|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
The Jewish Problem and Polish Films
| Article
# : |
19030 |
|
|
Section : |
THE ARTS
|
| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1991 |
1,373 Words |
| Author
: |
Paul Coates
Paul Coates is professor of literature at McGill University,
Montreal, Canada. |
Analysis of Polish-Jewish relations is almost a fashion in Poland these days. A cynic might deem this the result of impoverished Poles' understandable wish to produce work marketable in New York, the alluring heart of the dollar zone. Nevertheless, the artists in question are among Poland's most justly respected--veteran novelist Andrzej Kusniewicz, poet Jaroslaw Marek Rymkiewicz, or such intransigent cinematic dissenters as Agnieszka Holland and Krzysztof Kieslowski. And now Poland's great master filmmaker Andrzej Wajda has added Korczak, a study of the last years of the distinguished Polish-Jewish educator, from a script by Holland. One may suspect the trend to have been sparked by Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, object of virulent Polish diplomatic protests on its release.
Even as Lanzmann's fervent case for the prosecution stirred consciences, its blinkered self-righteousness screamed out for supplementation, and not just by the case for the defense. Indeed, the works of Kusniewicz and Rymkiewicz have been less the arguments of a defending counsel than considered meditations on the moral intricacies of an almost-vanished era. The sobriety of those Poles who perceive the injustices as well as the virtues of the interior years is all the more salutary following the melting of the communist ice and the reemergence of the old landscape, many of its contours of prejudice eerily well preserved.
Polish Anti-Semitism
Andrzej Wajda may justly claim to have been here before: Samson (1961), The Wedding (1972), and The Promised Land (1974-75) all feature Jewish characters. The severity and even honesty of his inquisition of Polish history in these cases is nevertheless open to doubt. Samson deploys Polish anti-Semitism as the dark value in its chiaroscuro portrait of communist heroism: the communists' reward for taking the Jew under their wing is promotion to the role of energizing force of the Warsaw uprising. The Promised Land, meanwhile, is an overheated evocation of the giddy industrialization of late nineteenth-century Lodz, with Wojciech Pszoniak as the mercurial Jewish member of a motley band of would-be capitalist barons.
Most haunting of the three is The Wedding, based on Stanislaw Wyspianski's hallucinatory X-ray of the Hamletlike frustration of the radical will in fin-de-siecle Galician society. Among the guests at the exemplary wedding of poet and peasant girl are an aesthetic Jewish woman, Rachel, and her father. As she drifts across misty fields, sleeves flapping, Rachel is, as it were, the harbinger of the phantoms that
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
