Abstract
Given the secular ideology of the Soviet Union, it has long been assumed that expressions of cultural or religious specificity were absent or at least marginalized in the region between 1919 and its collapse in 1991. However, complementing recent literature about the representation of the Holocaust in Soviet films by Jeremy Hicks (2012) and Olga Gershenson (2013), Maya Balakirsky Katz’s Drawing the Iron Curtain draws particular attention to the presence of Jewishness within the mainstream Soviet animation industry. Like Hicks before her, Katz takes the position that, because Jewish identity and themes might not always be explicitly visualized in works produced in the Soviet Union, their traces need to be excavated.
Throughout the book, Katz resists preconceptions about the strict control of the Soviet censors, and explores the blurred boundaries between in/visibility. Drawing the Iron Curtain offers evaluations of a range of films produced by Soyuzmultfilm – the main, state-funded animation studio in Soviet Russia – in order to identify the prevalence of Jewish identities in these works, in spite of the censorship of the time. As Katz notes, Soyuzmultfilm was rather ironically a haven for Jews and other political prisoners of the State. To explore the significance of Soyuzmultfilm, she adopts a blended method, combining testimonies of ex-employees at times with her own analysis of particular animated works. Although it was a State animation studio, Soyuzmultfilm offered its employees a level of creative independence and Katz seeks out stories from some of those who worked there during the Soviet era, revealing the close-knit community that developed within the studio. It was this environment that enabled Soyuzmultfilm to become a haven for creative talents otherwise marginalized in the then more respected traditional art world and theatre.
In Chapter One, Katz carefully examines a range of testimonies, wary that their nostalgic quality raises questions of historical truth (p. 27). However, she turns to them to explore the studio’s social life – its ‘family’ culture, as well as changing tensions in the relationship between Jewish animators, the industry and Soviet politics. Here, she begins to touch on the importance of reading Jewish identity in context. It would be quite wrong to dedicate a book about Jews and Soviet animation simply to looking for ‘Jewish’ characters, as Katz acknowledges, because this would perpetuate mythical and racist stereotypes, or to search for films that only project traditional images of Jewish culture, such as life in the Pale Settlement, for this would suggest that Jewish people did not progress along with their fellow citizens. Katz particularly focuses on the movement of young Jewish men towards intellectual circles in the early days of Soviet Russia, and then towards the city in the later period. In fact, she reads images of cosmopolitanism as subtly referencing the inclusion of Jewish identities in Soviet urban society. A theme that runs through Katz’s book is that Jewish-Soviet identity was often perceived by Jewish animators as part of a multi-ethnic society rather than separate from, or resistant to, it.
She also challenges the myth of Soviet isolationism, identifying the animators’ transnational influences, particularly through Sergei Eisenstein’s research trip to Disney’s studio. Although the administration was obedient to Party politics, the Communist concept of division of labour through directors’ groups gave creative teams a certain amount of autonomy, which both inspired a collective attitude and a departmentalization that allowed for more references to Jewish concerns than one might otherwise have expected from a State-sponsored production company. Furthermore, the growing anti-Semitism within the fine arts drew many Jewish artists to the animation industry, which, Katz explains, was considered only a ‘second-rate art’ (p. 42). It was the Studio’s original Jewish staff that made a conscious effort to bring in other Jewish colleagues who were struggling to continue as respected artists or performers elsewhere. Although, as across many industries, there was a purge of Jewish employees during the Stalin era, Katz’s research suggests that before and after his reign the studio welcomed Jewish creatives.
The second chapter perhaps seems only tentatively about Jewishness or animation as it maps the failed production of a Soviet live-action feature film, Black and White (developed in the early 1930s, but abandoned). The film, which was about racism in America, was supposed to feature several African-American performers. However, Katz argues that a critical review of the failed development of the film illuminates ‘how the representation of black Americans expressed Soviet multinationalism (mnogonatsional’nost’) and the interrelated “Jewish question”’ (p. 56). This is perhaps her least persuasive claim because much of the chapter is dedicated to a short, animated version of the film (Blek end uait, dir. Ivan Ivanov-Vano and Leonid Amalrik, 1932), the only form in which the narrative exists today, created by Mezhrabpom, a studio from which much of the staff would go on to join Soyutzmultfilm. However, the links between the representation of American racism and the Soviet Jewish question are light and hang mostly on the idea that African-Americans and Soviet Jews were both stateless (p. 71). This claim is not fully justified, and thus seems to grossly simplify the cultural differences of these experiences.
From Chapter Three onwards, Drawing the Iron Curtain is much more convincing. In Chapter Three, Katz discusses the ‘fairy grandmothers of Russian animation’ (p. 75) – Jewish sisters Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg – and their work in creating a haven for discredited anti-Soviet intellectuals, their use of folktale films as a way to explore ethnic figures, and their relationship with the State. Their emblem Little Man was accused of having an ethnic, and specifically Jewish, pattern and dialect of speech (p. 94), and characters were voiced by Jewish performers from the then defunct Meyerhold Theatre (p. 89). However, whilst Jewishness is foregrounded more in this chapter than the previous one, the cultural significance of Little Man is only tentatively associated with the Zionist activism of the Brumberg sisters’ father. At the end of the chapter, it remains uncertain to the reader how much their father’s political activity truly influenced their work, or whether there were more general interests in Jewishness or human rights at play.
In the chapter Big City Jews, Katz examines how censorship had a positive impact on the studio, enabling animators to project images of Jews as progressive and to avoid stereotypes of the Pale, which would otherwise be noticeable to the censors. She considers how animated drawings of films about urban space offered a veil for Jewish performers such as Zinovii Gerdt, well known for playing ethnic characters. Here, Katz argues, animation works as a cover behind which more controversial actors can still perform in voiceover without being visually recognized. Yet fans of actors such as Gerdt would recognize his voice and thus identify his Jewishness. As Gerdt was cast as the voice of a policeman in the animation Story of a Crime (Istoriya adnogo prestupleniya, Fyodor Khitruk, 1962), Katz argues, this casting represented Jews as participating in all levels of society, rather than as the ‘other’.
In Chapter Five, Katz considers how the character Cheburashka – an iconic figure of Soviet animation – was heavily influenced by the personal experiences of the Holocaust survivors who created him. In particular, she highlights the Jaffa oranges and suitcase associated with the character as subtle references to the plight of Jewish refugees. In Chapter Six, she goes into more detail about the Holocaust and the Soviet-Jewish experience of this period. She argues that films like Polkan and Shavaka (Aleksander Ivanov, 1949) blend innocuous stories of animals with personal testimony to tell experiences of the Holocaust. Although Ivanov’s film was based on a celebrated Soviet poem by Sergei Mikhalkov, which helped it pass the censors, it was heavily altered by the Jewish creative team. Katz argues that this reveals just how much agency Jewish animators were able to have at Soyuzmultfilm and the scope of the role that Jewish animators played in defining the Soviet anti-Nazi aesthetic.
In the final chapters, Katz turns to the growing presence and celebration of Jewish identity in animations after the de-Stalinization programs of the so-called ‘Thaw’ (1953–1964). Katz identities a retro-style adopted by several animators, celebrating the work of historical Jewish figures in Soviet culture, including the experimental films of Dziga Vertov and the rise of the Soviet-Jewish auteur Yuri Norstein. While at times Katz can seem to stretch the association of Soviet animated works to Jewishness, and incorporates a range of theoretical approaches which do not always seem necessary, these issues do not distract from the book’s important quest to search for suppressed identities in Soviet animations which might otherwise be forgotten in the annals of history. Drawing the Iron Curtain contributes a new counter-history to animation studies, which should encourage us all to reflect on the ways stories of marginalized voices in the industry, and suppressed identities onscreen, might challenge national narratives of the development of style and ideologies in animations.