The Barhydt Organ Spotlight Series features master organists and pianists that show our beautiful Barhydt Organ and Steinway grand piano at their finest. Admission to all performances is free! Voluntary donations will be accepted at the door ($10 suggested).
In East and West, Molly Picon, star of 1920s Yiddish theater, plays the daughter of a rich, assimilated American who is invited to a family celebration in an Eastern European shtetl. Though her brash behavior alienates her from the locals, she is admired by a shy orthodox Talmudic scholar. Molly realizes too late that, in the course of a wedding that she thinks is a joke, she has actually been married. This entertaining comedy, which like many works of Yiddish cinema has only survived in fragmentary versions, was reconstructed by the Filmarchiv Austria. East and West was unlike any previous Jewish film. E. G. Fried, a Viennese (and presumably Jewish) newspaperman, began his favourable review by confessing the he ordinarily went out of his way to avoid those “badly costumed, ridiculously sentimental” Jewish-subject films which, most likely produced by Otto Kreisler, were “permeated with pogroms, Sabbath tales, and all manner of poorly acted nonsense.” But East and West, to which Fried was drawn solely on the basis of Picon’s reputation, was something else. This film “breathes true Jewish character,” even though “it does not satisfy – one might say, thank God – high literary expectations. (84 min.)
The film has been newly restored by Filmarchiv, Austria with an original score by master silent film pianist Donald Sosin and violinist Alicia Svigals, the world’s foremost exponent of the klezmer fiddle (klezmer is the traditional music of East European, Yiddish-speaking Jews). The duo are now touring and performing live with the film in ‘cine-concerts’ around the world.
ABOUT ALICIA SVIGALS & DONALD SOSIN
Alicia Svigals and Donald Sosin have been bringing audiences to their feet throughout the US and Europe with their unique and stirring violin and piano scores for Jewish-themed silent films. Sosin is one of the world’s top silent film musicians, and Svigals is the world’s leading klezmer violinist and a founder of the Grammy-winning Klezmatics. After meeting at a silent film festival in Italy, the two soon recorded their first original score for the 1923 German film The Ancient Law.
