Beginning in the first part of the twentieth century, Kazimierz Dolny and the Vistula River became important symbolic elements in the memory culture of the Polish Jewry. This development had been fostered by earlier generations of storytellers and the Polish Jewish mythology they created. As Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska has emphasized, Yiddish literature associated Kazimierz, along with its river, woods, and castles, with the legend about King Kazimierz the Great and Esterke, his Jewish wife, even though the town’s name is actually related to a different king—Kazimierz the Just (Kazimierz sprawiedliwy). ¹ Chone Shmeruk demonstrated that during the nineteenth century, the myth of Polish-Jewish brotherhood that the town symbolized was recreated and reshaped, becoming an emblem of Jewish integration into a Polish state and recreating the figure of Polonia paradisus judaeorum. ² The changes continued into the first decades of the twentieth century, even as the myth retained its main features. ³ The Kazimierz myth helped recall the past, prompting recollection that both Jewish and Polish groups may have needed in order to make meaningful their common existence in a convulsive era in Polish history.

In Yiddish films from interwar Poland, Kazimierz was depicted as the emblematic Polish shtetl. Viewers saw two towns portrayed on the screen simultaneously—the real Kazimierz with its landmarks, and the symbolic one representing the legend of King Kazimierz and Esterke. The town was both photographed in a natural setting on location and artificially recreated in the studio. Kazimierz was perceived via the senses as a concrete reality, but its fleeting image of light in the darkness also evoked abstract ideas. In other words, the town was recreated on the screen in three different perceptional dimensions: material, symbolic, and functional.

Motifs and symbolic images are usually employed as vehicles to transfer ideas. Decoding these symbols and interpreting their transformations may help us understand changing situations not easily represented verbally. This article analyzes the role that the symbolic images of Kazimierz and the Vistula River played in interwar Yiddish cinema as a means for examining the interplay between the representation and the ones who represented it, between the images and the social circle that created them. By analyzing the iconic moving images of Kazimierz and the Vistula River in Yiddish film, we can trace the socio-political and sociocultural expectations of the filmmakers regarding the Jews’ place in Polish society. This article will follow the changing interpretation of these two symbols in Yiddish films in Poland from the interwar period and will investigate how formal public spheres reacted to their interpretation. My main argument is that whereas during the 1920s the motif of Kazimierz helped to celebrate Jewish integration and modernization, the messages changed during the late 1930s, as the filmmakers showed in a very delicate way their own rejection of the message behind the myth. They used the Vistula and the myth embodied in the small town of Kazimierz as a vivid (or morbid) symbol in order to present their vision regarding Polish-Jewish integration. The symbolic use of Kazimierz probably helped them to bypass censorship, which could be expected to look unfavorably on the messages they conveyed.

In order to present these points, the article is divided into three parts. The first section deals with the milieu that created the films; the second and third explicate the representation of Kazimierz during the 1920s and 1930s, respectively.

1. Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Kazimierz vel Kuzmir, Miasteczko różnych snów (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2006), 28–30, 383.↩
2. Chone Shmeruk, The Esterke Story in Yiddish and Polish Literature: A Case Study in the Mutual Relations of Two Cultural Traditions (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for the Furtherance of the Study of Jewish History, 1985), 14–16, 21–35.↩
3. Ibid., 55–82.↩