Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List is largely credited with revitalizing Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter of Krakow, in which many of the movie’s iconic scenes were filmed. Krzysztof Bielawski, who runs Virtual Shtetl, the impressive website from Warsaw’s Museum of the History of Polish Jews, asks whether Pawel Pawlikowski’s Oscar-winning Holocaust film Ida could have a similar effect on the places it features. (h/t Tablet contributor Ruth Ellen Gruber’s Jewish Heritage Europe, another excellent resource for information about Jewish sites in Europe.)
The film follows soon-to-be nun Anna and her acerbic aunt Wanda on a journey both emotional and very much physical. As J. Hoberman described it, “Ida is thus a kind of investigatory road film in which, driving through rural Poland, the cloistered novice learns more about life’s cruelties and her country’s recent past than she would surely ever want to know—while her aunt, whose belief in her own secular faith has long since eroded, is forced to re-experience the trauma she would prefer had remained buried.”
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From Tablet Magazine
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