This lecture examines the important role of acculturated Jewish comedians in interwar Poland's popular culture, focusing on cabaret and film star Kazimierz Krukowski (1901-1984). Krukowski regularly played a lower middle-class Jewish merchant named Lopek, who quickly became "Warsaw's most beloved Jew" in the city's priciest cabarets. Lopek's songs, written by Jewish lyricists and composers, rendered him an ironic commentator on business woes and everyday antisemitism, and made him into Warsaw?s everyman, a character bewildered by modernity, yet eager to pursue the city's high life. Having survived the war in the USSR, Krukowski returned to Poland and opened a cabaret:"Lopek's Place." Holmgren addresses modern Jewish urban identity and comedy, which thrived in interwar Poland, and she asks to what extent those Jewish writers and actors shaped a legacy for the communist period as well.

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