Ida. A film on European anti-Semitism.

I like the film.

In a Polish monthly for and by left-wing inteligencja (some of them intellectuals) Elżbieta Janicka writes about the film: “The tail that wags the dog”. The metaphor intends the cultural patterns dominating and guiding our thinking, taste, preferences and judgment. These patterns stem from a structural anti-Semitism*.

This structural anti-Semitism pervades European culture, and has been doing so since Christianity came to be the norm regulating thinking, taste, preferences and judgment. The causes of this are deep and writing about them here would explode the blog. I could, though, just for the heck of it, name the Austrian Catholic historian Friedrich Heer, who says the Europeans are “ill baptized” (schlecht getauft) and thus, in the depths of their souls, still cherish the old gods; for this they hate the Jews, who have taken Zeus, Thor and Perkun away from them. (In: God‘s first love. Christians and Jews over two thousand years. Available for under one pound, or Gottes erste Liebe. Die Juden im Spannungsfeld der Geschichte. Available as Ullstein Taschenbuch for eight euros).

Several spoilers follow here, so you could stop reading if you want to be surprised by the film. I was, and I like being surprised by films. This was one reason I liked the film.

The film revolves around Ida and her aunt Wanda, a communist lawyer, who was instrumental in Stalinist terror 1949 – 1954. “I even passed some death sentences” she says; “bloody Wanda, that’s me”. Ida was saved by the Catholic Church. The local padre placed her in a nunnery, where she was baptized Anna, and eventually came to become a nun herself. Just before she is about to take her vows, however, the Mother Superior tells her to call on her aunt and to remain there “as long as necessary”. Wanda tells Ida who she is and together they visit the place where Ida’s parents used to live. The man who helped them evade arrest had finally come upon other thoughts and killed them. With an axe. He butchered Ida's parents and her little cousin, Wanda's son. Ida he saved, because, being a baby girl, she was not identifiable as Jewish. He passed her on to the padre.

Wanda and Ida promise to give up claims for the farm, which the savior-murderer appropriated. They make him unearth the remains, take them to the beys oylom and bury them there. Wanda is then shown as she puts on Mozart on her record player, lights a cigarette and jumps out of the window to her death. The burial ceremony is obsequious in the communist mode – her role as a relevant Party member is mentioned. Nothing about her being a Holocaust survivor.

Ida comes to her aunt’s house, puts on her clothes, drinks her booze, sleeps with a boy. The boy is nice, a competent jazz-man, chemically free of anti-Semitism. Ida declines to lead a normal life: to follow the boy and his band, eventually to marry him and lead a normal life of the “little stabilization” of the early 1960s. The last we see of her is when she hurries back to the nunnery.

I agree with Janicka that one prominent aspect of the film’s meaning is that Jews cannot live as Jews. If they persist in being Jews they have to die. Jewishness is doomed. 

However, I see other aspects, and while the tail of structural anti-Semitism, in my view, certainly wags the dog here, I think these other aspects are not to be omitted.

The film is set in the early 1960s, the drab small towns, the dilapidation of the still standing pre-war buildings, the jazz (was it Coltrane they played?). But it is, in fact, about our present. Poland is judenrein. No Jews, except deep in the subconscious. There, they haunt the Polish mind. “We are murderers” the film says. A Jew cannot live among us as a Jew. We are not going to let Ida live among us. She must go. And where will she go? To Him.

Jesus is introduced in one of the first scenes. Ida and the other girls are renovating a statue which stands outside the monastery. Ida paints it, lovingly. A scene not to be overlooked is when she speaks to the statue. For me it was a little girl speaking with her doll. Ida had a childhood among the sisters. They were the family to which she now returns. In fact, I think she hopes to return to her childhood, which is not just mere fantasy. Nuns seem to me to be a sort of neotenic beings. In biology this means growing without growing up, eventually even reaching the ability to procreate (but not real adulthood). In a sense, they are immature. Robert Graves would have spoken here about the Goddess; one in three persons: the virgin girl, the mature, childbearing woman, and the crone.  The Catholics have slashed this pagan Trinity and retained only the girlhood (was this the harbinger of the infantilisation of the Western world?).

And what of Poland? To me the film conveys hopelessness, lack of hope for everybody. The young musicians, with all their vitality, seem out of place – with their American music to boot. This feeling of hopelessness is achieved by the film being in black and white, which makes everything stand out as grey. Really, to hide in a place where one is served a meagre soup and can play with dolls is maybe not the worst. (I have come across opinions that the situation is not so different now, even with the shopping malls, the new cars etc; having become practically a foreigner I can neither dispute or confirm it.)

Wanda’s choice seems to me quite plausible. She is a strong-minded woman and facing what she is facing: the death of her child, the death of her ideals, and the betrayal of her party comrades makes life difficult to bear. What can she do? Emigration to Israel means admitting that everything she believed in was of no value, which would be giving up the last vestiges of human dignity. This is no alternative for a person like her.  To live on in Poland means pretending that nothing has happened (“Nic się nie stało”). But Wanda is too smart and too proud for this. A formidable woman.

Wanda’s comrades stand out as a bunch of shmucks. The Polish communists, holding on to their Party membership as a hope for a career; as my dad and one of his comrades agreed: “they are no communists, they are just Party members”. They live in an illusory world which will, in time, fall to pieces around them. Being real shmucks, they will adapt. Some as entrepreneurs, some as members of other parties, embracing neo-liberalism. Very few will continue to embrace socialism.

So this is Poland. Oto Polska właśnie. To what degree this is Europe is a matter we can discuss. Anyone?

Have a good New Year, everybody.

_________________________________________________________________________

*interestingly enough, Wikipedia contains an article on structural violence, which term “refers to a form of violence where some social structure or social institution may harm people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs” and enumerates as its various examples: “[i]nstitutionalized elitism, ethnocentrism, classism, racism, sexism, adultism, nationalism, heterosexism, and ageism “ That anti-Semitism could a form of structural violence, since it prevents Jews from meeting the basic need to live where they were born and – in the extreme – living at all, is omitted here. This, I think, is an example of structural anti-Semitism.