Language:
English
Year of publication:
2020
Titel der Quelle:
In Geveb; a Journal of Yiddish Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2020) 11 pp.
Keywords:
An-Ski, S.,
;
Dybuk (Motion picture : 1937)
;
Motion pictures, Yiddish
Abstract:
This essay explores the “Jewish way of saying things” in the 1937 Yiddish film version of S. An-ski’s The Dybbuk, by examining the marshalik (emcee), badkhn (jokester), or wedding bard, featured prominently in the story. Comparison with a 1971 badkhn performance in Israel by Yosef Gruenwald, an ordinary practitioner of the art, emphasizes the badkhn’s paradoxical role as hired help — a professional outsider who nonetheless occupies a central role in articulating mythic and archetypal dimensions of nuptial union. In the film, the Marshalik is played by the same actor who played ill-fated Nisn, whose dear friend Sender had vowed with him to pledge their unborn children in marriage. Nisn dies and the vow goes unfulfilled, but their children meet and fall in love, and are eventually separated by death and reunited by dybbuk possession. The film is a complex, layered structure uniting, via mashal (proverb) and story, the nineteenth century shtetl, An-ski’s Great War-era play, interwar Poland, and the literature of catastrophe.
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