Filmed in Russia, this Yiddish-language film is based on a bittersweet tale by Sholom Alecheiem. Poverty-stricken Jewish ghetto dweller Shimmen-Eyle scrimps and saves enough to buy a female goat to provide milk for his children. But when he arrives back in the village, he discovers that he's dragged home a male goat. The poor man becomes the laughing stock of the village, because of his presumed lack of business sense. Soon, however, it turns out that Shimmen-Eyle is the victim of a practical joker, and when the villagers find out who perpetrated the hoax, they give the jolly jokester a sound thrashing. A happy ending? Not quite: The Czarist police, caring nothing about the reason behind the whole affair, order Shimmen-Eyle out of the village for inciting a riot!  The film was "re-worked" and released in 1933, but only to the extent that a narrator is telling the story matching the silent events on the screen and only part of it's been translated!

DVD-R is silent, but has been modified to have someone telling the story in Yiddish intertiles with occasional, hard-encoded English subtitles, which, while very typical for the period, left the person watching it to guess the rest of the unsubtitled film, if he didn't understand the language.  Approx. 75 mins. + a 7 min. newsreel.  Soft picture, as is to be expected from a film this old  (see sample!)