Creating Postwar Jewish Identity on Stage: The Case of the Yiddish Theater of Warsaw

• In Event: Graduate Student Lightning Session: Comparative Ashkenazi-Sephardi Studies

Abstract

My paper takes the postwar Yiddish theater scene in Poland as an opportunity to analyze the governmental attempts to build a model of Jewish Identity on stage. The Polish Communist government took it upon itself to support the remnants of the once-sizable Jewish minority. The state support model was built around creating and protecting an image of a non-assimilated, easily recognizable, “cute” Jew in traditional Jewish garb. Neither assimilated Jews, nor Israelis did not fit this image and therefore did not comprise typical “Jewish” culture under Communism. In order to survive Communism, the Yiddish Theater of Warsaw had to negotiate with the state how to promote the identity of the Jewish homo Sovieticus. Yiddish theater in Poland was highly avant-garde and experimental before World War II. By the 1950s—a time of cultural revolution and drastic changes—Yiddish theater had become notably old-fashioned. Furthermore, the Holocaust became a taboo topic in the Yiddish theater community. Almost no theatrical rituals were created in response to the painful themes of the war and no new Yiddish repertoire was written. The cultural exchange between Yiddish and non-Yiddish theater that had been so common in pre-war times suddenly ceased to occur. That-isolation has resulted in Yiddish theater acquiring hermetic characteristics that are retained to this day.
In my paper, I will demonstrate how management techniques undertaken by artistic directors of the Theater shaped the postwar image of Polish Jews.

Author

• Jana Mazurkiewicz, YAAANA