Mollie and her father are horrified by the realization that she is now married to a traditional student of the Torah. The wild Western woman cannot imagine her life as a traditional Jewish bride. The rabbi insists that Jacob renounce his marriage so that they can divorce. But strangely, without giving his reasons, he defies the rabbi.

       Because he has gone against the authorities, Jacob is ousted from his school and sent away from the Galician Brownstein household. Living for a while with a loving, poverty-stricken couple, Jacob eventually takes up the offer of his wealthy Viennese uncle to come live with him, announcing to Mollie and her father that, if after five years she still does not wish to live with him, he will grant her a divorce.

       The Browns, Mollie and her father, are forced accordingly to travel throughout Europe, the father hoping to keep his daughter’s mind from the dreadful reality that she may be facing. After a continental tour, in which Brown is absent from his business responsibilities, they arrive in Vienna.

       Jacob, meanwhile, entering the city as an outsider himself, and being mocked for his traditional Talmudist garb, gradually becomes assimilated, like his uncle, into Viennese society just as had so very many thousands of others during the very same years. But Jacob is, after all, a truly brilliant young man and eventually becomes a noted writer under the name of Ben Ali.

      Hearing that his wife and her father are now in Vienna, he arranges that his uncle invite them to his reading at the Oriental Society, which at the same event awards Ben Ali an honorary membership.

     Taken with the now quite handsome man whom she vaguely recognizes as being familiar, Mollie quickly becomes one of his fans. And meeting him for dinner at his uncle’s house and other activities, she begins to fall in love with Ben Ali.

    The five years are now about to pass, the uncle and his wife inviting the Browns to a special breakfast. Suddenly, Jacob appears in his Talmudic garb saying that he will gladly divorce Mollie is she desires. 

     She is about to claim that right and sign the contract, but the boy suddenly pulls off his costume revealing that he is now Ben Ali, she finally coming to the realization that she is already married to the man who she truly loves.

       The first long portion of this film clearly reveals Picon’s character as a dangerous outsider, perhaps even a young woman with more masculine behavior than female traits. And in some respects, this work is even more rowdy and truly sexually transgressive than her later Yiddle with a Fiddle (1936), where she is dressed for most of the film in male drag. Here she appears in drag only for a few moments, but her behavior throughout serves basically as a mockery of the paternal and male-centered Yiddish and Jewish traditions, something almost unthinkable in 1923. It is only when she is accidentally married and comes to be controlled by circumstances, turning from a tomboy in a mature woman that redeems her behavior and likely permitted her audiences to perceive her previous behavior as simply an example of childlike Western mischief. 

      But in a sense, both Mollie in Galicia and Jacob in Vienna share a deep kinship in being outsiders in worlds they inherently disrespect. In both instances, Picon’s and Kalich’s characters come to terms with those new worlds in which they have relocated by assimilating and learning to respect values and individuals different from their own selves.

     The film, accordingly, becomes almost a primer for both the new and old worlds to find a way to marry and embrace both the laws and traditions of the past and the rapidly changing and ultimately totally altering world of the present. Like the works of Sholem Aleichem such as Tevye and His Daughters (טבֿיה דער מילכיקער, the source of Fiddler of the Roof) which appeared in 1894, one might argue that Ost und West served an important educational role for Jewish assimilation while the later Yiddle and His Fiddle worked more as a nostalgic view of what was already nearly lost and would fully disappear in only a few years.

 

*Considered the poorest region of the former Austria-Hungarian empire, Galicia was located between Poland and Hungary, with its major city being Lviv; it is now part of both Ukraine and Poland.

 

Los Angeles, October 12, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).