#yiddish film

[kijew]

I watched the Dybbuk a few days ago, much to my delight. I found the Kino Classics Blu-ray collection called “Jewish Soul” which includes a bunch of Yiddish film that’s hard to find.

I’m watching it again today with the commentary track on and I’m so grateful for it. It’s by a film historian who gives perspective on story elements, context for the actors, comparison between the film and the play it was based on and information on the cultural setting. It helps so much and makes the movie that much more fascinating to me. ❤️

[fibula-rasa]

Favorite New-to-Me Films

August '23

(in order of collage above R to L)

Carmen, Jr. (1923) [letterboxd | imdb]

The Wind (1986) [letterboxd | imdb]

Deathstalker II (1987) [letterboxd | imdb]

Ost und West / Mazel Tov (1923) [letterboxd | imdb]

X電車で行こう/ Take the X Train (1987) [letterboxd | imdb]

プロジェクトA子 / Project A-Ko (1986) [letterboxd | imdb]

Don Q Son of Zorro (1925) [letterboxd | imdb]

Dream Demon (1988) [letterboxd | imdb]

Honorable Mention: Drifting (1923) because I can’t really say I enjoyed it that much, but it has its high points and Anna May Wong is wonderful in it. (In fact, I made a bunch of gifs of her!)

[nesyanast]

"It is a general rule that when the grain of truth cannot be found, men will swallow great helpings of falsehood. Truth itself is often concealed in such a way that the harder you look for it, the harder it is to find."

-Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy, by Isaac Bashevis Singer

[cladriteradio]

Here are 10 things you should know about Paul Muni, born 129 years ago today. Celebrated for his versatility, he was, early in his career, compared by some to Lon Chaney.

[onequeertorulethemall]

Hi Jumblr! I just found out about this super cool Yiddish vampire short film. They're crowdfunding right now and could really use the help if anyone has a few extra dollars. I have no association with them, but I love horror and creative film projects.

[whetstonefires]

So I can't reply to @phoenixyfriend having replied to my reblog because either they've blocked me or they don't do DMs with non-mutuals despite suggesting that as a preferable forum for disagreement, but in brief:

My reblog was 'necessary' within the very limited definition of that word that applies to fandom blogging because that post was not a post About Tony Stark. I don't engage with posts About Tony Stark or most characters in general that I disagree with, in general! It's rude and life is too short.

That post, however, was not about Tony. It was a conversation between bloggers asserting an argument for why people who don't agree with your headcanons are morally inferior and have Bad Corrupt Motives.

"What does it say that Steve is, in fandom, often considered a better/more qualified speaker on the topic of chronic illness and disability than Tony" and "these people would rather listen to the white, able-bodied guy than the person actually forced to live with the consequences of life-long disability" and "viewers with that perspective continue to see his disability as a sign that he's still a bad person, because he hasn't 'earned' a cure the way Steve did."

(Which again is wild as a take because Iron Man 3 has tony 'earn' his way out of both physical damage and PTSD through willpower and smartness in the ending montage, because inspiration porn doesn't work if you stay damaged.)

It was a post about the fandom. Accusing other actual human beings of being morally at fault for how they interpreted the marvel cinematic universe.

Not like, an intense horrible attack post as these things go, but it still wasn't about characters. It was about other fans. That is different from talking about characters! Your post was about how it's sus and shameful for people to disagree with you, not about your actual positions and why they're right. Let alone about the character. That doesn't fall under the curtain of 'don't start shit' because shit was already started.

Like I don't have any Avengers fic, haven't been in the fandom for several years, and I was still sitting here scrolling my dash getting these Bad Person Motives assigned to me just for thinking one character was more meaningful disability representation, that I would be interested in hearing from on the subject, than another.

You made inflammatory statements about other actual people in a public forum, where it could be predicted they would see it.

And then flew off the handle when someone went over your post asserting their alternate perspective, carefully avoiding attacking you personally or assigning you evil motives, which would have been incredibly easy except it's a shitty way to interact so no, and speaking only in general terms about things they found personally annoying.

If you can't deal with people reblogging your posts to argue that you're being unfair, then maybe don't post about how other people only disagree with you about your blorbos because you are a better human being than those people. I mean.

[bunny--manders]

The scene where Abe Gold has to get through a seder with his family from the old country who are earnestly trying to show him what they think is a good time, while they update him on the life stories of second cousins he does not know, is THE most relatable thing ever filmed.

[daisyofthenight]

Turns out in 1986 this Soviet Yiddish literary journal סאָוועטיש הייהלאַנד (Sovetish Heymland/Soviet Homeland) published an adaptation of Goncharov - not of the original trilogy 👇🏼 that the movie is based on…

but rather, Borekh (Boris) Shteynguter (Yiddish: באָרעך שטיינגוטער, Russian: Борис Штенгутер) wrote this ~60 page adaptation of Scorsese’s film Goncharov (1973) itself

After watching the film this weekend, I went digging and found a free PDF among 11,000 other free digitized books in the Yiddish Book Center database:

If you search “Goncharov” (you can search for the books in Yiddish letters and in transliteration) you should find it! But I’ve attached a screen recording and screenshots of the PDF in case you don’t want to go through the trouble

[hafewa]

[13thgenfilm]

"Can you help me film at Carnegie Hall this January?"  ❤️🎬 Read this personal message from director / producer Marc Smolowitz: 

👉 https://bit.ly/3hqcP8M

[b0ustr0phed0n]

The lyrics to Zunenshtraln, by Joseph Wulf

I recently watched the film Zone of Interest, which is extremely well made and thoroughly chilling. As the dialogue is primarily in German and I watched it in German in a German theater, I don't have much to say about it on the subject of translation except for this:

There is a small bit of music in the film. It is a real song written by a real survivor of Auschwitz, and we do not hear it sung, but rather tapped out very simply on a piano while subtitles appear on the screen.

The subtitles I saw were in German, but it was immediately clear that the syllables did not match the beats of the melody, so I assumed the composer was Polish. Some quick googling afterward told me that I was right---the composer, Joseph Wulf, was Polish, but the song is not in Polish, but Yiddish.

Finding the actual lyrics proved extremely difficult. Plenty of articles about the movie contain the fragment played in the scene, but not the full song. The recording of Wulf himself singing it is available on YouTube, and I spent some time trying to glean the lyrics from listening, but I only understand Yiddish insofar as it sounds like German.

As far as I can tell, there is only one (one!) website that has them written out, although it is possible that spelling variations are hindering the search results: https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php/commentocat.php?id=67793&cat=14&lang=en

So, in the interest of preserving it, here are the lyrics:

Zunenshtraln laykhtn, varmen, Mentshn-gufim kind un alt, Un mir do ayngeshlosn Undzer harts iz dokh nisht kalt.

Neshomes flamen vi di zun aleyn Raysn, brekhn trots der payn Vayl es flatert shoyn ot di fon Fun der frayhayt vos kumt on.

Shnayen vays faln shtil un zanft Oyf di shvartse velt vos iz shlekht. Un mir do ayngeshlosn Vakhn vi shternen in di nekht.

Neshomes flamen vi di zun aleyn Raysn, brekhn trots der payn Vayl es flatert shoyn ot di fon Fun der frayhayt vos kumt on.

Anyone familiar with German will recognize a great deal of the words if they read them aloud, but not all of Yiddish is related to German. The word guffim, for example, means Körper (bodies), and neshomes are Seelen (souls).

Antiwarsongs.org contains a German translation (as well as translations into Italian, English, French), but for anyone who's interested, here is a sort of halfway translation using as many German cognates as possible:

Sonnenstrahlen leuchten, wärmen Menschenkörper, Kind und alt Und wir tun(sind) eingeschlossen Unser Herz ist doch nicht kalt

Seelen flammen wie die Sonne allein Reizen, brechen trotz der Pein Weil es flattert schon die Fahne Von der Freiheit was ankommt

Weiße Schneen fallen still und sanft Auf die schwarze Welt was ist schlecht (die schlecht ist) Und wir tun eingeschlossen Wachen wie Sterne in der Nacht

Seelen flammen wie die Sonne allein Reizen, brechen trotz der Pein Weil es flattert schon die Fahne Von der Freiheit was ankommt

[transfemgorgug]

BEN RILEY JEWISH

[wanderinghedgehog]

I Watch Old Movies (Part 1)

DER DYBBUK (1937) on YouTube

Live reaction:

The audio quality is weird and half the subtitles are missing seems like. My Yiddish isn’t good enough to understand without so…

Ooooo these two guys have got a secret. Drama already.

Oh that’s not very interesting. They just want their kids to be married when they grow up.

Oh no the wife died

OH NO THE GUY DIED he just fell off a boat

Okay so we see the other guy’s daughter as she grows up and it seems like he’s just been counting coins the entire time. Does he do anything else or does he just start counting as soon as his daughter tries to talk to him?

Is this guy being judgmental about people riding in a carriage? Really?

The dead guy’s son seems nice. He looks perpetually zoned out, but he seems nice.

The son and the daughter finally meet and they keep staring at each other. I can’t decide if it’s weird or romantic.

there a grave? shrine? In the middle of town. This might be foreshadowing.

The guy apparently doesn’t like the son. What did he do?

okay so the son is actually weird. He’s talking about his ambitions I guess and he’s being really aggressive about. Chill out.

SOME RANDOM GUY THINKS THE SON IS INVOKING SATAN??????

oh no the daughter fainted. And the son is being nice and helpful.

why is he looking like that? Is he supposed to look suspicious.

why is she so distraught that the son left? The way this other lady phrased it, I thought he had just left the room or the house.

Just a quick shoutout to the marvelous beards in this movie. Movies need more men with big beards.

The rabbi just ignored that this guy says he’s scared? Dude why?

nevermind I think the scared guy just has social anxiety.

Ooooo the daughter can sing :)

The son is trying to leave town, but he got distracted by this dude whistling at the sky?

Oh so there was a marriage going to be set up with the daughter, but her father wouldn’t agree with it. So maybe the son has a chance now. Plot.

the son is talking to scared guy and they’re debating if sins are holy? It’s very dramatic

DUDE ARE THEY TALKIBG ABOUT THIS IN SHUL???? Someone’s gonna hear you

scared guy looks so confused oml

Oooooo the son can sing too :)

The son and daughter meet again. Staring again. Y’all are weird.

THE REVEAL FINALLY the son is the son of one of the guys at the beginning who made the really boring promise

OH BUT THE DAUGHTER IS ALREADY SUPPOSED TO BE MARRIED TO SOMEONE ELSE OH NOOOOO

and the son is very dramatically sad about this

SATAN IS AT IT AGAIN

Oooo smoke machine

the son trying to summon Satan

OH AND HE FELL OVER presumably because of all the Satan

OOOO SPOOKY WIND

The son is DEAD 💀 but there’s still an hour left

scared guy is too scared to say Kaddish for the son. Disappointed.

the daughter fainted in the middle of the funeral. she’s gotta stop that

oh is she gonna go crazy?

is she getting married now?

some guy with empty buckets is a bad omen

IH MY GOD there’s this weird guy that keeps showing up and I think he’s magic

ooooo people are fighting

ooooo is she gonna get possessed?

SHE WANTS TO GET POSSESSED BY THE DEAD SON

what on earth is happening

she looks like she’s about to fall over

don’t banish the magic man he was fun

spooky dance time

i think she’s lost it a little

scared guy is scared

they really gotta have everyone dance before this girl can get married

GHOST SON?????

oh shoot she’s not getting married

SHE POSSESSED

Magic man is magic

gonna unpossess her

Are they summoning another ghost?

Oh shoot the guy isn’t obligated to fulfill the boring promise

spooky wind time

ghost problems a lot of them

not enough to just pray. Gotta shout at a Torah.

ghost gone

NOT QUITE

IS SHE DEAD?????????????????????

her ghost boyfriend took her

Verdict:

Fun. Weird. Didn’t expect the ghost plot. Love the spooky bits. Wish I could understand everything.

8/10

[evilwickedme]

Fuck it I'm bored so here's a ranking of different Peter Parkers by how Jewish they are

Dead last, obviously, is MCU!Peter Parker. This version of Peter is the farthest from comic canon to the point of being almost unrecognizable at times. Also, Tom Holland answered the question "is peter parker Jewish" in a Wired Autocomplete Interview a while back with a very baffled "no", cementing him forever as my sworn enemy. So he's actually the only peter parker who, at least by word of God, is canonically NOT Jewish. -1000000/10

Next up is Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker. I think this Peter is... fine, at least he's much closer to comic canon than MCU!Peter, but honestly that's not saying much considering how far the MCU strayed from comic canon or even the spirit of comic canon. But like overall, Sam Raimi's movies just aren't particularly interested in presenting Peter as Jewish, so, eh. 1/10

By far the most Jewish of live action Peters is TASM!Peter, also by far the most comic accurate of live action Peters. I'd be remiss not to mention the fact that Andrew Garfield is Jewish, and he understands the character so fucking well. He stated on record that he played Peter as Jewish and that he sees Spider-Man as an inherently Jewish character:

However, the Webb movies still do not textually define him as Jewish, and the best parts of Andrew's Peter's Jewish subtext are better when viewed in light of the comics. Overall, 6.5/10

Next up is the original, our beloved comic book Peter, pictured here saying Happy Hanukkah in a panel from Matt Fraction's Hawkeye. Comic Peter is one of the most heavily Jewish coded comics characters of all time, which is saying something considering how Jewish comic books are as a medium. Obviously he was created and often written and drawn by Jewish writers and artists, but beyond that his driving ethos and values are incredibly Jewish, and as a bonus he's constantly sprinkling Yiddish and Jewish phrases into his speech, alongside things like the above panel where he outright acknowledges Jewish culture in a scene where everyone else is saying merry Christmas. However, despite the extremely heavy coding, Marvel Comics are fucking cowards, and he has yet to be confirmed Jewish, so I must give him a measly 8/10.

Finally, the cream of the crop, the most Jewish of all Peter Parkers, Into the Spider-Verse's Peter B. Parker my beloved!!! Peter B. is voiced by Jake Johnson, himself a Jewish actor, and is a phenomenally accurate representation of comic book canon - but he also has the unique quality of being canonically, textually, in the actual movie Jewish! It's a bit of a blink and you'll miss it scene, but when we get introduced to Peter B. in his "one more time" segment, we see his wedding to MJ, where he steps on a glass. This is a Jewish minhag - custom - meant to represent the destruction of our Temple and Jerusalem, as well as remind us that sorrow and joy come intertwined, and is one of my personal favorite Jewish customs. It's a phenomenal moment in the best Spider-Man movie, and while this version of Peter would have been my favorite film version regardless, his Jewishness absolutely pushes him even further up. 13/10, no complaints

[mashkaroom]

Translation thoughts on the greatest poem of our time, “His wife has filled his house with chintz. To keep it real I fuck him on the floor”

It’s actually quite tricky to translate. Because it’s so short, each word and grammatical construction is carrying a lot of weight. It also, as people have noted, plays with registers. “Chintz” is a word with its own set of associations. Chintz is a type of fabric with its origins in India. The disparaging connotation is from chintz’s eventual commonality. Chintz was actually banned from England and France because the local textile mills couldn’t compete.

Keep it real” is tremendously difficult to translate -- it’s a bit difficult to even define. It means to be authentic and genuine, but it also has connotations of staying true to one’s roots. Like many English slang words, it comes first from AAVE. From this article on the phrase:

“[K]eeping it real meant performing an individual’s experience of being Black in the United States. As such, it became a form of resistance. Insisting on a different reality, one that wasn’t recognized by the dominant culture, empowered Black people to ‘forge a parallel system of meaning,’ according to cultural critic Mich Nyawalo...The phrase’s roots in racialized resistance, however, were erased when it was adopted by the mostly-White film world of the 1970s and ’80s....Keeping it real in this context indicated a performance done so well that audiences could forget it was a performance.This version of keeping it real wasn’t about testifying to personal experience; it was about inventing it.”

One has to imagine that jjbang8 did not have the origins of these phrases in mind when composing the poem, but even if by coincidence, the etymological and cultural journeys of these two central lexemes perfectly reflect the themes of the poem. The two words have themselves traveled away from the authenticity they once represented, and, in a new context, have taken on new meanings -- the hero of our poem, the unnamed “him”, is, presumably, in quite a similar situation.

Setting aside the question of register, of the phonology, prosody, and meter of the original, of the information that is transmitted through bits of grammar that don’t necessarily exist in other languages -- a gifted translator might be able to account for all of these -- how do you translate the journey of the words themselves?

In my translations, I decided to go for the most evocative words, even if they don’t evoke the exact same things as in the original. The strength of these two lines is that they imply that there’s more than just what you see, whether that’s the details of the story -- what’s happening in the marriage? how do the narrator and the husband know each other? -- or the cultural background of the very words themselves. I wanted to try and replicate this effect.

Yiddish first:

זייַן ווייַב האָט אָנגעפֿילט זייַן הויז מיט הבלים

צו בלייַבן וויטיש, איך שטוף אים אופֿן דיל. zayn vayb hot ongefilt zayn hoyz mit havolim.

tsu blaybn vitish, ikh shtup im afn dil

This translation is pretty direct. There is a word for chintz in Yiddish -- tsits -- but, as far as I can tell, it refers only to the fabric; it doesn’t have the same derogatory connotation as in English. I chose, instead, havolim, a loshn-koydesh word that means “vanity, nothingness, nonsense, trifles”. In Hebrew, it can also mean breath or vapor. I chose this over the other competitors because it, too, is a word with a journey and with a secondary meaning. Rather than imagining the bright prints of chintz, we might imagine a more olfactory implication -- his wife has filled his house with perfumes or cleaning fluids. It can carry the implication that something is being masked as well as the associations with vanity and gaudiness.

Vitish -- Okay, this is a good one. Keep in mind, of course, that I’ve never heard or seen it used before today, so my understanding of its nuances is very limited, but I’ll explain to you exactly how I am sourcing its meaning. The Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary (CYED) gives this as “gone astray (esp. woman); slang correct, honest”. I used the Yiddish Book Center’s optical character recognition software, which allows you to search for strings in their corpus, to confirm that both usages are, in fact, attested. It’s a pretty rare word in text, though, as the CYED implies, it might have been more common in spoken speech. It appears in a glossary in “Bay unds yuden” (Among Us Jews) as a thieves cant word, where it’s definted as נאַריש, שרעקעוודיק, אונבעהאלפ. אויך נישט גנביש. אין דער דייַטשער גאַונער-שפראַך --  witsch -- נאַריש, or “foolish, terrible, clumsy/pathetic. not of the thieves world. in the German thieves cant witsch means foolish”. A vitishe nekeyve (vitishe woman) is either a slacker or a prostitute. I can’t prove this for sure, but my sense is that it might come from the same root as vitz, joke (it’s used a couple of times in the corpus to mention laughing at a vitish remark -- which makes it seem kind of similar to witty). I assume the German thieve’s cant that’s being referred to is Rotwelsch, which has its own fascinating history and, in fact, incorporates a lot of Yiddish. In fact, for this reason, some of the first Yiddish linguists were actually criminologists! What an excellent set of associations, no? It has the slangy sense of straightforward of honest; it has a sense of sexual non-normativity (we might use it to read into the relationship between the narrator and the husband) -- and a feminized one at that; it was used by an underground subculture, and, again, the meaning there was quite different -- like the “real” in “keeping it real” it was used to indicate whether or not someone was “in” on the life (tho “real” is used to mean that the person is in, while “vitish” is used to mean they’re not). It’s variety of meanings are more ambiguous than “keep it real”, which can pretty much only be read positively, and it also brings in a tinge of criminality. Though it doesn’t have the same exact connotations as “keep it real”, I think it’s about as ideal of a fit as we’ll get because it’s equally evocative of more below the surface. I also chose “tsu blaybn vitish”, which is “to stay vitish”, as opposed to something like “to make it vitish” to keep the slight ambiguity of time that “keep it real” has -- keeping it real does< I think, imply that there is a pre-existing “real” to which one can adhere, so I wanted to imply the same.

The rest is straight-forward. “Shtup” is one of a few words the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary (CEYD) gives for “fuck”, and I think it has a nice sound.

Ok, now Russian

женой твой дом наполнен финтифлюшками

чтоб не блудить с пути, ебемся на полу

zhenoy tvoy dom napolnin fintiflyushkami.

shtob ne bludit’ s puti’, yebyomsya na polu

In order to preserve, more or less, the iambic meter, I made a few more changes here -- since Russian, unlike Yiddish, is not a Germanic language, it’s harder to keep the same structure + word order while also maintaining the rhythm. I would translate this back to English as:

“Your house is filled with trifles by your wife. To not stray off the path, we’re fucking on the floor”

So a few notes before we get into the choice of words for “chintz” and “keep it real”. To preserve the iamb, I changed “his” to “your”. This changes the lines from a narration of events to some outside party to a conversation between the two men at the center. Russian also has both formal and informal you (formal you is also the plural form, as is the case in a number of other languages). I went with informal you because I wanted to preserve the fact that his wife has filled his house not their house, as someone pointed out in the original chain (though I don’t think that differentiation is nearly as striking in the 2nd person) and because it’s unlikely you’d be on formal you with someone you’re fucking (unless it’s, like, a kink thing). I honestly didn’t even consider making it formal, but that would actually raise a lot of interesting implications about the relationship between the speaker and the husband, as well as with what that means about the “realness” of the situation. Is, in fact, the narrator only creating a mirage of a more real, more meaningful encounter, while the actual truth -- that there is a woman the husband has made promises to that he’s betraying -- is obscured? that this intimacy is just a facade? Is there perhaps some sort of power differential that the narrator wishes to point out? Or perhaps is the way that the narrator is keeping it real by pointing out the distance between the two of them? there is no pretense of intimacy, the narrator is calling this what it is -- an encounter without deeper significance?

Much to think about, but I actually think the two men do have history --  i think the narrator remembers the house back when it was actually only “his house” and was as yet unfilled with chintz. We also don’t know what they were calling each other prior to this moment. This could be the first time they switched to the informal you. 

Ok moving on, I originally translated it as “твой дом наполнен финтифлюшками жены”. Honestly, this sounds more elegant than what I have now, but I ultimately though removing the wife from either a subject or agent position (grammatically, I mean) was too big a betrayal of the original. The original judges the wife. She took an active role in filling the house. If she were made passive, that read is certainly a possible one -- perhaps even the dominant one -- but it could also read more like “we are doing this in a space filled with reminders of his wife and the life they share” -- the action of filling is no longer what’s being focused on. Why do I say the current translation is inelegant? I feel you stumble over it a little, because it’s almost a garden path sentence. This is also an assset though. “Zhenoy tvoy dom napolnen” is a fully grammatical sentence on its own, and it means “Your house is filled by your wife” -- as in English, the primary read is that the wife is what the house is full of. If the sentence makes you stumble, perhaps that’s even good -- we focus, for good reason, on the relationship between the two men, but in a translation, the wife is able to draw more attention to herself.

Ok, chintz: I chose the word “финтифлюшки” (fintiflyushki), meaning trifle/bobble/tchotchke, because it, allegedly, comes from the german phrase finten und flausen, meaning illusions and vanity/nonsense. Once again, I like that the word has a journey, specifically a cross-linguistic one.

Keep it real: this one, frankly, fails to capture the impact of the original, in my opinion, but allow me to explain the reasoning. “Stray off the path” implies, again, that there is some sort of path that both the narrator and the husband were on before the wife and the chintz -- and one they intend to continue taking, one that this act is a maintenance of. It brings in a little irony, since the husband very much is straying from the path of his marriage. “Bludit’“ can also mean to be unfaithful in a marriage (as, in fact, can “stray”). The proto-slavic word it comes from can mean to delude or debauch -- they want to do the latter but not the former.

As for register -- “shtob” is a bit informal. I would write the full version (shto by) in an email, for example. The word for fuck, yebyomsa, is from one of the “mat” words, the extra special top tier of russian swears, definitely not to be said in polite company (and, if you are a man of a certain generation or background, not in front of women; it’s not that the use of mat automatically invokes a male-only environment, but if we’re already thinking that deeply about it. But while we’re on the topic, i will say that in my circles in the US, women use mat much more actively than men (at least in front of me, who was, up until recently, a woman and also a child).)

Ok i think that’s all the comments i have!

[traumaticemphaticfantastic]

This is a portrait of a Golem that I finished a little while back in June. I find that out of all the Jewish folklore creatures I’ve read about the Golem is the most prevalent and renowned, most notably because of the famous story “The Golem of Prague” which is basically THE Golem story that most of us are aware of, though, there are others. For instance, did you know that there was a Golem of Chelm? It’s true, you can find it online if you wish. And there was also a Golem of Vilna if you can believe it, you can find a translation of that story in the delightful collection “Yiddish Folktales” published by The Pantheon Fairytale and Folklore Library.

But, as I was saying, the Golem is pretty much the most well-known uniquely Jewish folk legend out there, I decided in this piece to make a shout-out to that legacy by using design motifs from possibly the most well-known Golem retelling, the German expressionist film Der Golem: wie er in die Welt kam, while I don’t particularly like how the story was retold in that film, I must say that the design of the scenery and costumes of the characters are simply delightful, I particularly enjoy the set of the Prague Ghetto and the design of the Golem himself. I do quite love German Expressionism and silent films as a whole and Der Golem is certainly a staple of both!

Another part of this Golem’s design is that its tunic is covered with Hebrew/Yiddish letters, this is a direct reference to the Golem’s more symbolic significance as a creature literally brought to life through the language of the Jewish people: that language is a powerful thing, especially to those communities who have consistently been looking down the barrel of cultural-extinction. For a much better explanation of this concept than I could ever write down here, I would like to point you to the YouTube video “The Golem and The Jewish Superhero” by Jewish video essayist Jacob Geller, a truly phenomenal and tremendously emotional look through the history of the Golem tale.

That will be all for today, may you be well, and Good Shabbos and a Shabbat Shalom to you all.