S. Ansky
Edited and with an Introduction by David G. Roskies
With translations by Golda Werman
Yale University Press
New Haven and London
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds: A Dramatic Legend in Four Acts
CHARACTERS
Act I
Act II
Act III
Act IV
Stories and Sketches
In the Tavern
The Sins of Youth
Hunger
Mendl Turk
Behind a Mask
Go Talk to a Goy!
The Tower in Rome
The Destruction of Galicia: Excerpts from a Diary, 1914–17
Biographical Notes
Notes
Glossary
Who could have predicted, back in 1992, the explosion of interest in S. Ansky as an ethnographer, playwright, chronicler, storyteller, and revolutionary? Who could have known that his rescued treasures—including the 500 wax cylinders of Jewish folk music—had survived the Soviet regime? That within a few years, the folk objects he had collected would be catalogued and put on display; that The Dybbuk would be staged and restaged, translated and retranslated; that his novel, Pioneers, on the first generation of Russian-Jewish rebels, would be hailed as a classic; that an international conclave of experts would meet to map out future directions of Ansky scholarship; that Ansky’s name would become synonymous with the quest for the lost shtetl? And so, my first debt of thanks goes to Ruth R. Wisse, who matched me up with Ansky’s life and work. For this and other gifts, too many to enumerate, I rededicate the book to her.
Most of the volume was translated by Golda Werman, including a new rendering of the famous Dybbuk itself. Her critical comments during our two-year collaboration also helped me ferret out what really worked in an English-language anthology. I owe a special thanks to Robert Szulkin, my beloved teacher, for translating an early sketch of Ansky’s from the Russian, and to Michael Stern for his dedicated work under difficult time constraints. My thanks as well to Ruth R. Wisse and also to Henry Holt & Co for permission to reprint copyrighted material.
Among the most memorable pieces in this volume is one translated by the late Lucy S. Dawidowicz. In addition to her many achievements, Mrs. Dawidowicz was responsible for establishing the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature, which co-sponsors with the National Yiddish Book Center the translations in the New Yiddish Library. The present volume was made possible by a generous gift to the Fund by Mr. and Mrs. Edwin M. Gale of Beaumont, Texas.
D.G.R.
When Solomon Rappoport fled the Bolsheviks disguised as a priest and reached the German-occupied city of Vilna aboard a refugee train, he was a broken man. A lifetime of service to the revolutionary cause in his native land and abroad had been cut short by Lenin’s seizure of power in January 1918. As a deputy to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly on the Socialist-Revolutionary ticket, Rappoport was now a fugitive. Worse still, the Bolsheviks impounded the treasures of the Jewish Ethnographic Museum in Petrograd on whose premises he had lived. The Moscow Art Theater’s premiere performance of The Dybbuk—the indisputable masterpiece of the Jewish theater that would have culminated his literary career—was canceled due to Stanislavsky’s illness and the political upheaval in Russia. Rappoport did not even salvage a copy of the play when he was forced to flee. Among other papers left behind was the manuscript of his four-volume war chronicle, The Destruction of Galicia. Now, from his sickbed in Vilna, where he lay stricken with diabetes and heart disease, Rappoport instructed future generations to study his life rather than to read his published and still unpublished works.
Yet there was no reason to choose between the man and his work. Having lived most of his life “on the border between two worlds,” he made the subject of competing loyalties into the substance of his fiction, drama, essays and memoirs. The divided life and complex personality of Solomon Rappoport-Ansky offered a key to the evolution of the Jews—and of Jewish literature—in modern times.1
Born Shloyme-Zanvl ben Aaron Hacohen Rappoport in Marc Chagall’s city of Vitebsk, Ansky was raised in the unusual confluence of two opposing streams of East European Orthodoxy. The historic center of Habad Hasidism (known today as Lubavitch), Vitebsk also boasted one of Jewish Lithuania’s finest yeshivas. When not engaged in his own talmudic recitative inside the besmedresh (house of study), Shloyme-Zanvl could listen to the haunting contemplative melodies that emanated from the small hasidic shtiblekh (houses of prayer). The young man was reputed to be a Talmud prodigy.
These were boom years for the city, whose Jewish population jumped from fourteen thousand in the year of Rappoport’s birth (1863) to twenty-four thousand when he left for good (1881). Some families, like the Zhitlowskys, struck it rich during this period of rapid expansion, whereas others, like the once wealthy Rappoports, suffered a severe reversal of fortune. Shloyme-Zanvl’s mother was forced to run a tavern, while his father was always away on business. They lived in Podvinye, the poorer section of town, and could not afford the monthly three-ruble tuition to send Shloyme-Zanvl or his two sisters to the local gymnasium. So he was left to learn Russian from his well-heeled friend Chaim Zhitlowsky, the future philosopher of a Yiddish-based nationalism, and together they strayed from the straight and narrow.
It began with some amateur Yiddish journalism: an issue or two of the Vitebsker gleklekh (The Little Bells of Vitebsk) with Shloyme-Zanvl serving as local correspondent and Chaim writing fiction. A traveling Yiddish theater inspired fifteen-year-old Shloyme-Zanvl to write a melodrama about the evils of (his) heder education, but actor-director Jacob Adler was not impressed. Meanwhile, the two boys were busy reading. They read the militant works of the Hebrew Enlightenment, notably Moshe Leib Lilienblum’s Hattot Ne’urim (The Sins of Youth, 1876). This autobiographical expose of a tradition-minded father and his idealistic son was an epoch-making indictment of the whole of Jewish civilization. And they read the Russian nihilist manifestos of Pisarev alongside Chernichevsky’s feminist and Utopian novel, What Is to Be Done?
By the age of seventeen, Shloyme-Zanvl had lost his faith, had become a “critical realist,” and was running a commune on the outskirts of town for poor boys who had left the yeshiva. He taught them mathematics and Russian and urged them on to “productive labor.” A year later, Shloyme-Zanvl left home to preach the gospel in the heartland of Jewish obscurantism. This brief period spent in the hasidic shtetl of Liozno as an undercover agent for the enlightenment was a turning point. While subversive tactics remained a vivid and viable option throughout his life, the inaugural mission failed because he was flushed out by the Orthodox establishment. It marked the beginning of his estrangement from the seemingly hopeless cause of Jewish reform. Meanwhile, Rappoport decided to head north to seek opportunity in the city of Dvinsk (Daugaupils, Latvia). During a brief stop in the shtetl Osvey, he wrote home to his buddies in a mixture of Yiddish and Russian:
Listen well—I’m earning twelve rubles giving private lessons. By Saturday night I’ll have as much as fifteen. I should reach twenty by next week. Twenty-five to thirty are still a Utopian dream. There’s no society of freethinkers [here], no antagonism toward me [either]; nothing to remind me of the [heady] phrases and self-sacrifices. They’re busy fleecing the goy, and that’s that. I take the measure of the households where I go looking for lessons. It’s awful how they treat me with such respect, even with love. But for all that, I don’t even make enough for matches.
Trying to liberate himself from the bonds of love and bourgeois society, he apprenticed to a German bookbinder—the only “productive labor” for which he would ever be formally trained. Yet to pay for the matches, Shloyme-Zanvl went on tutoring Jewish boys and girls in Russian for several more years.
His growing estrangement from the Jews is difficult to gauge precisely. We know that his mother died around this time and that his father declined all offers to move in with his equally mobile and penurious son. (A photograph of them taken in Moscow is the sole memento of their relationship.) At one point, Rappoport junior moved outside the Jewish Pale of Settlement to the city of Tula, perhaps in the hope that there a Jew might make it into the university. Shloyme-Zanvl had an uncle in Tula who was a former Cantonist (child conscript in the czar’s army). But if Ansky’s fiction is to be believed, he refused to accept help even from these distant relatives, gave lessons instead, and starved.
Judging from his early Yiddish writings, young Rappoport was at war with the past. The History of a Family chronicled the economic and moral collapse of a “typical” Jewish family. The men, raised on a strict diet of prayer and Talmud study, were utterly passive. The women sacrificed themselves even to the point of prostitution. Except for a grandfather’s stories and some old wives’ potions, there was nothing in tradition that had any redemptive power whatsoever. Only hard, physical labor could change a man, provided it didn’t kill him first. In the early 1880s, when The History of a Family was written, such frontal attacks on all the institutions of yiddishkayt were still rare in Yiddish fiction. Because no publisher would go near it, Rappoport finally placed his family chronicle in the Russian-Jewish periodical Voskhod, where it appeared under the pen name “Pseudonym” in 1884 in someone else’s translation. So completely did the young author cover his tracks that when Jewish socialists at the end of the century needed suitable material to further the class struggle, they translated this novel back into Yiddish—not knowing that there was once a Yiddish original and that its author was alive and well somewhere in Paris.
By the time a highbrow Yiddish literature came into being under the generous and energetic auspices of one Solomon Rabinovich of Kiev (alias Sholem Aleichem), the battle lines were firmly drawn. Rappoport found him to be a “dry” bourgeois entrepreneur with a parochial program and a draconian editorial policy. The meetings between them in the summer of ’89 bore no fruit, and volume two of Sholem Aleichem’s literary miscellany contained nothing by Rappoport. But for a cameo appearance in I. L. Peretz’s radical Holiday Folios in 1896 (this time apparently translated into Yiddish by a third party), Solomon Rappoport had severed all ties with the world of Yiddish—and Jewish—letters.
By 1887 he was living two thousand miles from home, in the southern city of Yekaterinoslav. Still precariously positioned “on the border between two worlds,” he rented a room from a Jewish family, earned his keep by tutoring young Jews but threw his considerable energy into a vastly different educational venture. The Russian narod, the simple peasant folk, now occupied the center of Rappoport’s moral imagination.
Typical of the Russian revolutionary movement as a whole, Rappoport was drawn to “the simple life of the narod, its naïveté, poverty, truth, its lack of malice,” as he announced to Zhitlowsky. Many roads then led to the Russian “folk,” foremost among them the path laid out by populist theoretician Peter Lavrov. An unpaid debt, he preached, weighed on the conscience of the privileged groups toward the millions of Russian workers of this generation and those of the past. According to Lavrov, the intellectuals had first to prepare themselves before they could wage successful propaganda among the masses. To this end, Rappoport set about educating himself on the life and reading habits of the peasants. He himself began reading to the illiterate peasants from the classics of modern Russian literature. What the “folk” read and what it was capable of absorbing became his abiding interest. The logical next step for a self-styled Jewish radical whose own people had no use for him was to become one with the “real” folk, the Russian narod.
But because the villages were by this time swarming with spies and police agents (wise to earlier attempts at infiltration from above), Rappoport found his niche among the miners of the Donets Basin instead. Every kind of misfit came to work in the mines. Backbreaking and debilitating, this hard labor was the great leveler of society. While shtetl fathers and especially mothers were constantly spying on the Russian tutor lest he undermine the morals of the young, here one could go about without an internal passport. The miners, who found the name Solomon Aronovich unassimilable, Russified Rappoport’s name to Semyon Akimovich, and thus it remained on his calling cards until the day he died.
By accepting their name for him, Rappoport signified that he had also adopted their way of life, their “poverty, truth and lack of malice,” as his own. Not only had he sacrificed his health in the three years he spent in the mines and lost most of his teeth to scurvy, but he also maintained his spartan surroundings, proletarian dress, and the practice of self-denial in all his subsequent travels—to St. Petersburg, Paris, Geneva, Moscow, Vilna and Warsaw. Meanwhile, his educational work among the miners convinced him that the intellectuals and the folk were utterly distinct cultural and psychological “types” and that to speak for the folk one necessarily had to be of them.
Semyon Akimovich was anxious for the radical intellectuals to hear his message. St. Petersburg was now the center of “legal populism” within Russia, home of agrarian socialist Nikolai Mikhailovsky and radical writer Gleb Uspensky. How exactly this twenty-eight-year-old veteran was catapulted directly from the southern mines to the charmed inner circle of the St. Petersburg intelligentsia (where no Jew could live without a residence permit) remains unclear. Apparently, the ever-vigilant czarist police finally flushed Semyon Akimovich out, threw him into solitary confinement, and sent him packing. (Rappoport later described his brief stint in prison but gave it no date.) It also appears that his published accounts of the miners’ life had caught the eye of a local Russian editor who gave Semyon Akimovich a letter of introduction to Uspensky. Be that as it may, the Jewish narodnik was taken in by the famed Russian writer, and within months of his arrival in St. Petersburg, S. A. An-ski’s Sketches on Folk Literature—the scholarly fruits of his labors in the Russian mines—was being serialized in a leading populist journal.
Now “S.A.” could stand for Solomon Aronovich or Semyon Akimovich. But where did the “Ansky” (or “An-ski”) pen name come from? Consistent with the split inside himself, Ansky told two competing versions of his life’s story. The “Jewish” version had it that “Ansky” came from his mother’s name, Anna. “I wanted to show Mother,” he explained to his confidante and literary executor Rosa Monoszon, “who suffered so much on account of my seeking an alien path, that my connection to her, who symbolized my beloved past, was not only not severed but would actually be preserved and strengthened in my future work.” The problem with this version is that Monoszon met Ansky twenty-three years after he first adopted this not-too-Jewish-sounding name; and besides, Anna had presumably died long before her son’s literary debut. In contrast, there was Victor Chernov, who knew Ansky in Paris as a man completely divorced from Jews and Judaism. In the version Ansky recounted to his Russian comrade-in-arms, Uspensky got the credit for inventing the pen name out of whole cloth. The truth of both versions of the “Ansky” story is that without his prior—and profound—alienation from Jewish life and letters it is impossible to understand his later “return.”
The only Jews with whom Ansky still maintained contact during his sojourn in St. Petersburg were his former Vitebsk buddies—especially Masha Reines and her cousin, Chaim Zhitlowsky. The latter, after marrying the daughter of a local Russian populist, headed for Switzerland to pursue his studies; so too did cousin Masha. So when Uspensky suggested to his Jewish protégé that he travel abroad to expand his intellectual horizons, Semyon Akimovich had an added incentive to leave. It was the first of many romantic debacles.
He headed for Paris, cradle of the revolution, and worked for a time as a bookbinder (alongside Rudolph Rocker, the famous German anarchist). But when Masha rejected his advances, Ansky was so crushed that he decided to return to Russia and convert to Christianity, thus eliminating the last barrier between himself and the Russian folk. Zhitlowsky, our only source for this remarkable episode (except for a scribbled note from Rappoport to Zhitlowsky, dated October 2, 1892), claims that he talked his friend out of so drastic an action, and the jilted lover did in fact return to Paris. There his life picked up when he met emigre philosopher Peter Lavrov, whose private secretary he became until the latter’s death in February 1900.
Ansky’s life in Paris was indistinguishable from that of other émigrés: another disastrous affair, this time with a Parisian woman named Jeanette; a bohemian life-style; heated debates to plan the revolution from afar. When Victor Chernov arrived from Russia, Ansky helped him establish the Socialist Agrarian League, reviving the old dream of mobilizing his beloved peasants. With the birth of the Socialist-Revolutionaries Party in 1902, founding member Semyon Akimovich adopted Z. Sinanni as his nom de guerre. The name meant “Anna’s son.”
There was now good reason for a Russian-Jewish radical to identify as the son of his people. The Jewish Labor Bund had been founded in 1897, and although it was aligned with his hated rivals, the Social Democrats, it raised the banner of revolution among Jewish workers. For a brief moment in time, Sinanni became the official poet of the General Jewish Labor Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia. The October 1902 issue of Der arbayter (published in London) featured “The Oath,” still sung today as the Bund’s official anthem, and the fiercely anti-Zionist and anti-religious hymn “To the Bund,” which defiantly proclaimed:
Messiah and Judaism—both have died,
Another Messiah has come:
The Jewish Worker (the rich man’s victim)
Raises the flag of freedom.
As this notorious stanza makes clear, it was the Bund’s militant Marxism and internationalism that first attracted Ansky to its ranks, not its concern for the Jews. But the new Jewish politics in Russia, Europe, America, and Palestine, as historian Jonathan Frankel has shown, was now entering a period of nationalization.2 Even the most hardened cosmopolitans from across the radical spectrum were asking themselves whether the Jews as a nation did not require their own strategy, platform, solution. Victor Chernov, Ansky’s Russian comrade-in-arms, tried to convince him to take a more positive attitude to the Jewish national revival. So too, Zhitlowsky, with whom Ansky now began, tentatively, to correspond in the mother tongue, Yiddish. Ansky’s populism, for all that it inspired his studies of Russian and, later, French folklore, was strictly universalist. In this he remained a true disciple of Lavrov. It would take a great deal of persuasion to convince Ansky that the Jews were also—let alone exclusively—worthy of his efforts.
Not until 1905—after meeting with Zionist youth groups in Geneva—did Ansky evince any sympathy for the Jewish nationalist cause. Almost overnight, however, he reclaimed his artistic stake in the lost world of the Jews. It happened when he read I. L. Peretz’s collected writings in 1901. For the first time, he discovered a modern European sensibility expressing itself in Yiddish. As an immediate result of reading Peretz, Ansky went back to writing in that language, after a nineteen- or twenty-year hiatus. The voice of these early efforts—a mixture of satire and neoromanticism—was Peretz’s through and through.
If Ansky had a lot of catching up to do in Yiddish, it was because Russian was by now his lingua franca and the only language in which he could bare his soul. But like other émigrés, his Russian, too, was stuck in a time warp. The aestheticism then taking hold of Russian arts and letters, for instance, left him cold. Making a virtue of necessity, Ansky returned to his own lived experience within the Haskalah movement of the 1870s. To his Russian audience, Pioneers, his chronicle of Jewish political radicalism, must indeed have read like tales of the Wild West. It told of young men who traded the
Talmud in for Russian nihilist tracts and together with a very few women burned all the bridges behind them. Their tragicomic story of living in one language and dreaming in another bore a striking resemblance to Ansky’s own.
Then, miraculously, his linguistic and political exile came to an end. The flash point in the liberation movement in Russia came on Bloody Sunday (January 9, 1905), when the czar’s army opened fire on unarmed protesters led by Father Gapon, the outstanding labor leader in Russia. Gapon fled to Switzerland, where he was befriended by Semyon Akimovich, among others. Jointly they defended the Nationalities platform at revolutionary conclaves in Geneva, collaborated on anti-pogrom brochures in London, and returned, separately, to Mother Russia immediately upon the granting of political amnesty and freedom of the press in October. Gapon’s career as liberator of his people ended soon thereafter in assassination. Ansky’s career had just begun.
Much had changed in St. Petersburg since Ansky’s departure thirteen years before. It was almost open season for plotting the downfall of the czarist regime. Aboveground, a network of Jewish cultural institutions was being established to preserve the facts and artifacts of Jewish folk culture and to disseminate knowledge thereof in the Russian language. Ansky was an intimate of the newly founded Jewish Historic-Ethnographic Society, the Jewish Literary Society, and the Russian-Jewish monthly Evreiski Mir whose literary editor he became. He was similarly close to the Society for Jewish Folk Music, also based in St. Petersburg.3 For the first time, Ansky, who habitually lived hand to mouth, could make a living as a Jewish writer, journalist, lecturer. He now did the circuit throughout the Pale of Settlement, spreading the word about Jewish folklore and language, Yiddish literature and theater, about war, the folk, and the revolution. In the inaugural issue of the Historic-Ethnographic Society’s journal, Ansky published his revelatory essay on Jewish ethnopoetics.
Now that he spanned the Russian and Jewish worlds like no one else among his contemporaries, he saw his way clear to an undivided life. Once and for all he hoped to achieve a synthesis between the folk and the intelligentsia, tradition and modernity, politics and culture. Meeting Peretz for the first time in St. Petersburg, Ansky was most impressed that the master did not carry himself like a traditional shtetl Jew at all. “In his whole demeanor—no hint whatsoever of goles [diaspora]!” he marveled. To erase the boundary between both worlds, Ansky married a Jewish woman, adopted Yiddish alongside Russian as his literary medium, and finally made an open confession to underscore the intensity of his “reconversion.”
At a 1910 banquet in his honor at Mikhalevitsh’s restaurant in St. Petersburg, Ansky expressed anguish for having once abandoned his people. “Bearing within me an eternal yearning toward Jewry,” he confessed to his audience in Russian, “I nevertheless turned in all directions and went to labor on behalf of another people. My life was broken, severed, ruptured. Many years of my life passed on this frontier, on the border between two worlds. Therefore, I beg you, on this twenty-fifth year of summing up my literary work, to eliminate sixteen years.”4
In fact, Ansky drew heavily upon his experience as a Russian populist and socialist to produce a modern artistic synthesis in his mature writing. If once he had toiled among the Russian folk to study their habits and to enlighten their minds, he now embarked on a large-scale exploration of the Yiddish-speaking “folk,” of the old-timers who still lived in remote towns and villages preserving the old folkways in unadulterated form. The Jewish Ethnographic Expedition that Ansky conceived and directed from 1912 to 1914 proved to be an act of personal and national self-discovery, for he ascribed to Jewish folklore the importance of a new “Torah” of the masses. Just as the Written Torah had been the source of all prior Jewish creativity in a religious age, so now the gathered texts and artifacts created by the folk through centuries of trial and tribulation would be the wellspring of Jewish artists of the future. Ansky was at once the theoretician who interpreted the significance of Jewish folklore, the field-worker who gathered it, and the inspired artist who drew upon it in his work, most notably in The Dybbuk. Shifting the source of authority from above to below, much as the revolutionary movement had done in politics, Ansky located in the Jewish people the aesthetic and moral foundation of a modern Jewish culture.
His childless marriage soon ended in divorce, however, and the expedition was cut short by the “guns of August” 1914. Though now suffering from serious ailments, including a first bout of diabetes, Ansky, at age fifty-one, threw himself into the most arduous task of his career: the rescue of Jewish lives, livelihoods and legends in the occupied war zone.
On August 31, 1914, the Russian Second Army was defeated in eastern Prussia, but in Galicia, the Russians broke the enemy front, capturing its capital, Lemberg, on September 3. Guided by directives from St. Petersburg, now renamed Petrograd, and fueled by ethnic and religious hatred among the local Christian population, the Russian army wrought terrible vengeance upon the Jews, every one of whom was suspected of being a German spy. Despite military censorship and the eventual banning of Hebrew and Yiddish from the press and even from private letters, news began to trickle back to the home front about wide-scale pogroms, expropriations and the mass expulsion of Jews. A year later, the Russian hinterland was inundated with almost two hundred thousand of its own Jewish civilian population, sent into internal exile by order of the czar. Mobilizing all his contacts in the Russian press, in liberal and radical circles, and among the Jewish elite (who had previously supported his ethnographic project), Ansky spearheaded a massive relief effort on behalf of Galician and Russian Jews and then took his rescue mission into the war zone itself.
Never had his ability to straddle both worlds stood him in better stead. With his impeccable Russian, Ansky could unmask the hatred and stupidity emanating from within the ranks of his fellow countrymen, especially the intellectuals. With his Red Cross insignia, supplied by the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos, he could move freely through the military and medical establishment. With his firsthand knowledge of Jewish life and lore, he could penetrate the inner reaches of the Jewish psyche and bring direct aid to the most isolated of Jewish settlements. With his eye for symbolic detail, he could later recast this experience into a lasting memorial.
From then on, events moved rapidly. On the political front, the February Revolution brought a provisional government into power, with Ansky’s Socialist-Revolutionaries playing a vital (though not always salutary) role. On the cultural front, Ansky appeared as the Nationalities representative on the presidium of the First All-Russian Theater Conference and read a lecture on biblical Purim plays; he gave readings of The Dybbuk in Yiddish and in Russian; saw the appearance of five volumes of his Collected Works in Russian; visited with Chagall in Chortkov, and shuttled between Petrograd and Moscow.
In the fateful January of 1918, Ansky was back in Petrograd. The Socialist-Revolutionaries had just won the first (and last) free election in Russia’s history. When the Bolsheviks launched a terror campaign against the Constituent Assembly, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks called a huge counterdemonstration at the head of which walked the veterans of earlier revolutionary struggles, Ansky among them. As before on Bloody Sunday, Russian troops opened fire on the unarmed demonstrators; only this time the soldiers wore Bolshevik colors. That night (January 5), the Bolsheviks disrupted the assembly’s meeting at the Taurida Palace. “All is lost!” cried Ansky over the telephone in the early hours of the evening to Roza Monoszon.
But perhaps not all was lost, for two months earlier he had sent greetings to the Central Zionist Bureau in Petrograd in honor of the Balfour Declaration. Ansky was not hedging his bets. He was gathering the sparks of holiness—as Khonon the young kabbalist in The Dybbuk might have put it—so as to hasten the redemption of the Jews.
Ansky’s last two years of life—spent in exile, first in Vilna, then in Warsaw—served, if anything, to intensify his Utopian dreams. With Vilna changing hands and pitched battles and pogroms raging in the background, Ansky’s voice was heard above the fray as a rallying cry of hope and solidarity. He helped establish the Vilna Union of Writers and Journalists, arguing almost alone for the inclusion of Jewish writers in non-Jewish languages. As the Bolsheviks advanced on the city, the young Jewish communist leader Shimelevitsh was killed in a riot—and Ansky delivered the eulogy. Ansky saw him as an exemplar of Jewish idealism, just as he had earlier applauded Vladimir Jabotinsky’s efforts to found the Jewish Legion. During the various military occupations of Vilna, it was Ansky who interceded to save Jews (among them, the noted Yiddish critic Shmuel Niger) from execution. In the breathing space between one occupation and the next, he chain-smoked; organized the Vilna Historic-Ethnographic Society (later named after him); delivered lectures in defense of the traditional heder; and announced the establishment of a new Jewish political party that combined a socialist, Zionist, Yiddishist, and Hebraist platform. The crux of his Utopia lay in achieving a “national-personal autonomy.”
But Vilna was no safe haven for aging dreamers. No sooner did the Polish Legion take the city from the Bolsheviks, in April 1919, than it poured out its wrath on the Jews. The final blow for Ansky was the murder, among fifty-five others, of playwright A. Vayter and the desecration of his body. Depressed by such a surfeit of Jewish martyrdom, the fifty-six-year-old Ansky moved to Warsaw, where he died, on November 8, 1920, from a complication of pneumonia.
Had the Socialists-Revolutionaries stood their ground against the Bolsheviks, Semyon Akimovich might have been buried in Petrograd, alongside the martyrs and makers of the Russian Revolution. His universalist dream might thus have been vindicated. Instead, Solomon Rappoport-Ansky died surrounded by the same Lithuanian Jews among whom he had been born and raised. The Vilna Troupe honored his memory by finally staging The Dybbuk—to immediate and lasting acclaim—and the Vilna Jewish intelligentsia pooled its meager resources to rush an Ansky memorial volume into print. Shloyme-Zanvl ben Aaron Hacohen Rappoport was buried in the Warsaw Jewish cemetery, alongside two other architects of the Yiddish cultural renaissance. An impressive tombstone, unveiled in 1925, marked the gravesite of S. Ansky, I. L. Peretz, and Jacob Dinezon. Remarkably, it still stands there today.
This anthology, then, the first of its kind, tells the story of Ansky’s homecoming. Since it was his search for the lost folk—rather than for lost faith—that brought the prodigal son home, it is altogether fitting to begin with the most dramatic episode of his adult life: the discovery of folklore as the wellspring of Jewish cultural renewal. It was Ansky’s singular achievement to become both prophet and chief practitioner of Jewish ethnography in Eastern Europe.
The term “ethnopoetry,” which Ansky introduced into the field of folklore studies, marks a turning point in Jewish literary culture.5 Whereas the first generation of Enlighteners, fired by enthusiasm for scientific rationalism, viewed folklore as the seat of ossified traditions, Ansky argued that it was the repository of progressive values: It is through folklore that biblical monotheism reached its most refined level, celebrating the power of the spirit over the violence and tribalism that still tainted the biblical narrative. Ansky distinguished between the principle of struggle characteristic of all folk creation and the principle of spiritual struggle characteristic of Jewish folk creation. His interpretation of the Jewish folk spirit proved highly influential in the political thinking of the Jewish Labor Bund and in shaping the liberal sensibility of Yiddish writers and artists.
Despite its obvious appeal to estranged Jews of every stripe, this grand theory was based, for want of any other sources, on a single collection of Yiddish folk songs (published in 1901) and another of Yiddish proverbs (1908). Ansky had to draw the remainder of his data from Yiddish and hasidic storybooks that were hardly an accurate reflection of what the “real” folk actually believed. This didn’t stop him from trying his hand at writing “stories in the folk vein,” but the result was a poor and highly tendentious imitation of Peretz. Fortunately, the Old Narodnik could not be satisfied studying a folk culture secondhand, or even studying it “at a distance.” “No,” Ansky wrote emphatically to Zhitlowsky in America, “Yiddish tales, legends and the like must be collected among old folks who carry the past with them in unadulterated form.” Only in the thick of Jewish life, the scene of his own rebellion, could the lost treasures be found.
Thus, the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, bearing the name of Baron Naftali Horace Giinzburg, was launched on July 1, 1912. It was Ansky’s brainchild. Though still short the twenty-three thousand rubles he needed to see the project through to the end, Ansky had already assembled a stellar group of scholars and energetic young field-workers. By the end of the first year in the field, the expedition had grown in Ansky’s eyes into “a survey of Jewish life on a national scale, if not larger.” Before it was cut short by the outbreak of the war, here is what the expedition had amassed:
2,000 photographs
1,800 folktales and legends
1,500 folk songs and mysteries (i.e., biblical Purim plays)
500 cylinders of Jewish folk music
1,000 melodies to songs and niggunim without words countless proverbs and folk beliefs
100 historical documents
500 manuscripts
700 sacred objects acquired for the sum of six thousand rubles
Ansky experienced a form of religious exaltation at unearthing these unimagined treasures. He gave poignant expression to his sense of homecoming and revelation in the preface to The Jewish Ethnographic Program (1914). “The Oral Tradition,” he wrote, “consisting of all manner of folklore—stories, legends, parables, songs, witticisms, melodies, customs and beliefs—is, like the Bible, the product of the Jewish spirit; it reflects the same beauty and purity of the Jewish soul, the same modesty and nobility of the Jewish heart, the same loftiness and depth of Jewish thought.” What he actually found, then, not only confirmed the folk in its spiritual grandeur but also raised its folklore to the status of a new Torah. And when he appealed to the conscience of his fellow intellectuals to preserve Jewish folklore in the name of the people’s suffering, he was following in the footsteps of his beloved teacher Peter Lavrov:
Jewish life has undergone an enormous upheaval during the last fifty to sixty years and the losses in our folk creations are among the most unfortunate victims of this change. With every old man who dies, with every fire that breaks out, with every exile we endure, we lose a piece of our past. The finest examples of our traditional lives, our customs and beliefs, are disappearing; the old poetic legends and the songs and melodies will soon be forgotten; the ancient, beautiful synagogues are falling to ruin or are laid waste by fire and there the most precious religious ornaments are either lost or sold, often to non-Jews; the gravestones of our great and pious ancestors have sunk into the ground, their inscriptions all but rubbed out. In short, our past, sanctified by the blood and tears of so many innocent martyrs, is vanishing and will soon be forgotten.6
For Ansky, identifying Jewish folklore as a new “Oral Tradition” was no mere conceit. Here, at last, was the bridge between present and past, the intellectual and the folk, this world and the next.
The volume itself—the only published fruit of his labors—was a detailed questionnaire (2,657 questions in all) posed to informants on the Jewish life cycle. Here, for example, are some of the questions pertaining to death and dying:
Is there a belief among you that if a dying man’s bed contains iron his death throes will thereby be prolonged?
Is there a belief among you that when the soul departs it is forbidden to stand opposite the dying man’s bed, because that is when the Angel of Death appears wielding a sword?
Why [upon a person’s death] must one spill out all the water from his house and all the surrounding houses?
Do you know any stories about a corpse that was left unattended and disappeared?
How does one ask forgiveness of the dead? Who is the first to ask forgiveness? What is one accustomed to say? Does one ask forgiveness of a dead child? Do strangers also come forward to ask forgiveness?
Is it your custom to carry the coffin slowly past the synagogue but quickly past the church?
Is it your custom for the beadle of the Burial Society to precede the coffin and cry out: “Charity saves from death”?
Is there a belief among you that when the last shovel hits the earth the dead man forgets everything?
Do you believe that when you meet a dead man you should strike him a blow in an offhand manner in order to make him disappear?
Do you know any stories about a dead person being brought before a rabbinical court?7
The Oral Tradition, then, was not a system of beliefs but a cluttered account of everyday life—and death. As such, this treasure trove of folk life and lore could draw other nations closer to the Jews. In particular, Ansky argued at a board meeting of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition on November 24, 1913, hasidic tales and legends were the best possible means of acquainting non-Jews with the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of Jewish culture.8
He knew whereof he spoke, for questionnaire in hand, Ansky had already conceived The Dybbuk. The romantic plot, the mystical setting and the historical landscape were all born en route from one godforsaken shtetl to another. He claims to have met the prototypes of the star-crossed lovers Khonon and Leah at a Friday night meal in the home of a wealthy Hasid. The study house in Gorlice provided the setting for the opening act. The holy tombstones from the time of the Chmielnicki massacres in the mid-seventeenth century pointed out to him by numerous shtetl informants suggested an historical analogue to the young couple cut down in the prime of life. And the folktales about dybbuks that he collected in the field offered a “realistic” way of bringing all the strands of the story together. Through a stunning orchestration of Jewish folk motifs and mystical lore, Ansky rescued for a secular (and largely non-Jewish) audience a most compelling version of a life that was about to vanish.
No Jewish drama was ever more popular—or controversial. The Yiddish production put the Vilna Troupe on the map and formed the basis of the 1937 Yiddish film classic, filmed on location in Poland. Habimah, the Hebrew repertory company founded in Moscow, made theater history with its expressionist decor and grotesque staging, which it has since preserved as a living memorial. The unprecedented furor over a mere “folk play” soon had professional critics in Poland and Palestine up in arms. “Pseudo-art!” screamed the title of M. Vanvild’s book-length diatribe against the Yiddish production, its philistine audience, and its deluded admirers.9 In Tel Aviv the recently imported Hebrew production was put on trial in 1926 and “convicted” of being a pastiche of “legendary, realistic and symbolist” elements. But even this elite group of Zionist critics, writers and public figures had to acknowledge that the play’s folk elements struck a responsive chord in the audience. Would that “the new life in Erets Israel and our cultural reawakening” could do the same!10 Ansky’s appeal was just the opposite: he had taken the “old life” and torn down all the boundaries—between Torah and taboo, the rebbe and the rebel, mysticism and modernity—only to put them back together again.
Billed as a “dramatic legend,” The Dybbuk is a highly stylized work. Ansky never conceived of it as folklore-in-the-raw. The characters speak a cadenced, learned (that is to say, super-Hebraicized) Yiddish.11 He deliberately situates his Hasidim not out-of-doors, as Peretz had done, but inside an “ancient wooden synagogue, its walls blackened with age.” The authentic Habad melodies that ethnomusicologist Joel Engel had collected are as much a part of the decor as the mystical opening song, the “old embroidered ark hangings,” and the “thick memorial candle.” Nothing as redolent of study house folklore and hasidic fantasy had ever been assembled on a Yiddish stage before.
Ansky introduced a rich layering of literary and folkloristic motifs that give the play an authentic, “mystical” feel even as it turns traditional narratives to secular, dramatic, ends. All the play’s major dichotomies—between rich and poor, the sacred and profane, life and death—are introduced by the synagogue regulars known as batlonim (idlers) as they casually swap stories about the competing hasidic dynasties. Holding the disparate strands together is the mysterious Messenger, who actually owes his existence to a last-minute suggestion by director Stanislavsky.12 Functioning as a kind of Greek chorus, the Messenger alone perceives the hidden links between opposing worlds—how violating the balance between rich and poor would affect the balance between the sacred and profane, and so on. These multiple and intersecting motifs confounded Ansky’s critics but have delighted his audiences.
The play’s central motif, of course, is that of the dybbuk itself. A dybbuk, in Jewish lore, is an evil spirit or the restless soul of a dead person that resides in the body of a living human being. It can usually be expelled by magical means. Now in his reading of Yiddish storybooks, Ansky may well have come across the Tale of an Exorcism in Koretz (Prague, ca. 1665) or may have heard a comparable tale recounted to him in his travels. He might then have been struck by how active and sympathetic a character the possessed heroine of the story was, and how the male spirit, by contrast, was portrayed as a vulgarian trickster, while the exorcist himself, one Rabbi Borukh Kat, did not perform any magic at all.13 Yiddish tales of exorcism, he might have noticed, now tended to be more true to life and were attached to real people and places. In a skeptical age like that of his own, moreover, the folk itself had begun to cast doubt on the reality of dybbuks and on the wonder worker’s ability to work any wonders.14 But whether in storybooks or in the field, whether an object of faith or subject to doubt, there was never a dybbuk who was in love with the woman he possessed. The victim was always chosen at random—by virtue of her maidenhood or, alternatively, because of her susceptibility to sin. No story before Ansky’s had ever told of a dybbuk who was a lover in disguise.
By the time The Dybbuk unfolds, roughly in the 1860s, only someone of the hasidic persuasion could still exorcise demons, for Hasidism had given Jewish mysticism a new lease on life in Eastern Europe.15 And of all the figures of early Hasidism, none was more attractive to Ansky, concerned with salvaging the beauty and mystery of Jewish folk religion, than Nahman of Bratslav (1772–1810), a storyteller of great renown. And so, to set the stage for the zaddik’s entrance at the beginning of act III, Ansky has the Messenger deliver a soliloquy on the longing of the world’s heart for the mountain spring. Identified as a “mystic teaching of Reb Nahman of Bratslav,” the speech is an almost verbatim quote from the “Tale of the Seven Beggars” (1810). Ansky enlists “the just man” of the parable (who was one of many cloaks for Reb Nahman himself) to introduce the Rebbe of Miropolye, the play’s great mediator between this world and the next. But whereas in its original context, the parable expressed Reb Nahman’s paradoxical faith in an absent God, the parable as retold by the Messenger alludes to the sexual longing between the living and the dead.
Dybbuks and hasidic parables were not all that Ansky turned to very earthly purposes. Upon entering, the zaddik Reb Azrielke begins to expound on the theme of ascending levels of holiness based on the Mishnah (Kelim 1:6–9). The thrust of the Mishnah is to establish the absolute otherness of the high priest entering the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur day—something so awesome that only God alone can witness it. Reb Azrielke, however, proceeds to allegorize each detail and thereby to subvert its original intent: “Every piece of ground on which a person stands when he raises his eyes to Heaven is a Holy of Holies; everyone created in the image of God is a high priest; every day in a person’s life is Yom Kippur; and every word which a person speaks from his heart is God’s name.”
The hasidic masters were well known for taking esoteric rabbinic and kabbalistic doctrines and cutting them down to psychological size. That too was part of their appeal for Ansky the dramatist and modern storyteller. But would a zaddik whose flock considered him a combination high priest and prophet himself espouse the supreme holiness of each individual and of every human utterance? Only if the rebbe, in turn, were portrayed as a man of very human dimensions, plagued by doubts about his own intercessionary powers. This trend to radically democratize the hasidic movement owes much more to I. L. Peretz than to any of the informants whom Ansky interviewed on his ethnographic travels.
Peretz had led the way in the secular appropriation of Hasidism and in using a religious setting to explore issues of sin and unrequited sexuality (notably in his play Chained to the Synagogue Vestibule, which Ansky had translated into Russian in 1909). Ansky, the idealist, replaced Peretz’s tragic plot with a pair of star-crossed lovers who rebel against bourgeois marriage and ultimately prevail. Ansky’s original twist on this well-worn formula, as critic Gershon Shaked has shown, is to introduce a prior set of marital vows made not between the lovers but prenatally, as it were, by their respective fathers.16 Ansky conjures up the dense world of Jewish folk belief to convince his audience that irrational forces are more logical than rational ones; that since the two lovers cannot live without each other, Khonon has to break the metaphysical bonds and enter Leah’s body at the canopy. Any attempt to circumvent this primal bond—however legally justified—is bound to fail. No wonder that the combined efforts of the charismatic leader Reb Azrielke (in act III) and the rabbinical judge Rabbi Shimshon (in act IV) cannot set things right again. And no wonder that flesh-and-blood Hasidim angrily boycotted the performances of Ansky’s Dybbuk in Poland. The manifold religious elements in the play had come to serve antireligious ends.
The power of The Dybbuk, however, cannot be explained solely in terms of its use and abuse of prior literary and folkloristic sources. Conceived before the war and completed after the Bolshevik seizure of power, the play is also an outgrowth of that period of monstrous upheaval, when Ansky saw the Jewish spirit struggling to maintain itself against forces of overpowering destruction. Even the tragedy of his own childless marriage found symbolic expression in the last, moving, moments of the play. Then as now, audiences who knew no Yiddish and had never set eyes on a Hasid could come away inspired by the story of Khonon and Leah. Alone and in the face of all odds, these young rebels had restored the moral and metaphysical order by sacrificing their own earthly pleasures and desires.
The Dybbuk