- National Center for Jewish Film
- Lili Lliana (not my grandmother) in Kol Nidre
There was no way I could have missed last night’s screening of Kol Nidre, which played as part of Doc Films’ free series of Yiddish-language American films from the late 1930s. The movie features an appearance by my maternal grandmother—her one and only screen appearance, in fact. How she came to be in Kol Nidre is a well-established piece of family lore. For years relatives would refer to the movie as “June’s brush with stardom” or something to that effect. Only in adolescence did I realize that other people were in it.
Kol Nidre is all about family obligations—I suspect my 13-year-old self would have hated it as much as he dreaded he would. In it a nice Jewish girl betrays her devout parents, who want her to marry a rabbi, by eloping with a smooth-talking playboy. Her father suffers a stroke upon learning of the betrayal, but returns to good health the following year, when the playboy—while trying to flee his wife with another woman, the schmendrick—dies in a car accident and the daughter agrees to marry the rabbi after all. Along the way there are musical numbers and comic interludes to ameliorate the moralizing.
