Sto Lat, ‘Dybbuk’! Celebrating & Commemorating the Classic Yiddish Play – Online
In December 2020, a series of talks and performances organised by myself, the Theatre Institute in Warsaw, and the director Paweł Passini honoured the immense legacy and haunting afterlife of S. An-ski’s famed drama. All of the events were available and open to the public online.
The Jewish ‘Romeo and Juliet’
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The Habima company performing ‘The Dybbuk’, Moscow, 1922, photo: from the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York
Reeling from the unexpected death of his close colleague, Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport, better known by his pen-name, S. An-ski, then Vilna Troupe director, Mordechai Mazo, vowed to pay tribute in the best way he could imagine: to stage An-ski’s The Dybbuk after the shloshim (the traditional Jewish 30-day mourning period) had ended, on 9th December 1920. But what began nearly a century ago as the heartfelt dedication to a suddenly deceased friend ultimately and indelibly altered the landscape of Jewish theatre and Jewishness in performance from that point forward.
Often referred to as the Jewish Romeo and Juliet, The Dybbuk took inspiration from An-ski’s ethnographic mission through the Jewish Pale of Settlement (from today’s Belarus to North Macedonia), conducted between 1912 and 1914. The play is set in a small Jewish village, or shtetl, in the 19th century, and centres on the failure to allow two young people to marry who had been promised to one another (the Jewish term for this is bashert [באשערט]). This results in, essentially, the death of the pair.
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Hanna Rowina as Lea in the premiere of ‘The Dybbuk’ at the Habima Theatre, 1922, photo: Wikimedia Commons
Khonon, a passionate but penniless yeshiva student, dies at the start of the play, after fasting and turning to the Kabbalah for inspiration for how to win his would-be bride, Leah. Due to her rich father’s desire to obtain a proper dowry, Leah is out of reach by any practical measures. As it happened, Leah and Khonon’s fathers had been close friends while yeshiva students themselves and had made a pact that their two unborn children would be married one day. Thanks to this, Khonon and Leah were bound by a pre-arranged marriage, or a shiddukh (שדוך) – thereby linking their unborn souls. Khonon’s father died young, however, and Leah’s father, Sender, failed to fulfil his end of the agreement, despite having both young people for a time under his own roof. Sender is now rather more interested in finding a financially compatible partnership, and therefore has arranged for Leah to marry someone from a neighbouring shtetl.
On the night of the wedding, however, Leah asks to invite her mother’s spirit to her wedding, and also invites Khonon’s. Once released from its grave, Khonon’s soul possesses Leah’s body and refuses to leave until they can be wedded in the afterlife. A rabbinical court is called in order to hold a trial regarding Sender’s broken promise and Khonon’s possession of Leah. Ultimately, the play closes without Khonon’s father forgiving Sender. This results in Khonon’s spirit departing Leah’s body – but only with Leah’s spirit in tow, with the pair to be bonded together for eternity in the next world.
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Szymon An-ski (fourth from left) with the Vilna Troupe, circa 1919, photo: from the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York
Eventually, An-ski’s narrative attracted the interest of a young Jewish theatrical touring company, the Vilna Troupe – originally based out of Vilnius, or Vilna, as part of Poland at that time. They had relocated to Warsaw by then, though kept their placename moniker. In spite of their interest, An-ski did not live to see his play performed; while convalescing at a spa outside of Warsaw, he died on 8th November 1920 at the age of 57.
Amid thousands of mourners at An-ski’s funeral at the Okopowa Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw, Mazo vowed to give the world premiere of An-ski’s play just one month later. Keeping his promise, on 9th December 1920, the Vilna Troupe premiered The Dybbuk at Warsaw’s Elizeum Theatre. And while, as Debra Caplan notes, it took critics nearly a month to fully acknowledge the critical success of the piece, for audiences, the production was an immediate and ‘meteoric’ success.
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Building of the former Elizeum Theatre, where ‘The Dybbuk’ premiered, photo: E. Troczewski / Wikimedia Commons
Within a month of its world premiere, The Dybbuk had become such a hit that on Warsaw’s tramways, rather than calling out the name of the station closest to the theatre, the conductor would simply call out, ‘Dybbuk! Proszę wysiadać [everybody out]!‘) While press coverage began as a trickle, eventually the floodgates opened, and coverage flooded in from all sides – from Jewish periodicals in Yiddish and Polish, non-Jewish Polish coverage in Polish, and even reviews stemming from as far flung as the New York Jewish paper, The Daily Forward.
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Postcard of Marszałkowska Street in Warsaw, before 1919, photo: National Library / Polona
Indeed, even seven months after the play’s opening, the visiting reporter for The Daily Forward went so far as to complain in the opening paragraph of his review that he had been asked no less than ‘several dozen times’ if he had seen The Dybbuk yet: ‘a portion of each conversation [he had] unavoidably had to be about Dybbuk’. Had he not seen the performance, he concluded, he would have felt downright unwelcome in Warsaw.
Arnshteyn’s ‘political act’
Although by the 1920s, theatre audiences had already been saturated by the Yiddish production, the 1925 premiere of the first Polish-language version of The Dybbuk nonetheless drew much attention – and represents a significant moment in Polish theatre history. From the outset of the idea of staging the piece in Polish, Mark Arnshteyn (Andrzej Marek), the Yiddish-to-Polish translator, was open about the Polish adaptation of the Jewish piece being undoubtedly a ‘”political act” furthering Polish-Jewish understanding’.
As his two names imply, Arnshteyn himself was a man with a foothold in both the Jewish/Yiddish and Polish worlds. The Polish version of the play was to serve as a complementary cultural corollary to the more politically focused Polish Jewish clubs and organisations of the time. As Michael Steinlauf put most directly:
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In the highly charged national atmosphere of interwar Poland [...] to produce Jewish plays on the Polish stage was much more than an artistic event; it was to stride unavoidably into the political arena.
Author
From ‘Mark Arnshteyn’, p. 404
Perhaps this is why Arnshteyn at first struggled to get the necessary permission and partnerships to stage the piece in the Polish capital. One Polish director deemed the work too ‘difficult, complicated, and incomprehensible’ for a Polish audience, to say nothing of the less overtly pronounced, though nonetheless lurking concerns of the political weight of staging such a piece.
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The Vilna Troupe performing ‘The Dybbuk’ 1920s, photo: from the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York
That said, in spite of its political heft, Arnshteyn got so far as to have a written contract for a production with one of the most – if not the most – famous Interwar Polish directors, Leon Schiller. Schiller, who was artistic director at the time of the Bogusławski National Theatre in Warsaw was, according to Arnshteyn, ‘in love with The Dybbuk’ – which might explain why he signed a production contract prior to ‘cooling’ shortly thereafter and eventually, it is implied, cancelling the planned production.
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Still from ‘The Dybbuk’, directed by Michał Waszyński, 1937, pictured: Lili Liliana, photo: Filmoteka Narodowa / www.fototeka.fn.org.pl
Nevertheless, Arnshteyn remained steadfastly determined to stage his Polish translation of the pivotal Yiddish piece. Eventually, he found a willing partner in Kazimierz Wróczyński, then-artistic director of the Łódź Municipal Theatre. In the leading Warsaw-based Yiddish literary journal, Literarisze Bleter (The Literary Pages), Arnshteyn discussed how impressed he was by the dedication of the resident acting company in their commitment to the Jewish material and its foreignness – though during the process, he had to work with them to specifically shy away from the Polish acting tendency to offer stereotypical portrayals of Jews on stage. (Scholars such as Michael Steinlauf and Alyssa Quint, and Debra Caplan have discussed that this even had its own term in Polish: żydłaczenie, meaning to use a specifically pejorative, so-called ‘Jewish’ intonation or accent.)
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Scene from a televised production of ‘The Dybbuk’ directed by Agnieszka Holland, 1999, photo: TVP archives / Forum
In the same interview, Arnshteyn attested to the fact that his ultimate motivation behind translating and staging the piece in Polish was rooted in his desire to help, in whatever way possible, the situation of Polish-Jewish relations. Pointedly, he stated:
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Each should do all that is possible in order to improve Jewish-Polish relations... Maybe an artist would have more success?... Of all firsts, The Dybbuk on the Polish stage ought to be the first step.
Author
From ‘Literarisze Bleter’, 30 April 1925, p. 2., trans. RMM
In spite of being condemned on the one hand as being too Jewish for Polish audiences, and on the other hand, too altered in its translation from the original Yiddish, the Łódź and the subsequent Warsaw productions of The Dybbuk received enthusiastic acclaim from both the Jewish and non-Jewish press over their months in production. The strangeness encapsulated by the Jewish tale, mired in the Jewish mysticism of a 19th-century shtetl, managed to entrance non-Jewish audiences – many of whom had very likely already seen the production in Yiddish.
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Scene from ‘The Dybbuk’, directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski, a coproduction of TR Warszawa and the Współczesny Theatre in Wrocław, photo: Stefan Okołowicz / TR Warszawa
The new Polish translation by Arnshteyn both utilised and diminished the original production’s layers of Jewishness, making the narrative more accessible to non-Jewish audiences, and therefore simultaneously positioning the longtime Other in Poland as somehow less foreign, less strange. Testifying to this, a number of Polish theatre critics even commented on the play’s overlap with canonical Polish materials circulating at the time, namely Adam Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve and Stanisław Wyspiański’s The Wedding.
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Scene from ‘The Dybbuk’, directed by Maja Kleczewska, 2015, pictured: Magdalena Koleśnik, photo: Magda Hueckel / The Ester Rachel Kamińska and Ida Kamińska State Jewish Theatre
The production marked an important moment of Jewish and Polish cultural ‘breakthrough’, as one contemporaneous theatre review emphatically suggested. And although neither the Łódź nor the Warsaw stagings of the Polish Dybbuk production matched the run length or audience sizes of the 1920 Vilna Troupe production, they nonetheless inspired critical, thoughtful debate that engaged both sides of the cultural sphere of Warsaw.
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Scene from ‘The Dybbuk”, directed by Anna Smolar, photo: Monika Stolarska / Polski Theatre in Bydgoszcz
Indeed, from 1920 onwards, The Dybbuk has become an entrenched element of Polish theatrical culture – being performed in both Polish and Yiddish, or some combination of both, in numerous iterations that have peppered the last century in Poland (as Marcelina Obarska’s recent article for Culture.pl beautifully demonstrates). In 1937, Michał Waszyński, with the help of Mark Arnshteyn and Alter Kacyzne as screenwriters, adapted the famed play into a haunting Yiddish film, captured on location in Kazimierz Dolny. Waszyński’s Dybbuk is often considered the best Yiddish film of all time, as well as being one of the most successful films of the Polish Interwar period. More recent non-theatrical pieces inspired by the work also include Hanna Krall’s 2003 short story The Dybbuk and Marcin Wrona’s 2015 film, Demon.
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Still from ‘Demon’, directed by Marcin Wrona, photo: Marta Gostkiewicz / Kino Świat
Well beyond Poland, too, The Dybbuk has crisscrossed the globe in its performance journey. In artistic representation ranging from opera, dance, film, music, literature and, of course, theatre, The Dybbuk, in its folkloric mysteriousness, continues to stimulate and entrance audiences the world over – even amidst the vast changes the last century has wrought.
My own intersection with The Dybbuk began by chance, when a visiting scholar taught a course on Yiddish Theatre while I was studying at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the mid-late 2000s, en route to a BA in Theatre. Little could I have known at the time that I would be living in Warsaw on the eve of The Dybbuk’s centenary, completing my dissertation in Interdisciplinary Theatre with a chapter specifically focusing on the first Polish Dybbuk.
On 8th December 2020, our two-day festival began with a symposium that I moderated, ‘Between Two Worlds: Reflections on the Creation, Circulation, and Legacy of The Dybbuk on its 100th Anniversary’ – which featured a panel of renowned international scholars whose own work intersects with The Dybbuk, the context of its creation, and its immense legacy. The symposium includeed scholars Ruthie Abeliovich, Debra Caplan, Agata Dąbrowska, Nathaniel Deutsch, Agnieszka Legutko, Diego Rotman and Michael Steinlauf.
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Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute, Warsaw, photo: Radek Pietruszka / PAP
In addition to the symposium, 8th December also featured a performance by the Israeli dancer Adi Weinberg.
Events on 9th December included a discussion between the Polish-Jewish theatre expert Professor Anna Kuligowska-Korzeniewska, Theatre Institute Director Jarosław Cymerman, and Polish theatre directors whose own work has intersected with The Dybbuk through their careers. And closing the festival on 9th December 2020 – the centenary itself – we premiered a new immersive, virtual-reality-based retelling of The Dybbuk, directed by Paweł Passini, which offered both a unique take on the world-famous play and an accessible mode of performance during times of isolation and distancing.
Indeed, we began our Dybbuk centenary commemoration, as the play itself did – with a yortzheit (death anniversary) ceremony, on Monday, 9th November 2020 at An-ski’s gravesite in Okopowa Cemetery in Warsaw. On that overcast November day, a small, masked and distanced group shared commentary about An-ski’s significance as a writer and a zamler, or a collector and ethnographer. Indeed, his years-long ethnographic mission through the Jewish Pale of Settlement just prior to World War I documented what are still some of the most valuable materials we have with regard to the remnants of the traditional, and frequently folkloric, Jewish life – which was essentially disbursed and destroyed owing to war and the collapse of the Russian empire.
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Paweł Passini, photo: Jakub Orzechowski / AG
As we closed our commemoration of An-ski’s life, Paweł Passini pronounced to the group – just as Vilna Troupe director, Mordechai Mazo, did a century before – that all were invited to a new staging of The Dybbuk in 30 days. This time, however, The Dybbuk would be immersive and, depending on COVID-19, potentially totally online, rather than live, as its predecessor was at the long-lost Elizeum Theatre.
Nonetheless, we were honoured to retrace the past trajectory of the first Dybbuk as we anticipate its next century of impact, influence and hauntings.
Sto lat (happy birthday), Dybbuk!
Written by Rachel Merrill Moss, Nov 2020, edited by LD
Sources: ‘Fardibekt! An-sky’s Polish Legacy’ by Michael Steinlauf (p. 238); Steinlauf quoting Marian Melman in ‘Teatr Żydowski w Warszawie w Latach Międzywojennych’ in ‘Warszawa II Rzeczypospolitej’, vol. 1 (Warsaw, 1968), p. 383, in ‘Fardibekt! An-sky’s Polish Legacy’; ‘The Worlds of S. An-sky: a Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century’ (p. 235); ‘Hot ir Shoyn Gezen Dem Dybbuk? S. Anski’s Piese, Velkhe Vert itst Geshpilt mit Groys Erfolg in Varshe’ by Tseibun in ‘Forverts’, 3 July 1921, in Yiddish; ‘Mark Arnshteyn’ by Michael Steinlauf (p. 404); ‘A Conversation with Mark Arnshteyn’ by Mark Arnshteyn in ‘Literarishe Bleter’ (30 April 1925, nr. 52, p. 2), in Yiddish; ‘The Polish Stage’ by Jakub Appeszlak in ‘Nasz Przegląd’ (30 May 1925, rok III, nr. 147 [787], p. 3. and 31 May 1925, rok. III, nr. 148 [788], p. 5), in Polish; ‘Jewish Theatre in Poland’ by Michael Steinlauf and Alyssa Quint (p. 4); ‘Yiddish Empire’ by Debra Kaplan, p. 61; ‘Theatre Notes: The Dybbuk on a Polish Stage’ in ‘Der Moment’ (6 June 1925), Esther-Rokhl Kaminska Theater Museum (RG8), YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, in Yiddish; ‘Dybuk na Scenach Polskich’ by Eleonora Udalska (p. 172), in Polish.
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