Topol, 74, a Best Actor nominee for Norman Jewison’s 1971 blockbuster Fiddler on the Roof (above), is attached to star in a Yiddish-language version of The Golem, Screen Daily reports.
The $5 million British/Czech/German co-production will be produced by Stuart Urban, who also penned the screenplay. Filming is scheduled to take place in Prague next year.
In The Golem, Topol (born in Tel Aviv in 1935) will play a 16th-century Prague rabbi named Maharal, who brings to life a clay statue to protect the local ghetto from anti-semitic pogroms.
Paul Wegener co-directed (with Carl Boese), co-wrote (with Henrik Galeen), and starred as the giant, Frankenstein-like Golem in a 1920 German version. Albert Steinrück played the rabbi in that film.
Photo: United Artists
I desperately hope you’re wrong about this film being a Yiddish-language one, written by Stuart Urban.
Having had experience with Yiddish dialog in recent Hollywood films (“Walk Hard,” “A Serious Man”), I know that the scripts’ original “Yiddish” was probably translated from English by the uncle-of-the producer’s-friend who claimed knowledge he sorely lacked.
To be authentic, the story of the Maharal must be told in medieval Yiddish — a task for a scholar.
Too, since Topol couldn’t lose his British-Israeli accent in “Fiddler,” I shudder to think what he’d do with Yiddish!