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• 1 media/scalar_kazik_title.jpg 2015-09-23T17:20:14-07:00 Artists in Kazimierz Dolny 33 plain 2016-09-29T16:42:17-07:00

  “Slavdom Shakes Hands with the Ghetto”: The Filmmakers

  From the beginning of the twentieth century, Kazimierz on the Vistula was quite popular among artists because of its mixture of typical and atypical features. The town was a place where an urban landscape merged with the surrounding countryside, where centuries-old buildings stood against the background of gentle rolling hills. Kazimierz boasted a picturesque market square, an impressive assemblage of churches and synagogues, and the winding Vistula River, with its sandy shore and vast woods beyond. The ruins of the legendary king’s castle watched over the city from the hills. ⁴

  In 1939, the poet Andrzej Wolica mentioned a specific “psychological climate” that characterized the little town. ⁵ At the same time, Karol Siciński, the well-known Polish architect, declared that in Kazimierz, “Slavdom shakes hands with the ghetto.” ⁶ Echoing the myth of King Kazimierz and Esterke, Siciński interpreted the space as a place where Polishness and Jewishness merged singularly in a way that gave the town a grand, charming, and unpretentious touch.⁷ Kazimierz was an ideal place of reference for writers and artists who themselves merged Slavic and Jewish elements and who worked in what might be termed a social “third space.” ⁸ Occupants of that space embodied the polysemic character of the interwar Polish Jewry; they created art on the border between the two cultures and belonged simultaneously to both. ⁹ Most Yiddish filmmakers came from that group. ¹⁰ They worked in both Yiddish and Polish and depicted on-screen worlds in both languages. ¹¹ From a socioeconomic standpoint, these filmmakers belonged to Warsaw’s Jewish middle class, which had undergone a process of acculturation or transculturation over a period of several decades. ¹² Some of these figures of Yiddish cinema moved back and forth between the two worlds of Yiddish and Polish filmmaking. For instance, during the 1920s, Leo Forbert produced about ten films, half of them “Jewish,” as it were. ¹³ Henryk Szaro’s body of work was similar to Forbert’s in this regard. There were those who tended to work more in Yiddish, like Aleksander Marten (director of On a heym in Yiddish and O czym marzą kobiety in Polish). Others, like Michał Waszyński, the director of Der dibuk, one of the best-known Yiddish films, made only occasional incursions into Yiddish filmmaking. ¹⁴ Waszyński worked with Anatol Stern, a famous poet and leading futurist, whose work in Yiddish film was sporadic as well. ¹⁵ The filmmakers’ attitude toward their own works in both languages was balanced. Waszyński, for example, was especially proud of his Yiddish film, Der dibuk. ¹⁶ However, he considered both that film and his Polish-language Znachor to be his best work. ¹⁷ Stern mentioned in the same breath writing the screenplays for both of those films. ¹⁸ Jan Nowina-Przybylski, a Christian film director, was quoted as saying that of all his films, he was most pleased with two, his Yiddish Yidl mitn fidl (shot on location in Kazimierz, 1936) and Manewry miłosne (1935), in Polish. ¹⁹ Both of these films were based on screenplays by Konrad Tom, whose work in Yiddish cinema was outstanding. (He was part of the teams of Yidl mitn fidl and Mamele [1938]), as were his Jewish characters in Polish films; for example, consider Moniek, alias Mieszek Oszczep-Sardinenfisz, in Sto metrów miłości [1932]).

  Because we are speaking about filmmakers who worked in the “third space” of the encounter between Polish and Jewish cultures, I would like to explore their representation of a space that has served as an icon of that encounter—Kazimierz on the Vistula. After all, these filmmakers had visited Kazimierz and were quite familiar both with the symbolic legacy of the town and its river and with its reality. ²⁰

  4. Adamczyk-Garbowska, Odcienie tożsamości: Literatura żydowska jako zjawisko wielojęzyczne (Lublin: Wydawnictow Uniwersytetu Marrii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2004), 50–54; Adamczyk-Garbowska, Kazimierz vel Kuzmir, 20–28; Renata Piątkowska, “I Come from Kazimierz, the Town of Kazimierz, where Painters Sit...,” in In Kazimierz the Vistula River Spoke to Them in Yiddish: Jewish Painters in the Art Colony of Kazimierz, ed. Waldemar Odorowski and Dorota Święcicka-Odorowska (Kazimierz Dolny: Muzeum Nadwislańskie, 2008); Waldemar Odorowski, “‘Painters Walked this Den of Poverty, as if it Was a Paradise,’” ibid. ↩
  5. Andrzej Wolica, “Mój Kazimierz,’” Wiadomosśi Literackie 2 (1939), quoted in Adamczyk-Garbowska, Kazimierz vel Kuzmir, 197, 381. ↩
  6. Quoted in Adamczyk-Garbowska, Kazimierz vel Kuzmir, 218, 383.↩
  7. Karol Siciński, “Urbanizacja Kazimierza,” Wiadomości Literackie 2 (1939), quoted in ibid., 20, 383.↩
  8. Theorists have used the term “third space” in various ways to describe and analyze the situation of ethnonational minority groups whose members live within a majority society that pressures them to acculturate and marginalizes them. I apply this concept to the field of art and media, using the term to denote how the real geographical space creates a symbolic space that contains members of the ethnonational minority who have adopted cultural elements of both the majority and minority groups and are active in both spaces. Following anthropologists Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, I treat this third space as a dynamic social space based on both “recognition of cultural similarity or social contiguity” and a response to “exclusion and constructions of otherness.” See Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Culture, Power, Place: Ethnography at the End of an Era,” in Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, ed. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 13. For a theoretical discussion of a real third space and an imaginary space, see Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996). For a general discussion of power, space, and identity-building, see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) and Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). See also Bhabha, “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998), 207–21.↩
  9. On the polysemic character of Polish Jewry, see the classic paper by Chone Shmeruk, “Hebrew-Yiddish-Polish: A Trilingual Jewish Culture,” in The Jews of Poland between Two World Wars, ed. Israel Gutman, 285–311 (Hanover, NH: Published for Brandeis University Press by University Press of New England, 1989). ↩
  10. With a few illustrious exceptions, such as Joseph Green, Alter Kacyzne, Henryk Bojm, Moshe Broderson, and Yekhezkel Moyshe Naiman, who worked only in Yiddish.↩
  11. Edward Zajicek, Poza ekranem: Kinematografia polska, 1918–1991 (Warsaw: Filmoteka Narodowa, 1992), 28–29.↩
  12. Marcos Silber, “Narrowing the Borderland’s ‘Third Space’: Yiddish Cinema in Poland in the Late 1930s,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 7 (2008): 236–39.↩
  13. In 1922, he produced Ludzie mroku; in 1923, Syn szatana. As Leo Forbert Film, he produced Ślubowanie (Tkies kaf, 1924) and Jeden z 36 (Lamed-vovnik, 1925). As EF ES Forbert Film, he produced W lasach polskich (In die poylishe velder, 1929) and Rywale (1925). The same year he produced a documentary on the foundation of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1926, he produced The Miner’s Daughter in Australia. As Leo Film, he produced Czerwony błazen (1926), Zew morza (1927), Kropka nad i (1928), Policmajster Tagiejew (1929), Uroda życia (1930), Serce na ulicy (1931), Legion ulicy (1932), and 10 procent dla mnie (1933). This last film included few “Jewish motifs” in Lopek’s character. In 1935 he produced a documentary—“Świat, dzieńi noc Palestyny”—in Palestine. Kalendarz wiadomości filmowe 1933 (Warsaw: Rotsztadt-Miastecki Ignacy, 1933), 47, 142–43; “Z żałobnej karty, B. P. Leon Forbert,” Wiadomości Filmowe, August 15, 1938, 2. ↩
  14. Although generally he did not pay much attention to Jewish topics, Jewish characters appear in several of his films. For instance, in his Sto metrów miłości, one of the heroes of the film is a Jew, a grotesque patron of sports named Mieszek Oszczep-Sardinenfisz, played by Konrad Tom (who wrote the screenplay for Yidl mitn fidl). In the film Sardinenfisz takes care of gifted street children, who, thanks to his care, are able to get ahead. Despite the grotesque depiction of the man (including his name), this is not anti-Jewish imagery, since it elicits sympathy in the viewer. During the second part of the 1930s, when several Jewish filmmakers were reluctant to deal with Jewish topics because of growing anti-Semitism, Waszyński did not abandon such matters completely. Often he adopted a new strategy. On one hand he minimized the presence of Jewish characters in his Polish films. For instance, in his Co mój maąż robi w nocy? he converted a Jewish role into a non-Jew (a foreigner). Kazimierz Krukowski played not the familiar role of the Jewish Lopek but a ridiculous, though nice, Romanian baron named Lolo Carolescu. In an interview, Krukowski commented on this character with typical cynicism, referring to Hitler and the growing anti-Semitism in Poland: “Under this man’s influence I became an anti-Semite, and in the present film I play a Romanian baron.” “O tym, jak popularny Lopek—gwoli Hitlerowi—antysemita¸ został,” Reporter filmowy, July 19, 1934. What he evidently meant was that antisemitic trends made it hard to play Jewish characters in a film in which a well-known, much-loved Jewish character like Lopek might appear. Nevertheless, unlike his colleges he occasionally presented minor Jewish figures in his Polish films, underlining their marginality (for example, the grain merchant in Ostatnia brygada from 1938). On the other hand, in Der dibuk, he maximized the Jewish presence, showing on screen a complete Jewish society, a kind of Yiddishland. Of course, this film was made in Yiddish. For elaboration see Silber, “Narrowing the Borderland’s ‘Third Space.’” ↩
  15. In summer 1939, Stern took part in an evening devoted to poetry written in Polish by Jews. During the evening, the poems were read in the Polish original and in Yiddish translation. Adamczyk-Garbowska, “Jewish Writers on Painters in Kazimierz,” in Odorowski and Święcicka-Odorowska, In Kazimierz. ↩
  16. Samuel Blumenfeld, Waszyński’s biographer, quotes various acquaintances in different periods of Waszyński’s life as saying that Waszyński ascribed the greatest importance to Der dibuk, his only Yiddish film. Samuel Blumenfeld, L’homme qui voulait être prince: les vies imaginaires de Michal Waszynski (Paris: B. Grasset, 2006), 80, 100.↩
  17. Film, September 1, 1937, 2.↩
  18. “Utwórcó w polskiego filmu: Rozmowa z Anatolem Sternem,” Świat filmu, August 1, 1937, 6.↩
  19. Tadeusz Naruszewicz, “W polskim świecie filmowym: Artysta i człowiek (wspomnienia pośmiertne o ś. p. Nowinie Przybylskim),” Srebrny Ekran: miesięcznik filmowy 18 (1937–1938): 31.↩
  20. See, for instance, Waldemar Odorowski, Artistic Colony in Kazimierz Dolny Centuries 19th–21st [sic]: Guide to the Permanent Exhibition at the Celejowski House (Kazimierz Dolny: Nadwiślańskie Museum in Kazimierz Dolny, 2005), 56–57, 59. ↩
  
  
• 1 2015-09-23T17:39:43-07:00 Jews and the Polish Spirit: In poylishe velder 7 plain 2016-09-29T16:45:57-07:00 Encouraged by the success of Jeden z 36, Forbert subsequently (in late 1928) presented a more complex vision of Jewish involvement in the Polish state-building project. As his vehicle, he chose a historical epic, Joseph Opatoshu’s iconic novel In poylishe velder (In Polish Forests). ³⁰ The enterprise was an ambitious one. Forbert engaged Majer Bałaban, the noted Jewish historian, to ensure historical accuracy. Forbert also sought a location for filming that could symbolize Polish-Jewish brotherhood. The film begins with a shot of some ancient oaks from a Polish forest, with a traditional Polish forest keeper looking at poor children collecting wood. An intertitle follows: “Because the Polish forests are great and wide, they can support the poor people who use them to warm their cold dwellings.” ³¹ Indeed, the film underscored the character of Poland as a generous home for the dispossessed, recalling the myth of the magnanimous reception of persecuted Jews by Kazimierz the Great. Echoing Forbert, the journal Kino dla wszystkich noted that “the work testifies how close the Polish Jews are to those Polish roads, Polish trees, Polish water, rituals, traditions, ways of life, Polish spirit.” ³²

   

  The charm of the surrounding non-Jewish culture is highlighted from the film’s outset, when it shows pagan rituals connected with the Vistula from the point of view of the main character Mordkhe. This display recalls the legend of the Princess Wanda, who threw herself into the Vistula because she did not want to be married to a German; instead, she became queen of the river. The film presents the fishermen’s ceremonial offering to her in order to quiet the Vistula’s waves, indirectly recalling the myth of Esterke as elaborated in Yiddish literature. ³³ Mordkhe is curious about and attracted to these strange but magnetic rituals.

  The film told about Jewish patriotism in the January uprising. ³⁴ Deviating slightly from Opatoshu’s novel, whose first half related Mordkhe’s early life, the film’s main plot developed this theme from the outset, underlining Mordkhe’s activities as a traveling agitator who is perceived alternately as a Jew and a Catholic. Thus, this film emphasized the supremacy of the third space. It praised people active in both Jewish and non-Jewish societies, as well as people who transferred cultural components, bridging the two worlds. Using techniques of melodrama, the film encouraged the spectator to identify with people active in Jewish and Polish simultaneously. In this way, the film recreated the narrative of integration and Polish-Jewish brotherhood that crystallized during the second half of the nineteenth century and urged its acceptance again in the late 1920s, when that narrative had long been under attack. Perhaps it was precisely this fresh assault that led to its resurrection.

  30. According to the director, the book was chosen because “only a film based on remarkable ideals could lead to success.” “W lasach polskich na ekranie: Rozmowa z rez˙yserem Jonasem Turkowem,” Kino dla wszystkich, December 1, 1925, 28.↩
  31. Sh. L. Shneiderman [Emil, pseud. ], “In varshtat fun di poylishe velder,” Film velt 1 (1929): 7. On the identification of the pseudonym, see “S. L. and Eileen Shneiderman Collection of Yiddish Books,” The University of Maryland Libraries and the Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies, last modified January 10, 2013, http://www.lib.umd.edu/SLSES/donors/decades.html.↩
  32. Ed. EK. “‘Społeczeństwo polskie a lasy polskie,’” Kino dla wszystkich, December 15, 1925, 18.↩
  33. Shmeruk, Esterke Story, 77–81.↩
  34. Hoberman, Bridge of Light, 143–46; Gross, Toldot ha-kolno’a, 36–40; Sheila Skaff, The Law of the Looking Glass: Cinema in Poland 1896–1939 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008), 98–101.↩
• 1 2015-09-25T15:40:58-07:00 The Town of our Dreams 2 plain 2016-04-03T18:38:57-07:00

  Kazimierz Dolny nad Wisłą (the full name, Lower Casimir on the Vistula, differentiates the settlement from the historically Jewish district of Krakow, also named Kazimierz) is a picturesque ancient town in East-Central Poland. Known to its Jewish inhabitants as Kuzmir (קאזמיר), the town was home to a large Jewish population for hundreds of years until the Jewish inhabitants of Kuzmir were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust

  In the years before World War II, Kazimierz stood out in several ways from other similar Polish towns with large Jewish populations. First, the combination of architectural and natural beauty that characterized the town had attracted artists since the nineteenth century. Second, by the turn of the twentieth century, Kazimierz was mythologized as a representation of an idyllic Jewish-Polish past. Although the founder and patron of this town was Prince Casimir II the Just, Kazimierz was routinely associated with the fourteenth-century benefactor of the Jews, King Casimir III the Great, and his fabled Jewish mistress Esterka. Third, during its artistic heyday, Kazimierz provided an exceptionally successful collaborative space for the Jewish and gentile artists who worked there. Perhaps it was the mythical quality of Kazimierz that enticed artists, whether their background was Jewish or Christian. In his 1939 essay “The Town of Our Dreams,” the Polish-Jewish writer Anatole Stern remarked: “I know people who habitually eat breakfast in Warsaw, lunch in London, and dinner in Paris. But at night they always return to Kazimierz, because it is the town of their dreams.”

  Jews were integral to the landscape of Kazimierz. They were also an active force in shaping that landscape. The Yiddish writer Samuel L. Shneiderman, a native of Kazimierz and the author of Ven di Visel hot geredt Yiddish (When the Vistula Spoke Yiddish), remarked that “Jews changed the architectural image of the town through attaching wooden balconies to the half-destroyed stone walls of the houses and adding steep and winding staircases to rooms that were situated one above another, nestlike. Under the Gothic archways the Jews had the little shops (…). Later on, from these makeshift extensions developed a certain Romantic style that harmoniously matched the surrounding landscape.” For the architect Karol Siciński, Kazimierz was a place where “the Slavic soul and the ghetto shook hands, creating a rare example of an architecture: fantastic and picturesque, full of natural grace and enchantment.”

  Already in the earliest Romantic images representing Kazimierz, Jews are an integral part of the artistic cityscape. One such example is found in Joseph Richter’s 1830 sepia drawing of the market square. With time, Jews became increasingly common as a subject of artistic scenes from Kazimierz. Artists’ journeys to Kazimierz also presented opportunities for interaction with the local Jews. For example, several artists mention staying at the inn of Lipa Rabinowicz, which in the 1850s offered very basic accommodations, according to the recollections of the painter Wojciech Gerson, but by the 1880s the painter and architect Michał Elwiro Andriolli praised its cleanliness and hospitality.

  During the 1920s, when artists started to arrive in Kazimierz in large numbers, they found the Jewish inhabitants of the town to be friendly towards them, although the traditional Jews of Kazimierz typically avoided posing for paintings. On the other hand, the Jews liked to help artists in their day-to-day challenges, for instance by assisting them in finding affordable accommodations. Some of the associations were especially close. For instance, Shulim Nudelman was so strongly linked with Tadeusz Pruszkowski, the professor of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and the leader of the younger generation of artists connected to Kazimierz, that he was known as “Professor Pruszkowski’s Broker.” In fact, he appeared under this name in one of the satirical szopka plays organized by the Academy of Fine Arts. Perhaps Jews were the first to recognize that the artists’ interest in Kazimierz opened other opportunities. Along with the artists, tourists started to arrive in Kazimierz. The town began to undergo a transformation, and it soon became a popular destination for summer vacationers.

  Introduction by Halina Goldberg, drawn on material from Waldemar Odorowski, Artistic Colony in Kazimierz Dolny. Centuries 19th -21st (Kazimierz Dolny: Nadwiślańskie Museum in Kazimierz Dolny, 2005).