Documentary 'Dust Bowls and Jewish Souls: Another Side of Woody Guthrie' makes its world premiere on Thursday.Woody Guthrie Publications/Supplied
Clap your hands! Happy Hanuka!
Clap clap hands! My little shtroodler!
On your toes! Happy Hanuka!
And around and around you go!
Most people would be surprised to learn the man who wrote the song Hanuka Dance was Woody Guthrie. What would an Oklahoma folk balladeer know from shtroodlers?
Turns out, plenty. In the eye-opening documentary Dust Bowls and Jewish Souls: Another Side of Woody Guthrie, which makes its world premiere on Thursday at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, director Steven Pressman explores the Jewish connection to the This Land is Your Land singer, whose guitar was famously emblazoned with the message “This machine kills fascists.”
Though his previous films are steeped in Jewish topics, Pressman was oblivious as to how Guthrie came to write a handful of Hanukkah songs for the local Jewish community and his children. The connection, he found out, was American-Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt, the mother of Guthrie’s second wife, Marjorie Guthrie.
Guthrie wrote a handful of Hanukkah songs for the local Jewish community and his children.Woody Guthrie Archives/Supplied
“I’ve been living in the Jewish historical world for number of years, but I never knew the name of Aliza Greenblatt,” Pressman said from New York. “So, when I discovered a few years back there was this Jewish angle into Woody’s life, that for me was enough to pursue this topic and make this film.”
Greenblatt, a New Jerseyite who lived from 1885 to 1975, wrote in Yiddish. Many of her poems were set to music and recorded. Guthrie illustrated one of her books and sometimes edited her song lyrics.
“We folk poets have to stick together,” Guthrie wrote in a letter to his mother-in-law.
The premise of Dust Bowls and Jewish Souls is to relate the Jewish experience with the hardships of Americans affected by the 1930s environmental disaster known as the dust bowl. Migrants fled to California from Guthrie’s home state of Oklahoma, among others.
“Hopefully the film will tell audiences that there were a number of interesting similarities in comparisons and parallel tracks between Woody and Aliza Greenblatt,” Pressman said.
Those who are only familiar with Guthrie from James Mangold’s 2024 Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown will know him as the hospital patient Dylan visits in the early 1960s. Suffering from Huntington’s disease, Guthrie was unable to speak at that point in his life.
The hospital scenes are more or less true, but before Dylan met his idol at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey, he arrived unannounced at the Guthrie family home in Queens, New York. Woody wasn’t there, but his children welcomed Dylan.
Daughter Nora Guthrie recalls that a 'dusty' young man showed up at their door and explained that he had come from Minneapolis to see Woody.PerlePress Productions/Supplied
In Dust Bowls and Jewish Souls, daughter Nora Guthrie recalls that a “dusty” young man showed up at their door and explained that he had come from Minneapolis to see Woody. Thirteen-year-old Arlo Guthrie, who would later write and record the hit song Alice’s Restaurant Massacree, played guitar and harmonica with Dylan.
“That’s the fun story that Arlo and Nora very colourfully describe in our film and it was just a lot of fun for me to sit there with them and have them talk about the famous day,” Pressman said.
The director said the children were pleased with the way their father was portrayed in A Complete Unknown, but thought specifics of his debilitated condition could have been explained.
“I can understand that,” Pressman said. “The filmmakers could have easily figured out a way to at least drop a passing reference to why Woody was in the hospital.”
The documentary dispels a bit of the mythology surrounding Guthrie.Library of Congress; P&P/Supplied
The documentary dispels a bit of the mythology surrounding Guthrie, who branded himself “Th’ Dustiest of Th’ Dustbowlers” on a business card early in his career. The Okie folkie, we learn, embellished his Dust Bowl Refugee experience.
“He didn’t hop many freight trains in his day,” Guthrie biographer Will Kaufman says in the film. “He preferred fast cars.”
If Guthrie’s hobo cred is suspect, those close to him accepted his Jewishness. His wife Marjorie believed he had a “Jewish soul,” and Yiddish folk singer Daniel Kahn had this to say: “He was a staunch anti-Nazi, which makes him Jewish in the most important ways to me.”
Pressman says Guthrie was a strong supporter of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. As for what Guthrie would think of the situation in Middle East today, the filmmaker speculated that although the populist singer would not be a huge fan of the current government of Israel, he would be a Zionist.
“He may have continued to support the idea of homeland for Jews in what used to be called Palestine,” Pressman said. “But he was also somebody who had a very strong and moral sense of social justice, and it would be fascinating to see how he would have responded both politically and artistically to the atmosphere today.”
Dust Bowls and Jewish Souls opens the Toronto Jewish Film Festival (June 4 to 14 in theatres; to June 23 online) on June 4 at Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema. Director Steven Pressman and Jerry Gray of the Travellers will appear.