Word: frankel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Earl Montgomery, as Doctor Stockmann, has much of the bearing of a "matinee idol," and appears much younger than his wife, admirably portrayed by Lois Holmes. Art Smith, as Morton Kiil, presents a striking portrait of her shrewd and disreputable father. Gene Frankel's direction is adept and certain touches are superb. Yet with the children, who add more distraction than depth, his direction is spotty and they generally dash onstage with a gust, then settle into the shadows to await their lines...
...five-hour walk among the city's "few central brick structures" and along the "muddy lanes" beyond, Yiddish-speaking Reporter Frankel "heard no more than four or five Yiddish conversations." He found Yiddish disappearing from the street signs, as it has already from the schools and the movies...
...last of his five dispatches last week, Reporter Frankel managed to send through Moscow's censors a far soberer picture-a picture of an old Soviet propagandists' paradise, the rarely visited Jewish Autonomous Province of Birobidzhan on the northern border of Manchuria. Founded with great fanfare in 1934 as "an empty plot on which the Soviet Jews were to pioneer without getting mixed up with Zionism," Birobidzhan is today, as Frankel describes it, a sad little whistle stop on the Trans-Siberian Railroad that "jet planes, hope, energy and momentum pass...
...There has been no significant influx of the Soviet Union's 2,500,000 Jews since World War II. The total population of an area twice the size of New Jersey is barely 160,000, "half Jewish, two-thirds urban." Young Jews leave to seek better opportunities elsewhere; Frankel met one in the train who spoke with "contempt" of the city of Birobidzhan (pop. 60,000) as "a city of three streets...
...visitor," wrote Frankel, "notes the absence of youngsters, at the movies and in the streets, even before he hears a sociological explanation for their exodus: they aspire to assimilation, to opportunity alongside the Russians. They might rebel against Yiddish culture even if it were sanctioned...