The most well-known and celebrated Yiddish film, The Dybbuk, was produced in Poland. Yiddish cinema spanned three decades and was produced in four countries, experiencing its highest moment of artistic and commercial success in the late 1930s.
Much of this cinema was rooted in the Yiddish theater, particularly in Poland and America, and The Dybbuk was no exception. It was adapted from a renowned play by Sholom Ansky. The play was inspired by Ansky’s 1912-1917 expedition through the villages of the Ukrainian countryside, during which he collected nearly 1,800 Jewish stories, legends and bits of folklore. In a tragic twist of fate, Ansky, who died in 1920, did not live to see his play produced on stage or adapted for the screen.
The story begins when devoted friends Sender and Nisn attend the High Holy Days where they vow to marry off their firstborn children, should one have a son and the other a daughter. Their spiritual leader, the Rebbe of Miropole, advises against it, and a visitor to the Rebbe’s court known as the Messenger warns them of dark consequences. Sender returns home to discover his wife has died giving birth to their daughter Leah, while Nisn suffers a fatal accident just as his son Khonnon is born at home.
Eighteen years later, Khonnon arrives in Sender’s shtetl where he falls in love with Leah. Sender does not recognize him and betroths Leah to the son of a wealthy family. A distraught Khonnon turns to mystical practices, engaging in incantations, ritual ablutions and numerology. Summoning dark, Satanic forces leads to his death. His restless spirit – a dybbuk – enters Leah’s body as she stands under the wedding canopy. Khonnon cleaves to her soul, possessing her.
The Dybbuk was directed by Michal Waszynski, an experienced filmmaker in the mainstream Polish cinema who had completed more than 25 features by the time he accepted this assignment. A Polish Jew, Waszynski was born in what was Imperial Russia but is now Ukraine. He left his remote village of Volhynia in the early 1920s and ended up in the film industry in Berlin when Expressionism dominated German filmmaking. Waszynski, who was known to embellish stories of his early career, claimed to have been an assistant director to F.W. Murnau, but there is no proof that he ever met the legendary German director. Still, an Expressionist influence is evident in a few scenes in The Dybbuk. When Leah seeks out the grave of Khonnon, the cemetery is crammed with tilted monuments and crooked markers, emphasizing diagonal lines, a signifier of instability in Expressionist iconography. The Dance of Death sequence, in which Leah is compelled to waltz with a figure dressed as Death, is shadowy and atmospheric, echoing the Expressionist preference for heavy mood.
Waszynski benefitted from a reasonable production schedule, shooting two weeks on location for the exterior scenes and five weeks at the Feniks studio in Warsaw. Compared to most Yiddish-language films in America, The Dybbuk exhibited good production values because it was made within the commercial Polish film industry.
A major success at the box office in Jewish centers in America and Europe, The Dybbuk offered Jewish audiences comfort in its nostalgic depiction of life in the shtetl, which was rapidly disappearing. The film not only provided a detailed depiction of life in a Hasidic community but also preserved a rich tapestry of Jewish lore and legend.
