[Jewish] Screening of The Cantor's Son

[Staci Akselrod]

Have you heard of the first talkie The Jazz Singer?
Did you know it had a Yiddish cousin?
Come see how The Jazz Singer was remade for a Yiddish-speaking audience!

Special screening of The Cantor?s Son in Yiddish with English subtitles

Tuesday, April 17th, 2012, 5:30PM

Flavin Auditorium (School of Management Room 137) University of
Massachusetts Amherst

Introduced by Dr. Rachel Rubinstein,
Associate Professor of American Literature and Jewish Studies at Hampshire
College


The Center for Jewish Film explains that this Yiddish feature film musical
drama, THE CANTOR?S SON, first released in 1937, marks the screen debut of
singer and cantor Moishe Oysher.  The film features Oysher in the title role
of a wayward Jewish boy who makes his way from his Polish shtetl to New
York's Lower East Side.  While washing floors in a nightclub several years
later he is ?discovered? and becomes a well-known singer.  Torn between Old
World tradition and New World expression, he returns home to Eastern Europe
to join his parents and childhood sweetheart, amidst new choices and
challenges.

In his book on Yiddish cinema Bridge of Light, critic J. Hoberman calls The
Cantor?s Son an "anti-Jazz Singer," further remarking that the film's story
parallels Oysher's own struggle to reconcile his cantorial calling with a
career in show business.  Like his film character, Oysher, born in
Bessarabia and the son and grandson of cantors, was both a matinee idol and
a celebrated cantor.  Oysher was married to his co-star Florence Weiss.  The
most expensive Yiddish production of the era, THE CANTOR?S SON was shot near
the Poconos and presents rare glimpses of the 1930s Lower East Side(the film
includes rare glimpses of the Lower East Side and of 2nd Avenue Yiddish
theater marquees of the 1930s). (from synopsis provided by the National
Center for Jewish Film)



Rachel Rubinstein received her B.A. in English from Yale University and her
Ph.D. from the Department of English and American Literature and Language at
Harvard University.  She is currently the dean of academic support and
advising at Hampshire College.  Professor Rubinstein's teaching and research
interests range across American literature and culture, with a particular
focus on ethnicity and immigration, as well as Jewish and Yiddish
literatures.  She serves on the editorial board of Prooftexts: A Journal of
Jewish Literary History and co-edited Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon:
Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth R. Wisse (Harvard U Press,
2008). Her work has appeared in American Quarterly and Shofar: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, and she is the author of
Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination (Wayne State
University Press, 2010).


Sponsored by the National Yiddish Book Center with support from the Jack and
Ruthe B. Cowl Center for Jewish Culture and the Righteous Persons Foundation
and by the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University
of Massachusetts Amherst

This event is free, open to the public and wheelchair accessible.  For more
information, email judaic at judnea.umass.edu or call 413-545-2550.