The Dybbuk: The Movie(s)

S. An-sky’s Dybbuk had scarcely materialized on the stage when it began, intermittently but inexorably, to haunt the movies, first in Poland before World War II, and then, as televised after the war, in the United States. Each Dybbuk film has a meaning all its own, but just as An-sky’s play would exemplify Yiddish theater, so the 1937 film version came to epitomize Yiddish cinema and even a lost Jewish-Polish civilization. The movie, directed by Michał Waszyński, was not only the most atmospheric and “artistic” of Yiddish talkies but arguably the greatest international success of the pre–World War II