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with but who eventually escape from drowning when talking in the water, their
extreme gesturing turning into swimming moves (Ibidem).
The Romanians had made the same observations. The Jews loved to gesticulate
as much as they loved to chat, a perception that was repeatedly drawn upon in
literature,” and especially in theater.'* In drama, the Jewish gestures have become,
in fact, alongside physical traits and clothing, an ethnic trademark.”
Less efficient than in theater and cinema, but highly more representational
than verbal interchange, the Jewish pantomime spread in visual arts. Efron certi¬
fies that the predisposition of the eastern ghetto Jew to gesticulate became a sub¬
ject-theme for the Jewish and non-Jewish artists (Ibidem: 62—63). But more than
a subject, we have to admit gesturing as a method, a way of verbalizing individual
and group motivations, which, for some artists and viewers, was in fact the main
point of interest. “If gestures without words are an exception, words without ges¬
tures are even more exceptional,” wrote Jean Claude Schmitt, concluding also
that, when an image has no additional text, gestures can express, if not the exact
content of the discourse, at least the idea of the word (1998: 322). In the case of
the Jews, the intense dialogue, the furtive information or the immoral condition
became translatable through gestures. Willingly or unwillingly, the artist appealed
concomitantly to social accuracy and pictorial conventions. The Jews’ unnatural
gestures, a perceived reality, ensured, in the mental and artistic evocation, a cor¬
respondence to their unuttered evil manifestations.
17 In Ionel Teodoreanu’s novel La Medeleni, the Romanians and Jews waiting in front of a lawyer
cabinet behave as Biltiu’s characters: “They [the Jews] were talking collectively—a choir without mu¬
sic—and gesticulating furiously, although they were not quarreling, spreading out and commenting
the local newspapers like some strategic maps.” Meanwhile, “the [Romanian] peasants were keeping
silence, standing implacable, suspicious and embarrassed” (1999 II: 50). The author returns upon this
Jewish attitude once more: “The Jewish litigants ... come in groups. They talk, gesticulate and stop
from time to time, ready to fall to blows, but they never do that; they start talking again. Although they
don’t have a briefcase under their arm, they all seem lawyers, through their restlessness, gesticulation
and the irrefutable tone” (Teodoreanu 1999 III: 87).
18 In Jidovul (The Yid), a play by an important Romanian writer, Liviu Rebreanu, the author intro¬
duces, among the multitude of Jewish characters, a pair of small Jewish businessmen of secondary
importance but adding hilarity. In a private conversation, Alter and Shtrul plan how to talk a Jewish
bank director into financing “a good deal” (in fact, a scam). The stage directions are clear: The actors
will “talk with inflammation and with lots of gestures” (Rebreanu 1980: 728).
5) A 1916 minor theater play, dramatizing the grand-scale consequences of a small-scale extortion
that a poor Jew tried to put together, led to a humorous event when the Jew that inspired the character
came to see the play. The original hero, a shabby broker named Burah, was left unsatisfied with the way
he was portrayed and tried, between acts, to demonstrate to the other theatergoers that the incident
was exaggerated. “But, getting too excited, the real Burah, unconsciously, lent himself to intonations,
gestures and movements, to everybody’s amusement and conviction that the actor had copied him
perfectly” (Actiunea 1916).