An Emmy award-winning film explores what Jewish life in Eastern Europe was like before the Holocaust destroyed it. Narrated by Oscar-nominated actor Elliot Gould, A Yiddish World Remembered uses the memories of surviving eyewitnesses to reconstruct the spirit and traditions of shtetl life.

“Don’t think that we were like Tevye in the movies. Far from that!” a New York City resident who was born in Europe says, insisting that Fiddler on the Roof isn’t a fair depiction of the Yiddish world in which he grew up. He’s convinced that life in the busy metropolis is no better than the shtetl life he once enjoyed, arguing, “We were just as civilized and just as cultured as we are here.”

But things certainly were different. Through vintage photographs, never-before-seen archival films, and intimate interviews, A Yiddish World Remembered traces the history and culture of the unique Jewish communities where people listened to Klezmer and cantoral music, ate latkes and perogies, and spoke Yiddish as their native tongue. Maintaining a separate existence from their gentile neighbors, these Jews of Eastern Europe stuck together in the face of antisemitism and poverty and relished life’s simple pleasures.

Long before the Holocaust, antisemitism threatened Eastern European Jews. Many Jews immigrated to the region after having been expelled from Western Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries, and their communities only became more concentrated when the Russian government confined them to the area, specifically the territories comprising modern-day Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Slovakia, and parks of Northern Hungary.

Once they were settled in Eastern Europe, the Jews still weren’t safe. A never-before-seen film shot in the 1920s reveals the aftermath of a pogrom, where Cossacks tore threw Jewish neighborhoods, raping, maiming, killing, and looting.

But terror and hostility unified the Jewish community by forcing them to rely on one another. Practicing charity as the Torah dictates, Jews of the shtetl all chipped in to help care for the poor and needy in their community.

Nothing says more about a people than their language. Eastern European Jews prayed in Hebrew but spoke Yiddish in their daily lives. The colorful Yiddish adjectives are lost in translation, but Yiddish insults seem to keep their sting, as one survivor proves, saying, “May all your teeth fall out, and may one remain as a tooth ache.”

Along with language, food was an essential component of Yiddish culture. From herring and potatoes to latkes to chicken soup, the film pays tribute to mouthwatering Jewish dishes enjoyed in the Yiddish World. “Cherry perogies are like a dream in my mind,” one survivor recalls.

And the balebustes [housewives], who prepared these dishes (among doing countless other chores) receive nothing but praise from their surviving children. “She didn’t have to go to places to exercise,” one survivor says of his mother, “a machine couldn’t do all that she did.” These hard-working women sound like superheroes when their children describe how they kept six dishes going on the stove at once, exchanged curses with impudent neighbors (when necessary), ran the family business, balanced the books, and still had time to tidy up the house.

In one of the film’s most intimate moments, an old man begins to cry as he remembers the joy he felt the first time he made Kiddush, the blessing over the Sabbath wine. When he looked across the table at his mother, he saw her glowing with pride: “I will never forget the look in my mother’s eyes,” he says, “I can never forget this.”

Sadly, after the Nazis swept threw Eastern Europe, all that’s left of the Yiddish World are the smells, tastes and memories that survivors will never forget.

Purchase the DVD at TwoCatsTV.com.