Laatst las ik, volkomen toevallig, een stuk over een New Yorkse delicatessenzaak. Het betrof de joodse 2nd Avenue Deli en de schrijver beschreef zijn herinnering aan het etablissement. Niets bijzonders - totdat hij de reden voor zijn afgenomen enthousiasme voor de tent beschreef:
I found myself increasingly fixated on the array of framed photographs from the Yiddish theater days that line the walls of the back room. Some of them depicted actors in traditional European Jewish garb, but the ones that got to me were the photos of Yiddish actors and actresses in then-modern dress, circa the 1920s.
There was an inexpressible joy and hopefulness to those photos when they were taken, a buoyant sense that the actors could combine their Yiddish theatricality with Roaring Twenties Americana, that made me wish I’d known them and known the language and could have experienced the pleasure they radiated. The hopefulness that came from not knowing that within a decade or so, the fertile civilization of Yiddish Poland, which had given birth to and sustained their art, would be cut off at the root, slaughtered in the camps.
Looking at the hopefulness of the Yiddish theater boulevardiers and flâneurs through those retrospective lenses evoked something infinitely sad. It gave a kind of theme-park vibe to the place, a whistling-past-the-graveyard, schmaltzy nostalgia for schmaltz. With nothing left of that Golden Civilization—except a few noble revival companies, our only means of communion with it is the food.
I was glad the food was there. I was glad they still offered three kinds of tongue—regular, center cut, and “tip of the tongue.” But the real tongue—the Yiddish tongue that flourished so brilliantly and whose last gleams can be found most heartbreakingly in Singer’s masterpiece, Shadows on the Hudson—that tongue has been cut off.
Aan die melancholische zinnen moest ik denken toen ik op onze website deze hartverscheurende beelden zag van Joods Amsterdam anno ‘41-’44. De beelden zijn vrij van geluid, maar ze schreeuwen het verlies oorverdovend uit. Het Joodse Europa zoals het bestond zou kort na deze verfilming voor eeuwig in gas en vlammen verdwijnen.
Klik hier om de beelden te bekijken.
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