PICTURE SAMPLES FROM VERSION 1:

PICTURE SAMPLES FROM VERSION 2:

NOTE -  There are two versions of this film to choose from:

1. A version with hard-encoded Yiddish and English subtitles  (98 mins. with some softness and pixellization);
2. A version with hard-encoded Russian and English subtitles  (89 mins., better quality and with authentic Yiddish music)

Jewish Luck was one of the first Soviet Yiddish films to be released in the United States during the 1920s.  Based on Sholem Aleichem's series of stories featuring the character Menakhem Mendl, the film revolves around this daydreaming entrepreneur, who specializes in doomed strike-it-rich schemes.  Some of the finest artistic talents among Soviet Jewry appears in this film and it's been speculated that Eduard Tisse's filming of certain scenes carried over into a much more famous project, namely, Battleship Potemkin, where the well-known "Odessa steps" scene mirrors the very same setting of the finale in Jewish Luck.  The original Russian intertitles for this film were written by the famous author Isaac Babel, who later fell victim to the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s.  At the time the film was made, however, the USSR was one of the very few European powers alleging its protection and promotion of minorities' rights, a declaration that contrasted glaringly with the situation of minorities in most of the newly independent eastern European nation states.  Not long after Stalin took power in 1924, however, the superficially liberal policies of the Bolsheviks would be eliminated and replaced with stifling conformist dictates.

See the first sentences above for information on the two versions you may choose.

FILM SAMPLE FROM VERSION 1:

FILM SAMPLE FROM VERSION2: