Animating Pushkin for the “Jewish War”

Abstract

AbstractThis article argues that Jewish animators Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg both evoked and challenged dominant constructs of homeland during the otherwise repressive Stalinist regime in their film The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1943). In particular, I explore their insertion of the folk motif of the hunt, which I see as emblematic of their experience during the war. The Brumberg sisters referenced the popular Central Asian Islamic motif of the hunter and the Eastern European Jewish motif of the hunted. In the final iteration, they transformed the hunted deer into a leaping gazelle, which revised conventional Soviet-Jewish folklore typologies and sheds light on the filmmakers’ wartime yearnings for national autonomy.