Word: yakov
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...reviewer wishes Malamud had written. The book is judged in terms of what it is not, and therefore is found to have "missed." There is nothing more contemporary than Malamud's theme; that of identity. Within the "innocent-guilty" framework is embedded the hard, solid nut of Yakov's stubbornness: I am what I know is true. Malamud speaks for contemporary Americans as well as for one Russian Jew. Man's inner quantum soul is reflected here...
Surrounded by Russia. He aims to pose the universal question of innocent man put to nothing by guilty authority. His hero is a Jew whose complaint against Gentiles is not that they are not Jews but that they are not Christians. He is called Yakov Bok (a name that suggests scapegoat), a Russian who is a stranger to Russia, who makes himself a stranger to his own Jewish tradition, and who is finally a stranger to everyone but the reader...
...history and men betray him. His cart breaks down, so he rides bareback to his fate. He cannot leave himself behind; the horse "looks like an old Jew," and as he canters, ambles, trots and staggers across the black plain, Yakov can only be seen as a Jewish Quixote. It could also be said of his dream of "good fortune and a comfortable house," in the conditions of the Ukraine of that day, that nothing could be more hopelessly quixotic. He trades his Rosinante for a ferry ride and enters the holy city of Kiev. As a final renunciation...
...Stalin's elder son. Yakov Dzhugashvili, reportedly died in a German concentration camp during World War II. He was the only child of Stalin's first wife. Vasily and a sister, Svetlana, believed now living in Moscow, were the children of the dictator's second wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, whom Stalin shot to death inside their Kremlin apartment in 1932 during a fit of rage...
Perhaps the main flaw in the film is the direction, the joint venture of Lev Kulijanov and Yakov Siegel. Although it is supposed to be a continuous story, the movie emerges as a series of different episodes--each one ending with a fade-out that lingers too long on a symbol. This effort at realistic symbolism fails because it is not consistent throughout the film. As soon as the viewer realizes that there will only be a symbol before every fade-out the imagery becomes obvious and uninteresting. The direction lacks subtlety and the camera work is fairly pedestrian...