In Search of Greener Fields: Music, Speech, and “The Folk” in the 1937 YiddishFilm Grine Felder, Talk by Zeke Levine at Sonic Representations of Jewishness on Screen and Off at UCLA, April 19-21, 2026.

In his review of the 1937 Yiddish language film Grine Felder, Der Tog editor William Edlin praises, “Another quality… is the beautiful Yiddish one hears. It is not a literary Yiddish, but a good, healthy, Yiddish.” Edlin’s attention to sound, and specifically sound as a medium for expressing Yiddish authenticity, invites an analysis of the sonic aspects of Grine Felder, including the film’s spoken dialogue and the musical score composed by Vladimir Heifetz. Scholars such as Jim Hoberman and
George Lipsitz have analyzed the Grine Felder, while Amelia Glaser and Yuri Vedenyapin, among others, have studied the film’s screenwriter Peretz Hirshbein. These studies have highlighted the ideological underpinnings of the text, as well as the deliberate use of light by director Edgar Ulmer, foreshadowing his later successes in the film noir genre. However, the film’s soundtrack has scarcely been addressed.
In this paper, I argue that sound serves as a crucial nexus for multiple understandings of Yiddish folkness, further amplifying the cultural, historical, and social impact of the film. I analyze both the sound of characters’ speech as well as Vladimir Heifetz’s score, drawing on the archive of Heifetz’s papers housed at the Center for Jewish History. Specifically, I emphasize how the left-wing tendencies of twentieth century Yiddish-American music influenced the representations of an
idealized pre-modern Jewish life on film.

Zeke Levine, PhD, is a musicologist whose research focuses on Yiddish-American folk song, the American Folk Revival, and American improvised music. His work is forthcoming in the journal American Jewish History and the Journal of Musicological Research. Dr. Levine is also a translator from Yiddish, having twice been selected as a Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow. He is currently an adjunct assistant professor in history and Jewish studies at Purchase College, SUNY.