Yizkor dramatizes its theme of fidelity to one's self, one's community and one's religion through a plot that revolves around hostage-taking, heroism and resistance. In a small Volhynian village, the local Count's daughter falls in love with Leybke, a handsome Jewish guardsman, but all her attempts to win him fail as he is in love with and betrothed to Kreyndl. The Countess desperately tries to seduce Leybke, and avenges her failure by falsely accusing him of attacking her. Arrested on the eve of his wedding, Leybke escapes and marries Kreyndl, but after they flee the entire Jewish community is held hostage. Leybke gives himself up, is buried alive and the Countess commits suicide. Made in Vienna, then "touted as 'the Hollywood of Europe,'...[Yizkor] presents Jewish life evolving in dialectical relation to the Gentile world--a point of particular relevance for a city as simultaneously charged by political antisemitism and Jewish cultural achievement as postwar Vienna," says J. Hoberman.
