20 Things You Didn't Know About A Serious Man

Nearly every scene set in the Gopnik household has the Yiddish folk song ''The Miller's Tears'' playing in the background. The song's (composed by Ukrainian-American singer Sidor Belarsky) subject of a sad miller living out the rest of his days alone and away from his mill mirrors Larry's current fears and struggles to some degree.

The song's subject is an allegory for late 19th-century anti-Semitic expulsions that took place in Czarist Russia. These expulsions, known as pogroms, was triggered by the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and the accompanying belief that the conspirators were of Jewish origin. However, only one of these individuals was of Jewish descent but unfortunately, the Russian media exaggerated the presence of Jewish people, sparking the riots.

The pogroms saw mass forced migrations of Eastern European Jews to countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States and it would not be far fetched to assume that the Gopniks may be descended from immigrants fleeing the riots. Furthermore, the song's turmoils mirror Larry's own eviction, both physically (when he lives at the motel) and metaphorically (he is uprooted from a sense of normalcy due to the movie's events).