MovieChat Forums > Ragtime (1981) Discussion > what happened with the german guy?

what happened with the german guy?



what happened when the german guy who was making evelyn profile in a cartboard? somebody was having sex with her daughther?

I really didn't get that part..

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so... nobody can help me?

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his wife had sex with another man (one of the neighbors told him) and thatswhy he left her. he became the "director" of this little movie which was shot at the beach starring Evelyn.

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He was a Russian who sometimes had a tendency to speak german (with a heavy accent) for some obscure reasons.

"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan

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He was a Russian who sometimes had a tendency to speak german (with a heavy accent) for some obscure reasons.


He was speaking Yiddish, not German. Yiddish sort of sounds like a bastardized German with a Polish accent and some Polish vocabulary thrown in.

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He was a Russian Jew immigrant who, as per history, took up film making and went on to be a success, taking another man's wife to boot as his spoils.

I think his wife was trying to earn money through prostitution, or so I recall; Fran Dresher's character...that may have been another character though.

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i like how people like you with little or no knowledge spread rumors like that he was latvian jew, omg please get aleast the most simple and easy to understand things right, thx

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He is neither Russian or German. He is a Jewish immigrant from Latvia. It would have been closer to Russia. It was ruled by Lithuanian and Polish governments. Tateh would have left the area between the New Current, a radical social and political movement of the 1890's and the Revolution of 1905.

In the book, he is a talented artist who publicly divorces his wife after her infidelity with their landlord, and Evelyn Nesbit begins coming to visit him almost daily. She become enamored with him. They are seen in public together until Emma Goldman recognizes her (in disguise) in a large crowd she is addressing. Tateh then leaves her. He goes to Philadelphia to create moving picture books (precursor to modern animation), for a local novelty store. Eventually he would become a silent movie director, writer, producer, with a down on her luck out of work young starlet named Evelyn Nesbit.

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There is an aspect of the wife's infidelity not dealt with in the movie. In the book, he was her employer in a sweat-shop and he often preyed on immigrant women by threatening to report them as illegals and having them deported if they did not sleep with him. The musical got around this by having her apparently dead when Tateh and his daughter arrived in America.

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He is neither Russian or German. He is a Jewish immigrant from Latvia. It would have been closer to Russia. It was ruled by Lithuanian and Polish governments.


In the 1770s, but after the Napoleonic wars Poland-Lithuania had been long absorbed by Russia, Prussia, and Austria--with Russia controlling Latvia for about a period of over one hundred years by the time they relinquished control after WWI.

Map of Russian expansion clearly controlling Latvia by the end of the 1700s.

http://blog.kob.tomsk.ru/file/ExpansionOfRussianEmpire187.gif

Red Wolf #4

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because its occupied still does not make him a russian, hes still latvian jew. and this movie is clearly not taking place in 1776, thats just basic facts

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