With the knowledge of what came after, a shadow hovers over the opening credits of The Dybbuk. The 1937 Yiddish language picture was filmed in Poland just two years before the Nazis invaded the country and herded the Jews into ghettos. From there they were pushed onto trains bound for the death camps. What became of the film’s cast and crew?
The Dybbuk is included in a new Blu-ray collection, “The Jewish Soul: Ten Classics of Yiddish Cinema” (released by Kino Classics). According to the set’s booklet, The Dybbuks’ director, Michal Wasczynski, escaped to the Soviet Union and was allowed to leave for the West. He became Orson Welles’ assistant on Othello (1952) and went on to produce Hollywood historical spectacles. What became of everyone else?
Today’s audience will find much of The Dybbuk melodramatic, but let’s put that aspect aside and look at it as a film that dramatizes a particular culture and mindset. The production was comparable in most scenes to contemporary Hollywood; the long shadows of German Expressionism are visible. The Dybbuk was adapted from a popular play by S. Ansky, an ethnographer who collected folklore among the Jews of the Russian Empire as the 20th century began. Ansky billed the play as a “dramatic legend,” a reworking of stories concerning ghosts (dybbuks) capable of possessing the living.
The film brings to life the Hasidic communities of 19th century Poland and Russia, steeped in rabbinical lore and disputations. The actors endow their roles with emotional sympathy and break into powerful, operatic cantorial singing. It’s to the venerable rabbi that the people turn to for an exorcism, separating the dybbuk from the body of the woman he has vengefully possessed. Doubt hangs over the proceedings. Will the rabbi’s incantations, accompanied by the blowing of the shofar horns, drive the spirit out?
Among the other nine selections included in “The Jewish Soul” is Tevya (1939), an earlier adaptation of the Sholem Aleichem story popularized decades later by the musical Fiddler on the Roof. It was directed by the actor who played its flummoxed milk man, Maurice Schwartz. His version doubled down on the marriage of Tevya’s daughter Chava to a Russian, which represented not just a disappointment in the family but was tantamount to death itself. Also of interest is a Yiddish language film by American cult director Edgar Ulmer, the surprisingly funny American Matchmaker (1940). The story relates how an enterprising but lovelorn New Yorker sets himself up as an “advisor in human relations,” a spiffed up rebranding of the Old World matchmakers. Ulmer’s comedy is a commentary on the various ways Jewish (and by extension, other) immigrants adapted to American society while keeping hold of tradition.
