Product Review

Menakhem Mendel is a lunftmensch (one who buys and sells dreams) who will try any strike-it-rich scheme to survive with his family in Tsarist Russia, from corset seller to matchmaker. Based on Sholom Aleichem's story, MENDEL THE MATCHMAKER, this pearl of the Yiddish cinema is the film debut of the great Yiddish State Art Theater actor, Solomon Mikhoels who gives to the main character a Chaplinesque aura. Before bringing this story to the screen, Alexander Granovdky first staged a dramatized version of the Menakhem Mendel stories by the Moscow Yiddish State Theater. This film adaptation captures the pre-October misery of the people of many archetypal Jewish tumbledown small Ukrainian town. "Mikhoel attains the summit of ethnic Jewish dandyism. Here is a ghetto-figure in concentrared form." Osip Mandelstam