Kador Ben-Salim

Kador Ben-Salim (Russian: Кадор Бен-Салим) was a Senegalese-Soviet acrobat, Red Army soldier and most likely the only actor of African descent in Soviet film throughout the 1920s and early 1930s.[1] A veteran of the civil war, he appeared in at least eight films, including The Return of Nathan Becker, the first ever Yiddish-language sound film.

Kador Ben-Salim
Ben-Salim, at left, in The Return of Nathan Becker (1932)
Born	1890s?
Died	1940s?
Known for	Acting

Biography

Ben-Salim was an acrobat in a touring Moroccan troupe that arrived in Moscow in 1912. By 1916, he had made his way to Almaty and joined a circus troupe run by Alexander Sosin (the first person to do a front double somersault).[2] Following the Russian Revolution and the start of the civil war, he joined the Red Army and served in one of the international cavalry units under the divisional command of Vasily Chapayev.

Filmography

Year	Title	Role	Director(s)	Notes	Refs.
1923	Red Devils	Tom Jackson	Ivan Perestiani		[3]
1926	Savur-Mohyla	Tom Jackson	Ivan Perestiani	Sequel to Red Devils	[4]
1926	The Crime of Shirvanskaya	Tom Jackson	Ivan Perestiani	Sequel to Savur-Mohyla	[4]
1926	The Punishment of Shirvanskaya	Tom Jackson	Ivan Perestiani	Sequel to The Crime of Shirvanskaya	[4]
1926	Ilan-dili	Tom Jackson	Ivan Perestiani	Sequel to The Punishment of Shirvanskaya	[4]
1927	Mr Lloyd's Voyage	Footman	Dmitri Bassalygo
1931	Black Skin	Tom	Pavel Kolomoitsev		[5]
1932	The Return of Nathan Becker	Jim	Ivan Perestiani		[6]

References

Notes

1. Kiaer 2020, p. 383.
2. Zaglada 2010, p. 103.
3. Hoberman 1998, p. 281.
4. Bogdanov 2015, p. 105.
5. Kiaer 2020, p. 360.
6. Roman 2012, p. 195.

Sources

• Bogdanov, Konstantin (November 2015). Translated by Cleminson, Ralph. "'Negroes' in the USSR. The Ethnography of an Imaginary Diaspora" (PDF). Forum for Anthropology and Culture. 15: 97–134.

• Hoberman, J. (1998). The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism. Temple University Press. ISBN 978-1-56639-767-4.

• Kiaer, Christina (2020). "A Comintern Aesthetics of Anti-Racism in Blek end uait". In Glaser, Amelia M.; Lee, Steven S. (eds.). Comintern Aesthetics. University of Toronto Press. p. 360. ISBN 978-1-4875-0465-6.

• Roman, Meredith L. (2012). Opposing Jim Crow: African Americans and the Soviet Indictment of U.S. Racism, 1928-1937. University of Nebraska Press. JSTOR j.ctt1ddr5sz.11.

• Zaglada, Vladimir (2010). One Coach's Journey from East to West: How the Fall of the Iron Curtain Changed the World of Gymnastics. AuthorHouse. p. 103. ISBN 978-1-4567-0123-9.