The Yiddish Supernatural on Screen

Rebecca Margolis

doi:10.5771/9781666910889

Summary

As a linguistic carrier of a thousand years of European Jewish civilization, the Yiddish language is closely tied to immigrant pasts and sites of Holocaust memory. In The Yiddish Supernatural on Screen, Rebecca Margolis investigates how translated and subtitled Yiddish dialogue reimagines Jewish lore and tells new stories where the supernatural looms over the narrative. The book traces the transformation of the figure of the dybbuk—a soul of the dead possessing the living—from folklore to 1930s Polish Yiddish cinema and on to global contemporary media. Margolis examines the association of spoken Yiddish with spectral elements adapted from Jewish legends within the horror genre. She explores how all-Yiddish prologues to comedy film and television depict magic located in an immigrant or pre-immigrant past that informs the present. Framing spoken Yiddish on screen as an ancestral language associated with trauma and dispossession, Margolis shows how it reconstructs haunted and mystical elements of the Jewish experience.

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Bibliographic data

Copyright year: 2024
ISBN-Print: 978-1-66691-087-2
ISBN-Online: 978-1-6669-1088-9
Publisher: Lexington, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 224
Product type: Book Titles

1. Contents No access
2. Acknowledgments No access
3. A Note about Transliteration and Translation No access
4. List of Figures No access
Introduction No access Pages 1 - 18
Reimagining the Dybbuk on the Yiddish Screen No access Pages 19 - 84
Haunted Presents in Yiddish Horror Movies No access Pages 85 - 136
Magical Pasts in Yiddish Prologues No access Pages 137 - 176
Filmography No access Pages 177 - 182
Bibliography No access Pages 183 - 210
Index No access Pages 211 - 222
About the Author No access Pages 223 - 224