Joseph Dorman’s wonderful documentary uses a stunning harvest of photos and film clips to examine the life, art, and context of the man born Solomon Rabinovich, whose stories made literature of Yiddish, inspiring his people and (no minor thing) Fiddler on the Roof. Humor was his central tool for understanding pain, poverty, and identity (“To make people laugh was almost a sickness with me”). A tremendous pathos emerges, for Yiddish was dying even as this genius lifted it to glory, and most of his Eastern European Jewish world died in the Nazi hell (a fate he intuited, though dead by 1916). Scholars such as Dan Miron and Hillel Halkin offer wise thoughts, but the great words are Aleichem’s. (2011) — David Elliott
This movie is not currently in theaters.