The haunting, seemingly haunted Russian shtetl of The Light Ahead was created on the same New Jersey farm on which Ulmer shot the more pastoral Natalka Poltovka and Green Fields during a five-year stint making independent ethnic films in New York. Within its shadowy, Caligariesque setting, The Light Ahead is a love story of two beggars-the lame Fishke and the blind Hodel-whose affair is thwarted by their position in life. David Opatoshu and Helen Beverly are radiant in the lead roles; the author-surrogate Mendl the Bookseller is played by Isidore Cashier. The Light Ahead is a portrait of a Jewish village that gives no measure to sentimentality. It recognizes the shtetl for what it is-an impoverished ghetto-and that no amount of piety or superstition can fill an empty stomach, epitomized in a farmer's reply to an elder who upbraids him for his impious beardless state: “Better a Jew without a beard than a beard without a Jew!”

Note: Arianné Ulmer appears in this film and American Matchmaker as a child.