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| S. An-Ski: Ethnographer, Author, Polyglot |
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| Recording in the Shetl |
This past weekend, I had the chance to see the
Polish/Yiddish 1937 film The Dybbuk
again, restored and uncut, with new English subtitles. What a cool movie! It was based on a play with a complex
history, written by S. An-Ski (aka Shloyme Zanvi Rappoport). An-ski was a complex guy himself. A product of Eastern European 19th century
Jewish culture, An-Ski is best remembered as an ethnographer, who with a photographer
and musicologist, sought to study the vanishing culture of the Eastern European
Yiddish-speaking shtetl (village) of
his time in a series of expeditions made between 1912 and 1914 in what is now
the western Ukraine.
At around
the same time, An-Ski wrote the Dybbuk. Completely bilingual in Russian and Yiddish,
he produced versions in both languages, beginning around 1911, and spent the
rest of his life trying to get it produced.
It was first published in Moscowa in 1920, but in a Hebrew translation
by Chaim Bialek--which subsequently was performed by the Habima company there,
and went on to have a long life in Israel, not only in continuous performance,
but inspiring several operas (you can watch them on YouTube).
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| The Dybbuk: First Vilna Production |
The Yiddish
premiere came in the city of Vilna (now Vilnius), a month after An-Ski's death,
and was an instant hit. It was later
translated into several languages and performed all over Europe, the United
States and Canada, and is still performed today.
But in many
ways, it is the 1937 movie that has endured in the popular imagination. It was made in Poland in Yiddish, directed by
Mical Waszinsky, himself quite a character.
Waszinsky had been born Moshe Waks in a Ukrainian shtetl, but later
moved to Warsaw, Poland and converted to Catholicism, after learning the film
director's trade from F.W. Murnau in Berlin.
Most of his prolific film career in Warsaw lay in Polish films, but in
1937, he made The Dybbuk in Yiddish
with a Jewish theatrical cast. It was
filmed in Warsaw and on location in the Polish town of Kazimierz Dolny, called
Kuzmir by its Jewish population. It was
lucky to have been made then, because two years later the Nazis invaded and began
obliterating this culture altogether
The
Dibbuk probably remains the only Yiddish-language film that was targeted to
an audience beyond the local Yiddish speaking community. In order to do this,
the plot was enlarged with a back-story to explain its subsequent events. Its story in the movie is as follows:
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| The Dybbuk: The Messinger and the Young Sender |
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| The Dybbuk: Leah and Chonan |
In a little
Jewish town, two friends, Sender and Nisn, whose wives were both pregnant, made
a vow if one baby was a boy and the other a girl to marry them off when they
grew up. In spite of dire warnings from
a mysterious Messeinger, they declared their vow in front of the illustrious
visiting Rabbi. Sender duly had a
daughter, Leah, and Nisn a son, Chonan, but Sender's wife died in childbirth,
and Nisn, returning to his distant village just as his wife went into labor,
died on the way home.
Fast forward
18 years. Sender, now very rich, decided
to find an even richer match for Leah, now eighteen and gorgeous. Enter a poor itinerant student, none other
than the grown-up Chonan, who comes to Sender's town to continue his higher
education at the town's Yeshiva. The Messenger reappears again, and persuades Sender to take in this poor student for his meals. Sender has forgotten his vow to Nisn, and
doesn't recognize the young man as Nisn's grown son. Leah and Chonan meet, instantly find a strong
bond, and realize that they belong together.
They wish to marry, but Sender will not hear of a poor match and
continues to pursue a more advantageous one.
The
distraught Chonan turns to mystical means to achieve his goal. He studies Kabala and other, less savory
magic texts, starves himself with fasting, and finally even invokes Satan to
achieve his ends. For this last
transgression, he drops dead in the Synagogue.
Leah is totally distraught, but even so her father goes ahead and
contracts a marriage for her with a rich but totally unattractive and stupid
prospect. The Messenger appears again,
and reveals to Sender that Chonan was the Nisn's son, and reminds him of the
vow--too late!
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| The Dybbuk:Leah at Chonan's Grave |
As
preparations for the marriage go ahead, Leah is taken to the cemetery to invite
the spirit of her mother to the wedding, as per local tradition. While there, she goes to Chonan's grave and
invites him also. The Messinger, lurking nearby, informs Leah's aunt, her
chaperone, and warns her about the dangers of letting the girl wander about the
cemetery alone--but--too late--the invitation has been Back in town, the marriage celebrations
begin, but in a macabre scene, Leah can only envision them as a dance with
death. When the time for the marriage
vows comes, she refuses her groom, crying out Chonan's name. Chonan has become a Dybbuk, a dislocated soul, and enters into Leah's body when she
calls out to him, and she begins to speak with his voice. Naturally the wedding doesn't go on. The distraught Sender makes every effort to
free Leah from Chonan's spirit, but both she and the spirit refuse. He finally takes her to a famous miracle-working
Rabbi, who first summons Nisn's spirit and asks his help to nullify the broken
vow. Nisn's spirit refuses him. Finally, with a blowing of seven shofars
(ram's horns) and the lighting of black candles at the Holy Ark of the
synagogue, Chonan's spirit is purged, but emptied of the spirit of her beloved,
and after portentous warnings by the Messinger, Leah dies in the synagogue.
made, and accepted.
The film,
done in black and white, is expressionistic in style, not surprising
considering the director's training, and much of the dialogue is stylized, as
well as is the gestural acting, not only by the main characters, but in the
menacing figure of the Messenger, who appears and disappears throughout,
standing impassively, and giving dire commentary and sometimes warnings to all.
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| The Dybbuk: Leah, at The Wedding, Dances with Death |
I showed
the film during my classes of Jewish and Judaic art, primarily because it
offers one of the few, Pre-World War II glimpses into an Eastern European
synagogue "in action," and thus a picture of the very
soon-to-disappear world that An-Ski was documenting. After the war, of course, that world, that
culture and that language would vanish.
What was so
very fascinating, though, was how my students reacted to the film: they loved
it. Most of my students weren't Jewish, but
the story resonated. Unrequited love and
hauntings exist through many cultures. In making such a "folkloric"
movie accessible to a wider audience as Waszinsky and his script-writers and
cast did, they also succeeded in making the film timeless. The story, after all, of star-crossed lovers
and the forbidden supernatural, is still plays loudly in popular imagination. The expressionistic, dark style transports us
to a spiritually strange world, where these things can happen. Modern versions would be loaded with CGI
effects that would be far more over-the-top, louder and loaded with exploding
color, but it's the very remoteness of the black and white stylization that
makes it so tragically mysterious--even with the in-your-face presence of The
Messenger.
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| The Dybbuk: Montreal, 2015; Mystical??? |
Of course,
if the story could have placed today, it never would have happened. a simple cellphone call would have told
Sender and Nisn's widow what had occurred in their respective towns, the vow
would have been remembered, and Leah and Chonan could have lived happily ever
after in a more egalitarian world.
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For an interesting account of An-Ski's ethnographic
expeditions, there is a wonderful book of photographs, entitled Photographing the Jewish Nation, Pictures
from S. An-Sky's Ethnographic Expeditions, Waltham, Massachusetts, Brandeis
University Press, 2009.
An English translation of The Dybbuk is available:
S. Ansky and David G. Roskies, The Dybbuk and Other Writers, New Haven, Yale University Press,
2002.
The complete, remastered 1937 film is viewable on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjy7O9sA1TQ&t=2707s
