On Moi Ivan, toi Abraham (Ivan and Abraham)

Yolande Zauberman’s film Moi Ivan, toi Abraham (Ivan and Abraham) inscribes itself, by its very title, in a relation of openness, in a motley Poland traversed by languages and migrants, where the camera captures shtetl and countryside, social relations and their atavistic fears, Jews and non-Jews caught in an inextricable relation of fascination and hatred.

At the same time, the viewer is guided toward a reality he believes he recognizes, and confronted with a radical strangeness — that of the world surrounding the shtetl, but also that of the shtetl itself, refracted through a certain gaze, a certain framing, and a choice of writing that refuses nostalgia as the primary dimension of the evocation.

This choice expresses itself from the opening onward, through the absence of any evocative melody, through the dryness of a “realistic” soundtrack: sounds of doors, of bolts, of footsteps, of horses whinnying, and very soon, in the inn, the telescoping of languages — Polish, Russian, Romani, Yiddish — without anything to guide the disoriented viewer or to warn him that one is passing from one to the other.

The songs will come later, in an unconventional form: a melody that a Jewish musician brings back as a gift to his son and whispers in his ear, a splendid funeral chant, not Yiddish but Romani.

The shtetl is the very heart of the film, the place where all flights and all returns converge. And yet we witness a tale of wanderings, where the course of the communist militant escaped from prison crosses paths with the roving of two children, Ivan and Abraham, set off on adventure, with the slow amorous progress of Aaron and Rachel on their old cart, and with the mad gallops of wild horses, drunk on space like their master, Stépan.

Beneath their step, around their course, Poland stretches to infinity — Poland so often reduced, in our representations, to the scale of the shtetl or the ghetto, to the urban perimeter of the great industrial cities, or to the accursed perimeters ringed with barbed wire. A country of great open spaces, a country of rivers, of trees, of roads whose measure is given by long tracking shots, and which one remembers is also the Poland of Wajda (something the presence of Daniel Olbrychski — Stépan, magnificent and fallen — comes once more to recall).

For all that it seems so vast and at times so beautiful, is it any the less terrible?

The spaces that open up on the other side of the village and of the bridge that bounds it are disquieting spaces, peopled with mad Cossacks who, under the lash of their whip, make Jews and Gypsies dance, merged in one and the same hatred; with wandering tribes governed by inexorable rites; with peasants steeped in ancestral superstitions.

For Ivan and Abraham — twin Tom Thumbs, one Jewish and the other goy — the forest is peopled with ogres and at times, as in fairy tales, with protective presences that snatch them from their tormentors. But for the viewer, who historically already stands on the far slope of the disaster, it is the world described by Kosinski in Le peintre oiseau (The Painted Bird) that looms. A world maddened by barbarity, by superstition, and by deadly religion, where the face of the Other represents absolute evil, to be destroyed, to be punished. Where the destructive gesture is sketched out, held in suspense.

The shtetl toward which Aaron, on leaving prison, directs his course — the viewer recognizes it with his memory or with his culture. With its wooden houses, its narrow streets, its rural enclaves, it offers itself to the gaze in a succession of familiar images: the Friday-evening prayer toward which the men converge in their Sabbath attire, holding their sons by the hand; the half-hostile, half-curious Polish neighbors; the argument about Marx-Shmarx between the still-observant father and the communist son; the diligence of Reisele the housewife who, on her knees, scrubs the floor before the arrival of the Sabbath; the heder where the children drone and chatter under the indulgent eye of the old teacher; the self-evident authority of the rabbi, with his imperious air and gray beard.

The black-and-white film stock plays on shadows and lights in what sometimes appears as veritable citations of Roman Vishniac’s photographs. It restores at once the movement of life and the premonition that the halo surrounding it is that of a doomed world. The film offers itself at times to be read like a picture book, and yet it inscribes itself in History through whatever contradiction it can bring to these images of Épinal.

While giving an account of the hostility external to this little world, the director was able to bear witness, in small touches, to the internal tensions that ran through it, that worked at it to the point of risking its implosion. In this, the characters bring to mind characters out of Joshua Singer,¹ whose works are inscribed at the heart of a still-living reality. They have their power, their anger, their involvement in the social struggles of the time, their desire for freedom, or their revolt in the face of rules too strict or a world too closed. The rabbi’s family illustrates this. The rabbi’s son is a musician; he tries to defend his children against paternal authority and courts his wife who, contrary to tradition, has not shaved her hair and does not wear a wig. The little girl Rachel refuses the suitor they want to impose on her, and runs off with Aaron, who is a communist, as a large part of the Jewish proletariat of the time was, and who for his part wants to leave for France, land of freedom.

In an interview granted to Nicola Zand, Yolande Zauberman explains herself:

“for me, the film was absolutely not a will to reconstruct a world, because this world, I don’t know it and I don’t know what it was like. But it was a somewhat imaginary intuition. Putting myself inside this world, I projected myself a great deal into the character of Abraham — I, who would have suffocated too inside this world, who wanted this world to exist and at the same time to live in a mixed world.”

For it is in Abraham that a large part of this revolt crystallizes. The child does not want to pray, he is bored at the heder, and plays with a whistle at the synagogue. He does not obey his grandfather; he loves horses and rides them despite the prohibitions. He would rather be separated from his whole family than from his friend Ivan, who is not Jewish and with whom he runs away. An important moment in the film, it seems to me, is the one where the child cuts off his peot [sidelocks], thus enacting a major transgression, an act of symbolic severance — which, however, will change nothing in the perception that non-Jews have of him.

The two children flee the shtetl in the dead of night, dancing under the moon like little ghosts drunk on freedom. When they return, there is no more shtetl, there is no one left, only smoking ruins and a few bewildered survivors.

For the strength of the film is to have carried out a kind of parallel montage, one part of which remains invisible, off-screen. To the wandering of the children and of the young couple through the Polish countryside there ought to correspond, in cross-cutting, the scenes of the pogrom that we shall not see.²

The drama — we have seen it prepare itself ineluctably. Yolande Zauberman dwells at length on the deep and the immediate causes of this pogrom: the fascination and superstitious fear of the Polish peasants before what they imagine to be the Sabbath ritual. Accusations of ritual murder. The responsibility of the Church in the religious teaching of hatred. A situation of social distress after the flight of the lord of the manor, which ruins the village and deflects onto his Jewish steward the villagers’ hatred… The arrival of an agitator who channels their desire for vengeance toward the shtetl. Here again, no stereotypes: the agitator is an old schoolteacher, embittered and alcoholic, who seeks scapegoats for his misery and his failure. Facing him, a younger man, more ambivalent, who tries to master his own superstitions and to defend the Jews. Without success. We see him force the rabbi’s door and stop short, disconcerted at seeing nothing that corresponds to his fantasies. He shouts at them to leave, but it is hard to disentangle the meaning he himself gives to this message.

The director has been reproached over the accuracy of this or that detail, over the absence of an exact location for her village, somewhere on the marches of Poland, over the absence of any pogrom on the dates she seems to have indicated (the year 1930). This is to fail to take into account the fact that, in the case of a work of art, the criteria of truth (barring gross error, which is not the case here) are of another order and are assessed on another scale.

The date of the pogrom matters little; what matters is the dismantling of the mechanism that makes it possible and, little by little, inevitable in a given society. For it inscribes itself in a different temporality, as the symbol of many other pogroms and as the announcement of the catastrophe to come.

The unrepresented scene takes on the charge of our memory, and of our knowledge.

Just as, paradoxically, if they survive, Abraham and his companion will be charged with the memory of this world they had wanted to flee; and Aaron and Rachel, on the road to France, effect a symbolic splice, phantasmatically establishing something of the order of filiation with the director and with a part of the audience.