by RACHEL MANEKIN
Rebellious Jewish girls fled their Galician villages, leaving their mark on books, film, and even Orthodox education
In 1913, the silent film Der Shylock von Krakau was released with a script by the Austrian author and critic Felix Salten, the author of Bambi, and its protagonist portrayed by the Austrian actor, Rudolph Schildkraut. The film tells the story of Isaak Levi, a money lender and God-fearing Kraków Jew, whose daughter runs away to Berlin with her lover, a Polish count and a client of her father. Abandoned there by her lover, the daughter had become a beggar to support herself. After many years she returns to Kraków, only to find her father cold, bitter, and old. The father rejects the lost daughter, but finally forgives her on his death bed. As a Viennese Jew, Salten would have been very familiar with the Galician runaway stories, which made Kraków a logical setting for an Eastern European version of the Venetian Shylock.
Indeed, press reports about Jewish female runaways in Galicia left their trace on works of many contemporary authors, playwrights, and even filmmakers. In 1902, the noted German Jewish author Jakob Wassermann (1873-1934) published a story titled Der Moloch. The book tells the story of Arnold Ansorge, who, while living in the Moravian village of Podolin meets Samuel Elasser, a poor Jewish peddler, and learns from him that his thirteen-year-old daughter Jutta was kidnapped by Felician nuns and held in a convent against her will. Upon hearing this, Ansorge decides to help Elasser to get his daughter back, especially since the law alone had failed to achieve the justice he deserved. Ansorge’s friend, Maxim Specht, is convinced to join the mission, and in order to pressure the authorities he keeps sending articles to the Viennese press about this disturbing convent story (Klostergeschichte). Ansorge later travels to Vienna for the same purpose, but while in the big city—the modern day Moloch—he is lured by the worldly pleasures it offers and forgets his original commitment to seek justice for Elasser. Afflicted with guilt after his life takes a turn for the worse, Ansorge compensates Elasser with a significant sum of money and subsequently commits suicide.
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