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• 1 media/scalar_kazik_title.jpg 2015-09-23T16:07:26-07:00 Kazimierz Dolny as a Symbol of the Jewish Past 27 plain 2016-09-29T16:40:45-07:00

  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.↩
• 1 2015-09-25T15:51:30-07:00 Jewish Artists and Writers Arrive in Kazimierz 4 plain 2016-09-29T16:41:58-07:00

  In beginning of the twentieth century, Kazimierz was discovered by Jewish artists. A Jewish community had existed in Kazimierz since the Middle Ages, and this Jewish population grew with every century. At the turn of the nineteenth century, there were 3,000 inhabitants in the town, most of them Jews. In that respect, Kazimierz was similar to hundreds of Polish towns, especially those to the east of the Vistula. Nevertheless, Kazimierz managed to stand out, although at first glance it is quite difficult to say what made it so different. Still, both Poles and Jews observed Kazimierz’s singularity. Of greatest interest is that the common denominator for Poles and Jews was King Kazimierz the Great. The well-known legend about the King and his beloved Esterka, a Jewish girl, was a manifestation of the Kazimierz Jews’ veneration for the great King. The author and poet Konrad Bielski wrote about this phenomenon: “We are royal Jews, they used to say, and I think they believed that Kazimierz the Great himself had chosen them to settle in the town and had given them special secrets to guard. And they were so separate, so different from others.” Another witness to the times, Zygmunt Kamiński, who participated in a painting workshop in 1901, also noticed the very specific nature of the Jews of Kazimierz. He wrote, “Generally, the Jews of Kazimierz were so different, so ancient, old and almost monumental—marked with signs of the past, tradition, and time that had been stopped.” For Jewish culture, Kazimierz had gradually become an archetypical model of the shtetl—a typical small Jewish town. If for Polish culture Kazimierz was a synonym of the state of being Polish, for Jews, Kazimierz became a symbol of Jewishness. Such a perception of Kazimierz by Jews was shaped by Jewish painters and writers. Most of them were those artists who at the beginning of the twentieth century, after the failure of assimilationism, decided to go back to tradition and folklore associated with the shtetl.

  The first Jewish artist whose presence in Kazimierz is well documented was Józef Mojżesz Gabowicz (1861– 1939). A great sculptor who was widely known in Europe, Gabowicz created busts of many famous people (among whom was Sara Bernhardt) and was awarded the Legion of Honor order in 1910. In 1901, he settled in Warsaw, and it was probably at that time that he visited Kazimierz. One result of that visit was a small pastel drawing depicting Kazimierz as seen from the Three Crosses Hill. Soon many other artists, some of them relatively obscure today, started coming to the town. After 1910, Stanisława Centnerszwerowa often painted Kazimierz.

  Jewish writers started coming to the town at the same time as Jewish painters, and it was not by pure chance that most of them chose to write their works in Yiddish. Sholem Asch’s visit was most significant. He described Kazimierz in his poetic novel A Shtetl (The Village), which was published in 1905. Although the name “Kazimierz” did not appear in this work, it was Asch’s goal in this novel to depict a full year’s cycle in a typical shtetl. Thus he created the literary foundations for the movement in Jewish literature and culture that drew upon the shtetl’s traditions and habits. Acknowledged as the father of Yiddish literature, Isaac Leib Peretz incorporated those traditions into his Folktales (the title itself suggests the theme—Jewish folklore), but this work also had no mention of Kazimierz. However, the town meant much to Peretz, as in 1909, when he commissioned the Jewish artist Ber Kratka to illustrate the book, Peretz specifically requested that the illustrations should depict Kazimierz. Zusman Segałowicz, who was also called “the bard from Kazimierz,” wrote directly about the town in his verse and prose.

  From Waldemar Odorowski, Artistic Colony in Kazimierz Dolny. Centuries 19^th–21^st, trans. Joanna Roszak, revised by Halina Goldberg and Virginia Whealton (Kazimierz Dolny: Nadwiślańskie Museum in Kazimierz Dolny, 2005), 37–38.