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

By Gabriella Safran
Harvard, 392 pages

Those nostalgic for Yiddish culture often claim to be searching for a more “authentic” form of Jewish life. Yiddish theater, where actors reawaken words spoken generations ago, might appear to be the best place to find that authenticity. The most famous Yiddish play is unquestionably S. An-sky’s The Dybbuk, subtitled Between Two Worlds. The iconic drama of a young woman promised before birth to a man who dies and then possesses her adult body, it has been performed around the world as an authentic enactment of Yiddish-speaking culture. As well it should be: its author devoted years to ethnographic expeditions into the shtetls of Eastern Europe, where he collected thousands of folktales that he wove into a play. He then wrote this play in the language he knew best: Russian. Like most modern Jews, An-sky lived his life between two worlds.

Gabriella Safran’s Wandering Soul, the first full-length English biography of An-sky, is an exhaustively researched and fascinating book that will challenge readers’ preconceptions of what it once meant to be Jewish in Europe. An-sky was an immensely influential public figure who played a pivotal role in the Eastern European Jewish world, and his life would make a terrific movie. With wars, romances, bohemian set pieces, courtroom dramas, political intrigues, and special effects ranging from assassinations to burning cities, an An-sky biopic would be a box-office smash. But the less flashy, more disorienting story in this book is composed of the painful insights relating to An-sky’s ideological commitments, some of which would prove fatal to the Jewish culture he devoted himself to preserving.

Shloyme-Zaynvl Rappoport (1863-1920; the pseudonym An-sky was a deliberately arbitrary choice) was born and raised in Vitebsk, a Russian city immortalized in the paintings of another of its native sons, Marc ­Chagall. Abandoned early by his father and raised in poverty by his tavern-keeping mother, he first gained access to the intelligentsia through his schoolmate Chaim Zhitlowsky, a rich boy who later became a celebrated Yiddish public intellectual in New York. Zhitlowsky introduced Rappoport to Jewish enlightenment thinkers and to various strains of Marxist philosophy, much of which Rappoport attempted to impart to the Jewish students in smaller towns where he worked as a subversive tutor in his teens. Caught corrupting the youth, Rappoport moved to Ukraine to work in a salt mine and foment revolution. There he lived the lauded life of a laborer by day and spread Marxism among the peasantry by night. He soon began publishing fiction in Russian and was welcomed into revolutionary circles. A lifelong activist in the Socialist Revolutionary faction (a group that advocated terrorism for many years), he had even served as a representative in the short-lived Russian Constituent Assembly by 1909. But his lasting achievements came from his realization that his devotion to “the people” could include his own.

On the lam from the tsarist police, An-sky spent years in France, a period during which he briefly worked at the 1900 World’s Fair. At a fair spinoff, he encountered Inuit performing for audiences in an “Eskimo village” built by a French entrepreneur. Unaccustomed to European germs, two Inuit had already died. Unlike many revolutionaries who saw only the positives of observing “primitive cultures,” An-sky, in Safran’s telling, recognized the moral problem with ethnography, noting that the Inuit’s exhibit conditions were “offensively cruel.” But An-sky also recognized ethnography’s power to inspire artists and intellectuals to new forms of expression. When he returned to Russia after the 1905 revolution, he dedicated himself to collecting Jewish folklore, believing that this authentic material from “the masses” would be the strongest foundation for a new secular Jewish culture.

By 1910 he had secured funding for an ambitious ethnographic expedition to backwater shtetls, and in 1912 he hit the road, traveling with a photographer, a musicologist, and a phonograph that fascinated rural Jews. The team gathered hundreds of artifacts, including folk songs, photos, ritual objects, spells, melodies, and especially “true” stories, many of which were repeated as local fact in town after town—like the story of children who, while digging in dirt, uncovered an entire buried synagogue, or of a young couple murdered by Cossacks under their wedding canopy. An-sky ultimately created a Jewish ethnographic museum in St. Petersburg, and spent years curating written materials while also drawing on them for his fiction. The Dybbuk, which he first drafted in 1915, is a theatrical version of this museum, its dialogue and plot a composite of collected legends.

But An-sky’s devotion to Jewish life took a consequential turn during the First World War, when his planned expedition became a humanitarian mission into a war zone. Retreating Russian soldiers were raping, pillaging, torturing, and murdering tens of thousands of Jews in their path, using synagogues as latrines, and burning entire towns to the ground. An-sky’s museum now included such artifacts as boots made from Torah scrolls. As an aid worker disguised in a Russian army uniform, he repeatedly risked his own life to rescue pogrom victims. The Destruction of Galicia, An-sky’s multivolume memoir of the annihilation of shtetl life and the popular apocalyptic legends that accompanied it, occupied him until his death.

It is this dark undertaking that makes An-sky’s biography so compelling and so unbearable. Throughout these pages, we see a man whose faith in “the masses” blinds him to the reality of Europe’s ultimate rejection of the Jews and who maintains his faith by embracing exceptions as though they were the rule. Arriving in St. Petersburg in 1892, for example, An-sky went to visit the Russian writer Gleb Uspensky, who agreed to serve as his mentor in his fledging literary career. After spending the evening with Uspensky, An-sky planned to wander the streets until dawn—because, as a Jew, he could not legally spend the night in the city without a special permit. When the insomniac Uspensky bumped into him at 3 a.m., the Russian writer offered An-sky his own bed; when An-sky woke the following day, he found Uspensky weeping at the injustice. As Safran reports, “For many years after 1892, An-sky and his friends retold the story of Uspensky’s tears, for this anecdote made the young Jew’s acceptance by the Petersburg intelligentsia a matter of public record.” Of course, the real public record wasn’t the sympathy of an exceptionally emotional writer (whose emotions were, in fact, so exceptional that he soon landed in an insane asylum), but rather Russia’s discriminatory laws that made it impossible for a Jew even to rent a room in the city. In Paris, An-sky again embraced anomalies as a reporter covering the Dreyfus affair for Russian émigré journals. Another Jewish reporter in Paris, Theodor Herzl, felt that the city’s anti-Semitic mobs revealed Europe’s true nature and responded by founding the Zionist movement. But An-sky reached the opposite conclusion, effusively admiring Emile Zola’s defense of Dreyfus as though it were an emblem rather than an anomaly of European life. An-sky’s response to the 1913 Russian trial of Mendel Beilis on a medieval blood-libel charge was to celebrate the defense lawyers as “true knights of justice,” despite their failures. Safran wisely points out that An-Sky’s faith in folklore ought to have died right there: what was the blood libel, after all, but folklore from “the masses”?

The book becomes painful to read when An-sky confronts the horror of Russian pogroms. His belief in the Russian peasantry was almost obsessive; he had devoted years of his life to living among Russian laborers, and he was convinced that peasants were merely manipulated into anti-Semitism by the tsarist regime. After the 1905-1906 pogroms, which left hundreds dead and thousands homeless, he published long articles insisting on the peasants’ and revolutionaries’ righteousness, even though his own faction had failed to defend the Jews. When confronted with the pogroms of the First World War, he blamed Russian soldiers’ savagery entirely on wartime’s rumor mill. By 1919, when An-sky’s own revolutionary allies were leading the vaunted masses into murdering 250,000 Jews in an unambiguous attempt at genocide, An-sky still, according to Safran, “retained his conviction that Russian anti-Semitism was not inevitable, [and] that Jews could build a future in Russia.”

In exploring An-sky’s private torment, Safran doesn’t flinch. An enchanting storyteller and painstakingly objective historian, she never judges her subject. Instead she interprets the deep division in An-sky’s soul as revelatory of his age: “[H]is inconsistency opens a window onto the intellectual life of an era when people’s choices were less consistent than we customarily imagine.” Noting that An-sky sometimes “spoke of a terrifying ‘emptiness’ at the center of his own identity,” Safran intriguingly presents An-sky as a kind of dybbuk, one who occupied other people’s identities and fully inhabited their lives and hopes, and whose “ability to negate his own identity made him better able to help those in need.”

The Hebrew poet H. N. Bialik was less kind. When An-sky asked Bialik to translate The Dybbuk into Hebrew, Bialik recognized An-sky’s self-negation and told him so: “Your imagination is like a product of this world of oblivion, An-sky! You worked for the goyim your whole life, and at the end of your life, when you were half dead, you were sentenced to wander among the garbage dumps and gather folklore. The Dybbuk came out of what you gathered.” But Bialik, who had himself devoted years to gathering Jewish legends, ultimately understood the possibilities that thrive in contradictions. His translation of The Dybbuk became the cornerstone of modern Hebrew drama. While An-sky’s political torments shaped his life, today he is best known for his successful theatrical revival of the dead.

After reading this magisterial biography, one cannot help but imagine the possibilities if someone today were to follow An-sky’s lead. What new visions might arise if someone would once again set out on an expedition to Jewish communities to collect contemporary Jewish folklore—not the “high culture” of books and films, but all the stories, jokes, routines, Internet rumors, music, parodies, and other urban legends that reflect our current experiences and challenges? As An-sky knew, there is no authenticity beyond the daily details of our contradictory lives. All of us are condemned to live without hindsight, forever balanced between two worlds.

+ A A -
You may also like
Share via
Copy link