The Dybbuk (Warszawskie Biuro Kinematograficzne Feniks, 1937)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The last two nights my husband Charles and I had screened two highly unusual movies; on Tuesday, December 7 we ran Josef von Sternberg’s 1927 film Underworld and last night we cracked open the Kino Classics boxed set Jewish Soul: Ten Classics of Yiddish Cinema to watch its lead item, a 1937 film of S. Ansky’s play The Dybbuk. The film was made in Poland and directed by a relative newcomer named Michal Waszynski from a script by S. A, Kacyzna and Andrzej Marek. It’s a somber tale set in a 17th century Jewish ghetto in Poland, and the story kicks off with two young men who grew up together and attended the same yeshiva, Nisan (Gerszon Lemberger) and Sender (Mojzesz Lipman), whose wives are both pregnant. The two make a pledge that if one of their children is a boy and the other a girl, the two kids will get married. They make this pledge despite the warning of a mysterious stranger (Ajzyk Samberg), who appears throughout the film as a sort of voice of reason, that it’s wrong to make a pledge binding two people who haven’t even been born yet. Dire things begin to happen as soon as the two kids are ready to be born: Sender’s wife dies in childbirth and leaves him and the girl’s aunt Frayde (Dina Halpern) to raise the child, Leah. Nisan’s wife survives but he doesn’t; he’s drowned when he falls off a boat trying to cross a river in a storm. The two kids re-meet as young adults and are played by Leon Liebgold as Chanan and Lili Liliana as Leah.

They meet and duly fall in love with each other, but Leah’s father Sender has become a money-obsessed miser who sits around all day and literally counts his gold – a staple of anti-Semitic prejudice at the time and a surprising image to see in a Jewish movie produced for a Jewish audience. Sender has arranged for Leah to marry someone else, a rich guy named Menasze (M, Messinger) who’s seen only briefly in the film. Chanan can’t compete because he’s just a poor Talmudic scholar, so he decides he needs supernatural help: he rips off a book on Kabbalah from his school library, starts casting some of the spells in it, and ultimately attempts to summon Satan himself – only he’s struck dead when he tries it. But that doesn’t stop him; he returns to earth (as a double-exposed ghostly image) and becomes a dybbuk, a spirit that haunts the world to take care of the business he left unfinished when he died. In that form, he takes possession of Leah, who under his control disrupts the wedding ceremony. The rabbi who’s been appearing throughout the whole movie basically as the voice of Jewish tradition tries to conduct the Jewish version of an exorcism (confusingly referred to in the subtitles as “excommunication”), but he fails and at the end Leah lays dead, her spirit having been reclaimed by her dead former lover.

In bare outline, The Dybbuk is a sort of Jewish Lucia di Lammermoor – a woman driven crazy by her family, who want her to marry a rich man who will save their fortune instead of the man she really loves – and George Gershwin, of all people, tried to buy the operatic rights but was turned down. But the movie I kept thinking of while watching it was Carl Dreyer’s 1943 film Day of Wrath, a medieval story about a young woman accused of witchcraft who’s browbeaten so relentlessly by her inquisitors she either hallucinates she’s a witch or actually becomes one (Dreyer deliberately kept it ambiguous). Like Dreyer, Waszynski deliberately paces his movie very slowly – one reason I wanted to watch this was the production stills reminded me of 1930’s Universal horror films, but a story a Universal horror director would have told in 70 minutes takes over two hours here – to evoke the feeling of a distant time, place and culture. The movie The Dybbuk reminded Charles of was an even more off-the-beaten-path one: A Page of Madness, an experimental film made by Japanese director Teinosuke Kinugawa, and though The Dybbuk has a much more linear plot line than A Page of Madness it manages at least some of the Japanese film’s uncertainty about the line between sanity and madness and how catastrophic events can stretch it pretty thin.

What impressed both of us about the 1937 The Dybbuk was how beautifully it was produced physically; we’d both been expecting (and dreading) a far cheaper and cheesier production, with cardboard sets and noisy recording; though the opening credits mentioned that the restorers had done a lot of work on the soundtrack, both it and the picture were in excellent quality, quite watchable and close to the best-preserved U,S, films of the time. The extant print was pieced together from a shortened 98-minute version released in France in 1938 (oddly, though Poland was a center for Yiddish cinema before World War II, the Polish government – which was highly anti-Semitic even before the Nazi takeover in 1939 – forbade many of the Yiddish films made in Poland to be released there) and a full-length (123-minute) version found in an Israeli archive. The Israeli print had been subtitled in Hebrew, and in this version (restored and reissued by a company called Lobster – which struck Charles as ironic because under kosher dietary rules lobsters are as about as impure a food as you can get) the Hebrew subtitles were grayed out on the screen and the English ones printed over them. This meant I could see where the editors for the French version had made at least some of their cuts – and frankly the editing eliminated important bits of dialogue that helped clarify the film.

The Dybbuk is also an unusual film in that it’s practically a musical; the Jewish religious services shown shade from preaching into intoning into outright singing much the way the Black revival scene in King Vidor’s 1929 film Hallelujah featured a minister (Daniel Haynes) whose sermon shaded from speaking to rapping to singing (and the song, “Waiting at the End of the Road,” was composed by a Jew: Irving Berlin).There’s also a guest appearance by Warsaw-based cantor Gershon Sirota, who once appeared on a CD of classic cantors of which the Fanfare reviewer said he was good enough to have had a major operatic career if he’d wanted one – and the extraordinary singing he does in this film bears out the point even though director Waszynski shoots the scene with Sirota at the other end of the church set from the camera, so we get to hear him but not really see much of him. And, as one imdb.com reviewer pointed out, the spectre of the Holocaust looms large over the movie, not only because it’s such a downbeat story but because many of the cast members were among the Nazis’ victims: Gershon Sirota was killed in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and Ajzyk Samberg (Meszulach the Messenger), Samuel Landau (Zalman the Matchmaker), Abraham Kurc (Michael), and Zisze Kac (Mendel) were murdered in the death camps. At least the romantic (if you can call them that) leads, Leon Liebgold and Lili Liliana (a real-life couple), had the good sense (and good luck) to flee to the United States, where Liebgold appeared memorably in Maurice Schwartz’ 1939 film Tevya (a stunning adaptation of the same Sholem Aleichem stories that later became the basis for the musical Fiddler on the Roof) as the non-Jew Tevya’s third daughter falls for: he was such a strapping hunk and such a powerful actor I wondered why the Hollywood casting directors, who had plucked Paul Muni out of the Yiddish Art Theatre and turned him into a major movie star, could have missed someone as obviously qualified for stardom as Liebgold. It’s possible he didn’t want a movie career – imdb.com lists only five films for him, all in Yiddish, though he lived until 1993 and could have seemingly had a major mainstream movie career for the asking.