I have recently watched the 1923 silent Yiddish film East and West. You can find it on YouTube with bilingual title cards.
The premise of the movie is what happens when an American born Jewish girl, named Molly Brown, vists her Orthodox cousins back in Galicia in the Austrian empire. She engages in some shenanegans including eating on Yom Kippur and teaching the synagogue choir boys an American song and dance.
The main conflict of the story begins when Molly wants to do a mock wedding with her cousins. At the time, her cousins' family had been hosting Yankel, a Yeshiva Bochur, for meals. The mock wedding needed a groom, so they forced Yankel to be the groom. Molly wanted him to go through all the motions of a marriage including putting the ring on her finger. Yankel understood that giving her the ring would constitute a halachic marriage, but he had developed a crush on her and allowed himself to be forced to do it.
Yankel refuses to give her a divorce, and is ostracized by the community. He tells Molly that she should find him in Vienna in five years. Yankel moves to live with his secular uncle in Vienna. He gets a secular education and becomes an aclaimed author. When Molly returns to Vienna, she unknowingly meets her legal husband at one of his book talks in which he was appearing under a pseudonym. He starts actively courting her using his pseudonym and she falls in love with him. Molly thinks they cannot start a committed relationship, since she was married and is an Agunah. Then Yankel reveals himself to her and she is happy that they can be together, and the movie ends happily ever after.
I find it thought provoking how Molly as a character engages in gender role inversion. In her role in the play as the super Americanized girl, she boxes for fun. When the cook rats her out for eating the break fast meal on Yom Kippur, she tries to get her revenge by socking the cook.
Later she dresses up like the other members of the all-male synagogue choir and tries to join them when they perform at her cousin's engagement party.
(In these instances when Molly does somethings wrong, she gets a patsh. It's not pleasant to observe even fictional children on screen being hit. Those scenes are meant to played for laughs.)
In her last moment of gender inversion, she basically forces Yankel to marry her. He knows he shouldn't perform the marriage and all the men watching the mock wedding tell him not to, but Molly encourages him. She forced him to be at this mock wedding in the first place. After she learns what happened, she blames herself for forcing Yankel to marry her.
The first inversions are played for laughs. It's simply funny to see a woman doing something that a man would normally do. The same kind of way gay men are often just played for laughs in more recent cinema. The final inversion of gender roles at the mock weddding results in tragedy. You could read the mock wedding scene as the limitation of acceptible gender inversion. This is when it goes too far, and she gets into real trouble.
The overall message of the second act of the movie is very problematic. It is essentially a manifestation of the fantasy of men who refuse to divorce their wives. In Jewish law, only the initiative of the man can lead to a divorce. If a man wants to abuse his ex-wife after they have already separated, he can withhold the divorce and prevent her from getting remarried. A woman in this situation is known as an Agunah, someone who is chained.
Yankel turns Molly into an Agunah when he refuses to divorce her. Molly's father calls him a scoundrel. The rabbi of the community orders him to divroce Molly, so the Jewish community rises up against him and he is forced into exile. The community mob is framed as mindlessly following the rabbi's orders. As if wanting to free an Agunah itself is a backwards practice. (Granted, you can criticize Orthodox Jewish marriage law as backwards. In my opinion the movie is pretty neutral about Jewish marriage law itself.)
Then Yankel runs away for five years. He spends these five years fixing himself up to be attractive to his imagination of who he thinks Molly is. Yankel barely knew Molly before he married her. He just happened to be in the house when they were doing the Mock wedding. He makes himself secular, because he knows Molly is an American girl. He makes himself into a famous author, because he knows she enjoys reading books.
When she meets Yankel, she falls for him. He guessed correctly. Then when he reveals himself to be her abuser, she is happy and stays in love with him. Her happy acceptance of his true identity does not make any sense. She wouldn't have known that he was serious about waiting the five years. A regular person would have assumed he was just stalling to refuse again later or to simply disappear and leave her chained forever.
It is unbelievable that the moment Yankel reveals himself to Molly after the five years, she doesn't at least slap him across the face. She certainly should have refused to continue the relationship now that she knows that he was who made her into an Agunah. Instead she's happy and kisses him. This is the fantasy of a get refuser. That if they keep withholding the divorce, maybe they can repair the relationship, and everyone can live happily ever after.
It's a fun movie to watch. At the same time the moral of the story is a justification for abuse that ignores the agency of women. It is a fantasy that continued abuse can result in a happy conclusion.
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