Seekers of Happiness () is a 1936 Soviet film about Jewish settlers relocating to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the far east of the Soviet Union. It is also known by its alternative name, A Greater Promise.
Plot The film tells the story of a Jewish family relocating to the JAO (a.k.a. Birobidžan). "The plot lays out a successful solution to the 'Jewish Question' through two love stories and a crime" in the JAO. The love stories and crime provide a narrative basis to demonstrate how several obstacles are overcome:
The end to impoverishment of the Jewish population; The transformation of Jews into farmers; Shifting the social structure of the Jews by integrating them into a “productive work” environment; Replacing formerly religious social with secular socialist institutions; and The sublimation of religiously and culturally based contradictions between different nationalities by virtue of a secular socialist Russian and Jewish culture
Dvoira is the matriarch of a family that travels to Birobidžan in order to find a happy, economically and politically untroubled life. In the first sequence of the film we see the migrant family, consisting of Dvoira, her two daughters, Rosa and Basya, her son Lyova, and Basya's husband Pinya travelling to Birobidžan, first by ship and then by train. The point of origin is unclear, but the ship indicates that the family is coming from abroad. While some identify the United States as the family's origin, Alexander Senderovich in his Dissertation states that the family were “repatriates to Soviet Union from Palestine.”Senderovich p296 Arriving in the JAO, despite difficulties in the beginning, the whole family quickly adjusts to the new way of living at the collective farm “Red fields” – except for Pinya. While everyone else is excited to start working in the collective, Pinya only agreed to accompany the family after he read in a newspaper article that someone had found gold near the farm. Refusing to do hard physical work, he manages to be assigned to garden work, which gives him the opportunity to sneak away to a small river bank, where he searches for gold. Caught doing so by Lyovka, Pinya offers him half of the gold he found. But when Lyovka threatens to hand over the gold to the collective, Pinya hits Lyovka on the head with a shovel. Believing Lyovka to be dead, Pinya attempts to flee over the border to China, but gets caught and arrested.
After arriving at the collective, Rosa, the daughter, meets Korney a young fisherman's son, and they fall in love with each other. Dvoira is worried about their relationship, because Korney is “a Russian” and not a Jew. In a short conversation between mother and daughter, Rosa asks rhetorically: “I don't know who's better … The Russian Korney or the Jew Pinya?” Because Korney is found with Lyovka's body, the collective suspects him to be the murderer, and arrests him. Only when Lyovka somewhat miraculously awakes, and points to Pinya as the guilty, is Korney's name is cleared. The movie ends with the marriage celebration of Rosa and Korney and the last still showing Dvoira praising their bond and the government for providing Jews with a home country of their own: “Pour some wine and we'll drink to our motherland and to those who gave us such a good life!”
Basya, the second daughter has fallen in love with Natan, the chairman of the “Red Field” collective. But becoming a couple is not possible as Basya is married to Pinya. She is very unhappy in her marriage because Pinya has refused to assimilate. However, Pinya's arrest clears the path for the two, and, after Dvoira's blessing, they are shown dancing happily at Rosa's wedding celebration.
Background The JAO experiment arose from different tendencies and conflicts in the broader discourse on the so-called “Jewish question” in Russia of the early 20th century and shifts in the national policies of the post-revolutionary society. The puzzling question is why the Bolshevik soviet government that was originally committed to internationalism, at some point, agreed and actually pushed forward the establishment of a Jewish national project on the territory of the USSR.
The phenomena of the JAO stands both in the context of the Zionist idea of Jewish Statehood and the history of the Jews in the Soviet Union, hence under consideration of the changing governmental policies on the matter and on the question of national policies in general. Before the October Revolution there were three main positions on the Jewish side on the matter of the “Jewish question”. Two within Zionism, and one outside of it. The Zionist movement was split into those who aimed to establish a Jewish State on the territory of Palestine, and the territorialists for whom Palestine was only one of several options. A third position was held by the Bund (General Jewish Labor Bund of Lithuania, Poland and Russia) who promoted the idea of a national cultural autonomy in a multi-ethnic State. This notion of nationality was not bound to the existence of a national territory, but imagined an administrative unit for cultural issues independently from the place where someone lived. The Bund, in the pre-revolutionary time, pictured the future State as a federative System of culturally independent units without territorial binding.Kuchenbecker 2000 p43
In the beginning of the 20th century, before the October Revolution, a tense conflict between the Bund and the Iskra-group around Lenin broke out. The Bund called for the federal restructuring of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDRP), and the recognition of Jews as a nation. Both claims where heavily rejected by the Iskra-group as being separatist and backward. For the Bolsheviks the Jewish people couldn't be a nation, because they lacked one fundamental component: an own territory. In 1913 Stalin, who later between 1917 and 1923 held the position of the Commissariat for Nationalities Affairs, published an article on the point of view on nationhood by the social democratic party, where he defined nationhood by virtue of a common language and territory. In fact, in the context of Lenin's two phase model with the goal of merging all nations into one socialist world society, the Jews already held an advanced position.Kuchenbecker 2000 p43 The general answer to the “Jewish question” by Marxists, including the Menshiviks, was assimilation.
However, the post-revolutionary situation required a conceptual shift. At the end of the 19th century 74%Kuchenbecker 2000 p59 of the Jewish population, due to restrictions in the tsarist times, “made livings from petty commerce, retail sales, small-scale handicraft production, and unskilled labor”,Kuchenbecker 2000 p59 while only 3.5% worked in agriculture.Kuchenbecker p.59 The social structure of the Jewish population basically reversed the overall proportions of the agricultural society they were living in. Already the slowly starting industrialization had caused much unemployment among Jewish merchants and crafts. After the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917 their original belief in a self-completing assimilation process, was confronted with the actual mass poverty of the Russian Jews. World War I caused pogroms during the Civil War (1918-1920), and finally the Soviet centralization of production of even small industrial businesses and the prohibition of private propertyKuchenbecker p57 had catastrophic consequences for the Jews, due to their particular social structure, and most lived in despair.Kuchenbecker 2000 p57
The implementation of the NEP (New Economic Policy) in 1921, which brought back a low form of capitalist production, mitigated the situation partly. But many Jews fell under the category of lišency. Lišency means: “those who are deprived of rights” and was used as a political instrument to fight bourgeois elements. It was generally applied to all who were considered to have worked in sections that fell under the category of “unproductive labor”. Hence, while the Bolshevik policy granted equal rights for Jews as Jews, their particular social structure effectively deprived about one third of them of these rights all over again.Kuchenbecker 2000 p60-62 The Soviet government was conscious of this dilemma. In order to solve this problem two institutions were founded, KOMZET and OZET, and provided with the task of a “productivation” of the Jewish population, by finding a territory were Jews could be relocated and transformed into farmers, as agriculture was considered “productive work”. In contrast to the pre-revolutionary position Russian Jews were now handled in the same way as the multiple other nations living on the former tsarist territory. “National in form and socialist in content”,Weinberg 1998 p15 was Stalin's well known formula. The goal now was to establish a secular Yiddish counter-culture against a religiously or Zionist self-understanding. Most other nations, though, had their territory within or outside the USSR. In contrast to, e.g., Germans or Polish living on Russian soil, Jews were exceptional in the sense that they were an extra-territory nation without even a territory elsewhere.
After a first attempt to relocate the Jewish population in the Crimea had failed due to the resistance of the local authorities and antisemitic biases and even attacks by the peasantry, the decision fell on a region in the far east with a border to China – Birobidžan. In 1928, the Soviets designated the region around the rivers Bira and Bidžan for the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (JAO).Weinberg p21 In 1934 the area was officially declared to be the JAO.Weinberg p24 The relocation project, however, already began in 1928.Kuchenbecker 2000 p62 For this, propaganda was produced on a large scale. From literature to radio broadcasts over poems, songs and a stage play, even an airplane was named “Birobidzhanets”.Weinberg p39 Also, the free train ride, and a welcome payment were extra motivations.Kuchenbecker 2000 p128 However, the organization was disastrous. The provided shelters were quickly overcrowded, and in combination with the rough climate, heavy rainfalls in spring, hot and humid summers, and very cold winters, hunger and disease were the result. Many arrivals who could afford it, left after a very short time, leaving only the poorest behind.Kuchenbecker 2000 p128
Between 1936 and 1938, beginning in the same year in which “Seekers of Happiness” was released, purges in all national republics and provinces took place, wiping out the local party leaderships and administrative elites. With them the national policy shifted from a cultural integrative federal system to Russification and centralism.Kuchenbecker p183 The murder of the JAO elites was being justified by reproaching them of secret Zionist and Trotskyst ideology and espionage. 1938 even KOMZET and OZET fell prey to the Great Purge. In effect the purge led to the destruction of the soviet Yiddish culture that had slowly developed in the short time the JAO had already existed. Only after World War II and under the impression of the shoa, a Yiddish culture on Soviet soil was shortly in bloom again. This time, however, not initiated by the government, but solely due to higher migration.
Motifs: Dreams, work, and happiness