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If you know about the Jewish state that came into existence two decades before the founding of Israel -- "the first Jewish state established in the world since 70 BCE," according to wildly versatile film director Yale Strom -- please raise your hand.
There's no penalty for not knowing the answer. The state in question is the Jewish Autonomous Region of the former Soviet Union, set up by Stalin in 1928 in a far eastern region of Siberia bordering China. Because so "few people, including Jews, have ever heard of it," Strom said, he decided in 2000 to record on film its history and precarious present-day existence. His documentary, "L'Chayim, Comrade Stalin," currently making the festival circuit in the United States and overseas, will play in Washington, Los Angeles, Buffalo and many other American cities before having its U.S. theatrical premiere at New York's Quad Cinema on Jan. 31, 2003.
Arriving in the Jewish Autonomous Region's capital city, Birobidzhan, after a weeklong journey from Moscow on the Trans-Siberian Express, Strom was thrilled to alight at "the only railroad station in the world with lettering in Yiddish," the filmmaker told the Forward during a recent interview in his Washington Heights apartment. Sitting beside him and joining in was his wife, Elizabeth Schwartz, who as the film's writer and producer monitored from afar the film crew's nearly disastrous misadventures with Russian bureaucracy. Few, if any, specialists in Yiddish culture are as qualified to tell the story of the Soviet Yiddish homeland as the multitalented, prolific Strom. Now 45, he became interested in klezmer music as a student in San Diego 20 years ago and launched...