A Jewish Wedding

"The wedding ceremony ended, the rabbi sank into a chair, then he left the room and saw tables lined up the whole length of the courtyard. There were so many of them that the end stuck out of the gates onto Gospitalnaya Street. The tables, draped in velvet, coiled through the yard like a snake on whose belly patches of every color had been daubed, and these orange and red velvet patches sang in deep voices." -- Isaac Babel, "The King"

Babel's images of Jewish life in Odessa may have seduced the Russian reader of the 1920s and 30s, but the carnival of Jewish life that comes out in the Odessa Stories has had at least as great an impact on American Jewish writers. In this montage, set appropriately to Leonid Utesov and beginning with a Babelian image of decapitated poultry, Gregory Freidin notices the uncanny similarity between the wedding scenes in Vladimir Vilner's 1926 Benya Krik (a cinematic interpretation of Babel's Odessa Stories) and Larry Peerce's 1969 film version of Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus. Internalized antisemitism on all sides? A celebration of Jewish culture? Nothing to do with Jews or secular diaspora culture? The comments logged in response to this you-tube posting are almost as entertaining as the films themselves.  

Woody Allen would later mine Russian literature to embellish his own version of American Jewish comedy with his 1975 Love and Death.