20 August—A few nights ago I recorded a movie from 2009 called “A Serious Man.” I’d never heard of it, but the Republican-American’s TV listing service (which leaves a lot to be desired, mind you) reported a four-star rating and said it was about a Jewish college professor. Ratings can’t be taken seriously, but with a title and subject like that I reckoned it must be a comedy, so it was worth a go.

“A Serious Man” is indeed a comedy, though a charcoal grey one verging on drama throughout, about a schlemozzle (or umgluck, if you prefer), a good man—the Jewish professor—who suffers through domestic and professional tsuris—troubles. Kind of like Archibald MacLeish’s Book of Job-inspired “J.B.,” though thoroughly middle-class, not hampered by interminably awkward free verse, and much, much easier to sit through and appreciate.

The Coen Brothers’ film, with an intentionally (or so you’d think) all-Jewish cast (or pretty close to it), makes the most of Jewish stereotypes—for dramatic as well as comic effect. Bottom line, although it’s not laugh-a-minute enjoyable like, say, a Mel Brooks flick, “A Serious Man” is an excellent movie and certainly deserves a top rating.

One of the film’s closing credits is “No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture.” What a relief!

No surprise that the music at the very end of the closing credits is a Yiddish song called “Dem Milners Trern,” “The Miller’s Tears,” by Mark Varshavsky, a late 19^th-century Ukrainian lawyer who moonlighted as a Yiddish-language poet and composer. (He must have been an honest lawyer, because he barely managed to make a living.) It’s about the expulsion of Jews from towns and villages in Czarist Russia, as lamented by the tearful miller—an umgluck.

“Dem Milners Trern” certainly is sadly historical, reflective of the persecution of Jews in Czarist Russia (of which the Ukraine was then a part) and just about everywhere else. But don’t worry about the words, because as absolute music—just as music—it’s absolutely beautiful. Especially as sung plaintively by Ukrainian-American baritone Sidor Belarsky with appropriately unobtrusive piano accompaniment. Here it is: