When Woody Guthrie met Marjorie Greenblatt, their careers were just beginning. She, a dancer with Martha Graham’s company, met him on the set of a Broadway production where he was playing music. Their connection was instant, leading them both to divorce their spouses and start a family together — and leading Marjorie to introduce Guthrie to her mother, the renowned Yiddish poet and composer Eliza Greenblatt.
Recognizing each other as kindred spirits, Guthrie and his mother-in-law forged a loving familial relationship and a rich creative partnership — one that’s largely gone unexplored as a piece of the folk troubadour’s story. In Dust Bowls and Jewish Souls: Another Side of Woody Guthrie, a new documentary from director Steven Pressman and co-writer Lisa Stark, that connection is brought to light.
Dust Bowls and Jewish Souls screens at the Belcourt Aug. 18 to open the Nashville Jewish Film Festival, which will run through Sept. 9. The documentary is structured as a pair of interlocking biographies. Guthrie’s traces a familiar story: his childhood in Oklahoma, watching the Dust Bowl unfold, making his way to California and later New York. Greenblatt’s, meanwhile, follows her own journey as a refugee from the Russian Empire to Philadelphia and later Brooklyn. It’s a lot to fit into 90 minutes — each subject could have probably had their own documentary, if not multiple ones.
When these stories come together, though, they illuminate a piece of American political and Jewish history. Guthrie and Greenblatt bonded not just as artists, but as left-wing thinkers. Guthrie’s politics were kindled through his time organizing with migrant workers (and eventually led to his blacklisting during the Red Scare), and Greenblatt’s developed through the tradition of socialist Yiddishkeit. They workshopped each other’s antifascist lyrics and exchanged correspondence. At one point in the film, Guthrie writes to Greenblatt: “Us folk poets have got to stick together.”
The Guthrie family’s Judaism — what daughter Nora Guthrie calls in the film “a goulash of religions,” complete with a Hanukkah tree — is another cornerstone of their unique family life, lovingly brought to life in the film. Anecdotes happy and sad sparkle with wry wit: Arlo Guthrie recalls his relief at his bar mitzvah because his famous father took all the attention in the room, and later finds humor in grief while recounting losing Woody to Huntington’s two weeks after the release of his debut album. “He heard Alice’s Restaurant, and then he died,” he quips.
Dust Bowls and Jewish Souls isn’t afraid to complicate Woody Guthrie’s mythos. Scholar Will Kaufman, whose book Woody Guthrie, American Radical centers the musician’s activism, points out Guthrie was raised by a middle-class, conservative politician father, and moved to California not to flee the Dust Bowl but to kick-start his music career — a contrast to the Okie everyman image he cultivated.
The depiction of Greenblatt’s early Zionist advocacy is rosier, and at times, the film leaves looming questions unanswered. As NPR has reported, Yiddish is currently seeing a revival thanks to both pandemic hobby learners and reclamation by young American Jews who are critical of Israel, but the language’s modern resonances aren’t explored. A sudden, unexplored reference to the Guthrie family’s coincidental Brooklyn connection with future far-right Israeli extremist Meir Kahane is jarring to say the least.
There are contradictions on the tip of this film’s tongue — oppression and liberation, solidarity and violence, history and today — and they may be more than this film can chew. Where Dust Bowls and Jewish Souls finds its firmest ground is in the loving family at its heart: the rich artistic relationship between Guthrie and Greenblatt, its illumination of Yiddish history, and its resonance with the history of the American left.
