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The Yiddish Supernatural on Screen
Dybbuks, Demons and Haunted Jewish Pasts
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Book Presentation:
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.
About the Author:
Professor Rebecca Margolis is Pratt Foundation Chair of Jewish Civilisation at Monash University, Australia.
Press Reviews:
A welcome addition to the scholarship on Jewish cinema and television and the representation of Jews, Jewishness and Judaism on screen, The Yiddish Supernatural on Screen: Dybbuks, Demons and Haunted Jewish Pasts by Rebecca Margolis takes a particularly timely topic as its subject: how screen production in Yiddish reconstructs magical pasts and haunted presents within global film and television. Very much recommended.
-- Nathan Abrams, Professor of Film Studies, Bangor University, Wales and author of The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema
Twenty-first century Yiddish cinema is full of ghosts. In this brilliant study, Rebecca Margolis simultaneously introduces the contemporary genre of Yiddish Supernatural film and sheds new light on the continued relevance of a language caught between past and present. Yiddish speaking characters are haunted by treacherous pasts and in turn haunt the contemporary world. By turning our attention to a recent genre in Yiddish art, one that includes remakes, new cinema, and cameo preludes, Margolis offers a fresh take on the meaning of Yiddish eighty years after the Holocaust.
-- Amelia M. Glaser, UC San Diego
See the publisher website: Lexington Books
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