Dubbing the Dead Der Dybbuk 1937–2017 at the Jerusalem YMCA Hall
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CriticalActs Dubbing the Dead Der Dybbuk 1937–2017 at the Jerusalem YMCA Hall Zehavit Stern We are at the YMCA concert hall in Jerusalem, tor, Ido Shpitalnik. The group is known for a beautiful auditorium in the neo-Moorish playing in public spaces and alternative ven- style, built between the years 1928 and 1933. ues, striving to expose new audiences to clas- Hand-painted geometric patterns and flower sical music. For the time being, though, only motifs decorate the enormous dome dominat- a single clarinet and a single violin are play- ing the space and the impressive proscenium ing an enchanting Hasidic melody, accompa- arch framing the stage. On a large screen, nied by a faint humming sound, the source aligned with the burgundy velvet curtain that of which is unclear; is it the film’s soundtrack marks the borderline between the stage and or the live performers? Towards the front of the apron, we watch the first few shots from the stage, distributed between its two sides, Michał Waszyn;ski’s 1937 Polish-Yiddish film are five additional performers, all in elegant Der dibuk (The Dybbuk), the first and most black-and-white attire that seems to corre- renowned cinematic adaptation of the highly spond with the black-and-white 80-year-old acclaimed play created in the years 1913 to film. These five lend the show their voices and 1917 by the Russian Jewish writer S. An-sky.1 manipulate objects to make sound effects, and We watch a group of Hasidim gathered around will later be joined by an operatic singer in a their rebbe (Hasidic rabbi), swaying and sing- bright red dress. For the time being, however, ing wholeheartedly a solemn Hasidic tune. they simply stand there, humming softly, we What we see is a cinematic remake of a tish now realize, without moving their lips, as do (from tish, table in Yiddish), a Hasidic ritual in the musicians. While we, the audience, let our- which the Hasidim gather around their rebbe selves be immersed in the humming, we also and share food, listen to lengthy speeches on wonder what to expect of this performance. the Torah, sing (often wordless melodies), and Is this intended as an homage to the classical sometimes also dance ecstatically. Below the Yiddish film, and to the most famous of Jewish screen is the Jerusalem Street Orchestra, a plays?2 Is it an ironic takeoff on the traditional, group of 28 young players and their conduc- remote world depicted on screen? A provoca- 1. Already in the 1920s, the play was being produced in Yiddish, Hebrew, German, English, and French. On the play and its playwright see Safran and Zipperstein (2006), Steinlauf (2010), and Safran (2010). 2. While An-sky wrote the play in Russian and Yiddish, The Dybbuk’s Hebrew translation, done as early as 1918 by H.N. Bialik, the Hebrew “national poet,” gained iconic status, as did Yevgeny Vakhtangov’s 1922 production for the Ha-bima Hebrew theatre, which became the company’s flagship for decades thereafter. The Dybbuk thus doubles as the most famous Yiddish and the most famous Hebrew play. Zehavit Stern is a researcher of Yiddish film, theatre, folklore, and Hebrew and Yiddish literature currently teaching at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Previously she was the Hasse Fellow in Eastern European Jewish Civilization and a Research Lecturer at the University of Oxford (2010–2015). She holds an MA in Yiddish Culture from the Hebrew University (2005) and a PhD in Jewish Studies, with a designated emphasis in Film Studies, from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Graduate Theological Union (2011). [email protected] 158 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram_a_00841 by guest on 26 September 2021 Figure 1. From left: Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman, The Jerusalem Street Orchestra (behind), and Ayu Rotman-Mauas. Onscreen: end frame (“Koniec,” The End in Polish) from the film Der dibuk, 1937, directed by Michał Waszyn;ski. Der Dybbuk 1937–2017, by Adi Kaplan and Shahar Carmel, and the Sala- Manca Group. Jerusalem YMCA, November 2017. (Photo by Andriy Malakhovskyy) tive appropriation of a gothic fable of posses- bottom of the screen (only the film’s opening sion and exorcism? and ending subtitles, including credits for the While we have scarcely begun to ponder filmmakers, remain in the original Polish). these questions, the spiritual ceremony of the Upon hearing the first few words many tish comes to end, and the camera focuses on in the audience burst out laughing, although two young Hasidim, warmly embracing each nothing is particularly funny in the words spo- other. When one of them opens his mouth, ken, which are taken directly from the orig- live dubbing begins: the actors at the front inal film, nor in the way they are vocalized of the stage pronounce the exact words said and acted. Why, then, do so many people by the film actors, in a process that might be laugh? It may be that it is hilarious, embar- called “reverse lip-syncing,” in which live sound rassing, or even disconcerting, to hear Yiddish replaces recorded sound (here: the movie’s in the 21st century; it is a language associ- soundtrack), rather than the other way around, ated with otherness, a lost world, and ulti- as in the common playback. While in com- mately also with death. Perhaps it feels as mon playback live performers rely on recorded if a mummy has escaped from its crypt, the sound as a convenient shortcut, in tonight’s mummy being the historical film and the “reverse lip-syncing” the performers insist on Yiddish language itself. True, it is still possi- the “superfluous” live reproduction of techno- ble to hear Yiddish in Jerusalem these days, logically produced sounds, i.e., the voices (and spoken by ultra-Orthodox Jews who use it to music) already given in the film and translated express and strengthen their independence into English and Hebrew in subtitles on the from mainstream Zionist Hebrew culture.3 Critical Acts 3. On Yiddish among ultra-Orthodox Jews and the effort to retain this language and battle the dominance of main- stream Hebrew (in Israel) or English (in the United States), see Dalit Assouline (2017). 159 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram_a_00841 by guest on 26 September 2021 It is much stranger, however, to hear it artic- and since most of the audience does not under- ulated by secular, hip, politically involved, and stand Yiddish (or understands only a little), and well-known artists — quite opposite of the typ- would rely on the Hebrew or English subtitles. ically conservative image of Yiddish, associated Yet, it is exactly this redundancy that endows with the ultra-Orthodox, or with old people. tonight’s performance with a symbolic mean- It might also feel odd to view the long dead ing, marking it a radical political and aesthetic actors of Waszyn;ski’s Polish-Yiddish Der choice: to voice a silenced language; to enliven dibuk, filmed in black and white in picturesque the petrified object of the historical film; to Eastern European locations, while hearing the allow, perhaps, the living to possess the dead, vivid voices of the actors onstage, with hints of rather than vice versa, as in the play’s origi- Argentinian and Israeli accents. nal possession story. Reedited and shortened What are we then to make of this live from 2 hours to 50 minutes, Der dibuk screened Yiddish dubbing that remakes, rather than for Der Dybbuk 1937–2017 better suits con- translates or adapts, the words uttered in this temporary sensibilities; accompanied by live interwar “talkie”? The ostensibly futile act music, sound effects, and dialogue, An-sky’s in Der Dybbuk 1937–2017 feels like a heroic, famous drama becomes more entertaining and Don Quixotic gesture, a desperate attempt to vivid than ever. At the same time, however, the “revive” the Yiddish language, or at least to reverse lip-syncing recreates, to use Walter imagine such a possibility.4 This gesture, no Benjamin’s terms, the auratic “distance,” i.e., less audacious than Don Quixote’s holding to the charged awareness of an ineffaceable gap the already obsolete chivalric norms, may be between art and life, or perhaps merely ges- better understood in light of the film’s histor- tures towards the aura, typically lost in the age 6 ical screenings. Paradoxically, back in 1938, of technical reproducibility. It thus endows when Yiddish was the mother tongue of the this classic drama of love and death, created a majority of Jews living in Palestine (and in the century ago, with yet another layer of meaning. world), Der dibuk was screened in Palestine An-sky’s drama of amour fou narrates the dubbed into Hebrew (rather than in Yiddish story of Leye, the daughter of a rich merchant, with or without Hebrew or English subtitles).5 and Khonen, a poor orphan dedicated to the Back then, dubbing this renowned Yiddish film study of Jewish religious texts, who fall in love into Hebrew was a clear ideological statement, with each other. When Sender, Leye’s father, rooted in the Zionist negation of the Eastern arranges a more suitable match for his daugh- European Jewish diaspora and its infamous lan- ter, Khonen desperately turns to Kabbalistic guage, Yiddish. Now, on 22 November 2017, magic, which ultimately leads to his death. this performance of live Yiddish dubbing in the Then, in the midst of Leye’s wedding cer- heart of Jerusalem reverses the Zionist nega- emony, Khonen returns to Leye’s body as a tion of the diaspora by making the silenced lan- “dybbuk,” a possessing spirit.