Played in klezmer style, its melody bent into a plaintive minor key, the traditional American folk standard, "Home on the Range," makes a fitting theme song for this documentary. For any good Jewish story - even when it takes place in the unlikely setting of California chicken farms - has both joy and heartbreak, exuberant spirit and noisy argument.

"A Home on the Range" tells a story at once familiar and unique. Very familiar is the arc of the story, from struggle to community-building to assimilation, of four generations of Jewish immigrants. But the choice to live on the land rather than on Main Street was unusual. The film details with great warmth the livelihood and lively culture of Jews who get up at dawn to tend chickens so that they can argue politics and read Yiddish poetry in the afternoons. Perhaps their choice of rural life is less strange given the context of early 20th-century Zionism and Socialism in Eastern European Jewry. Contemporaries of these Petaluma farmers were, after all, founding kibbutzim in Palestine as early as 1909 and working the land in a Jewish autonomous homeland within the USSR - as witnessed in last year's Festival documentary, "L'Chayim, Comrade Stalin."

The film is told plainly, in titled chapters that blend interviews with photographs and home movies. Though not visually spectacular, nothing stands in the way of effective storytelling. The most moving chapter recounts the tarring and feathering of five agricultural union organizers, who were tear-gassed, dragged out of their houses, made to kiss the American flag, and paraded down the streets of Santa Rosa. Later, under the pressures of McCarthyism, the community split apart, with the most unrepentant lefties literally kicked out of the Community Center. The film fairly addresses the divisions between left and right, Communist and Zionist, atheist and religious, and brings us to the present-day Jewish community in Petaluma, which is assimilated, affiliated more through the synagogue than the Community Center, and totally out of the chicken business. It ends with a deliciously incongruous moment as Scott Gerber, a folk-singing secular Jewish cowboy, sings in Yiddish about farmers in Russia.

Most of the first generation had died before this film was made, leaving the telling to children and grandchildren who might be less contentious and more nostalgic in their recollections. For a fuller story, with interviews going back to the 1970s, check out Kenneth Kann's Comrades and Chicken Ranchers: The Story of a California Jewish Community (1993, Cornell University Press).

Jeff Fischer teaches English and film at Mt. Ararat High School. He lives in Bowdoinham and is a member of Congregation Bet Ha'am.

2004 MJFF Program Book edited by Abby Zimet