Urban Peasants

” The first section of the film consists of a no-image soundtrack recording of a Yiddish language course that teaches us those expressions that will come in handy when we are far from home and need a toilet or a postage stamp. As Jacobs points out there is, of course, no country where Yiddish is a native language. There are pockets of elder citizens in various countries who speak it, as the members of a family whom we see later in the film do, but it is essentially an extinct language, the product of an oral tradition and only as a dead language is it a course of study.
The second section of the film consists of silent 16mm home movies filmed in the 30’s and 40’s by Stella Weiss, a relative of Jacobs’ wife. Jacobs’ title refers to these transplanted people who in image after image display their smiles, dresses, children, tricycles, rollerskates and cars for the family camera – itself a left-over from a rich uncle. The movie footage from this family album is not manipulated by Jacobs, but speaks silently, in Yiddish, for itself…”