Yiddish-language films produced in Poland during a period of less than a decade in the late 1930s are a unique part of the rich culture Jews created between the two world wars. They combine a technology - at the time not as modern as Hollywood's - used by a secular people developing its own modern identity, with themes that explore the religious and mythical roots of the Jewish experience in that part of the world.
Nostalgia Laden
Since much of the appeal behind these films, even in the 1930s, was nostalgia, the movies often remain on the level of shtetl-kitsch, or melodrama, telling old stories of broken vows, parental disapproval, and reconciliation with a little push from God. Visually, most look only as competently made as they needed to - sometimes a director just needed to fit a few rabbis on the screen, as they would be placed on la stage in the Yiddish theater, where most of the film scripts originated. In a few cases, the films rise above the ordinary.
If any single film best represents the finest achievements of Yiddish film between the wars, it is The Dybbuk (1937), what, in modern times, might be described as a Yiddish combination of The Exorcist and Romeo and Juliet. Not surprisingly, it is the one Yiddish film that today's audiences know best.
Films shot in Warsaw studios played in Jewish cinemas throughout Poland. Still, in spite of a Jewish population of three million in Poland itself, the Jewish audience was too small to support the Yiddish-language film industry. The real market for the movies was abroad, where they reached a public of millions in what then could be called the "Yiddish-speaking world": Vienna, Berlin, Paris, Brussels, London, Buenos Aires, and, of course, New York.
Yiddish film was a secular medium that took on themes that had religious roots and told stories for the moral lessons they offered, and for the opportunity to present urban Jews and Jews in the broad diaspora with a folkloric view of the culture their families had left in the previous generation or perhaps earlier. Two-thirds of the Yiddish films that were produced in the heyday of Yiddish cinema, 1936 to 1939, were in fact made in and around New York.
German Influence
Shot in Warsaw, and in a small village nearby, in an austere Expressionist style that shows the influence of German directors from a decade before the film's making, The Dybbuk retells the legend of a broken marriage contract between two Hassidic elders. Nisn and Sender, who agree that the children their wives are about to bear will marry if one child is a boy and one a girl. Nisn ends up having a son, Khonnon, while Sender's wife bears a daughter, Leah. Years later Khonnon, now a young rabbinical student, comes to town and takes a room in Sender's home without revealing his identity. Leah falls in love with the young stranger, not realizing who he is, while Khonnon invokes the numerological magic of the Kabbala to try to prevent her betrothal to another. Khonnon dies when he calls on the Name of Names, and his spirit, called a dybbuk, possesses Leah as she prepares to marry. The film ends with an elaborate exorcism where Sender confesses his earlier promise, the dybbuk is driven from Leah, and Leah dies to join her true
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