A Professor and member of the Academy of Art in Berlin is suspended from the Academy for his Jewish origin in George Roland's movie "The Wandering Jew" from 1933. Shot in the United States in Yiddish, this movie tackles the subject of anti-Semitism in Germany head on. As the fictional Professor Artur Levi watches the German people enthusiastically burn books by Jewish authors to the tunes of Volksmusik, Levi fears his latest painting will be taken from his adjacent flat and burnt. He decides to destroy it himself before this happens when his late father appears to him in the form of a ghost and hinders the destruction. The ghost reminds Levi of the long history of persecution the Jewish people have endured since the times of Babylon. The ghost of Levi's father lifts his spirit by pointing to countries where Jewish life thrives and encourages him to persevere. This was the first Yiddish-language movie to take on the subject of anti-Semitism. As in other movies representing persecution, "The Wandering Jew" alludes to the long history of violence experienced by Jews as a point of convergence despite differing locations: The locations may change, but time after time, Jewish people experience plunder, rape, and death at the hands of their non-Jewish countrymen. Polish director Michał Waszyński made a single Yiddish-language movie in his long career which included numerous Polish-language blockbusters. In 1937 Waszyński shot an adaptation of S. An-sky's play "The Dybbuk" about a young woman magically possessed by the spirit of her lover in Poland. In his particularly dark interpretation of An-sky's work, Waszyński's "Dybbuk" alludes to the story of a couple of lovers killed in a pogrom years before and offers a complete capitulation as a response to the threat of destruction of Jewish life. Averting censorship from the Hays Office which stipulated that movies made in the United States in the late 1930s should be neutral towards Nazi Germany, Maurice Schwartz decided to set his movie about European anti-Semitism in Tsarist Russia. A notion of convergence between past and present is present in Schwartz's film adaptation of Sholem Aleikhem's "Tevye the Milkman" in 1939. Edgar Ulmer, an Austrian Jewish director working in the US, offered an even more abstract allusion to the dangers Jewish people were facing in Europe in his movie "The Light Ahead" (1939) which centers on a cholera epidemic in the Ukraine that can be seen as a metaphor for anti-Semitism. In my paper I discuss how these different movies can be regarded as repositories of cultural memory of persecutions and responses to them before the experience of the Shoah changed everything. Different views on past violence and its significance as well as different shades of hope that still existed in the 1930s vanished with the civilizational break constituted by the crimes of the Nazis. My paper unearths some of these past perspectives as a contribution to the recovery of pre-war Yiddish cultural heritage.
