The Vow And The Dybbuk: Film Analysis

In two Yiddish Films, The Vow and The Dybbuk by Michal Waszynski (based on the play by S. Ansky and Henryk Szaro), two fathers make a vow to marry their unborn children if one had a daughter and the other a son against the advisement of the rabbi and the prophet. Both films represent the Jewish culture before World War 2. At this time, Jewish towns were apprehensive about embracing new trends and movements. The town issues severe repercussions as a consequence of the men not following through with their vows. However, love proves superior to tradition and emphasizes a clash between the traditional and the modern. Although The Vow and The Dybbuk both depict Jewish communities that attempt to break free from their bonds to traditional religious and cultural values to attain a more modern way of living and thinking, The Vow represents tradition as inescapable while The Dybbuk explores a middle ground between tradition and modernity. While the two films display different storylines of how a community deals with morality, both films present a culture that is becoming more modernized through the devolution of their religious traditions but not without serious repercussions. It was customary in the Jewish tradition for a father to arrange the marriage for his daughter. Arranged marriages were representative of the religious values held during the time these films were produced. In The Vow,

However, The Vow presents a more optimistic outcome where obliging to tradition prevails whereas The Dybbuk shows contradicting overlap of traditional and modern