The Soul of Catastrophe: On the 1937 Film of S. An-sky's The Dybbuk

This article examines historical catastrophe in Michał Waszyński's 1937 Yiddish film, The Dybbuk. Based on S. An-sky's World War I-era play, which had conflated mass violence against Jews at the hands of Ukrainian nationalist Bogdan Chmielnicki in 1648 with the mass slaughter of eastern European Jews in 1914-18, Waszyðski's film contemplated Polish Jewry's vulnerability in Hitler's Europe. Yet, rather than lamenting an external enemy, the film, like An-sky's play, casts its reflection on catastrophe purely endemically. Focusing on two key Jewish texts, the Song of Songs and the Kaddish, the film examines the "horizontal" rapport between lovers and spouses against the imperative of "vertical" continuity between generations. As in the play, the gap between rich and poor is central to the film's story, inflected by the homophilic bond between the fathers of the ill-starred lovers. The film portrays a shtetl ruled by death and a Jewish modernity ridden by catastrophe.