Katz, Maya Balakirsky Drawing The Iron Curtain: Jews and the Golden Age of Soviet Animation (review)

Abstract

SEER, 95, 3, JULY 2017 548 is the description of Diagilev’s failed attempt to refocus the crazed Nizhinskii’s wandering mind by fetching him from the asylum to which he was confined to watch the performance of a ballet in which he had once starred? The Impresario’s faults are not ignored: his possessiveness, his dictatorial quirks and bullying tactics, his promiscuous, not to say predatory, homosexuality. As to the latter, any publication in Russia today must, by law, tread carefully round the question: so it is not surprising that we learn little of how this affected the man’s emotional and spiritual life; the subject is not evaded but neither is it examined. The resultant portrait is the familiar one of a dominant, Svengali figure: a moulder of men devoted to pioneering ever new forms of the Gesamtkunstwerk: from the sharply satirical to the nostalgic neo-romantic to the steamily primitive; from elegant neo-classicism to the grotesque, the constructivist, the futurist, culminating in the limpid simplicity of the parable of ‘The Prodigal Son’. Diagilev comes across as sophisticated yet superstitious, cosmopolitan yet homesick, dictatorial yet capable of suggesting to his artists some subtle insight able to supply the key to an entire performance. When he died, in Venice, leaving only a few thousand francs in his bank account, the Ballets Russes simply dissolved into thin air, an ephemeral rainbow bubble, the dream of a country lad from the extreme periphery of Europe — yet, for many, a dream come true. In his final chapter, Brezgin shows the surge of publications, memorial events and exhibitions in Europe and America which began to build immediately after Diagilev’s death, the initial deafening silence in the Soviet Union and the upsurge of interest in Russia, beginning from the 1980s, which, as this rich book bears witness, continues to this day. Department of Modern Languages Avril Pyman University of Durham Katz, Maya Balakirsky. Drawing The Iron Curtain: Jews and the Golden Age of Soviet Animation. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, and London, 2016. xi + 289 pp. Notes. Glossary. Filmography. Index. $34.95. Drawing the Iron Curtain is an important contribution to Jewish studies, animation studies and Russian studies. Maya Balakirsky Katz’s book investigates the history of one of the most prominent animation studios in Eastern Europe, Soiuzmul´tfil´m, and the significant number of Jewish artists that the studio employed. Katz argues that Soviet animation at Soiuzmul´tfil´m served as fertile ground to uncover ways in which Jewish culture influenced a popular form of Soviet culture, cartoons. Katz’s work revises the idea that Soviet animation is a Russian-centric product. While Jewish scholars have REVIEWS 549 documented the demise of Jewish culture during the time of the Soviet Union, Katz’s book aims at discovering an official avenue for its expression. While Soiuzmul´tfil´m operated as an official organ of the Soviet state, Jewish artists were allowed and even encouraged to work in animation. These artists not only legitimized animation but the animation field provided them with a space to showcase Jewish culture in an official manner. Many Jewish animators only talked about their Jewishness after retirement or after the collapse of Soiuzmul´tfil´m in the 1990s. Katz argues that Jewish animators during their careers adopted invisibility, some even stressing their Russianness, but that these animators would reject the terms invisibility or silence to describe their work. Jewish animators during the Soviet Union often modelled their characters after themselves and other Jewish animators. Katz concludes that on the screen, Jewishness was not invisible but it was not always identifiable to the average viewer. Soiuzmul´tfil´m became a meeting ground for both official and independent artistic communities, including a large Jewish community. While Katz sets out to tell the story of Jewish involvement in animation, she also reconstructs the confusing first years of animation in the Soviet Union with clarity. She documents the beginnings of Soviet animation by describing the work of independent artists, studios, clubs and the contributions that Jewish animators made in the years before Soiuzmul´tfil´m. From the early years Katz discusses the work of artists like Zinaida and Valentina Brumberg, who...