Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky

by Gabriella Safran

The man who would become S. An-sky―ethnographer, war correspondent, author of the best-known Yiddish play, The Dybbuk ―was born Shloyme-Zanvl Rapoport in 1863, in Russia’s Pale of Settlement. His journey from the streets of Vitebsk to the center of modern Yiddish and Hebrew theater, by way of St. Petersburg, Paris, and war-torn Austria-Hungry, was both extraordinary and in some ways Marc Chagall, another child of Vitebsk, would make a similar transit a generation later. Like Chagall, An-sky was loyal to multiple, conflicting Jewish, Russian, and European identities. And like Chagall, An-sky made his physical and cultural transience manifest as he drew on Jewish folk culture to create art that defied nationality.

Leaving Vitebsk at seventeen, An-sky forged a number of apparently contradictory paths. A witness to peasant poverty, pogroms, and war, he tried to rescue the vestiges of disappearing communities even while fighting for reform. A loner addicted to reinventing himself―at times a Russian laborer, a radical orator, a Jewish activist, an ethnographer of Hasidism, a wartime relief worker―An-sky saw himself as a savior of the people’s culture and its artifacts. What united the disparate strands of his life was his eagerness to speak to and for as many people as possible, regardless of their language or national origin.

In this first full-length biography in English, Gabriella Safran, using Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and French sources, recreates this neglected protean figure who, with his passions, struggles, and art, anticipated the complicated identities of the European Jews who would follow him.

392 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2010

Reviews

[Jay Resnick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Safran's fascinating biography is a product of her incredible research into Ansky material in Russian and Yiddish, much of which became available in the 1990's after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

[K C · Rating 2 out of 5]

Have no idea how this book got on my list to read, considering it is a literary biography of an author I'd never heard of and needless to say, works I've never read. However since An-sky lived and worked in pre-revolutionary Russia, crossing paths and ideologies with Russian Populists, socialist revolutionaries, Jewish nationalists, and Zionists, the book had potential. Unfortunately the book is scholarly and dry, thoroughly researched, but plodding to read.

[Alex Kudera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good literary biography that sheds light on the late Tsarist to early Bolshevik period in Russia/USSR. Particularly relevant for those interested in Pale of Settlement, St. Petersburg residencey papers, etc.