Joseph Dorman’s documentary starts off looking like a glorified DVD extra for “Fiddler on the Roof,” but it eventually becomes a far more gemutlich portrait of the creator of Tevye the Milkman, who took the pen name of Sholem Aleichem (from the Yiddish greeting “Peace be with you”).
Born Solomon Rabinowitz in a shtetl in Czarist Russia, as a prosperous Kiev stock trader in the 1880s he turned to writing in Yiddish and published others in a colorful language that had seldom been used for literature.
The film faithfully charts his ups and downs — including fleeing pogroms to New York City twice, where his plays flopped with assimilated Jews — but he died a folk hero in 1916, with the city’s largest funeral to date.
“Laughing in the Darkness” offers well-chosen selections from Aleichem’s darkly humorous work, much of which deals with Jews exploring their place in a secular world (among them the two film versions of “Fiddler,” which take very different views of intermarriage).
Among the excellent assemblage of talking heads are poignant recollections by Aleichem’s granddaughter, 100-year-old Bel Kaufman, herself the author of the 1965 best seller “Up the Down Staircase.”