Joseph Green and Jan Nowina-Przybylski | אידל מיטן פֿידל (Yidl Mitn Fidl) (Yiddle with His Fiddle) / 1936

shifting gender

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Green (screenplay, based on the fiction by Konrad), Joseph Green and Jan Nowina-Przybylski (directors) אידל מיטן פֿידל (Yidl Mitn Fidl) (Yiddle with His Fiddle) / 1936

 

The plot of the most successful Yiddish film of all time is remarkably simple. Arie (Simcha Fostel) and his daughter Itke (Molly Picon) are Polish Jews, living hand to mouth, relying mostly on handouts from Itke playing her violin in the streets and market in the village of Kazimierz Dolny. When she returns home one day, she discovers her father and their few possessions on the street for their inability to the pay the rent. They have no choice now but to take to the road, but Arie is worried about the dangers a young girl will face on such a journey. To resolve the situation, Itke quickly dresses as a boy, transforming herself into a young teenage male named Yidl. Together the two began a long trek through the countryside, hitchhiking when they can, surviving through Yidl’s fiddling and singing and Arie’s bass-fiddle accompaniment as people toss a few coins from their windows.

     In one small town, however, they are bested wherever they go by another musical duo, a young man, Efraim Kalamutker (Leon Liebgold) and his father Isaac (Max Bozyk), the latter who plays a clarinet. As the father and son duo become increasingly furious with the other pair, and vice versa, the four finally compromise, joining together to create a small klezmer band that, on some days at least, is far more successful than they could have done as separate duos.

     Over a period of time the two elders become friends and Yidl falls in love with Efraim, in a situation very similar to the later Isaac Singer tale, made into a film by Barbra Streisand, Yentl (1983). Unlike Yentl, however, the totally unsuspecting Efraim develops no feelings of love toward Yidl. And when the group is hired to play at a wedding, where the unhappy bride, Teible (Dora Fakiel) is forced by her parents to marry a rich older man, Salman Gold (Samuel Landau) instead of her true love Yosl Feldman, Yidl finds a way for her to escape with the musicians. Teibele quickly joins up with performers as a singer, Efraim eventually falling in love with her—much to Yidl’s dismay.

      When they reach Warsaw, moreover, things begin to truly fall apart as first Isaac determines to marry a city woman he has long admired, particularly for her cooking; Teibele is hired to sing in concert hall show and Efraim has been signed as a performer in the orchestra, leaving Yidl and Arie much the way they began, all alone.

      However, behind the scenes, Yidl has worked to find Teibele’s lost lover. When he shows up she runs out on the concert debut at the last moment and Yidl is forced to replace her. In a brilliantly adlibbed comic song, Yidl reveals his/her true sexuality and his love of Efraim, who has also disappeared. Itke/Yidl is now asked to sign a contract to perform in the US, and when Efraim hears of the truth, her secret lover joins her and her father on the boat to the new world.

     The wonder of this work lies not in this simple plot, however, but in the excellent acting of all the characters and, in particular, of the young Molly Picon who not only, at times, convinces us that she truly is a young boy but, for the most part, joyfully rolls along with the rough and tumble world her male character experiences. Picon’s performance is what keeps the work together and gives credibility to the otherwise frail and somewhat fragmented tale.

      Some critics I previously read—although I have not been able to recover the sources of those essays that I encountered months before actually seeing this film—that perhaps the most important aspect of this film are the numerous extras culled from the Polish communities of Kazimierz Dolny and Warsaw who through their very images represent a Yiddish world that within a few short years would entirely disappear. Surely most of the extras in this film were sent off to concentration camps soon after the movie was released and died there along with the culture they represented. Watching this film, I was simultaneously intrigued and troubled at witnessing something that I knew would soon disappear, so much so that, at moments, I almost needed to turn away given the realization that I was watching the faces of those soon after murdered for being the very figures that this film celebrates.

      Even those who escaped to the US like Picon were forced to transform their talents in ways that erased the history portrayed in this last major Yiddish work of cinema.

      Picon was already a fairly noted figure by the time this film was made, and although the total budget of the film was only $50,000, the seemingly astronomical fee of $10,000 or a fifth of the film’s budget was paid for her to star in the work.

      The reason it appears in the pages of My Queen Cinema, of course, is because of Picon’s gender-crossing performance. Although one might imagine this was an odd experiment and certainly an exception in Yiddish drama and film, as Eve Sinclair reveals in her excellent piece “Gender Rebellion in Yiddish Film,” this was not Picon’s first appearance in a so-called trouser role. Sinclair writes:

 

“The 1921 show which launched Picon’s career ensured that, from the beginning, her fame was linked to her performance in boys’ clothing. Yankele featured Molly in the (masculine) title role wearing elaborate yeshive bokher and drummer- boy outfits. The play, written for Picon by her husband/ manager and sometime co-star, Jacob Kalich, was characterized in her autobiography as ‘the Yiddish Peter Pan.’ Picon, who had been born in New York in 1898, was sent to Europe in this show to prove herself with the Yiddish audiences of Warsaw.”

 

     In the 1923 film Ost und West (East and West) Picon also performed in Hasidic drag. Beginning as a spoiled Jewish American flapper named Mollie Brown, she is dragged back to the old world by her corrective father (Sidney Goldin) where she is forced for a period of time to become a yeshive boy. In other scenes she plays a tomboy through her behavior, punching the bag in which she has packed her clothing, “strutting around in boxing gloves,” and basically intimidating the religious folk who attempt to correct her queer behavior. At another point in the film at her cousin’s wedding, she disguises herself as a Hasidic boy, for which finally she is punished, and spanked by Mr. Brown. See my description of this film in the 1887-1929 volume of My Queer Cinema.

      Although these roles were surely highly radical for a theater and film world in which women seldom appeared and in which men often took over female roles, Sinclair is careful to point out that Picon performed as only boys, never as men, and throughout she maintained a spritely innocence in her role-playing. Sinclair summarizes:

      

“Molly Picon’s characters often combined rowdiness and modesty, a formula well-suited to audiences trying out new roles in a world quickly dropping its familiar social restraints. In this climate, the actress was given license to impersonate boys—but not men. She maintained a kind of worldly innocence, daring enough to delight viewers, but never going too far. Latter-day comparisons to characters such as Yentl or Victor/Victoria recognize the fascination common to stories of women ‘passing’ in a man’s world. But we should also take into account the notably untransgressive nature of the parts Picon chose to play, in which questions of her character’s sexuality came up only obliquely if at all. Molly Picon’s butchy stuff was mild even for her own period, if we remember any of the wilder female-to-male non-Yiddish entertainers.”

     There is an important incident, right after Yidl has imagined himself transforming back into a woman in order to accept Efraim’s reciprocal love, soon after which he falls into a lake, only to be saved by his imaginary lover. At that moment he almost forgets himself and as Efraim is carrying Yidl off from the water, the boy leans into to kiss his savior. Unlike Mandy Patinkin’s character Avigdor in Yentl, who would certainly have been tempted to complete the kiss, confused as Avigdor was about his increasing attraction to the young Yeshiva boy in that film, Efraim immediately pulls away and drops Yidl back into the water, startled by the event and clearly not at all interested in the boy as a sexual being. “And just to dispel any lingering notions of Jews as incapable of productive labor,” Sinclair adds, at another moment, “Froim is shown in an otherwise gratuitous scene doing carpentry— not merely a fiddler, he can handle hammer and nails!—at which Yidl, naturally, is hopeless.”

     The gender-crossing role, nonetheless, is absolutely essential to the plot of this wonderful Yiddish musical. In fact, without the concerns of how a young girl can adapt to a man’s world and without Picon’s comic abilities to carry the role off, there would be no major story to tell. Some of the scenes, indeed, remind us of the age-old problems of female drag performers as in movies such as William Wellman’s Beggars of Life (1928), Reinhold Schünzel’s Viktor/Viktoria (1933), or Geroge Cukor’s Sylvia Scarlett (1935) such as being asked to bed down snuggled up next to the male counterparts. Forgetting the homosexual implications of these requests—in Yidlle with his Fiddle, Efraim repeatedly requests the boy come lay down on the straw next to him—as a boy in drag Yidl must find a way to please his friend and yet keep his moral distance for fear of not only the sexual attraction but discovery of the ruse. Only in the first of these films, where the male is actually a gay man, is the problem easily resolved.

    Even dressing and undressing in the communal spaces in which the quartet live is problematic and presents a Yiddish girl with serious moral issues. Somehow, however, Picon is able to politely adjust to the situations at had without so much as a wink of indiscretion.

    Picon’s real tour de force of the film is her final last piece on stage as she somewhat unintentionally tears away the illusion as a sense confusion, confession, and emotional collapse overwhelms her portrayal of a being other than she truly is. In some respects, it is a grand heterosexual coming out, a feeling of exhilaration the way young gay men sometimes feel in finally being able to tell the truth about who they really are. That it is accomplished in partial rhyme, song, and spoken word combined gives proof to the sense of inclusion and a return to the real world after having lived a fantasy world created by society and sexual circumstance.

     If in the beginning Yidl might seem to represent simply a comic frame involving gender issues, in the end it becomes something far more important, as a young girl must suddenly come to terms with her maturing heterosexuality in the very same way that young lesbians and gay boys must finally face up to their sexual and gender identities. And in that respect, Yiddle with His Fiddle is a far more transgressive film that one might have first imagined.

 

Los Angeles, October 7, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).