Bel Kaufman

A portrait of writer Sholem Aleichem, whose stories about Tevye the milkman became the basis of the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof. Aleichem (1859-1916) was a rebellious wordsmith who created a new genre of literature and used his remarkable humor to encapsulate the realities of the Eastern European Jewish world in the late nineteenth century. Using a rich collection of archival footage, the film recreates a time in czarist Russia when Jews...