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A restored version
of the Yiddish film classic
"The Dybbuk" will be screened
at Congregation Shaarey Zedek.
SUZANNE CHESSLER
Special to the Jewish News
T
he reality of the Polish
landscape merges with the
fiction of exorcism in The
Dybbuk, a Yiddish film to
be shown 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov.
15, at Congregation Shaarey Zedek in
Southfield.
The 1937 film, based on the play
written by S. Ansky between 1912 and
1917, has been newly restored and
subtitled. Its local presentation, free to
the community, has been arranged by
the synagogue's Cultural Commission.
"My uncle took me to see the film
when I was a child," says Evelyn Kasle,
a former member of Wayne State
University's humanities department
who will introduce the movie. "I
remember the excitement of viewing
shtetl life and found the film as star-
tling as more recent audiences found
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Published by The Detroit Jewish News
The Exorcist."
The Dybbuk, which is set at the end
of the 19th century and runs 120
minutes, charts the romance of
Khonnon (Leon Liebgold) and Leah
(Lili Liliana), who can't be married
because her father has agreed to her
union with a wealthy young man.
Khonnon, looking to the occult to
stop the wedding, dies and transfers his
spirit (the dybbuk) into the bride as the
marriage ceremony begins. Khonnon's
voice, spoken by the bride, intensifies
the action, and forces the young woman
to seek exorcism through a rabbi. The
lovers ultimately are reunited in death.
"The emphasis is on the power of
love after death," says Kasle, who
recently viewed the technically upgrad-
ed version in Illinois. "This is a penulti-
mate example of film
at the time, and I
had the same intense
thrill and fear [as
when I saw it the
first time]. It's
provocative on reli-
gious and psycholog-
ical grounds."
On a deeper level,
the film portrays the workings of a
Chasidic community with the central
rabbi, respected as mentor and healer,
influencing his followers. The title
derives from folk beliefs about spirits,
first thought to be devils and later,
under kabbalistic teachings, migrant
souls that could not find rest.
S. Ansky, the author, who used a
pseudonym for his real name, Shloyme
Zanvl Rapaport, is best known as a
folklorist. He led an expedition through
Ukrainian villages between 1911 and
1914 and gathered some 1,800 tales
and legends.
"The Dybbuk is told in an exception-
ally graceful, darkly unsettling labyrinth
of deep-shadowed, gothic images," says
Elliot Wilhelm, curator of film at the
Detroit Institute of Arts and host of the
Detroit Public Television series Film
Festival, which shows classic movies at 9
p.m. Fridays on WTVS-Channel 56.
"It is profoundly moving as an artifact
of a world that would soon cease to
exist and is evocative as living history.
To see a story in film is breathtaking
because it bridges the decades."
Wilhelm, who saw the film for the
first time 15 years ago, believes that part
of the appeal of the movie is watching
the performance of Yiddish actors.
Many of the Jewish films made before
the Holocaust were destroyed.
A scene from "The Dybbuk": The film
draws its name from a popular folk
belief about spirits which enter a living
person, cleave to his soul and speak
through his mouth.
The film was shot on location in
Kazimierz and in a Warsaw studio
under the direction of Michal
Waszynski, whose experience reached
back to 25 feature films. He captured
the shtetl pattern of Jewish settlement
shaped in the 16th century within the
Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania, as Jews
were brought into private towns owned
by nobility.
With Jews in the majority serving as
lessors of assets such as land, mills, inns
and breweries, they could keep a close-
knit life based on their pattern of values.
In service to the nobility, their econom-
ic existence remained poor.
By the time the film was made, one
out of every four Polish Jews lived in
one of the five largest Polish cities, and
40 percent lived in settlements with
more than 10,000 Jews. The city, not
the shtetl, had become the center of
Jewish politics and culture.
Andrzej Marek (Mark Arnshteyn),
who collaborated with Alter Kacyzne
on the screenplay and served as artistic
director, drew on a 40-year career as