Marcos Silber Cinematic Motifs as a Seismograph: Kazimierz, the Vistula and Yiddish Filmmakers in Interwar Poland Beginning in the first part of the twentieth century Kazimierz Dolny and the Vistula River became important symbolic elements in the memory culture of Polish Jewry. This development had been fostered by earlier generations of storytellers and the Polish Jewish mythology they created. As Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska has emphasized, Yiddish literature associated Kazimierz, along with its river, woods, and castles, with the legend about King Kazimierz the Great and Esterke, his Jewish wife, even though the town’s name is actually related to a different king — Kazimierz the Just (Kazimierz sprawiedliwy). 1 Chone Shmeruk demonstrated that during the nineteenth century the myth of Polish-Jewish brotherhood that the town symbolized was recreated and reshaped, becoming an emblem of Jewish integration in a Polish state and recreating the figure of Polonia paradisus judaeorum. 2 The changes continued during the first decades of the twentieth century even as the myth retained its main features. 3 It helped recall the past — a recollection that both groups may have needed in order to make meaningful their common existence in a convulsive era in Polish history. In Yiddish films from interwar Poland Kazimierz was depicted as the emblematic Polish shtetl. Viewers saw two towns portrayed on the screen simultaneously — the real Kazimierz with its landmarks and the symbolic one representing the legend of King Kazimierz and Esterke. The town was * This paper was made possible thanks to the generous support of research funds provided by the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Haifa. 1 Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Kazimierz vel Kuzmir, Miasteczko ro ´z ˙nych sno ´w, Lublin 2006, pp. 28y30, 383. 2 Chone Shmeruk, The Esterke Story in Yiddish and Polish Literature, Jerusalem 1985, pp. 14y16, 21y35. 3 Ibid., pp. 55y82. Gal-Ed 23 (2012) 37