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Dancing with Death and Salvaging Jewish Culture in Austeria and The Dybbuk

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Gabriella Safran
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Jerzy Kawalerowicz told reporters that he made his 1982 film, Austeria (The inn) to commemorate the Polish-Jewish people and culture destroyed in the Holocaust. This non-Jewish Polish director, known best in the west for his Mother Joanna of the Angels (a depiction of death and possession at a medieval French convent), grew up among Jews in the eastern part of Poland. He had been struck by the Polish-Jewish author Julian Stryjkowski's 1966 novella, Austeria, a haunting depiction of Jewish life in Galicia at the beginning of the twentieth century. Kawalerowicz—with Stryjkowski—immediately decided to turn the book into a movie. After the Six-Day War in 1967 sparked an “anti-Zionist campaign” in Poland, however, the Polish government found the Jewish topic of their screenplay “politically unacceptable.” In 1981, the film was granted permission and funding. It was completed in 1982, following the crackdown on Solidarity and the imposition of martial law. The authorities allowed its distribution, having determined that it displayed “humanitarian values” and that it did not represent a political threat. In the capacity of a quasiofficial expression of Polish regret at the passing of the Jews, and perhaps as a demonstration of liberalism aimed at the western critics of the new regime, Austeria was widely promoted and exported to film festivals abroad.

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Articles
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Slavic Review , Volume 59 , Issue 4 , Winter 2000 , pp. 761 - 781
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2000

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References

I am grateful to all those who read drafts of this paper: Oksana Bulgakowa, Lazar Fleishman, Gregory Freidin, Monika Greenleaf, Katarzyna Jerzak, Jack Kugelmass, Madeline Levine, Barbara Milewski, Marci Shore, Michael Steinlauf, Halina Stephan, Michael Wachtel, Froma Zeitlin, Steven Zipperstein, and the two reviewers at Slavic Review, especially David Roskies.

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33. Yoav Elstein and Avidov Lipsker point out that clusters of folkloric motifs such as “wedding,” “wedding in a cemetery,” “the appearance of the dead,” and “the dance of the living with the dead” inform not only Der Dybbuk but other Yiddish and Hebrew works from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Mendele Moykher Sforim's “Sefer ha-Kabtsonim” (The book of the beggars) and I. L. Peretz's Bay nakht afn altn mark. Elstein, and Lipsker, , ‘The Homogeneous Series in the Literature of the Jewish People: A Thematological Methodology,” trans. Bar-Ilan, Ruth, in Trommler, Frank, ed., Thematics Reconsidered: Essays in Honor of Horst S. Daemmrich (Amsterdam, 1995), 106-10Google Scholar. Many thanks to Dan Ben-Amos for finding me this article.

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36. Bardett, Rosamund, Wagner and Russia (New York, 1995), 94–103 Google Scholar.

37. Gathered from notes taken at a paper given by Seth L. Wolitz at the annual convention of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages in San Diego, December 1994. In many ways, his paper—unfortunately still unpublished— has inspired this work.

38. An-sky, , The Dyblmk and Other Writings, 212nl2Google Scholar.

39. Zhizn’ cheloveka, prologue, in Leonid Andreev, P'esy (Moscow, 1991), 91.

40. Anathema, scene 3, in Andreev, P'esy, 306. On the reception of this play, see Viktoriia Levitina, Russkii teatr i evrei (Jerusalem, 1988), 2:112—26.

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42. Moscow Theatre Habima, “The Dybbuk” (no publication information; it seems that this playbill, which I saw at the Center for Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, was produced for the Habima's appearance in New York in 1926), 3.

43. Ivanov, Vladislav, Russkie sezony teatra “Gabima” (Moscow, 1999), 83–113 Google Scholar. On p. 94 Ivanov cites A. Volynskii, “Evreiskii teatr. Stat'ia 2. Pokhodnyi kovcheg,” Zhizn’ iskusstva, no. 28(17Julyl923):4.

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45. For a description of these dances and some words about the choreographer Judith Berg, see Hoberman, J., Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film between Two Worlds (New York, 1991), 281 Google Scholar. For more information about the film and its recent reconstruction and for an interesting psychological analysis of it, see Konigsberg, Ira, “'The only “I” in the World': Religion, Psychoanalysis, and The Dybbuk ,” Cinema Journal 36, no. 4 (1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46. Stefania Zahorska, review of The Dybbuk, Wiadomości Literackie, 1939, no. 44, cited in Wladyslaw jewsiewski, Polska kinematografia w okresie filmu dźwiekowego (1930-1939) (Lodz, 1967), 116.

47. Ocalony na Wschodzie, 235, 236.

48. For an analysis of this aspect of Stryjkowski's language, see Jan Paclawski, 0 twórczości Juliana Stryjkowskiego (Kielce, 1986), esp. 160—62.

49. Ocalony na Wschodzie, 235, cf. 67-69.

50. Ibid., 236.

51. For another voice in this critical consensus, see Michalek, Boleslaw and Turaj, Frank, The Modern Cinema of Poland (Bloomington, 1988), 112-13Google Scholar.

52. One reviewer called this dance a mayufes, which he defined as a “traditional Jewish dance.” Zygmunt Kaluzynski, “Pol dnia w Chicago,” Polityka, 1982, no. 41:11. He probably did not understand the negative implications of this expression. The mayufes was a humiliating dance once performed by Jews to entertain the non-Jews they served. The word eventually entered the vocabulary of Polish Jews as a term for “toadying or coerced conformity to the expectations of Polish gentry.” Shmeruk, Chone, “ Mayufes: A Window on Polish-Jewish Relations,” Polin 10 (1997): 274 Google Scholar. Could Stryjkowski have intended his Hasidim to give a mayufes-like performance before the Polish film audience? This seems unlikely: Shmeruk cites Stryjkowski's bitter reference to the mayufes in a different context (282).

53. Stryjkowski, , Austeria, 99 Google Scholar.

54. Sobolewski, , “Zaginiony Świat,” 13 Google Scholar.

55. Three albums of An-sky's collections have recently been published: Rivka Gonen, ed., Back to the Shtetl: An-sky and the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, 1912-1914 (Jerusalem, 1994); Beukers, Mariella and Waale, Renee, eds., Tracing An-sky: Jewish Collections from the State Ethnographic Museum in St. Petersburg (Zwolle, 1992)Google Scholar, and S. An-ski, , The Jewish Artistic Heritage: An Album, ed. Rakitin, Vasilii and Sarabianov, Andrei (Moscow, 1994)Google Scholar.

56. See the image of black hats washing ashore in a photograph taken in Tarnobrzeg and reproduced in Tencer, Golda, ed., And I Still See Their Faces: Images of Polish Jews (Warsaw, 1996), 173.Google Scholar The photo was submitted to the editor by a person who explained, “This is how the Gestapo and military police amused themselves in late 1939 and early 1940. In Tarnobrzeg they liquidated the Jewish elite by driving them into the Vistula and shooting at them.” Many thanks to Michael Steinlauf for pointing out this reference.

57. Very broadly speaking, one could say that Roskies, David, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1984)Google Scholar, and Mintz, Alan, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (Syracuse, 1996)Google Scholar, argue for continuity, while Lawrence Langer, as evidenced by the selection in his Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology (New York, 1995), sees more disruption. See Roskies, David G., “The Holocaust according to its Anthologists,” Prooftexts (January 1997)Google Scholar.

58. Picem-Karczag, Ida, in ‘The Jewish Trilogy of Julian Stryjkowski,” in Micgiel, John, Scott, Robert, and Segel, H. B., eds., Proceedings of the Conference on Poles and Jews: Myth and Reality (New York, 1986)Google Scholar, cites an interview with Stryjkowski (August 1981), in which he defined his goal as commemorative. Also see Spiewak, Pawel, “Miedzy Austeria i Ameryka,“ Twórczość 30, no. 9 (September 1974): 102 Google Scholar; Zaleski, Marek, “O twórczośći Juliana Stryjkowskiego,“ Twórczość 42, no. 5 (May 1986): 72 Google Scholar. Compare Stanislaw Eile, in “The Tragedy of the Chosen People: Jewish Themes in the Novels of Julian Stryjkowski,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 13, no. 3 (1983), who focuses on the moral choices and on Jewish separatism in Stryjkowski's novels.

59. Laura Quercioli Mincer states that “Stryjkowski shouldered his guilt and accused himself of it in every novel.” Mincer, “A Voice from the Diaspora: Stryjkowski, Julian,“ in Polonsky, Antony, ed., From Shtell to Socialism: Studies from Polin (Washington, D.C., 1993), 492 Google Scholar.

60. Konigsberg, “The only “I” in the World,'” 25. A 1997 Polish production of The Dybbuk by the Wierszalin troupe presented the play very explicitly as a commemorative device. The actors wore modern clothes, but carried large dolls dressed as the characters in the play, with enlargements of prewar photos of Polish Jews pasted on to the dolls’ heads. Vera Szabo, “Tsvey ‘Dibuk’ forshtelungen,” The Yiddish Pen 32 (Summer 1997).

61. Bernstein, Michael André, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley, 1994)Google Scholar.

62. English translations of some contributions to this debate appear in Polonsky, Antony, ed., “My Brother's Keeper?“: Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust (London, 1990)Google Scholar. For an analysis of this discussion and others of the sort, see Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead, esp. chap. 6.

63. See, for example, Opalski, Magdalena and Bartal, Israel, Poles and Jews: A Failed Brotherhood (London, 1992)Google Scholar; Shmeruk, Chone, TheEsterke Story in Yiddish and Polish Literature: A Case Study in the Mutual Relations of Two Cultural Traditions (Jerusalem, 1985)Google Scholar.

64. Kawalerowicz quoted in Beale, “Drama's On,” K.

65. Irwin-Zarecka, Neutralizing Memory, 119n7.