Dybbuks, Demons, and Hauntings: Images of Possession in Jewish Eastern Europe

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

This panel examines representations of possession and the demonic in modern Polish-Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture. Dybbuks, demons, and hauntings have long occupied a prominent place in the East European Jewish imagination. Yet as reports of possession declined from the turn of the twentieth century, the dybbuk, demons, and ghosts of Jewish Eastern Europe assumed new forms, whether literary, metaphorical, or occult. These three papers, drawing on the Yiddish press, Yiddish literature, and Polish-Jewish literature, respectively, demonstrate the hold that the spectral continues to exert on Jewish culture from the beginning of the twentieth century to this day, and examine its implications for our understanding of the modern Jewish experience.

Samuel Glauber’s paper examines a 1914 media spectacle surrounding a haunted house in Warsaw to argue that the growing influence of modern occultism in the early twentieth century engendered a paradigm shift in popular Jewish conceptions of possession—from the demonic to the parapsychological. A key figure here is Tsipora Kózka, a young girl linked to the alleged haunting, who was experimented upon by Polish spiritualists. Kózka’s story, long absent from the historical record, opens a window into broader conceptual shifts surrounding possession in early-twentieth-century Poland.

Agnieszka Legutko’s paper interrogates the role of dybbuks and demons in the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Looking at a selection of Singer’s short stories narrated by demons, and at dybbuk/demonic possessions featured in his debut novel, SATAN IN GORAY, Legutko explores Singer’s use of demonic motifs as a means of grappling with the crisis of modernity, as well as the complexities of the modern Jewish experience marked by past traumas, and examines how the demonic in Bashevis’s oeuvre challenges the conceptual paradigms of modernity.

Lizy Mostowski’s paper explores questions of memory and the Holocaust in the post-war Polish-Jewish literary works of Hanna Krall and Agata Tuszyńska, whose works consider the trauma of post-Holocaust generations through the lenses of the spectral and fictitious remembering. The issues of intergenerational Holocaust trauma and innovative ways of approaching individual memory, Mostowski demonstrates, are addressed by spectral figures who reconcile the disjointed present to the inaccessible past.

Sub Unit

• Modern Jewish Literature and Culture

Chair

• Gabriella Safran, Stanford University

Individual Presentations

• Bashevis as “The Last Demon:” Dybbuks, Demons, and the Crisis of Modernity - Agi Legutko, Columbia University

• “Demons in Warsaw!” Possession in the Age of Mass Media - Samuel Glauber, Washington University in Saint Louis

• Fictitious Remembering & the Spectral: Contemporary Polish-Jewish Literature - Lizy Mostowski, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Respondent

• Natan Meir, Portland State University