Yolande Zauberman's Moi Ivan, toi Abraham

Somewhere in Poland in the 1930s

Yolande Zauberman’s film Moi Ivan, toi Abraham (Me Ivan, You Abraham) takes place in a country whose images are familiar and yet strange, crossed by languages, by whispers and the gallop of mad horses. The camera there seizes shtetl and countryside, social relations and atavistic fears, Jews and non-Jews caught up in an inextricable relation of fascination and hate. It is a Poland recreated by a second-generation filmmaker.¹ The viewer discovers there a gaze attentive to childhood and to what is rebellious in it; he also discovers there a writing choice that refuses nostalgia as the primary dimension of the evocation.

This refusal expresses itself from the opening of the film through the absence of any evocative melody: no violin, no klezmer, but on the contrary the dryness of a “realist” soundtrack — creaking bolts and slamming doors at the moment when a communist militant flees his prison with the help of his guard, the sound of his rhythmically resounding footsteps, creaking axles, and very soon, in the inn where he stops, crossed melodic lines and a telescoping of languages: Russian, Ukrainian, Romani, Yiddish, with nothing to guide the disoriented viewer or warn him that one is moving from one language to another. The film is an opening onto the world and its murmurings, a primary relation to otherness inscribed in its very title: Moi Ivan, toi Abraham, and also expressed in the choice of casting. The actor who plays the role of Abraham is not Jewish but Romani.

“I wanted a past-present time,” the director confides in an interview. The shtetl is the very heart of the film, but it is a shtetl stirred by a disordered, incessant movement that is the movement of life — a place where, in ceaseless circulation, departures, flights, and returns cross paths: the nocturnal escape of two children fleeing their familiar world; the running of Aron, the communist fugitive who plans to go to France; then the slow loving progression of Aron and Rachel who, on an old cart, are searching for the runaway children, while strange and long funeral processions cross the screen. Finally, the return of the children toward the shtetl and what has already become “the world of yesterday.”

Beneath the protagonists’ steps stretches a country at the edge of Ukraine and Poland, a land of wide spaces, land of rivers and trees, of misty and dreary fields, of deserted roads on which a few sparse silhouettes make their way and whose measure is taken by long tracking shots. This Poland is often reduced, in our representations, to the constricted surface of the ghettos and the cursed perimeter of the camps. But the viewer remembers then that it is also the Poland of Wajda — which is recalled by the presence of the director’s fetish actor, Daniel Olbrychski², a magnificent Stepan, a Polish aristocrat staggering with drunkenness and solitude.

Yet, however vast and at times beautiful it may seem, is this country any less threatening for it?

The spaces opening on the other side of the village and of the bridge that bounds it are disquieting spaces, peopled with Cossacks who make Jews and Romanies dance, equally hated, beneath the lash of their whips. One encounters there wandering tribes of Romanies with immutable rites and peasants steeped in ancestral superstitions. Ivan and Abraham, leaving the village, are two twin little Tom Thumbs, one Jewish and the other Romani, and as in fairy tales for children, nature unfolds before them an unknown, dangerous space, peopled with ogres, with malevolent forces, and sometimes too, as in fairy tales, with protective presences that snatch them from danger. The viewer who is historically already on the other side of the disaster and of the Shoah believes he recognizes the savage countrysides described by Jerzy Kosinski in L’Oiseau bariolé (The Painted Bird)³, or the forests and deadly forest edges where the Jewish children wander, evoked by Aharon Appelfeld in Tsili and then in Histoire d’une vie (The Story of a Life).⁴ A mad world of barbarism, superstition, ignorance, and deadly religions, where the face of the Other, Jewish or Romani, represents absolute evil — a face to punish, to destroy, where the destructive gesture is already outlined, but in suspense.

The shtetl — the director, like the viewer, recognizes it, with a cultural as well as familial memory. Certainly, it offers itself to the gaze as a sequence of familiar images, with its wooden houses, its narrow streets, the synagogue where, for the Friday evening prayer, the men converge in Shabbat dress. They hold their sons by the hand, under the gaze of Catholic neighbors half-curious, half-hostile. Seated at the heder, children with dark curls hum the Hebrew alphabet and chatter under the indulgent eye of an old master dressed in white, a poetic and good-natured melamed. Elsewhere is seized a discussion between a still-observant father and his communist son. — Tell me, without God what would we be, you and I? — What we are. Two poor Jewish workers.

Everywhere, like a basso continuo, Yiddish resounds — matrix and original murmur, but also language adopted for the duration of the shoot: “The actors are Russian, Polish, French, Ukrainian. Nothing is dubbed. For months, they learned their text in Yiddish. They worked for a very long time on the language and they made it their own,” the director recalls. “For Roma, who is Romani and who plays the role of Abraham, it was extremely difficult.”

The black-and-white film plays on shadows and lights in images that appear as splendid quotations from Roman Vishniac’s photographs, Un Monde disparu (A Vanished World)⁵, but which precisely restore to this “vanished” world, to this book of perishable images, the vibratory and confused movement of the present, attesting to the aspirations, contradictions, and internal tensions that cross it at the risk of making it implode.

Abraham’s family is seized across three generations, in which the authority of tradition, the appeal of modernity, and a vital revolt confront one another. The grandfather, Nahman, a patriarch with a gray beard and an imperious gaze, is the guardian of the tradition he wishes to continue imposing. In Nahman’s house, Ryzele, his son’s wife, is framed on her knees, scrubbing the floor before the arrival of the Shabbat. But already she no longer wears a wig and lets her long hair show. Behind her, her husband, who has returned from the city for the end of the week, courts her lovingly. He is a musician by trade with a moon-shaped face; he hums and dances on the tables (saltimbanque practice or traces of Hasidism?). He has brought back to his son Abraham, as a gift, a tune that he whispers into his ear. But he tries unsuccessfully to protect his children against his father’s authority and remains crushed by him, while the children, for their part, are in open revolt.

Rachel, the daughter, refuses the suitor her grandfather wishes to impose on her and gives herself to Aron, who is a communist as was much of the Jewish proletariat of the period. She will leave with him for France, land of liberty, homeland of Victor Hugo and Zola. As for little Abraham, he wordlessly embodies this revolt. The child does not obey the grandfather, he does not want to pray, he is bored at the heder, plays with a whistle in the synagogue, arrives late at the Friday evening table. He prefers being separated from his whole family to being separated from his friend Ivan, who is older, is not Jewish, and with whom he runs away, thus conferring on certain sequences of the film the magical charm of the world of childhood. He loves horses and rides them bareback as if their gallop symbolized his desire for liberty. He knows how to care for a sick horse and seems in union with the forces of nature. He does not like study. Already, for his grandfather, he seems to belong to the “world of the goyim.” An important moment is that in which the child cuts off his peot, thus carrying out a major transgression and an act of symbolic rupture — which will not, however, as we shall see, change anything in the perception the Ukrainians have of him.

At moments one would think oneself in La famille Moskat (The Family Moskat)⁶ by Isaac Bashevis Singer, or in a novel by his elder brother Israel Joshua Singer, whose works describe a contrasting reality, confronted with the mutations of an ancestral world grappling with the attraction and refusal of modernity, inscribed within the social struggles of the period. The young protagonists have the same desire for liberty, the same revolt before the rules and prohibitions of a religious world that imprisons them and claims to perpetuate itself.

In an interview given to Nicole Zand, Yolande Zauberman evokes her relation to this revolt:

The film for me was absolutely not a will to reconstruct a world, because this world I do not know and I do not know how it was. But it was an intuition, a little imaginary. By placing myself in the midst of this world, I projected myself a great deal into the character of Abraham — I who would also have suffocated inside this world, who wanted this world to exist and at the same time to live in a mixed world.

The two children fled during the night of the Shabbat, without a glance back, advancing like two little ghosts beneath the moon. They go to meet the world that extends beyond the village, a world whose violence and absolute strangeness Abraham will discover. When they return, there will be no more shtetl, no more anyone. The director has organized the encounter of the fairy tale and of History.

For the strength of the film is to have effected a parallel montage of which one part remains invisible, off-screen. To the wandering of the children and to the advance of the young couple gone to search for them should correspond, in alternating montage, the scenes of the pogrom whose premises we have perceived but which we will not see.

The drama, indeed, we have seen it prepare itself, in an ineluctable fashion. Yolande Zauberman draws its deep causes and also its annunciatory signals: fascination and superstitious fear of the Polish peasants before what they imagine to be the ritual of the Shabbat. Accusations of ritual murder and the responsibility of the Church in the religious teaching of hatred. Witness the long static shots of the painting which, inside the village church, illustrates the manner in which Jews kill Christian children and drain them of their blood. There is an endemic alcoholism, illustrated by the incessant circulation, on screen, of vodka bottles. But there is also a situation of social distress and, in particular, the flight of the lord of the manor, who ruins the village while the villagers shift their hatred onto his manager Nahman. An agitator channels their fear and their desire for vengeance toward the Jews. A classic scenario. The agitator is an old, embittered, and alcoholic schoolteacher seeking scapegoats for his misery and his failure. Facing him, a more ambiguous character, a young man who tries to dominate his own prejudices and to defend the Jews, but without losing his ambivalence. We see him force the rabbi’s door on Friday evening and stop, disconcerted at seeing nothing that corresponds to his fantasies. When he shouts to old Nahman to leave, it is difficult to disentangle the meaning he himself gives to this message. Warning? Threat? He himself no doubt does not know.

One could level at the director reproaches about the accuracy of this or that detail, about the absence of exact localization of her village, somewhere at the confines of Poland or Ukraine, about the approximate date of the events. This is to fail to take into account the fact that within the framework of a work of art, the criteria of truth (barring gross error, which is not the case) are of another order and are evaluated on another scale. It is the dismantling of the mechanism that renders the pogrom possible, and little by little inevitable, in a given society that makes the strength of the film, inscribing it in a cyclical temporality. Charged with the reminiscences of other pogroms, it is also like the announcement of the great Catastrophe to come. Its unfolding remains unrepresented, unrepresentable. Faced with events before which speech recoils, and where, as Federico Garcia Lorca wrote, “the imagination burns,” the ellipsis takes on all its signifying scope. From Sholem Asch to Bialik or Lamed Shapiro, there have been great texts evoking other pogroms in pages of immense power, but the representation of this pogrom — which is at once an announcement and a metonymy of what Piotr Rawicz would call the definitive pogrom — seems confronted with the same impossibilities or the same ethical prohibitions as works bearing on the Shoah.

In Piotr Rawicz’s Le sang du ciel (Blood from the Sky)⁷, the narrator, sole survivor of a massacre perpetrated by the einsatzgruppen, only resumes his account once the noise of the machine guns has fallen silent. He will not describe the massacre. He will evoke only the quality of the silence reigning after the killing. Likewise, in Aharon Appelfeld’s Le Temps des prodiges (The Age of Wonders)⁸, the reader is confronted with an ellipsis covering not a few hours but several years, more than ten years no doubt. The narrator, the child of an assimilated Jewish family, interrupts his account at the moment when he is pushed with his mother into a freight car heading toward the worst. The account resumes when, as an adult, he returns to visit his native land. Between the two narrative blocks, on a blank page, are inscribed two sentences: When all was accomplished. Years later. A laconic formula that conveys Appelfeld’s choice not to evoke the disaster frontally, to give it to be apprehended only in its premonitory signs and in its traces. This is also the choice that Yolande Zauberman makes — that of the ellipsis that signals what, in literary or cinematographic writing, falls silent, intimating to the reader or viewer to call upon an inner theater and his own knowledge.

The two children return in the morning to a deserted village whose ruins are still smoking, where a few haggard survivors wander. Their childish escape will have made survivors of them. Ivan, the older of the two, then has for Abraham a gesture of compassion. He places his hand before the child’s eyes. He has understood that there are images one must not see. Paradoxically, tragically, Abraham and his companion will bear the charge of the memory of this world they had wanted to flee. “They are all dead, it is they who will never leave you again,” the old melamed said to them, standing as if lost in the devastated heder.

Aron and Rachel walk toward France, they walk toward life, but also toward the hard lessons of exile. “From now on, we will always have an accent,” says Rachel, sensing the suffering there is in leaving one’s mother tongue. The departure of the two young people and their destination operate a symbolic link with the history of the filmmaker, establishing something of the order of filiation between them, the director, and a portion of the viewers.