Urban Peasants

The first section of the film consists of a no-image sound-track recording of a Yiddish language course that teaches us those expressions that will come in handy when we are far from home and need a toilet or a postage stamp. As Jacobs points out, there is of course, no country where Yiddish is a native language. There are pockets of elder citizens in various countries who speak it, as the members of the family whom we see later in the film do, but it is essentially an extinct language, the product of an oral tradition and only as a dead language is it a course of study. The second section of the film consists of silent 16mm home movies filmed in the ‘30s and ‘40s by Stella Weiss, a relative of Jacobs’ wife. Jacobs’ title refers to these transplanted people who in image after image display their smiles, dresses, children, tricycles, roller-skates and cars for the family camera – itself a leftover from a rich uncle. The movie footage from this family album is not manipulated by Jacobs, but speak silently, in Yiddish, for itself. The return of darkness and the Yiddish soundtrack at the end makes the irony of the film more pointed. Situation 8 of the lesson teaches us how to communicate “when you’re in trouble.” Yet if one thinks of the horrors in store for the Jews in Germany in the ‘30s and ‘40s, these everyday phrases seem sadly inadequate.