This article analyzes a 1916 story by Isaak Babel', “El'ia Isaakovich and Margarita Prokof'evna” (published in Maksim Gor'kii’s Letopis'), in which a Jewish businessman from Odessa takes refuge with an Orel prostitute to avoid being sent back to the Pale of Settlement by the police. Safran sees El'ia Isaakovich as a character type new to mainstream Russian literature, a strong Jewish man who is neither a victim nor an exploiter of Russians but can inspire them to positive change. Safran pursues four related lines of reasoning: she sets the story in light of Gor'kii’s attitude toward Babel' and the “Jewish Question”; she reads it as a parody of the urban myth of the Jewish false prostitute; she compares it to Jewish folktales about Elijah the Prophet; and she considers the hero’s repetition of the word nivroko, a formula that Odessa Jews used to ward off the evil eye.

Jerzy Kawalerowicz told reporters that he made his 1982 film, Austeria (The inn) to commemorate the Polish-Jewish people and culture destroyed in the Holocaust. This non-Jewish Polish director, known best in the west for his Mother Joanna of the Angels (a depiction of death and possession at a medieval French convent), grew up among Jews in the eastern part of Poland. He had been struck by the Polish-Jewish author Julian Stryjkowski's 1966 novella, Austeria, a haunting depiction of Jewish life in Galicia at the beginning of the twentieth century. Kawalerowicz—with Stryjkowski—immediately decided to turn the book into a movie. After the Six-Day War in 1967 sparked an “anti-Zionist campaign” in Poland, however, the Polish government found the Jewish topic of their screenplay “politically unacceptable.” In 1981, the film was granted permission and funding. It was completed in 1982, following the crackdown on Solidarity and the imposition of martial law. The authorities allowed its distribution, having determined that it displayed “humanitarian values” and that it did not represent a political threat. In the capacity of a quasiofficial expression of Polish regret at the passing of the Jews, and perhaps as a demonstration of liberalism aimed at the western critics of the new regime, Austeria was widely promoted and exported to film festivals abroad.