At the beginning one can observe Herschell Grünbaum digging a long ditch in Shlushk until soon the shovel handle first breaks and soon after what is left of the shovel. By this point, those familiar with the country cannot fail to recognise that the country can be no other than Russia, or the Soviet Union, where else could everything not work, no tool last (at best an English stapler or an American car or this faux 'writer' might compete). (However if one drops a tool in Russia, one does not hear it fall on the ground because someone will have already nicked it, for completeness one should note that while nothing technical, economic or political ever worked in the Soviet Union, Russian culture, literature, music and cuisine are immensely rich) Shlusk or Shlushk or Schluschck or Schluszchck is also wonderfully named.
Cossacks get a rather rough deal in this film. The freedom fighting witty Zaporoghians are reduced to enforcers of oppression which in their versatility cossacks also were, Czarist mounted riot police giving political protestors a taste of their nagaika, not to mention pogroms. Yet when it comes to oppression the Czarist regime were mere primitive amateurs compared to the professional industrial oppression of (national) socialists. Like J.K. Paasikivi said: ''Bobrikoff's time was idyllic compared to Molotov's fime!''
One then also can remember the Mousekewitch family travelling over the seas from East to West singing happily that 'there are no cats in America and the roads are paved with cheese!'
With his Jewish entrepreneurial skills of making a huge success starting from nothing, the naturalised Herschel Greenbaum's organic pickle, produced from what he finds in the rubbish and prepared in rain water (even in polluted New York), is healthier to eat than most industrially produced chemically poisoned 'food' sold in supermarkets but it is Herschel's organic pickles that breach a large number of regulations while all the nutritionless rubbish worse than animal food sold in American-style supermarkets is of course legally compliant or beyond the reach of even the long arm of the law - the law really is an ass!
Another poingnant point of (contemporary American) society is that Herschell could be immensely popular with his bigoted views until he gave the Christian religion a share of his views. The same enthusiastic bigoted audience suddenly changed its mind completely, turning against its prophet.
Plus ça change!
