Written by the poet Peretz Markish, The Returnof Nathan Becker is a paean to the Five Year Plan cloaked in what Variety called"a definite strain of the native Jewish sense of humor." In the storyof bricklayer Nathan Becker, who after twenty-odd years in America returns hometo Russia with his black friend Jim ("you, too, are going home"), thefilm promotes movement away from the shtetl and its traditions, and from Americancapitalism and assimilation, in equal measures. But it also realistically assertsthat you can't go home again, at least not without the mixed blessings of such areturn. Moscow Yiddish State Theater director Solomon Mikhoels, at age forty-two,steals the show as Nathan's elderly father using a unique mixture of Russian andYiddish, clicks and clucks. Mikhoels and Markish (both of whom appear in theshort film that follows) fell victim to Stalin's postwar anti-Semitic purges. J.Hoberman's introduction will place this complex film, with roots in FEKS (Factoryof the Eccentric Actor) and in Yiddish folk culture, in context.