‘They don’t pay $1,000 a week to just anyone’: Sholem Aleichem and early Jewish American movie moguls.

Recently discovered archival documents show the famous Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem’s (1859-1916) significant interest in the field of silent cinema. Living in Switzerland, he wrote a number of film scripts and established numerous contacts with various cinema figures in Berlin, Moscow, Riga, Odessa, Warsaw, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1913-14. World War I interrupted his creative ties and led him to abandon his cinema projects. However, when he immigrated to America in December 1914, his motion picture ambitions revived and he tried to establish contacts with a whole range of film companies: ‘Vitagraph,’ ‘Fox,’ ‘Universal,’ etc. The paper is dedicated to Sholem Aleichem’s quest to find a place for himself in the American cinematograph. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]