Seekers of Happiness (Russian: Искатели счастья, romanized: Iskateli schastya) is a Soviet film from 1936 trying to attract Jews to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (JAO) in the far east of the USSR.

The love stories and crime provide a narrative basis to demonstrate how several obstacles are overcome: Dvoira is the matriarch of a family that travels to Birobidžan in order to find a happy, economically and politically untroubled life.

While everyone else is excited to start working in the collective, Pinya only agreed to accompany the family after he read in a newspaper article that someone had found gold near the farm.

The movie ends with the marriage celebration of Rosa and Korney and the last still showing Dvoira praising their bond and the government for providing Jews with a home country of their own: “Pour some wine and we'll drink to our motherland and to those who gave us such a good life!” Basya, the second daughter has fallen in love with Natan, the chairman of the “Red Field” collective.

However, Pinya's arrest clears the path for the two, and, after Dvoira's blessing, they are shown dancing happily at Rosa's wedding celebration.

The JAO experiment arose from different tendencies and conflicts in the broader discourse on the so-called “Jewish question” in Russia of the early 20th century and shifts in the national policies of the post-revolutionary society.

The puzzling question is why the Bolshevik soviet government that was originally committed to internationalism, at some point, agreed and actually pushed forward the establishment of a Jewish national project on the territory of the USSR.

The Bund, in the pre-revolutionary time, pictured the future State as a federative System of culturally independent units without territorial binding.

The Bund called for the federal restructuring of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDRP), and the recognition of Jews as a nation.

In fact, in the context of Lenin's two phase model with the goal of merging all nations into one socialist world society, the Jews already held an advanced position.

At the end of the 19th century 74%[9] of the Jewish population, due to restrictions in the tsarist times, “made livings from petty commerce, retail sales, small-scale handicraft production, and unskilled labor”,[10] while only 3.5% worked in agriculture.

After the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917 their original belief in a self-completing assimilation process, was confronted with the actual mass poverty of the Russian Jews.

[13] The implementation of the NEP (New Economic Policy) in 1921, which brought back a low form of capitalist production, mitigated the situation partly.

In order to solve this problem two institutions were founded, KOMZET and OZET, and provided with the task of a “productivation” of the Jewish population, by finding a territory were Jews could be relocated and transformed into farmers, as agriculture was considered “productive work”.

In contrast to, e.g., Germans or Polish living on Russian soil, Jews were exceptional in the sense that they were an extra-territory nation without even a territory elsewhere.

After a first attempt to relocate the Jewish population in the Crimea had failed due to the resistance of the local authorities and antisemitic biases and even attacks by the peasantry, the decision fell on a region in the far east with a border to China – Birobidžan.

The provided shelters were quickly overcrowded, and in combination with the rough climate, heavy rainfalls in spring, hot and humid summers, and very cold winters, hunger and disease were the result.

[21] Between 1936 and 1938, beginning in the same year in which “Seekers of Happiness” was released, purges in all national republics and provinces took place, wiping out the local party leaderships and administrative elites.

In effect the purge led to the destruction of the soviet Yiddish culture that had slowly developed in the short time the JAO had already existed.

Only after World War II and under the impression of the shoa, a Yiddish culture on Soviet soil was shortly in bloom again.

But the seed capital that the gold is supposed to become, is neither the product of exploitation nor of any kind of violent dispossession as described in Marx' chapter on the “so called primitive accumulation”.

But his capitalist dream not only activates his willingness to do physical work, it also provides him with a brief moment of happiness, namely when he first believes to have found gold.

The suggestively appealing contrast between the movie's title on the one and Pinya's role on the other side – the first called “Seekers of Happiness” and the latter “seeking for gold” - proves to be reductive.

In a suggestive montage Pinya's gold-seeking is juxtaposed with the harvest of the collective, which is depicted as productive by the shear mass of “golden wheat”, as the first line of the Russian extra-diegetic song that underlies the pictures comments.

When, earlier in the movie, Pinya asks a worker, what one needs in order to find gold, he answers: “Luck.” Hence the montage contrasts two notions or modes of work in their relation to happiness.

In particular, because the rhetorical question posed by Rosa: “I don't know who's better … The Russian Korney or the Jew Pinya?”, finds a definite answer here.

Senderovich suggests such a reading in the train sequence at the beginning of the film: “a peculiar figure appears: a man playing a mournful tune on his clarinet.

Seekers of happiness was released in 1936 shortly before the beginning of the Great Purge in which the entire political elite of the JAO was decimated.

In his main work “Sefer Chofetz Chaim” he deals with the problem of “Lashon Hara”,[25] the term for derogatory speech about another person which is severely forbidden in Jewish law, even then when what is said is true.

The film undermines censorship by unfolding the critical message by means of esoteric signs only readable for the Jewish audience.