The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century 9781503620247

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The Worlds of S. An-sky

STANFORD STuDIES IN JEWISH HisTORY AND CuLTURE EDITED BY

Aron Rodrigue and Steven J Zipperstein

'>if C) 1@ e>'! ' (I'" -J•!. e)

S. An-sky with his signature in Yiddish: "Shloyme Rappoport (Sh. An-ski)." SOURCE: Sh. An-ski, Gezamelte shriftn, IS vols. (Vilna, 1920 -25), 1: frontispiece.

The Worlds of S. An-slr a time I also had to work in the mines. Thus I didn't just learn

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Safran about the miners' work and lite, but I deeply felt the whole punishing weight of that life and that work, all the scandalous, burning injustices that suffuse the bosses' attitudes to the miners. I wrote an article, "The Miners' Life," and I sent it with a sketch, "To the Urals" (about the migration movement in the Slavianoserbsk district) to Northern Herald. In a few days they wrote back that my manuscripts would be returned. For many reasons, my life has developed in such a way that if writing were removed from it, such an emptiness would appear that it would simply horrify me. But the editor's last response has powerfully shaken my faith that I am able to serve the people with my pen. I beg you, tell me, what should I do with my life? Point me toward a field where I can use it to bring some use to the people. From my novella ( Voskhod, '84, Nos. 9, ro, n, 12) and the manuscripts at the Severnyi vestnik offices, you can judge whether I can serve the people with my pen or if I must seek another field to serve it.... Do not refuse to advise me. When I was confident in myself! did not ask for advice, but now my life has been shrouded in an oppressive, heavy darkness from which I cannot escape. I tecl that I will fall without moral support, without advice from one of those on whose works I myself developed. 5 Rappoport's letter paints a touching picture of a young man who wants only one thing: to become a realist writer like the writers he admired most, whose fiction and nonfiction could draw the readers' attention to poverty and injustice and thereby spur them to work for change. Although he seems to be writing at a particularly gloomy moment, and he was clearly presenting himself in the light he imagined would be most favorable in the eyes of Mikhailovsky, what we know of his life up to the age of 24 conforms with the letter. He came from a poor Jewish family; his father had apparently abandoned his mother, who ran a tavern to support him and his two sisters. Mter a minimal traditional Jewish education, Rappoport learned to read Russian, and he and his friends read and debated Russian books and the radical political interpretations of these books that they found in the writings of critics such as Dmitry Pisarev, Nikolai Dobroliubov, and Mikhailovsky himself. Rappoport left home in his late teens to work as a tutor in various Belorussian shtetls, where he continued his own self-education in

An-sky in 1892 Russian and tried to draw other young Jews to his radical cause. In 1884, after a visit to Moscow and a brief stay in Tula, a city south of

Moscow, he moved farther south to Ukraine, where, as he told Mikhailovsky, he worked as a tutor and a miner and wrote copiously, but could not get anything published. 6 Mikhailovsky never answered the letter. After waiting almost six months, Rappoport decided to approach a different one of his idols and wrote in April 1888 to Gleb Uspensky, a narodnik writer known tor his uncompromisingly dark pictures of peasant and provincial life. This time he took a different tack, telling Uspensky that he had given up on ever publishing his pieces on the miners himself but could not stand the idea that the horrors he had seen would never be made public: "I saw that terrible life of several thousand people from so close that I am tortured by the thought that no one knows about it .... If that manuscript stays with me, it will tear me up and torment me." 7 Therefore, he offered to give the manuscript to U spensky and asked him to publicize the material described there however he could. Uspensky, unlike Mikhailovsky, responded sympathetically to the unknown young writer and was willing to look at his manuscripts. Rappoport sent two substantial articles, on the life of miners and on the migration of peasants from Ekaterinoslav province to the Urals, and a sketch about events in a Jewish tavern. Uspensky read two of the pieces immediately and wrote back encouragingly: "I found them positively magnificent, intelligent, sensible, and fair. Just in a few places the language is not right." Uspensky urged him to work on the problem of conveying the Ukrainian speech of his characters in literary Russian. His recommendations show that he agreed that Rappoport's sketches could indeed educate readers about the poor conditions in the countryside. The sketch on the tavern needed, he said, more background: "You must expand it, say a few words about the place and the working population of the city and about how, in what way, and why such inveterate drunkards appear." Uspensky promised to ask the editors of Russkaia mysF if they would be interested in the piece on migrants. 8 Rappoport, of course, was thrilled, and wrote to Zhitlowsky immediately with a full report of Uspensky's reactions. "What can you say about this, my dear brother-this is a turning point in my life!" 9

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Safran Actually, it was a slow turning point. In the late 188os, Uspensky was already experiencing symptoms of the mental illness (perhaps manic depression, perhaps schizophrenia) for which he would be institutionalized a few years later. 10 He would suddenly feel compelled to leave St. Petersburg and travel to other cities, only to return home immediately, and he periodically fell into periods of depression when he could accomplish little. 11 He wrote to Rappoport in December 1889 that he had been in the care of a psychiatrist, emphasizing that the seriousness of his condition kept him from devoting much attention to getting Rappoport's manuscripts published.l 2 He did include some miners' songs that Rappoport had sent him in an article of his own in 1889, and in early 1890 the piece on migrants finally came out as "To New Lands," under the pseudonym "S. Vid'bin," in what Uspensky called a "modest little journal," Trud (Labor). 13 (Rappoport probably meant the pseudonym to refer to the Vit'ba [or Vid'ba] river in his home town ofVitebsk; he had already experimented with other pseudonyms based on "Vitebsk." Uspensky himself, though, interpreted the pseudonym as coming from the verb videty [to see], emphasizing Rappoport's legitimacy as an eyewitness to the phenomena he described.) 14 Rappoport knew that, if he wanted to make a career tor himself as a writer, he would need to leave the south and travel to St. Petersburg, the center of the empire's intellectual and publishing activity. In the fall of 1886, he was already asking Zhitlowsky to find out for him "what documents and papers I would need to have the right to live in Petersburg." 15 As a Jew, he was in principle confined to the Pale of Settlement, the 15 western provinces of the Russian empire that were the historic center of the Jewish population; other places were open only to Jewish soldiers and retired soldiers, graduates of institutions of higher education, high-guild merchants, and certain craftsmen.l 6 Rappoport belonged to none of these groups, but he continued to think about moving to the capital. In August 1891, he was "still dreaming of going to Petersburg" and hopeful that the trip would work outP He never got the correct papers, and finally he stopped waiting for them. In January 1892, he set out with all his manuscripts for St. Petersburg. 18 This move seems to account for the dramatic change in Rappoport's publishing fortunes. In January and February 1892, he published "A

An-sky in 1892 Sketch of the Coal Industry in the South ofRussia" in Russkoe bogatstvo, and other articles of his would appear in more than half the issues of the year. 19 Before this could happen, though, he needed to resolve one technicality: his nom de plume. Neither "Pseudonym," under which he had published "History of a Family" in r884, nor "S. Vid'bin," which he had used in Trud in 1890, seemed to satisfY him. Viktor Chernov, a radical thinker who became close to him around 1900, retells a conversation in which Rappoport explains how he began to sign his works "An-sky": "You know what was the hardest thing at the beginning of my work as a writer?" [he] said to me. "You'll never guess-it was how to sign what I wrote. I felt somehow ashamed to use my own name. Take Turgenev, or Pisemsky, or Ostrovsky-that gives you an idea right away what kind of intellectual food you're being offered. It's the literary equivalent of a brand name. But how could I come out with some kind of 'Solomon Rappoport,' which doesn't mean a thing to anybody? I was honestly relieved when they told me I could use a pseudonym; I took it literally and signed my virgin work-a story about a Jewish family-simply 'Pseudonym' and thought that I'd done the right thing .... Later I laughed at myself. When I understood my mistake, then for a long time the question of a signature was something like Gogol's 'enchanted place' for me .... " "But then you came up with that name, a rather odd one by the way: 'S. A. An-sky'?" "I came up with it? Not me. It was Gleb Ivanovich [Uspensky] who made me come up with a pseudonym-not a common noun but some kind of proper name. And you know, I sat down a fevv times and tried, but I couldn't find anything, everything seemed stupid and awkward. Just think about it: Uspensky himself signed his work 'G. U.' for a long time, or 'G. Ivanov.' Or Vasily Pavlovich Vorontsov: for his whole literary life he was the simplest possible thing, 'V V' And Nikolai Frantsevich Daniel'son? Karl Marx's friend and correspondent? Just 'Nikolai -on.' And if you want, Dobroliubov did better than anyone else: what could be simpler and more modest than his signature, '-bov'?" "So? How did you resolve this 'riddle of the Sphinx'?" "It wasn't I-Gleb Ivanovich himself saved me. He kept at me, then finally took the pen himself. He took my initials from the

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Safran nickname of my mining days: 'S. A.' [Semyon Ak:imovich, a Russification ofShloyme-Zanvl Aronovich]. Then at random he wrote 'An ... ,' thought for a moment, put down a hyphen, and added the ending 'sky.' 'Do you want this one?' he asked. 'How would this be?' I was delighted-I took a tremendous liking to it, undoubtedly just because it had been written by his hand and in his handwriting. So ever since then I have been S. A. An-sky." 20 Indeed, Rappoport went on to sign "S. A. An-sky" (or "S. An-sky") not only to most of his published articles and stories but to many of his letters as well, and it ultimately appeared alongside his birth name in his final will and testament. 21 This anecdote suggests that the young writer, in selecting a new name, was simultaneously selecting a new lineage and a new set of antecedents. It may be that the early experience of abandonment by his biological father had contributed to his reluctance to use "Rappoport." In that case, Uspensky, in the role of a new and better father, could provide a new name-one that even rhymed with his own. This new father was part of two entire new families: Uspensky's own wife and children, and the radical St. Petersburg literati. The narrative voice in An-sky's story, as Chernov retells it, is that of a novice to the radical literary world in St. Petersburg, but one who displays his own entry qualifications and who knows that he can feel at home there. He knows of the Russian literary canon, as signaled by his recitation of the names "Turgenev, or Pisemsky, or Ostrovsky." He also knows of the radical canon and its passwords, as he demonstrates by saying that the revered critic Dobroliubov published under "-bov" and Vasily Pavlovich Vorontsov, a writer on economic issues, used "V V" He shares the ideology that lies behind the radicals' choice of names, the valuing of the "simple and modest," the "simplest possible," and the urge to escape any excessive attention. Like other radicals, he wants to be anonymous. His yearning for anonymity may well have been based on a genuine feeling of modesty. At the same time, it testifies to the centrality of the literary device of the pseudonym among the writers of the Russian empire-especially the radicals-before the 1917 Revolution. Although writers have used pseudonyms since ancient times, rarely have they done

An-sky in 1892

Figure 6. An-sky and his father. SOURCE: Anski, Gezamelte shriftn, IS vols. (Vi Ina, 1920-25 ), ro: unnumbered front matter.

so in such numbers as in tsarist Russia, where the opposition between writers and the state was taken for granted by both parties. In order to avoid the attention of the censor or evade prosecution for their opinions, writers from the eighteenth-century radical Alexander Radishchev to the noblemen involved in the December Revolution of 1825 either published their works unsigned or used pseudonyms that would allow the perspicacious reader to guess at their identity without revealing it explicitly. Some chose pseudonyms based on their initials, home town, or ancestry; others selected comically foreign-sounding names, adjectives meant to describe them (such as Gorky, "bitter," and Bedny, "poor"), or entirely mystifying expressions (the Decembrist

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r.

H. Ycnctlc~~:ttA

C nopypeta wac.,oM Stpomcm.:o

Figure 7. Gleb Uspensky in 1884, painted by N. A. Iaroshenko. SOURCE: G. I. Uspensky, Polnoesobranie sochinenii, 15 vols. (Moscow, 1954), 14: frontispiece.

G. S. Baten'kov used the mathematical symbol for the square root of minus one). 22 In the second half of the nineteenth century, almost all the contributors to radical journals such as Sovremennik (The Contemporary) and Otechestvennye zapiski (Fatherland Notes) wrote under false names. 23 These names were often selected or invented not by the author but by a friend or a publisher. 24 Thus, by giving the story of his pseudonym, An-sky testifies to his own assimilation into the subculture of radical Russian writers. Of all the available models for pseudonyms-names based on places, qualities, or riddles- the speaker in Chernov's anecdote prefers pseudonyms that reveal as little information as possible. A number ofRussian

An-sky in 1892 writers used such pseudonyms: An-sky cites the example of Dobroliubov's "-bov," but he could also have mentioned Ryleev, \vho published under "-e-," or Efros, who published under "-f-." 2 s Such pseudonyms point not toward any quality of the writer but instead toward absence, a total refusal to divulge the writer's identity. The pseudonym that U spensky devised reinforces this refusal. Although An-sky told Chernov that Uspensky chose the letters A and N "at random," it is striking that they are the first letters in "Anon." or "Anonymous" (anonim ), both used as pseudonyms for Russian writers of that period. This implication of these letters is very slightly disguised by the addition of "sky." Thus "An-sky" in this anecdote sounds like a kind of "Mr. Anonymous," whose name is absence. Since he had already used the pen name "Pseudonym," it seems logical for him to continue to hide his name completely by becoming "Anonymous-sky." The hyphen in the middle, which An -sky continued to use throughout his literary career in Russian and Yiddish (though it has often dropped out of English and Yiddish criticism) signals the artificiality of the name, its obvious pseudonymity.26 An-sky's contemporaries noticed the exceptional emptiness of his pseudonym. In 1910, when a writer for Novae vremia (New Times), an antisemitic newspaper, reported on the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of An-sky's literary activity, he mocked him for being unable, over all that time, "to find a last name" more normal-looking than "An-sky": "If this is a pseudonym, it has something missing." 27 That missing something points toward an alternative lineage suggested in Chernov's anecdote. The question of a pseudonym, it appears, made the young Rappoport think of Nikolay Gogol's "enchanted place." Gogol, a Russian writer of the r83os and 184-os, had, like An-sky, come to St. Petersburg from the south and, at the beginning of his career, experimented with an assortment of comical or misleading pseudonyms, including "Hanz Kiukhel'garten" and the mysterious "oooo." 2 K In his fiction as in his literary persona, Gogo! explored themes of disguise, misrepresentation, confusion, and mistaken identity: the heroes of the r836 play The Inspector General and the 184-2 novel Dead Souls fool everyone with their assumed identities, at least at first, but in the stories "Nevsky Prospect" ( 1835 ), "The Nose" ( r836 ),

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Safran and "The Overcoat" (1842 ), the heroes' attempts to master the shifting landscape of St. Petersburg and to produce the effects they desire end in absurdity, madness, or death. Thus, with his gesture toward Gogol, the An -sky of Chernov's anecdote undermines the tale of his own successful assimilation into St. Petersburg radical culture. He hints that his own story might have something in common with those told by Gogol and by the other Russian writers who explored the difficulties of selftransformation in the capital, the St. Petersburg script about the failure of the provincial parvenu to find a place in the city. In spite of this hint that things might not turn out entirely as planned, what we know of An-sky's activities during his first months in the capital fits into the story of successful assimilation. Under his new pseudonym, An-sky entered the St. Petersburg narodnik intelligentsia, the circle around Uspensky as well as Mikhailovsky and Sergei Krivenko, the new editors of Russkoe bogatstvo. In spite of his Jewishness, he seems to have appealed to them as a member of a group that fascinated them: the intelligentsia "from the folk," literate, semi-educated rural people who shared the principles of the urban narodniki but were also able to speak to the peasants in their own language, to live among them comfortably and be accepted by them. An-sky was only one ofUspensky's folklorecollecting correspondents, who also included several peasants with varying levels ofliterary ability. It was important to Uspensky to help these beginning writers get published, because, as he wrote in 1889, it would be wrong to ignore these ''formerly unknown voices from the folk masses." 29 An-sky, who had introduced himself to Uspensky as a laborer who had only recently begun to study Russian, would seem to qualifY as such a "previously unknown voice," and, to judge by Uspensky's interpretation of"Vid'bin" as something like an eyewitness as well as by the efforts that Uspensky and his friends put into publishing his works, they valued that aspect ofhim. 30 An-sky published a number of articles in 1892: after the sketch on the coal industry in the January and February issues of Russkoe bogatstvo, another piece, "Hangover" (Pokhmel'e), which was set in a Jewish tavern, appeared in the March issue, and four lengthy articles on peasant literacy in the July, August, September, and October issues. (They were republished two years later as a book.) A sketch about the sale of sheep,

An-sky in 1892 slated for publication at that time, was forbidden by the censors. 31 All these pieces were in the spirit of populism and Russkoe bogatstvo. The coal-industry article emphasizes that, though miners earn more money than peasants who work the land, they should be pitied because their work prevents them from settling down or feeling secure about their livelihood; when peasants go to work in the mines, An-sky insisted, they are tragically torn from their familiar surroundings, made degenerate and alcoholic by their new, unnatural working conditions. 32 The alcohol that the Jewish tavern-keeper in "Hangover" provides to the peasants who drink in her establishment leads inevitably to their moral and physical degradation, a problem she recognizes but cannot so lYe. 33 The book on peasant literacy focuses on the search for appropriate reading material for the newly literate peasants; it argues that bourgeois literature is inaccessible to the peasants, vvho need stories that reflect their own values, rather than books that could lead them down the path of a dangerous modernization. 34 The censored story about sheep-if it is indeed a version of the sketch about a sale of sheep that An-sky would eventually publish in his Collected Works-tells of a group of nasty speculators who take advantage of peasants when they buy their sheep. 35 In one way or another, all the articles that An-sky published in 1892 argue that readers must do all they can to slow the capitalist incursions into the countryside, to rescue the peasants and their culture from the moral and physical ruin that would otherwise await them. The articles that An-sky published in Russkoe bogatstvo, like the new pseudonym under which he published them, advertise what seems to be his successful assimilation. There arc tew clues in these articles tl1at the author is a Jew who did not even read Russian until his teens. They appear to have been written by a person who fits seamlessly into the St. Petersburg intelligentsia of the period, who can "serve the people" with complete anonymity. Indeed, in a letter he wrote to Uspensky in February 1892, An-sky described the Jews in the language of populism, including them among the enemies of the peasants, agents of the capitalism that threatened their way of life: I see only one possible solution to the Jewish question: to remove from the Jews, in the most radical way, all possibility of exploiting the

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Safran population, and especially to protect the defenseless peasant village from them, but at the same time to open the door for them to agricultural work. It seems to me there's no other solution. 36 Uspensky's writings suggested that he was not personally hostile to Jews. In an r888 account of a trip to eastern Russia, he gave a positive depiction of a Jewish coachman who yearns only to buy land and work it. An-sky's words in the letter echo Uspensky's vision of that wouldbe Jewish farmer-but An-sky goes yet further than his mentor in asserting that all Jews should take that path. More than in any of his published texts, An-sky here distanced himself from other shtetl Jews and represented himself as a St. Petersburg intellectual whose loyalties to the Russian narod were firmly in place. If the adoption of the pseudonym devised by Uspensky was in part the choice of an alternative lineage and a new father, then this letter might have been an attempt at the renunciation of an older lineage and a Jewish father. The Russkoe bogatstvo articles were not all that An-sky worked on in r892. Of the stories that he would publish later, he dated some 1892, including "Twenty Years Old" (V dvadtsat' let), a story of a hungry would-be student. 37 Whereas the Russkoe bogatstvo pieces testifY to Ansky's assimilation of the ideals of the narodnik circle in St. Petersburg, this story indicates that he also imbibed some of the literary traditions associated with the city. In it, he very obviously imitates the opening chapters of one of the best known works of fiction about St. Petersburg, Dostoevsky's r866 Crime and Punishment. The narrator of "Twenty Years Old," like Dostoevsky's hero Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, is a hungry student who relies on tutoring to support himself but has lately run into hard times and lost his regular students. Like Raskolnikov, An-sky's narrator is in debt to his landlady and obsessed with finding some money. Like Raskolnikov, An-sky's narrator does get some money but then almost immediately gives it away to a family with a sick mother and small pathetic children. Like Raskolnikov, An-sky's narrator considers going to a fellow student to get help, but changes his mind. And like Raskolnikov, An-sky's narrator is tormented by thoughts of what others might say about him, which prevent him from reaching out for help when he needs it. Raskolnikov is furious with

An-sky in 1892 injured pride when he learns that his sister is willing to sacrifice herself in order to help him, and An-sky's narrator suffers from the same kind of pride and angry inability to accept help from a young woman: Several times the sentence was on the tip of my tongue: "Annushka, by the way, give me something to eat," but the sentence did not come out of my mouth. It was exactly that "By the way." I had come to ask for bread for hungry people, and by the way I would satisfY my own hunger. No, I can't even ask Annushka in this way! And she, as though on purpose, did not guess herself that she should offer me something to eat. 3 8 An-sky's hero's anticipation of his interlocutors' criticism and his responses to what he imagines they might say rather than to what they actually say demonstrate that the young writer had mastered Dostoevsky's signature style of dialogue and interior monologue, the selfaccusatory tones of the young man from the provinces who is nearly driven mad by his exposure to the possibilities and the dangers of the big city. Thus this story, like the Russkoe bogatstvo articles and like his correspondence with Uspensky, suggests both the allure and the horror of St. Petersburg for Shloyme Rappoport in 1892, as he tried to transform himself into the Russian writer An-sky.

Residence Permission If An-sky had become completely comfortable as a writer in St. Petersburg, tl1en it is difficult to understand why he left the city so abruptly in the summer ofi892 for Western Europe. It does not seem that he left because he had a well-founded fear of arrest: an arrest warrant was issued for him only two years later, in 1894, as a result of information the police received about his activities in France. 39 The memoirists give various reasons for his sudden departure. Some assert that he left because he wanted to become acquainted with the life of European workers;40 others that he was motivated by a passion for a woman, Zhitlowsky's cousin, Masha Reines, a childhood friend of An-sky's who was studying in SwitzerlandY After a few weeks in Berlin (which he did not

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Safran like), An-sky went to Bern, where he had a happy reunion with Zhitlowsky. As Zhitlowsky reports, An-sky's first meetings with Masha went well, but things did not develop as he had wished; after she rejected him, he first wanted to return to Russia, but Zhitlowsky convinced him to go to Paris instead. 42 References to Masha (as "M.R.") appear frequently in An-sky's letters, and it seems entirely feasible that his interest in her drew him to Switzerland. The precise timing of the departure, though, points to another possible cause. Uspensky's mental condition worsened precipitously in the spring ofr892. At the end ofJune, his psychiatrist and friend Boris Naumovich Sinani wrote to Krivenko that Uspensky was suffering from delusions of persecution and was convinced that many of his friends had been killed or committed suicide. "To my horror, my study and careful observation of him have made it impossible for me to deceive myself that his disease might not be as serious as it had seemed on my last visit to Petersburg .... God, how hard it is to accept this fact!" 43 In July, Uspensky was admitted to a private mental hospital in St. Petersburg, where he stayed until September, when he fell into another depression and attempted suicide. On September 21, he entered the Kolmovskaya mental hospital near Novgorod; aside from a brief respite the following year, he would remain hospitalized until his death on March 24-, 1902. 44 It may be that this tragic withdrawal of his friend and patron somehow contributed to An-sky's decision to leave the city precisely in the summer of 1892. 45 Regardless of the reason, the departure from St. Petersburg casts doubt on the story of An-sky as a successful assimilator into Russian literature. Of course, the biggest problem with the scenario of Shloyme Rappoport as a St. Petersburg writer is that, as a Jew, he was not actually allowed to live in the city at all. According to his fellow revolutionary 0. S. Minor, this problem became apparent on his first night in the city: In the winter Semyon Akimovich set off to Petersburg to Gleb Ivanovich [ U spensky] in order to arrange for the publication of his works on what the Russian folk reads. It was easy for Semyon Akimovich to pack: he had no belongings at all. Mter his next paycheck he quickly got ready and left, with only his

An-sky in 1892 passport, according to which, by the way, he was not allowed to live in Petersburg. But that did not stop him! Straight from the train station he went with his manuscripts to Gleb Ivanovich. The wise Gleb Ivanovich, with his great heart, spent a long time listening to Semyon's excited stories. They sat up late. Semyon left ... and only once he was outside did he realize that he had nowhere to stay and he couldn't go to a hotel: he had no "residence permission." There was nothing to do! He decided to walk about until morning. He was swaying from exhaustion, but he couldn't sleep-a policeman would come up to him right away. An unusual event saved him. It was almost three in the morning when someone called to Semyon. "Why are you walking around herd" It was the voice of Gleb Ivanovich, who under the influence of Semyon's powerful stories had been unable to sleep and had gone outside to take a walk. "I'm wandering." "Why? Why aren't you at home?" "I have no home." "A hotel?" "I have no residence permission .... " Gleb Ivanovich was in shock. Of course, he knew that Jews did not have "residence permission" to be outside the "Pale of Settlement," but he had never mn across this in his own life. He could not understand it. He became terribly agitated, brought Semyon back to his own house, and put him to bed. Toward morning Semyon woke up, opened his eyes, and saw the bent figure of Gleb Ivanovich, who was sitting next to him in tears .... From that day Semyon was surrounded by all possible care. 46 The story appears in almost identical form in other memoirs; clearly, An-sky told it often. 47 The sight of Uspensky's tears in his presence must have profoundly affected the young Rappoport. Although he left no written account of his reactions, we know that before he came to St. Petersburg he wrote many lengthy letters to Uspensky (up to 17 pages long), where he

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explained how much of a difference the older writer had already made in his life. Mter receiving his first letter, Rappoport told Uspensky, he was finally released from the oppressive voices in his mind telling him that he was "a failure, a superfluous man." At last, he could say, "sincerely, as before God, that such happy, bright minutes, like those given to me by the content and the tone of your letter and by your clasping of my hand, I have hardly had at any other point in my life .... To use Tolstoy's words, 'I saw [in your letter] the living God.'" He asked Uspensky to meet him in Moscow, explaining his hope that, once he heard Uspensky's advice, "my life will lose its 'temporary' character." Later, he apparently began to worry that he had written too much to his idol and apologized for wasting Uspensky's time with such long letters. He asked for forgiveness, saying, "Your sympathy and respect are more valuable to me than anything else in the world." 48 Mter An-sky left St. Petersburg, heremained close to Uspensky's family and wrote to his wife, Aleksandra Uspenskaia, years later in worshipful tones of his feelings on rereading Uspensky's works, especially The Customs ofRasteriaeva Street (Nravy Rasteriaevoi ulitsy), a depiction of the economic decline and moral squalor of provincial Russian life. Mter Uspenskaia sent him a new edition of it, he stayed up until2: 30 in the morning reading it, then wrote to her that he felt as though he had "returned after a long absence to my native town and seen my relatives, friends, places that were full of dear memories for me." 49 When An-sky met him, Uspensky was a celebrated writer, the author of dark, powerful novels and sketches depicting the physical torment of peasant life, the moral degeneracy of urban existence, and the falsity of the promises of progress. He was seen as a careful observer who refused to shut his eyes to the horror of what he saw in Russia, and he was renowned for his sympathy for all the oppressed people of Russia. For Rappoport, as for others, Uspensky must have exemplified the intelligentsia virtues of moral clarity and the refusal to compromise. That this man was so visibly moved by his own plight must have awoken a powerful emotion in Rappoport himself, reinforcing the bond that he already felt for this surrogate father. Perhaps it was at this point that Rappoport also began to feel the sense of closeness and responsibility toward Uspensky and his family so strongly evident in the later letters

An-sky in r892

to Uspenskaia. He wrote to Uspenskaia from Western Europe that he kept a special album for his pictures of the Uspensky family, and, he said, "At a sad moment, when my spirit is low, I look at that album and my soul becomes higher, better, clearer." 50 Nonetheless, these undoubtedly genuine emotions cannot account entirely for An-sky and his memoirists' fascination with the story of Uspensky's tears. It is easy to see the many functions this story could have served. First of all, as a literary anecdote, a respected genre in the Russian oral tradition, the story proves that the teller has had contact with the world of famous writers. The mention ofUspensky's tears, in particular, signals the intimacy of the encounter and thereby the legitimacy of An-sky's connection to the literary world that Uspensky represents. The tears also show that An-sky had encountered one ofUspensky's best known qualities, his sadness. In clinical terms, Uspensky's sadness was undoubtedly connected to his mental illness. His strong feelings frequently manifested themselves in public: at the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his writing career in 1887, the intensity of his emotion made him unable to read his most recent work out loud, though the crowd nonetheless applauded him enthusiastically. 51 Uspensky 's friends, whether or not they knew he was being treated for what seems to be clinical depression, often pointed out his sadness. In their writings-and undoubtedly in their experience ofinteracting with him, especially during the early stages of his disease -that sadness did not appear pathological but revealed an admirable sensitivity to suffering that was consistent with his ideals. 52 His colleague at Russian Wealth, Vladimir Korolenko, discusses his friendship with Uspensky at the end of the I88os. "Perhaps that remarkable sensitivity revealed the illness that was already near. ... But at that time such an idea never entered my head, even more so since the sadness and the sensitivity produced a single whole that was too attractive to seem ill." 53 By retelling the story of Uspensky's terrible agitation in his own presence, An-sky and his memoirists let their listeners know that he had met the real Uspensky. Simultaneously, An-sky's anecdote casts the "Jewish question" in a new light. The sympathy and sensitivity so powerfully expressed in Uspensky's writing was directed at the suffering people of Russia, first among them the painfully modernizing and often exploited peasantry,

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which he depicted in essays such as "The Peasant and Peasant Labor" (Khrestianin i khrestianskii trud) and "The Power of the Soil" (Vlast' zemli). When he cried for An-sky, he symbolically extended his famous sympathy for the oppressed to include a new group, the Jews, whose limited rights were marked above all by the residence restrictions that confined them to the Pale. Uspensky's tears, by creating an equation between Jews and peasants, legitimized the suffering of the Jews and opposed the stereotype that the Jews were themselves oppressors, guilty for contributing to the peasants' misery. When An-sky retold an anecdote in which he cast himself as the Jewish object of the sad gaze of the famous writer, he suggested that he stood for all the Jews of the empire. Chernov, in his own retelling of the anecdote, brings this political subtext to the surface with a metaphor from the New Testament. He compares Uspensky to Doubting Thomas and the Jews of the empire to the crucified and resurrected Jesus, citing John 20:25 in the biblical Church Slavonic language almost word-for-word to describe Uspensky's reactions when he ran into An-sky on that dark St. Petersburg street. For the first time, according to Chernov, Uspensky was "placing his fingers on the nail wounds" (vlagaet persty svoi v iazvy gvozdinnye) of Jewish life. 54 Chernovends with An-sky awakening to see Uspensky's tears and wondering, "Was it long ago that this quiet, wordless weeping for the fate of another, an orphaned nation had begun?" 55 Although the political significance of the anecdote of his first night in St. Petersburg must have accounted in part for its appeal to An-sky and his friends, the story also carries a broader cultural weight. By relating an incident in which he wanders the streets of the empire's capital all night, An-sky suggested a kinship between himself and some of the city's most famous Russian writers, who had depicted that very scene in their works. One of the central texts of the Russian canon, Alexander Pushkin's "Bronze Horseman" (Mednyi vsadnik), begins with a description of the grandeur of the imperial capital and a paean to its founder, Peter the Great, and continues with the story of the poor clerk Evgeny and his love for Parasha. When a storm hits, tragedy strikes: a flood rises and Parasha's hut is swept away. Evgeny goes mad with grief and begins to wander the city day and night. One night, he comes across the Bronze Horseman, a statue of Peter the Great. In his

An-sky in 1892 madness, he blames the tsar for Parasha's fate and challenges the statue, which then begins to pursue him: I vo vsiu noch' bezumets bcdnyi Kuda stopy ne obrashchal, Za nim povsiudu Vsadnik Mednyi S tezhelym topotom skakal. [And all night the poor madman ran Wherever his steps took him The Bronze Horseman followed Rushing with a heavy clatter]. A host of later authors developed these themes in stories that combine depictions of the city's magnificence with heroes who wander the streets, their perceptions clouded by madness ofone sort or another, hopelessly challenging the omnipotent state. In Gogol's "The Overcoat," the poor clerk Akaky Akakievich wanders the "sinister emptiness" of St. Petersburg's streets in the cold, searching for his stolen overcoat, to no avail; after he dies, his ghost walks the same streets, snatching coats from men, until he wreaks revenge on an "important personage," an official who had terrified him, and vanishes. Before Dostoevsky took up the theme of the St. Petersburg wanderer in r866 in Crime and Punishment, he explored it in the 1848 story ""White Nights" (Belye nochi), whose hero, a bookish dreamer with no friends, wanders St. Petersburg and meets and falls in love with Nastenka, an equally bookish girl. The two talk and weep, sharing their frustrations and their dreams. He tells her that the life of a St. Petersburg dreamer like him is "a mix of something purely fantastic, fervently ideal, and at the same time (alas, Nastenka!) dully prosaic and ordinary, not to say unbelievably vulgar." 56 When An-sky told his story of wandering the St. Petersburg streets at night, his well-read interlocutors would have noticed the familiar images. Like Evgeny and Akaky Akakievich, An-sky feels mistreated by the authorities, as represented in the Jewish residence restrictions and his (very reasonable) fear of the police. Like both of these literary models, An-sky is collapsing from exhaustion. Like the dreamer, he cannot reconcile his literary ideals-his ecstasy at meeting Uspenskywith prosaic reality, in this case his "ordinary," even "vulgar" lack of

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Safran residence permission. Evgeny 's madness and the dreamer's tears are mirrored in An-sky's depiction of the mentally ill Uspensky, also a nighttime wanderer. All these parallels indicate how the story could legitimize An-sky both as a modern man, alienated by his urban setting, and as a Russian intellectual, who takes his opposition to the state for granted and who is full of ambivalence about the Westernization of Russian ways that is represented by St. Petersburg itself. The anecdote about wandering the streets turns on the revelation that the Jewish author has no right to live in St. Petersburg, but it also locates that Jewish author within the literary tradition associated with the city. There is no way to know whether An-sky grasped all of these possible meanings for his nighttime stroll in 1892. His mention of the "Jewish question" in his February 1892 letter to Uspensky suggests that, when the two men had finally met a tew weeks earlier, the topic of Rappoport's Jewishness had come up, but his assertions in the letter about the danger that Jews pose to peasants seem to contradict the picture that emerges from the anecdote of Jews as primarily victims of the regime. It may well be that, as An-sky told and retold the anecdote, he began to see it-and his entire time in St. Petersburg-differently. The works of fiction that An-sky dated 1892 demonstrate the evolution ofhis representations of Jews. One of his most successful and earliest Jewish-themed stories is "Mendel the Turk," which he would first publish in 1902Y The narrator of this story is a young "modern" Jew who is living in a small Belorussian town and working as a tutor. The year is 1877, and the narrator realizes that all of the Hasidic Jews of the town are fascinated by the ongoing Russo-Turkish war. Some of the Jews believe the Russians will win, whereas others support the Turkish side; every day they debate the war in synagogue, between the afternoon and the evening prayers. The hero of the story, Mendel, a 28-year-old melamed (a teacher ofTalmud to young boys) who sides with the Turks, discovers that the narrator can teach him about the history of the conflict and give him up-to-date information, because the narrator is the only person in town who gets a Russian newspaper regularly. When the Russian army takes Plevne, Mendel is initially upset, but he takes comfort in the discovery of mystical biblical hints of the ultimate victory of the Turks.

An-sky in 1892

In the 1892 manuscript version of the story, the narrator runs into Mendel 10 years later, after both of them have immigrated to Paris. 58 Although at first Mendel is appalled by what seems to him the degeneracy of Parisian life (he especially dislikes the bare-breasted statue symbolizing the French republic at the Place de la Republique ), he quickly reconciles himself to his new surroundings, takes a job in a factory, and begins to learn French. Within a year and a half, he has become fluent in French and stays up nights reading Marx, Lasalle, and Proudhon; a couple of years later, the narrator finds out that Mendel has moved to London and become a labor organizer and an admired orator. 59 This ending reveals the author's faith in the radical ideals of self-transformation. All it takes is removal from the shtetl and a thorough immersion in radical theory for Mendel to become a different person, one who stands tall and commands the respect of a crowd. The narrator recognizes that Mendel has suffered to remake himself~ but he has succeeded. 60 The shtetl Mendel "the Turk," who saw no reason why he should identifY with Russians, has taken up the cause of the international worker. In its published form, the story carries no such clear ideological message. It concludes not with Mendel's London speech but with thenarrator's departure from the shtetl, where he leaves Mendel, who forever, it seems, will continue to dream of a Turkish victory. Whereas the 1892 manuscript version of the story affirms that education can remake a Jew, the 1902 published version treats Mendel's attempts to access the narrator's newspaper with irony: he does not seem to reeducate himself but merely to find new support for his old, absurd notions. Rather than showing that Jewish traditions can and must be abandoned, tl1e published version testifies to their staying power. Even in the published version, though, the story reveals the author's literary debt to the city where he spent the first months of 1892. Even though he lives in a shtetl rather than in the capital, Mendel inhabits the same mental world as the heroes ofPushkin, Gogol, and Dostoyevsky-a world marked by the desperate but impossible attempt to recreate oneself as a new and better person. Thus, even though his 1902 revisions of"Mendel the Turk" show iliat An-sky was moving away from the radical ideals he had embraced so whole-heartedly in 1892, the revised story even more strongly demonstrates his continued affiliation with the St. Petersburg literary tradition.

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His revision of another 1892 story supports the same argument. In 1911, An-sky published "Hungry" (Golodnyi), a revised version of "Twenty Years Old"; he signaled the connection of the two stories by retaining the date of 1892 after the new version. 61 In the later version, the hero has a Jewish name-Yosele-and a Jewish aunt in the town where he lives. He thinks constantly about his Jewishness, fearing that both Jews and non-Jews will recognize it and judge him. Asking a Jewish shopkeeper to give him bread on credit seems impossible, because "She looks at me with sad eyes .... Of course she knows that I am a Jew, but she pretends that she hasn't guessed .... and in her heart she is cursing me .... How could I barge in and ask her for credit? She won't just turn me down, but she'll rejoice in my sorrow." 62 When his friend's father asks whether, as a Jew, he is interested in the problems of the city's poor Jews, Yosele responds in confusion. "It's strange: I never hid my Jewishness, but nonetheless, each time someone reminded me of it out loud, I inadvertently got confused and blushed, as though I had been unmasked. It wasn't that I was ashamed of my Jewish roots, but it was unpleasant when anyone reminded me ofit." 63 He knows that he could appeal to his relatives, but he resists, wanting to avoid contact with the family he dismisses as "fanatics" with whom he has "nothing in common."64 Finally, dazed from hunger, he wanders into his Aunt Basya's house and collapses. When he wakes up, he hears the havdalah service that marks the end of the Jewish Sabbath and sees Basya, along with his Russian friends. He at first is terribly embarrassed when his friends hear his aunt's Jewish accent in Russian, but after he learns that the father of one of his friends is friendly with Basya and his friends admire her, he calls to his aunt "happily and freely," asking her for some gefilte fish. 65 The revision makes the story stronger and less derivative, though, paradoxically, the changes bring it even closer to the Dostoevskian model. Religious texts are central to both "Hungry" and Crime and Punishment. What first sets Raskolnikov on the path to release from his agony is his encounter with the prostitute Sonia, who reads to him from the New Testament about the raising of Lazarus (John n); in the final scene of the novel, when he recovers from his illness in the Siberian prison and his story of "renewal" and "rebirth" begins, he looks at his New Testament and remembers Lazarus. 66 Yosele experiences

An -sky in 1892

the same kind of relief-"as after a sickness" that recalls Raskolnikov's sickness-when he hears another woman's voice, his aunt singing a tkhine, a women's prayer in Yiddish: Somewhere through the wall a woman's voice was singing, very quietly, in the sad, drawn-out, but soft and peacefl1l chant of a prayer. And suddenly I remembered: this was the prayer of the end of the Sabbath, which begins with the words, "God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in your glory!" Once I guessed vvhich prayer it was, I immediately recognized Aunt Basya's voice. I was not at all startled by it; I didn't even ask myself how I had ended up here. I felt peaceful and joyful, as after an illness, and my aunt's singing seemed tender and poetic. 67 Aunt Basya is singing the tkhine "Got fun Avrom," a well-known song that even relatively Russified Jewish readers might recognize. 68 "Hungry" might be read as a response to Crime and Punishment: by designing his story as a reworking of Dostoevsky's canonical text, An -sky suggests that Judaism, no less than Christianity, might offer the modern intellectual a respite or a cure for alienation. When contrasted with the passage Sonya reads from John, Aunt Basya's tkhine represents a very specific facet of Judaism. What Yosele responds to is not a Hebrew prayer that might represent the normative male experience of the religion, nor a rabbinic text that might speak of the ex perience of elite, educated men, but rather one of the Yiddish prayers that were the basis of women's experience of religion within the domestic sphere. 69 The final pages of the story reinforce the power of the female, domestic aspects of Jewish life: we hear of Alyosha's father sitting at Aunt Basya's house for entire evenings talking to her, and Yosele at the end asks her for gefilte fish. An-sky's protagonist returns, it would seem, not to Jevvish high culture and Jewish men but to a Jewish woman and the Jewish home. Whereas Raskolnikov's return to religion is motivated by a young woman, Sonia, Yosele's redemption is facilitated by an older woman, the mother of a family (though each of these women is at first associated with the shame she brings on her male relatives-Sonia's father, Basya's nephew-before emerging as the vehicle of release from shame). Since Yosele's own mother is dead, his aunt stands in for her, and other female characters double this figure,

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Safran such as the old Jewish woman in the shop who looks at him with "sad eyes," and Annushka, the friend who takes in the poor children and bears the Russian name of An-sky's own mother. This name, Anna (or the Yiddish Chana), appears frequently in Ansky's stories and anecdotes. He gave it to the most sympathetic of his Jewish tavernkeepers in "Hangover" and to the strong figure of the agunah (abandoned wife) in the 1896 novella "In a Jewish Family." 70 At some point, he began to claim his mother's name for himself as well. He did so first of all in late 1901 or early 1902, when he began to publish Yiddish verse and revolutionary propaganda under a new pseudonym, Z. Sinanni. 71 The literary scholar David Roskies reads the name as "syn Anny," or "Anna's son." 72 The name points, though, to analternative patrilineal lineage as well as a reclaimed matrilineal one: the writer sometimes spelled it "Sinani," suggesting a link to Boris Naumovich Sinani, Uspensky's psychiatrist and An-sky's good friend, a Karaite Jew who was married to a non-Jew and was a respected St. Petersburg scholar and a member of the narodnik intelligentsia. Like An-sky's turn to writing more in Yiddish around 1900 and his work editing and publishing Yiddish propaganda for the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, this pseudonym, with its two referents, suggests that the writer was taking a few careful steps away from the Russian narodnik persona he had first defined in 1892. He went on to take more steps away. In a version of the story of his pseudonym that completely contradicts the account Chernov had once heard, Zalmen Reyzen, a friend of An -sky's and the author of a detailed and largely reliable essay on him, reports that "the pseudonym An-sky comes from his mother's name Chana [Anna]; the hyphen in An-sky [instead ofAnsky] was the error of a typesetter who took the crossbar in the Russian N [which looks like H] for a little line." 73 The story of the misspelled name that stuck forever sounds like a Gogolian absurdity. If the typesetter had actually mistaken an N for a hyphen, then the pseudonym would have ended up as "A-sky," not "An-sky." It may be, then, that the original choice was "Annsky," but to anyone familiar with the conventions of Russian spelling, the doubled N in "Annsky" in Russian looks foreign and odd, and even though An-sky's Russian may not have been as good in r892 as it would later become, it is unlikely that he would have

An-sky in 1892 had so little feeling for the shape of the written Russian word. Reyzen's story may be a corruption of a somewhat more likely version that An-sky told his young friend Roza Ettinger at some point after 1915 about the decision he faced when his first article was accepted by Russkoe bogatstvo: The question arose of renaming the young writer, since the excessively common "Rappoport" was rejected. Semyon Akimovich suggested the name "Annensky" after his mother Anna [Chana]. "I wanted," he said, "to convince my mother, who grieved over my departure tor the society of others [ chuzhuiu sredu], that my connection to her who personified my own Jewish heritage was not only not broken but rather would be made closer and stronger in my future work. But because the well known narodnik N. F. Annensky was already publishing in Russkoe bogatstvo, it had to be changed to "An-sky." 74 Ettinger's story, even more explicitly than Reyzen's, depicts a hero who has little in common with the radical writers who sought anonymity, the better to serve the Russian people while evading the attention of the regime. Ettinger's An-sky is bound by personal ties: he demonstratively embraces his family and, through them, the Jewish people. The depiction of an attachment to Jewish culture that arises after a period of alienation evokes an ancient archetype: the baal tshuvah (literally master of return), meaning a kind of prodigal son, a person who has left Judaism or committed a sin but has since returned to the tradition or repented from the sin, a theme that Roskies has explored in an influential essay about An-sky.7 5 With his words to Ettinger, Ansky depicts himself as a baal tshuvah. By linking that image to the nom de plume that he would retain for his entire professional career, An-sky suggested in his words to Ettinger that his whole literary oeuvre should be read as an expression of a "return" to Jewishness that began in 1892 with his choice of a pseudonym.

"A Brilliant Covering Thrown Over an Abyss" A paradox haunts all the tales that An-sky started to tell in 1892 and went on to tell differently later. Although both "Twenty Years Old'/ "Hungry" and "Mendel the Turk" changed dramatically in the years

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after r892, An-sky concluded every publication of either one with that early date. Although comparison of the various anecdotes he told about his pseudonym indicates that the connection to his mother's name became important to him only later in his life, he insisted to Reyzen and Ettinger that he had had it in mind already in 1892. At some points, particularly around 1910, An-sky would tell the story of his own life as a perfect ricochet of departure from the Jewish fold followed -after around 1900-by return to it. 76 In telling the tales I've analyzed, he takes a different tack, moving the moment of "return" back in time, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, to the year when he adopted his pseudonym and his literary career began in earnest. One could easily dismiss An-sky's ta.lse dating and his inconsistent stories as motivated by the storyteller's urge to please his audience, to make himself and his tale seem as consistent and as attractive as possible. Instead of doing that, I prefer to draw attention back to the location of the writer during the months under dispute-that is, to St. Petersburg. The Russian literary tradition depicts that city as a construction of masks, facades, and mystification, where nothing is what it seems to be. Raskolnikov takes on the identity of a radical intellectual, only to go almost mad with despair when he realizes the moral emptiness of his new self. In shifting from depictions of himself in St. Petersburg as a successfiii assimilator to depictions of himself as already a baa! tshuvah when he arrived, An-sky followed the tradition that makes that city the site of multiple self-transformations, none necessarily permanent. Indeed, the revelation that An-sky does not feel at home in this city may be precisely what identifies him as a legitimate denizen of St. Petersburg. In "The Noise ofTime," the poet Osip Mandelstam's memoir of a St. Petersburg Jewish childhood in the 189os, he writes of his teeling that the city's magnificence is a sham, "a brilliant covering thrown over an abyss." His images echo Pushkin, Gogo!, Dostoyevsky, and the city's other writers. In his analysis of the Petersburg myth in Russian culture, the semiotician Yuri Lotman describes the northern capital as the prototypical city "at the edge," haunted by eschatological visions of total destruction, painfully aware of its own artificiality and theatricality: "Petersburg does not have its own point of view on itself-it has always to posit a spectator." 77 Russian writers who have

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lived in the city and written about it point out that same theatricality, the sense that they inhabit a stage set that may come down at any moment, and that they are acting out entirely artificial roles that may have nothing in common with their true selves. An-sky belonged to a generation of Russian and Jewish writers tor whom the distinction between life and art, or private life and politics, was hazy if it existed at all. People in his milieu took it for granted that one's literary texts illustrated one's life and one's life illustrated one's literary texts. 78 For An-sky himself, this assumption was more true than for most, perhaps for personal as well as ideological reasons. As we remember, he had written to Mikhailovsky that "my life has developed in such a way that if writing were removed from it, such an emptiness would appear that it would simply horrifY me." Whereas other writers might in fact have elements in their lives that could not be brought into conformity with their literary and political ideals, An-sky had nothing but his work. For most of his life, as he periodically complained, he had "neither a wife, nor children, nor a house, nor even an apartment, nor belongings, nor even any settled habits." 79 All he had was his art, his ideals, and the stories that he could tell about himself and them. In writing and rewriting his 1892 stories, in telling and retelling his anecdotes about that year, An-sky constructed a literary identity that was at the same time a work ofliterature, and he used the literary techniques that he had mastered. Like the two most brilliant Yiddish writers who were his contemporaries, Sholem Abramovitz (or Mendele Moykher Sforim) and Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich (or Sholem Aleichem), An-sky created a pseudonym that was part of a carefully articulated literary persona. 80 He created his persona as he created his literary texts, making extensive, even ruthless revisions. Just as his literary texts would always remain stylistically within the parameters of mainstream Russian literature, so his literary persona was determined by the most widely available Russian genres. The persona that he created with his stories of and about 1892 fits squarely in the St. Petersburg tradition, identifYing its creator as a typical St. Petersburg writer, even a typical member of the Russian intelligentsia, terribly conscious of his own mobility and rootlessness, aware of and anxious about the artificiality and contingency ofhis self and its setting.

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Safran Even though he was not innovative stylistically or formally, An-sky was able to give his readers and listeners a perspective that was new to Russian literature. In their multiple redactions, the 1892 texts engage with the myth of St. Petersburg now from one viewpoint, now from another. Though at first An-sky suggested that he had simply assimilated himself to the Russian model, he later changed the model itself, assimilating it to his own situation, insisting in effect that one could be both a St. Petersburg character in the tradition of Raskolnikov and a Jew who had not forgotten his mother. In a sense, even before the younger writer Mandelstam (whom he eventually met at Sinani's house), An-sky succeeded in naturalizing the place of the Jew in Russian literature, filling in the "something missing" in his peculiar pseudonym, developing a voice and a literary presence that could be both Russian and Jewish. The young man living out a fantasy was the author also of that fantasy.

Four "We Are Too Late": An-sky and the Paradigm ofNo Return Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

In an influential article on An-sky, David Roskies convincingly argues that An-sky embodies the "paradigm of return" typical of many acculturated European Jewish intellectuals at the turn of the nineteenth century.1 According to Roskies, An-sky completely integrated himself into Russian culture and Russian socialism, reimagining himself as a Jewish populist and reinventing the Judaism to which he attempted to return. Once a sociologist who researched the literary perceptions and tastes of Russian miners, 2 he became a fervent zamler (collector) of relics of the Jewish past. 3 Formerly a Russian man of!etters whose selected writings in the Russian language exceeded five volumes,4 An-sky reverted to the unequivocally nationally oriented Yiddish language. 5 A man of universalistic convictions, a sympathetic observer of the European worker, and a proponent of political populism, he turned into an advocate of the Jewish case in politics, journalism, and cultural entrepreneurship. Once a masked enlightener who used his traditional attire as a way to smuggle progressive ideas into the core of the Jewish ghettoized world, such as the Hasidic-minded community of Liozno, at the end of his life he turned to Hasidism as the quintessence of his reimagined personal yidishkayt, his new Jewish identity. In sum, An-sky defected from his aggressively non-Jewish interests by striving to regain his formerly abandoned Jewish culture. Indeed, Roskies 's point is valid: An -sky's vector was that of a returnthrough Russian populism to the discovery of his Jewish roots. But in order fully to assess An -sky's spiritual evolution, we must ask yet another question: Did An-sky manage to return? If he did, how smooth was his way back? If he did not, what obstacles prevented him from doing so? In

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this chapter I argue that An -sky remains an emblematic Jewish figure not merely because ofhis attractive example of return, with which perhaps any individual can identify; rather, An-sky remains an irresistible and tragic personality even today because of the enormous obstacles and sufferings he encountered on his way back, because of his failure to eradicate the "populist" sins of his youth, and because of his final drama of no return. The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset once observed that a man is the author of a novel about himself. It is difficult to resist the temptation to see An-sky's life story as a novel or drama with An-sky as its protagonist. Although An-sky was certainly not an actor, the plot of his personal drama suggests the possibility of this unexpected comparison. Perhaps the fascination of the postmodern Jewish world with the figure of An-sky is rooted in the fact that An-sky himself was the protagonist of an unwritten Jewish psychological and intellectual novel of East European decadence. In this imaginary novel, an assimilated Russian-Jewish intellectual tried to regain his Jewish identity in order toreturn to the vanishing culture of the Jewish shtetl and redeem it from oblivion. An-sky's love of disguise, masks, role-playing, and even his messianic pretensions suggest that he was not unaware of the possibility of that comparison. For An-sky, as well as for a good many literary heroes of the turn of the twentieth century, such a return signified an attempt to reconstruct an unstained personal identity free of spiritual weakness, aggressive immorality, or servile conformism. In broader terms, it signified the nostalgic longing of decadence for the lost paradise of romanticism, the epoch when the fin de siecle had not yet challenged the human intellect with the immoral will of the superman and had not yet poisoned the human worldview with the sweet venom of cynicism. The literary heroes of the turn of the twentieth century wanted to return to the coherent self-perception of their youth, seeking to regain faith, openness, and honesty. Like An -sky, they were looking for ways to stop toying with multiple identities. They wanted to represent themselves, not others. They needed a reality in which God was still a possibility and beauty was not necessarily synonymous with death. For them, return aimed at recreating a romantic past in which a person was able to meet the challenge, confront the enemy, and withstand the

An-sky and the Paradigm of No Return temptation. Return, and not only for Friedrich Nietzsche, was a passage to myth, to a utopian past, or to both. Marcel Proust realized that the return to paradise lost was possible only in the creative memory and the imagination. Yet before Proust's Swann, the protagonists of decadence still thought that return was a real option, not an imaginary one. This return was ubiquitous in the literature of the European fin de siecle. The characters in Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard entertained the notion of returning to the good old days, of stopping the sale of the estate and the destruction of the garden. Oscar Wilde's Dorian Grey hoped that his new romantic love would return him to the time when his portrait reflected the beauty of his immaculate youth and not the spiritual corruption of his horrifying present. Henryk Ibsen's Peer Gynt, whatever adventures he undertook, thought that sooner or later he would victoriously return as a national hero, a loving husband, and a son. And Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim believed that running away from civilization into the jungles and becoming a teacher, leader, and savior of the natives would eventually enable him to regain the integrity of his past. However, they were all doomed to no-return. Dorian's pathetic atonement made his portrait's ugliness deteriorate even further. Peer Gynt returned to nothing but mockery and oblivion. Lord Jim never succeeded in obliterating his immoral defection from the Pathna steamship. And Chekhov's characters were too weak to save the cherry orchard. In a word, nco-Romanticism was based on a contradiction between the strivings of characters and the logic of plot: the latter refuted the former, emphasizing the significance of the paradigm of no return. Whatever the modern assessment of his return, An-sky, the virtual protagonist, felt that he failed to accomplish the task. From the moment An-sky returned to Russia in 1905 to start his famous enterprise within the framework of the Jewish Society for History and Ethnography (Evreiskoe Istoriko-Etnograficheskoe Obshchestvo) until the moment he fled Russia in 1918 for Vilna, his every undertaking was marked by the indelible trace of an approaching catastrophe. Whatever he did or attempted to do signified there was no way back. All of the enterprises that An -sky launched to reconstruct his identity were corrupted by dybbuks-spiritual, political, philosophical, and personal. These dybbuks shaped An-sky's drama both in life and in literature, and perhaps in his

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afterlife. They made An-sky's return a bitter, perhaps impossible, experience. I will illustrate this point with three brief case studies. One preliminary observation is in order. In this chapter I use the term "dybbuk" metaphorically. It is common knowledge that a dybbuk in the literal sense is a "possession" of one's mind and body by a transmigrating soul. Syntactically, it is used as a direct object. In Yiddish, one says "he has a dybbuk" as one says "he has a fever." Sometimes the dybbuk is used as a subject, identifYing a soul of a deceased person, usually male, that enters somebody's body, usually female, and claims it as its property. One would say to a person, "What dybbuk has taken possession of you?" However, this chapter employs "dybbuk" in a wider sense, as a metaphor that indicates obsessions, double or false identities, corrupted doppelgangers, and insolent impostors. Gabriel Garda Marquez's "demons" from his semiautobiographical book Of Love and Other Demons (Del Amory otros demonios, 1994), manifesting the idee fixe of the writer, are close relatives if not twins of this chapter's "dybbuks." I use the dybbuk in an interpersonal, social, or even political context. We will find dybbuks in An-sky's family, among his friends and colleagues, and in An-sky himself. The dybbuk, as it were, was not only a character in An-sky's famous play but also An-sky's live companion. People An-sky loved and ideas he cherished turned out to have dybbuks of their own. These dybbuks eventually brought An-sky to his Dybbuk-and simultaneously prevented An-sky from coming back. What we celebrate today as An-sky's literary success, in fact, \vas a symbol of his life crisis. In a word, this chapter uses An-sky's own metaphor to unlock An-sky's innovations and explore his fascinating psyche. My observations are based on several hundred letters written to and by Ansky as well as on a number of An-sky's personal papers, drafts, and unpublished works from U.S., Israeli, Russian, and Ukrainian archives. 6

Act One: The Family In his early f(xties, An-sky finally decided to break away from his bachelor habits. His search for a new integrity-and a new identitypresupposed an understanding of sex quite different from that accepted

An-sky and the Paradigm of No Return

in the milieu of Russian socialists, who considered family a bourgeois atavism to be replaced by free love or civil matrimony. For Russian socialists, revolution and traditional family were incompatible. Revolution demanded the whole self of all the men and women who decided to devote themselves to its sublime cause. The private domain of family life, with its conventional femininity, was to be substituted by the public domain with its new revolutionary understanding of gender. 7 By and large, the socialist environment suppressed sexuality, and, when it did not, sexuality took the form of random, superficial, and nonbinding relations. A murky first marriage of An-sky to a French woman in Paris, of which almost nothing reliable is known, was perhaps an idiosyncratic and transient civil matrimony not binding for either side. It ended abruptly and seemed to have had no significant impact on An-sky. We find almost no traces of it in An-sky's personal correspondence and memoirs of his friends. One may argue that, when An-sky later decided in favor of an old-fashioned marriage, he was seeking to control the dybbuks ofhis licentious revolutionary youth, if not to banish them altogether. It is crucial to place An-sky's altered vision of sex against the backdrop of his new life stratagem. 8 Mter 1905, for An-sky, being Jewish seems to have implied being traditionally married. Yidishkayt for him signified first and foremost the old-fashioned Jewish family in which the husband earns money and the wife takes care of the household. Therefore, it was no surprise that in early 1908 An-sky married Edia Glezerman, the daughter of a middle-rank merchant, the owner of a lamp and dishes store in Vitebsk, Isaak Glezerman. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this step: after his cosmopolitan sexual experience in France, he was back home with a nice, young Jewish girl, and in the town of his childhood. An-sky was proud of his wife, a charming pianist. An-sky cherished her genuine provinciality, apparent naivete, and sentimentalism. 9 He kept writing to Chaim Zhitlowsky how happy he was wherever he went with Edia, be it Finland, Switzerland, or St. Petersburg. 10 But Edia did not like any of those places, nor did she like An-sky to overexert himself She implored him to return to Vitebsk, where he would be able to furnish her with "a calm life, full of reason and peace." 11

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Petrovsky-Shtern For An-sky, however, having a family in the first place implied financial responsibility. But Petr Lavrov, the head of the Russian emigration and the leader of revolutionary populism, whose secretary An-sky was between 1894 and 1900, was dead, so the Russian populist movement no longer supported him. Hence, An-sky began to earn his living by lecturing throughout Russia. Before 1905, one could hardly consider lecturing as a stable financial source, but after 1905 the situation radically changed when the first liberal winds brought the revival of nationallife into full swing. An-sky wrote to Zhitlowsky that it was possible to make 600-700 rubles monthly just from his literary engagements, a substantial sum in the 190os. 12 In 1909 Simon Dubnow (1860-1941) wrote to An-sky: "Departments of the Jewish Literary Society have been established in many cities. There is an urgent need to organize lectures and reports on Jewish literature, both scholarly and belles lettres, on a regular basis. The interest in Jewish literature among Jewish society is so powerful that we should do our best to meet this demand." 13 Thus, An-sky became a professional visiting lecturer. He was happy to accept any speaking engagement available, whereby he could simultaneously fulfill his obligations as a Jewish Kulturtrager (cultural ambassador) and support his family. It is difficult to follow An-sky's itinerary and the variety of his audiences and topics between 1909 and 1911. He lectured at the Jewish Society of Literature in Lutsk, Minsk, Kovno, and Baranovichi (Lithuania and Belarus) and at the divisions of the Society of Enlightenment of Jews in Russia established in the towns of Balta, Gomel, Dvinsk, Kiev, Perm, Ekaterinburg, Kharkov, Tomsk, and in more than half a dozen localities in Siberia. He was invited to speak, for example, at the Society for Poor Children in Skvira, the Visiting the Sick Society in Vitebsk, and the Society of Russian Artisans in Berdichev. He became known everywhere. Praise for An-sky's "loyalty to the development of Jewish national identity and to the flourishing of Jewish Societies of Literature" was a cliche in the letters of gratitude written to him. Yet An-sky's attempt to build a family resulted in failure. During short intervals on his lecture tour, he discovered that a monstrous dybbuk had taken possession of his wife. An unknown person, whose abbreviated name A.I.P. is mentioned in An-sky's letters, tempted Edia,

An-sky and the Paradigm of No Return purportedly not without her consent. After three months on tour, Ansky learned that his wife had spent some time at Ligovka hospital, very likely to abort a pregnancy. 14 An-sky was in despair. He never suspected such a horrible outcome for his matrimonial endeavors. Reality was not inclined to follow the pattern An-sky desired. Notwithstanding his personal sufferings, An-sky hoped that a peaceful domestic life was still possible. To reassure himself that there was some hope left, he dryly asked Edia to repent. She wrote back several pathetic letters, saying: "I experienced torture and pain and solitude. I am leaving a person who loves me. I cannot love anybody but you; take my life and do whatever you want with it." 15 An-sky decided to be merciful and forgive. He thought he himself would be able to perform a tikkun, a spiritual correction, ofEdia's soul, exorcise Edia's dybbuk, and live happily with her ever after. The letter he wrote to his wife was imbued with theological allusions. Although he could not entirely forgive, he was able to reconcile with her. "The [good] name I earned is as pure as a diamond. And my pure name, my pure labor, are the utmost treasures of my lite. Hence, I am asking you, as before a great God, whether you are able to become a wife I can entrust with my immaculate name, my pure life." He wrote that Edia should work arduously, and live peacefully and honestly. She should never try to conceal anything from herself or from him. "If you can become different-prove it. If you do so, I will wholeheartedly return." 16 An-sky was at pains to reclaim the lost paradise of his much-desired family life. He dispatched his wife to Davos, regularly sending her kind, benevolent letters. He was continuously dreaming of their future. He wrote a new play and imagined how he and Edia would read it together. He poignantly craved a "little nest" for both of them in Vitebsk. He was expecting kindness to shine again and all hardships to disappear in the "irreversible past." 17 For the time being, the dybbuk seemed to vanish. An-sky's sensitivity and care appeared to overcome the evil. But An-sky was wrong. The dybbuk was still there. When Edia came back from abroad, An-sky learned more details about her adultery. It turned out that she had accepted money from her lover. She had never stopped exchanging letters with him. And, to add insult to injury, she and her "significant other" discussed the inevitable death of An-sky in the near

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Petrovsky-Shtern future, because, as Edia had learned, doctors had purportedly diagnosed An-sky with serious heart troubles. An-sky realized there was nothing to restore. Passion seemed to be much stronger than sensitivity and social custom. "We are too late," as Reb be Azriel said in the final scene of The Dybbuk. An-sky wrote three angry drafts of a letter to his wife, dismissed them, and finally managed to write: "There is no hope for return." 18 An-sky decided in late 19n that he and his wife should immediately and formally part. This was a pitiful coda to An-sky's family life. The more bitter it was, the more dramatic was An-sky's selfabnegation; he hastily undertook preparations for his expedition to the Pale of Settlement that began in the summer of1912.

Act Two: The Environment On the eve of An-sky's return to Russia, Jewish folklore and ethnography became his new credo. He wrote to Zhitlowsky: "I decided to dedicate the rest of my life to the Jewish task I consider to be paramount for the making of Jewish culture. I mean, the creation of Jewish ethnography, the collection of artifacts ofJewish folklore, etc. There is no need to explain to you how important is this task; you know only too well that nothing has been done in this field." 19 The task set forward by An-sky radically changed his immediate cultural environment. Lavrov, whom An-sky had admired, and Gleb Uspensky, a brilliant Russian costumbrist (local customs) writer whom An-sky had imitated, became for An-sky things of the past. An-sky's favorite democratically minded Russian writers-such as Aleksei Nekrasov, Mikhail SaltykovShchedrin, and Nikolai Garin-Mikhailovsky-all moved into the background. Instead, the classic Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz acquired for him a pivotal significance. By the same token, An-sky's former comrades from the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries Party receded to the periphery, and Jewish intelligentsia from Moscow and St. Petersburg became the center of An-sky's activities. An-sky's encounter with the Russian Jewish milieu brought him both celebration and frustration. Initially, An-sky's reappearance in the midst of the Jewish cultural developments of the late 1900s was a great

An-sky and the Paradigm of No Return success. The memoirists are unanimous in stating that An-sky's audiences adored him as an outstanding personality, an incomparable storyteller, and a wise and kind rebbe. 20 On his part, An-sky did not fail to realize how far his acculturated interlocutors with all their literary, ethnographic, musical, and historical societies were from the 96 percent of Russian Jews who inhabited the Pale of Settlement. An-sky started to plan his expedition to the Pale as a full-fledged undertaking aimed at overcoming the rift that separated the assimilated Russian-Jewish intelligentsia in the capitals from the body of Russian Jewish society. It was not enough for An-sky to reinvent his own values; apparently, he aimed at transforming the values of Russian-Jewish intellectuals. He wrote to Zhitlowsky in 1909: Do not look for yidishkayt on the edges of the tsitsit [ritual fringes], on the rim of the milah [foreskin], or on the tip of the tongue. The more I think of it the clearer I realize that yidishkayt is embedded in a 4-,ooo-year psychology and 4-,ooo-year culture (if you like, add two millenniums more!). If we manage to adapt our culture to life, we will survive; if not, we will suffer and exhaust ourselves until we pass away. Yet, there is no surgeon able to sew onto us somebody else's head and heart. 21 Indeed, An-sky conceived the expedition so that it would require the participation and active support of Russian-Jewish intellectuals. However, with nineteenth -century idealism firmly in hand, An -sky attempted to undertake a project that would alienate the same intellectuals it planned to involve. The March 1912 Conference gathered to discuss An-sky's expedition proved only too well the irreparable rift between An-sky and the acculturated Russian-Jewish intellectuals. The latter argued that anthropology, demography, and progressive ideology were far more important for Jewish culture, Jewish scholarship, and Jewish education than Jewish folklore, let alone the Hasidic legacy, which was An-sky's particular love. To them, An-sky's enthusiasm for folklore seemed outdated, trivial, and purposeless. They belonged by and large to Litvak (Jewish Lithuanian) families, and they saw Hasidism as irrational and outdated. In addition, Russian- Jewish scholars could not but realize

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that the goals of the expedition to some extent denied their vision of what Jewish life should be, as well as their self-identification as Russian Je·wish intellectuals. They still wanted to refashion Russian Jewry, whereas An -sky wanted to accept it as is and preserve it in the collective memory. Even if the conference grudgingly supported the expedition, very few people were eager to take part in it and even fewer offered to help with fundraising. In I9II, An-sky wrote optimistically to Zhitlowsky, "I managed to inspire a number of Moscow and Kiev millionaires, in particular Kiev baron V G. Guenzburg, [Lazar] Brodsky's son-in-law, about the issue ofJewish ethnography and folklore. They promised me approximately 30,000 rubles for the expedition to collect these materials. I hope to start this summer. It is a gigantic task, worthy of my sacrificing the rest of my life." 22 But in 1912, it turned out that, except for Vladimir Goratsievich Guenzburg, there was hardly anyone eager to buttress An-sky's project. Dubnow and Samuel Vermel (1860-1935), the only ones An-sky saw as true scholars familiar with Jewish traditional life and able to work on the project, never took part in the expedition. 23 Eventually, Guenzburg turned out to be the only one to generously support the expedition financially and to accommodate An-sky psychologically.24 Before any viable sum of money was collected and financial matters got settled, Guenzburg insisted on an immediate trial expedition "to put the machine into gear." He encouraged An-sky not to waste time on finding an umbrella organization to support the project. Guenzburg believed in An-sky's organizational talents and in his ability to carry out the expedition as a one-man show. He wrote to An-sky, "[A]ny hampering of the scholarly or financial part of the expedition would destroy it." 25 He repeatedly urged An-sky to hurry up. In 1913, when it turned out that financial assistance from St. Petersburg would never come, he insisted that the expedition should continue "whenever the weather permits." 26 In May 1913, he wrote to An-sky that he was sharply against the decision of the Commission on Jewish Ethnography-to which the expedition was formally submitted-to postpone the expedition in case money from donors was not forthcoming. More aware of the financial difficulties than anybody else, Guenzburg told

An-sky and the Paradigm of No Return An-sky "not to let financial circumstances overcome him." He argued that the indifference of those who surrounded An-sky should not have any impact on An-sky's spiritual energy. 27 Because of these financial difficulties, An-sky's despair mounted. Ansky's letters to Guenzburg, dating back to the time of the expedition, reveal his depression and bitterness. He seemed to be on the brink of a breakdown. Every now and then Guenzburg had to cheer him up and urge him to do the work: "Do your business, support will come later." 28 However, financial support remained a stumbling block. Those Jewish intellectuals and influential Russian Jews whom An-sky trusted and who promised him their support in fundraising virtually betrayed him. Having reassured An-sky with promises, Mikhel Sheftel (1858-1922 ), a noted lawyer and Duma member, withdrew his support from the expedition. Henrik Sliozberg (1863-1937), a legal adviser of the Guenzburgs, hardly did anything he was supposed to. When An-sky suggested to Sliozberg that he himself would raise funds, Sliozberg forbade An-sky to do so. When, looking for additional funds, An-sky went to Moscow, L. Vysotsky, a famous tea-tycoon, warned him that Moscow was IO times poorer than Kiev and St. Petersburg, and almost refused to support the project. 29 Maksim Vinaver (1863-1926), one of the founders of the Jewish people's group in the First Russian Duma and of the Kadet party, was fascinated by the idea of the expedition, but, as An-sky complained, "when it came to the financial side [kogda delo doshlo do koshel)ka], he drew back." 30 As a result, the expedition underwent an irreversible contraction. For instance, An-sky complained to Zinovy Kiselhof (Zusman) (18781939 ), a member of the Society ofJewish Music and a professional folklorist, that he had to stop collecting music because there were no funds to pay those who had secured it at An-sky's requestY Guenzburg's letters to An-sky reveal his considerable skepticism about the understanding and generosity of An-sky's colleagues in St. Petersburg and Moscow. By June 1914, financial support for the expedition was almost exhausted. An-sky attempted to pinch his budget and save some money at his own expense. Guenzburg admonished An-sky and provided him with an additional2,ooo rubles in excess of the allocated sum. But even Guenzburg insistently dissuaded An-sky from the idea of expanding his

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Petrovsky-Shtern expedition to Poland and Lithuania, on the grounds of insurmountable financial difficulties. 32 One's admiration for the amazing achievements of An-sky's expedition must be compared with An-sky's personal expectations. The expedition was without doubt a success. The number of artifacts, documents, manuscripts, pictures, and music amassed during the expedition, known today as An-sky's, not Guenzburg's, was astonishing. 33 Scholars identified and sorted everything for years afterward. To this day, the work is unfinished. However, there was no discussion among the leading contemporary scholars of the permanent expedition that An-sky envisioned. Galicia, Lithuania, Belorussia, Southern Ukraine, and Poland, geographically five-sixths of the East European Jewish settlement, remained unexplored. Despite An-sky's tremendous breakthrough in three central provinces of the Pale-Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev-nobody expressed any interest in the continuation of the expedition to the rest of the Pale and the Polish kingdom. The "indifference" of those surrounding An-sky, sarcastically cited by Guenzburg, gained the upper hand. An-sky's attempt to reconcile the two worlds of Russian Jewsthose in the Pale with those in the capitals-and to make them interact with each other in the framework of the expedition, was a failure. Too self-absorbed, the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia rejected An-sky's remedy. It was too late to employ Jewish folklore as a palliative against irreversible assimilation. Misunderstood by his colleagues and abandoned by his compatriots, An-sky was already curtailing his expedition when the crisis of World War I disrupted it for good. Aware of his failure to reconcile witl1 his milieu, An-sky resorted to yet another measure to come to terms with his Jewishness.

Act Three: Hasidism The earliest Russian- Jewish writers, champions of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) such as Osip Rabinovich (1818-69) or Grigorii Bogrov (1825-85), denounced Hasidim as the fundamental cause of Jewish backwardness, illiteracy, and seclusion. Due to many a denunciation ofHasidism in the Russian maskilic press, at the turn of the twen-

An-sky and the Paradigm of No Return

tieth century such notions as tsadik (spiritual leader) came to signify the worst features of the Jewish communities in the Pale of Settlement-their scorn of secular knowledge, their medieval superstitions, and their resistance to integration into Russian culture. The sharp criticism if not denigration of the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism in the writings of enlightened German intellectuals ofWissenschaft des Judentums poured even more oil onto the fire. No wonder that, inn volumes of his pioneering History of the Jews, Heinrich Graetz (1817-91) devoted only a few scornful paragraphs to Hasidism before abandoning the issue altogether. For enlightened Russian Jews (who in this case followed the German maskilim), Hasidism simply did not exist as part of contemporary Jewish spirituality. The anti-Hasidic bias of liberal-minded Russian Jews was so powerful that Dubnow, the founder of Russian-Jewish historiography and the author of the groundbreaking History of Hasidism, moderately praised the eighteenth-century founders of the movement yet entirely dismissed nineteenth-century Hasidism as lacking in spiritual innovation, socially oppressive, and dull. Fifty years after Rabinovich's devastating portrayal of the stupidity and covetousness of Hasidic leadership, Isaac Babel furnished a "donkey's burial" to Hasidism in his Red Cavalry (Konarmiia). Indeed, An-sky's perception ofHasidism differed from the modernist version of Babel and from the positivist version of Russian-Jewish enlighteners. There is no doubt that An -sky drew heavily on Peretz, who discovered in Hasidism an auld lang syne source for his neoRomantic inspiration. Both Maurice Maeterlinck, who introduced into European drama the quest for mysticism, and Ibsen, whose return to national folklore became the exemplar for many fin-de-siecle playwrights, profoundly influenced An-sky's perception of Hasidism. But it was An-sky who reimagined Hasidism as the only non-blurred source of Jewish culture that still nurtured idiosyncratic modes of thinking, folklore, ethics, music, applied arts, and, indeed, literature. Hasidism became for An-sky not just a literary theme or an exotic motif. He strongly disagreed with Dubnow in regard to the spiritual values of nineteenth-century Hasidism. An-sky turned Hasidism into a universal myth, in whose midst he envisioned himself as its rhapsodist, harbinger, and champion.

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Petrovsky-Shtern Throughout his 1910-13 notes, An-sky highlights the consolidating and revolutionary, not schismatic and destructive, features of Hasidism. 34 Hasidism becomes for him the utmost expression of his notion of narod, the people. 35 Neither more-or-less assimilated Jewish intellectuals nor Russian-speaking Jews who still cleaved to the tradition represented the core of the Jewish people; rather, pre-Haskalah, lateeighteenth-century-type Hasidim from Volhynia, Podolia, and Galicia embodied the full-fledged idea of the Jewish people. An-sky argued that Hasidism was a miracle that saved Jews from cultural decadence after the Khmielnitsky massacres of the mid-seventeenth century. In one of An-sky's letters to Zhitlowsky, he stressed the crucial role ofHasidism in the context of the human struggle for liberty. He wrote that romantic themes of political liberation pervading European literature were paralleled by motifs of spiritual liberation typical of Hasidic literature and folklore. "Instead of knights liberating prisoners, [we have] Hasidic poetry [that emphasizes] the liberation of souls from Hell or from an evil power." 36 In addition, An-sky relied on Hasidism as a powerful counterbalance to the corrupted reality of European decadence. Only Hasidism was able to redeem Jewish culture from the evil spirit of relativism and cynicism. Influenced by Nietzschean symbolism, An -sky compared the Hasidic behavioral pattern to the elan vital, to fire, to outbursts of passion and self-sacrifice-in a word, to revolution. 37 In the 1900s, Hasidic folklore and genuine Jewish culture became for An-sky synonymous. His classic article "Jewish Folk Art," containing his call to launch Jewish ethnography, pointed out two major parts ofJewish popular culture: a biblical and a Hasidic legacy. 38 An-sky's itinerary led him back to Hasidism. First, he cited the primogeneity of Hasidic folklore in Jewish popular culture, and, second, he planned to rescue the Hasidic legacy from oblivion by making it a priority of his expedition. While tracing the route, methods, and main goals of his expedition to the Pale of Settlement, An-sky spared no effort to prove his point to Russian-Jewish intellectuals who disagreed with him on this issue. 39 In 1912, An-sky started his ethnographic expedition in Ruzhin, the birthplace oflsrael Friedman, the famous Ruzhiner tsadik. Rovno, Ostrog, Zaslavl (lziaslav), Miropol, Ostropol, Staro-Konstantinov, Polonnoe, Slavuta, and Novograd-Volynskii, towns with an overwhelmingly

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Hasidic population and with authoritative Hasidic rabbis, followed immediately thereafter. An-sky assigned Iuly Engel (1868-1927), a well-known Jewish composer, to record Hasidic nigunim (melodies). Shlomo Yudovin (1892-1954 ), An -sky's nephew and a prominent Jewish artist, copied traditional Jewish ornaments while An-sky himself began recording Hasidic tales. Among the manuscripts he collected for his planned Jewish museum were Hasidic pinkasim (communal records) containing unique data on such outstanding Hasidic masters as Abraham Yehoshua Heschel (the Apter Rebbe) 40 and David Twersky (the Talner Reb be), 41 or semi-legendary figures like Menahem Mendel of Bar (the Maggid of Bar), 42 one of the closest associates of the Baal ShemTov. However, An-sky's Hasidic coin had another side. It turned out that Hasidism was far from being an immaculate source of spiritual enthusiasm. It became corrupted from without by Russians and from within by Jews. First, the Russian political imagination maliciously distorted Hasidism. While An -sky was still preparing the trial expedition, many Jewish terms, appropriated by Russian antisemitic journalists and identified as "Hasidic," suddenly became notoriously popular among Russian readership. Largely, this was the result of the notorious Beilis trial (19U-13), based on a false blood libel accusation. The trial started in Kiev, where An-sky's expedition had its headquarters and where Ansky stored the collected artifacts and received cables with financial aid from Guenzburg. The trial of the innocent Menahem-Mendel Beilis (1874-1934-), accused of the ritual murder of a Christian boy, Andrei Iushchinsky, brought to life a wealth of Hebrew words and expressions that inundated the Russian conservative and right-wing press. Tsadik, Hasid, matsa, and talmud-torah entered dozens of Russian-language newspapers, with mostly pejorative connotations. Tsadikim (Hasidic leaders), they argued, instructed Jews how to employ kabbalistic symbols to extract the blood of Christian boys; the talmud-torah served as the place where this secret knowledge was disseminated; matza was the final product made from ritual murder. Hasidism, the Jewish movement least familiar to Russian journalists, got the lion's share of accusations. In 1913, any person named Shneersohn became so suspect that he faced arrest and accusation of ritual

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murder even if he was merely a Russian of German origin and not a relative of the Habad-Lubavitch Hasidic leader. 43 In one of his articles written during the trial, An-sky mentioned that Russian right-wing Duma deputies (initially, Georgy Zamyslovsky and Aleksei Shmakov) tried to convince the Duma that Beilis was very familiar with Rebbe Shneersohn's teaching. According to An-sky's notes, it was Hasidism and accusations against Hasidim that ignited his specific interest in the Beilis trial. Yet an Emile Zola-like paccuse protest was too narrow and too biased a pattern for An-sky. Instead of defending Beilis, An-sky raised his voice to defend Hasidism. For this purpose he broke away from his expedition and attended the Beilis trial. Simultaneously, he collected documents and prepared historical surveys on blood libel for Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko (I853-I92I), an outstanding Russian democratic-minded writer and journalist whose passionate reports of the trial condemned the prosecution. Among these surveys was An-sky's article entitled "Blood Libel Accusations in Jewish Folk Art," published in the January 1912 issue of Russkoe bogatstvo (Russian Wealth). 44 In addition, An-sky took Shivhei ha-Besht (In Praise of the Besht), a Hasidic source par excellence, and rendered into Russian three blood libel cases depicted in it. 45 Finally, An-sky's drama The Dybbuk was a most powerful attempt to defend Hasidism against the vitriolic accusations of Russian conservative journalism. At first glance, An-sky's choice of a Hasidic theme does not seem to be more courageous than the attempts of Ibsen and William Butler Yeats to resurrect either Scandinavian folklore or Irish myths. Nor was An-sky's choice a novelty within the Jewish context, because Martin Buber had already begun to coin his literary versions of Hasidic legends about such Hasidic masters as Rabbi Nakhman of Bratslav and the Besht. However, myths, legends, and folklore in the case oflbsen and Yeats were an indispensable neo-Romantic exoticism, whereas for Ansky (more than for Buber) it was also an ethical choice. At the beginning of the twentieth century in Russia, it could not be otherwise. Hasidism, as we have seen, had turned into a buzzword with pejorative connotations in Russian conservative discourse. In addition, assimilated Russian Jewish intellectuals, even those who (like Dubnow or Samuel Horodetsky) respected early Hasidic masters, expressed an overt disdain for

An-sky and the Paradigm of No Return

contemporary Hasidism, denied its spiritual validity, and considered it a major threat to a successful Russian-Jewish interaction. Hence, An-sky's choice of a Hasidic plot has to be seen as a passionate defense ofHasidism, the despised Jewish movement, against negligence, scorn, and denigration. It is against this anti- Hasidic backdrop that one should assess An -sky's bold choice-particularly given his decision to write The Dybbuk in Russian, predominantly for Russian readers, and perhaps with the ambitious idea to see it produced at Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theater. Hasidic protagonists, legends, themes, and even melodies embedded in a plot ofJewish mystery and presented to a Russian spectator would be able to fight anti- Hasidic prejudice by affirming the kinship of Hasidic lore with Russian folklore, Russian symbolism, and Russian messtamsm. But An-sky's effort was doomed from the outset. His Hasidism, with its revolutionary spiritualism, messianic strivings, and redemptive fire, could withstand attacks from without but could not safeguard itself from the inner enemy. The latter was represented by the dybbuks offalse messianism, false revolution, and false Hasidism. These dybbuks were ubiquitous and destructive. Revolution could not triumph because its harbingers, like Evno Azef, a notorious double-agent and terrorist, had been caught playing in a pseudo-revolutionary masquerade, full of bigotry and hypocrisy stronger and more attractive than revolution itself. By the same token, Hasidism did not triumph because it was itself possessed by the dybbuk of Sabbatianism, a pseudo-messianic mystical movement of the late seventeenth century-the best example of pseudo-messianism An-sky had at hand. 46 The Miropoler rebbe in The Dybbuk faces a much more difficult task than most of the rabbis in folklore. The case he confronts is not just a dybbuk who has entered a girl's body to claim the property he was denied. Khonen's dybbuk is special because Khonen informs his vision oflife and death with a pronounced shade of Sabbatianism. Khonen presents a Sabbatian interpretation of empiric reality, to a great extent informed by old and new Jewish heterodoxical doctrines going back to gnostic heresy. As in gnosticism, in Khonen's imagination ethical values have become corrupt, the powers of the divine have diminished, the world has gone from bad to worse, and evil is steadily growingY It is in the eyes of Sabbatianism that the

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Petrovsky-Shtern generations "grow weaker and weaker and their sins more monstrousand the righteous tsadikim are scarcer and scarcer." For Khonen, as for the Sabbatians, Judaism consists of mystical experiences, not religious commandments. Sabbatianism presents Kabbalah as a higher authority than the Talmud. These are Khonen's words: The Talmud is cold and dry ... the commentaries are cold and dry. The Talmud is profound, it is sublime, but it shackles you to the earth, it keeps you from soaring to the heights. (Ecstatically) And Kabbalah! Kabbalah tears the soul from its earthly bonds! It lifts man to the highest spheres and opens up the heavens so that he can see inside. 48 Khonen walks the slippery slope that separates Sabbatianism from Jewish mysticism without formally revealing his message. But the moment he touches upon the issue of sexuality, he reveals his Sabbatian agenda, mentioning two profound Sabbatian issues: holiness in sin, and the transformation of the most vile sin into the greatest holiness. 49 He is so articulate that his words shock Henekh, his interlocutor ("Holiness in sin? Where did you get such an idea?"). Thus, the dybbuk ofKhonen, imbued with a Sabbatian Weltanschauung, turns out to be stronger than all the efforts of the great tsadikim put together. This dramatic depiction of the human ability to banish the evil embodied in the dybbuk could have come to An-sky during his expedition to Volhynia and Podolia. The manuscript Sefer ha-heshek (The Book of Desire), apparently uncovered by An-sky during the expedition and preserved as part of his collection, tells the story of a baal shem who called himself Hillel and who was a pre-Beshtian Hasid, a kabbalist, and a vagabond healer, active in Volhynia and Podolia between 1732 and 1740, who sometimes failed to exorcise demons. 50 Hillel's Sefer ha-heshek was a kind of encyclopedia of popular medicine and a guide to exorcising evil spirits. It contained incantations and condemnations against dybbuks, offering a variety of curses for particularly difficult cases. It provided dozens of examples of how exorcism should be performed, how large the assisting congregation should be, how many Torah scrolls are required, and so forth. Sometimes it spelled out the entire procedure of exorcism, including the interrogation of the spirit, its identification, and the condemnation of the universal powers of evil embodied in him.

An-sky and the Paradigm of No Return Unlike the popular stories of tsadikim whose attempts to banish dybbuks were usually successfUl, Sefer ha-heshek furnished examples offailures, as in the crucial episode of The Dybbuk. For example, the following dialogue between the baal shem and the dybbuk might have served as one of the sources for An-sky's drama: Once with the help of God I came across a dreadful incident in the country ofVolhynia in the town of Ostroh where the demon of idolworshippers appropriated the soul of a woman from the same town. I was not able to perform [against the dybbuk] for several days. Iresorted to great oaths in the synagogue with the Torah scroll and the people and holy witnesses. And the spirit answered me trom the body of that woman (may God protect us): "You are the Rabbi who has been working tor six days already, you pronounced oaths over me and tried to exorcise me using holy names. However, you could not do anything [shum pe)ulah] to me at all, although you have somewhat weakened the evil powers that surround my soul, and damaged my members, sinews, and bones. This is not the place that permits you to utilize the holy names, because there is a place of filth next to this holy synagogue. So if you would like to complete this work, you should go together with me and try in a different place. Only with seven Torah scrolls and with seven boys who have not sinned up till now or with seven-or more-proper men [will you be able to perform]. The same day when they pronounce oaths, let them go with you to the ritual bath, pray [ daven] together with you, and after that, with the help of G-d, you will succeed and I will go out of the body of this woman. The only thing I do not know is whether I will leave her body without her soul or with it." 51 This episode emphasizes the knowledge and the power of the dybbuk, who is more aware of the secrets of healing and of the exorcising operation than the baal shem himself. Though not directly linked to the plot of The Dybbuk, this and other episodes from the same manuscript could have supported An-sky's perception of the decaying spiritual power ofHasidim.s 2 However, rival contemporary authors, those real-life dybbuks, appropriated the same genre in which An-sky worked. For example, Sabbatai Sevi, a play by Sholem Asch, "imitator of fashionable issues,"

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Petrovsky-Shtern particularly irritated the author of The Dybbuk. 53 By acknowledging the failure of Hasidism to cope with the dybbuk at the end of his drama, An-sky seemed to argue that schism was more powerful than integrity, Sabbatianism was stronger than Hasidism, and destructive two-faced ethics were more influential than spiritual wholeness. 54 An-sky's tragic scene in The Dybbuk signified that his neo-Romantic utopia based on Hasidic premises was no longer possible. 5 5 Apparently, An-sky himself recognized the weakness of Hasidism as an existential spiritual basis: it was no accident that Guenzburg, seemingly the first reader of The Dybbuk, wrote that he, as a reader, did not believe in An-sky's tsadik, whose focal communal role and self-confidence were far from evident. 5 6 Ansky returned to Hasidism as if to testify that it was no longer a redeeming haven for the Jewish intellectual. It was "too late" to re-enact it.

Conclusion An-sky's failure to construct his Jewish identity around a new family, a new milieu, and a new ideology should by no means prevent us from seeing the importance of his effort. An-sky's last years in Russia represent a dramatic rift between his reinvented identity and the old realities of Russian-Jewish life. In addition, three aspects of An-sky's noreturn shed new light on The Dybbuk, An-sky's famous drama whose success and longevity far exceed its literary merits. The Dybbuk became a Jewish drama par excellence, included in anthologies of the best European dramas after Shakespeare, because of its almost Kafkaesque-like power of prophecy. When Bolshevism, that incipient dybbuk of the Russian Revolution, came to power, An-sky could not but join the first ranks of mass protest against the Bolshevik coup .57 In this sense, Ansky's drama acquires an important feature: it seems to be a prophecy of the Coming of the Dybbuk, the major character and political reality of the new century. An-sky's attempt to exorcise it from his personal life, his environment, and his ideological utopia, however futile, helps modern Jewish intellectuals identify with his experience and reinvent themselves on the crossroads of tradition and modernity.

Five Spiritual and Physical Strength in

An -sky's Literary Imagination Brian Horowitz

The zigzag trajectory of An-sky's life has propelled scholars to view him as plagued with paradoxes. One cause for this perception was his shifts in ideology. Before 1905 he defended armed revolution, then turned to pacifism and folklore studies, and then returned to support revolution. It can be shown, however, that these apparent swings, rather than signs of eccentric indecision, reflected An-sky's coordination with mainstream thinking in Russian and Russian- Jewish society. In particular, An-sky was deeply affected by the Revolution of1905 and the ideological changes that occurred following it. His literary works, civic activism, and folklore expeditions all reflected the rejection of revolution that became part of the general Weltanschauung of Russian society after 1905. Similarly, An-sky's change to support revolution and militancy during World War I and particularly in 1917 linked him with a society that was equally infected by a sharp turn toward aggression. 1 Despite the external changes in his life, a persisting feature of Ansky's works was the striving for Utopia. An-sky's work in the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries Party (PSR) and his Jewish ethnographical studies were paradoxically motivated by a single fundamental desire to transform the world. Even when he rejected revolution as the most effective means to achieve Utopia, An-sky proposed cultural projects that nevertheless encouraged the struggle for change. In fact, although his folklore studies may seem apolitical, in his treatment he did not just describe (as a scholar would) but attempted to give the Jews a new Torah. This new Torah was supposed to bring about a reconciliation of Orthodox and secular Jews and transform Jewish society. 2

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Horowitz Another characteristic of An-sky's life and works, especially after 1905, was his attempt to bring Russians and Jews closer to each other.

He claimed that their political interests and spiritual origins paralleled one another and that they were both "chosen" peoples. Trying to synthesize elements from the Jewish and the Russian traditions, An-sky wrote stories, practiced journalism, and engaged in political projects that benefited both Russians and Jews. To understand An-sky's unique synthesis of Russian and Jewish elements, I use as a key marker An-sky's famous essay "Jewish Folk Art" (Evreiskoe narodnoe tvorchestvo, r9o8). 3 Not only was this article one of the most innovative and weighty of all his contributions to a modern conception of Ashkenazi Jewish culture but it also represented a pivotal turn in An-sky's evolution. Paradoxically, "Jewish Folk Art" provides unlikely support for the claim that An-sky sought a Russian- Jewish synthesis, even though in that essay he drew a vivid distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish cultures. An-sky argued that, as opposed to Christian nations that had their origins in paganism and subsequently praised military prowess, the Jews were different. Their folklore, he contended, reflected the spiritual origins of Jewish culture. Established on the grounds of ethical monotheism, the Jewish religion encouraged the Jewish people to disregard, even to scorn, military might. According to An-sky, the Jews were exceptional as compared with all other nations because they possessed exclusively spiritual values. Concentrating on Torah, Jews devoted their lives to study, moral contemplation, and theological inquiry. In theory, they ignored the external aspects oflife and mined the riches of their own internal depths, which found tangible form in folk creations: legends, plays, songs, jokes, and religious artifacts. In "Jewish Folk Art" An-sky offered more than merely an expression in modern form of ideas that traditional Jews had been saying about themselves for centuries. Rather, by viewing the life of shtetl Judaism as the source of Jewish creativity, An-sky expressed some important tenets of Diaspora Jewish nationalism. Traditional Jews were not fanatics, inclined to isolation, ignorance, and poverty, but, by seeking spiritual as opposed to material riches, they composed a unique, contemplative religious-ethnic nation. And the Jews were a genuine nation

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with its own folk culture-the expression of the nation's experience during its long journey to the present. To understand how "Jewish Folk Art" reflects An-sky's conception of synthesis, we should examine two critical themes that run through the essay and reflect a departure from An-sky's earlier worldview: his idealization of physical weakness, and his positive reevaluation of traditional Jewry. For example, only three years before, during the Revolution of 1905, An-sky vaunted physical strength. As a leader of Russia's most important revolutionary party, An-sky insisted that armed struggle offered the sole means of removing the tsar and bringing about a better society. Similarly, after 1905 in both his Russian and his Jewish writings, An-sky reached out to groups he had either ignored or condemned earlier. In his civic activism and fiction regarding Jewish life, he demonstrated his respect for the idea of klal yisroel, a love for all groups in Jewish society. Indeed, in contrast to previous criticism of traditional Jewry, now he extolled traditional Jewish texts, including the Bible, Talmud, and Hasidic folktales and songs. In his Russian writings he did something similar, attempting to reach out to groups in Russian society that he had ignored earlier, such as the bourgeois intelligentsia.

To understand An-sky's evolution, it is necessary to perceive his desire for synthesis. 4 Although his essays on the Russian peasant reader, written in the early 189os, demonstrate his early association with Russian populism, An-sky remained committed to the Russian radical movement even in the years when he became active as a Jewish nationalist. For example, in 1907 An -sky published an anthology entitled What Is Anarchism? (Chto takoe anarkhizm) in which he made available for the Russian reader selections from the writings of William Godwin, P. J. Proudhon, Max Sterner, Mikhail Bakunin, Petr Kropotkin, and Lev Tolstoy. 5 In 1909 he compiled Life Is Everywhere (Vsiudu zhizn'), a volume of parables, stories, and poems by Tolstoy, Vladimir Korolenko, Vsevolod Garshin, and Nikolai Nekrasov that were meant to edify the Russian lower classes. 6 Furthermore, in 1914, at perhaps the high point of his participation in Jewish national culture, An-sky published a

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collection of articles on the Russian peasant reader with the new title The Folk and the Book (Narod i kniga)? Because An -sky was active in Russian intellectual life during the period of his main contributions to Jewish culture, one might consider the degree to which the Russian context influenced his conceptions of the Jewish people. To understand how An-sky arrived at his idea of Jewish spiritual power and his reassessment of the relations between traditional and modern Jews, we have to consider the Revolution of 1905 as a catalyst that drastically changed An-sky's worldview. Like many Russian radicals, An-sky reexamined his ideological principles following the failure of the Revolution. During 1905 An -sky had supported the PSR, even entering in early 1906 into a heated polemic on the pages of the Jewish newspaper Voskhod with the Jewish historian and leader of the Folkspartei, Simon Dubnow. Taking a strictly nationalist perspective, Dubnow argued that, during the pogroms that started in October, the Jews were attacked solely because of their status as Jews and not as revolutionaries. 8 As a result, by siding with the Revolution, by renouncing national interests, the Jews were akin to "slaves in revolution." Aiming to discredit the Jewish revolutionaries with this term, Dubnow advocated a defense of national interests, which supersede class identity. In response An -sky attacked Dubnow, claiming that the Jews had their best chance for liberation by joining with Russian radical parties to achieve the overthrow of tsarism. At that time An-sky maintained the theoretical validity of the class struggle and believed it should be applied to Jewish society. 9 The failure of the Revolution of 1905 was a traumatic experience for revolutionaries. The lack of will to continue the struggle among both workers and peasants after the announcement of the October Manifesto in 1905 pointed to a tragic disparity between dream and reality. The peasantry, it turned out, was not a revolutionary element in society but, for the most part, a conservative stratum loyal to the tsar. As a result of the failure of the Revolution, many Russian intellectuals repudiated their commitment to radicalism and sought more promising avenues for their political energy, such as support for the Duma and participation in the growing civil society. Some even made peace with the tsarist government itself. The example of Petr Struve is especially

An-sky's Literary Imagination revealing in this regard: he put aside the revolutionary goals of the liberation movement, which he led, to become a major activist in the Kadet (Constitutional Democratic) Party. 10 Another monument to the change in viewpoint is Landmarks (Vekhi; 1909 ), a volume that sold out five printings in a year. In that slim tome, seven Russian writers addressed the revolutionaries, asking them to seek more profound avenues for their energies, namely the gradual education of society as a whole and deeper spiritual understanding of the self.U An -sky was politically to the left of the writers of Landmarks, but he too drew similar lessons from the failed Revolution. In What Is Anarchism?, An-sky added a postscript in which he described his own views on political action. Although he was not a member of any anarchist syndicates, he began to see the logic of such thinkers as Tolstoy that an immediate and broad revolution was not the answer. Instead, An-sky located the site of revolutionary change in the individual. Comparing the power of education to the effect of microbes that can produce enormous change in society, An-sky wrote: [J]ust as microbes invisible to the naked eye destroy the quiet course of life in entire countries, so too the ideas of anarchism little by little gain possession of minds, enter into an irreconcilable struggle with thousand-year-old prejudices and finally lead humanity to the true path of historical development. This development, an improvement in social forms, will occur in connection with the inexorable amelioration [of reality] for the individual's own benefit. 12 Previously convinced of the efficacy of revolution, by 1907 An-sky had changed his mind. Instead of an immediate political upheaval on the horizon, An-sky put his faith in the gradual political maturation of individuals who would inexorably bring about the transformation of society. Anarchy, working like powerful microbes, held the answer to political change, but results would appear only among future generations. The volume Life Is Everywhere had a similar purpose. Whereas the ultimate goal was to radicalize the reader, the selected parables and stores were intended to bring about the individual's gradual change in consciousness. For many Russian and Jewish intellectuals, the idea of power began to have negative associations after 1905. Mter all, physical might had

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Horowitz put down the revolution and had shown that might is stronger than right. Furthermore, after the defeat, it was now better to speak about the moral superiority of society. But the rejection of revolution did imply a positive conception of society. Instead of basing his hope on a war between classes, An-sky's new conception involved the healing of society and a belief in the harmonious unity of its members for the good of the whole. These ideas of gradual improvement reflect a new sympathy with society as a whole that surpasses An-sky's previous fixation on the struggle of the workers and peasants led by the revolutionary intelligentsia.

* In setting off in a new direction, An -sky was in good company among his Jewish colleagues. A glance at other Jewish Diaspora nationalists of the time shows that Dubnow, Henrik Sliozberg, Maksim Vinaver, and Alexander Braudo were also deeply skeptical of military power after 1905. In his writings about 1905, Vinaver speaks of the "moral struggle" to fight the closing of the First Duma on July 8, 1906, a struggle that he hoped the Vyborg Declaration would introduce. 13 Certainly scholars are aware of this change in attitudes. But perhaps less known is the fact that such a conception of power influenced the kind ofJewish historical and folkloric research that took place in pre-World War I Russia. If we take a look at Perezhitoe (Experience), the four volumes issued in St. Petersburg between 1909 and 1913 devoted to historical studies of Ashkenazi Jewish society, in which An-sky's "Jewish Folk Art" originally appeared and on whose board of editors he sat, we see to a certain degree a focus on subjects that feature powerless Jews. In these volumes one finds a surprising interest in Jewish passivity. We encounter articles on the struggle with the government concerning Jewish dress by Iuly Gessen and an article on the folk songs about the slaughter ofJews by Cossacks in 1648. We also find a celebration of earlier, supposedly ineffectual, sources ofJewish power, such as the Shtadlanut14 in Sliozberg's article on Baron Horace Guenzburg and An-sky's own treatment of the legend of the Mstislav Affair of1843-44. The title of the work metaphorically underlines the editors' emphasis on offering studies of what today we would call a history of daily life,

An-sky's Literary Imagination rather than the traditional subjects of historical investigation such as politics, law, and military events. For example, in the introduction to the third volume, the editors wrote, "In the combination of various sources and facts on which the study of the past is based, there are no materials that are bereft of decisive meaning; every line, however unimportant it might seem, every outline, however insignificant, has value in the general picture of the reconstructed [ vossozdavaemoe] past." 15 History, as the editors envisioned it, consisted of the subtle, quotidian, and seemingly hidden and insignificant-which was itself the experience of a Jew in Russia. In his treatment of the altercation in 1843 between the Jews of Mstislav and Russian soldiers, in which a Russian was killed, An-sky chose to highlight the version of the legend that reflects admiration for Tsar Nicholas I. An-sky related how the Jews ofMstislav sent a wealthy representative, Itsele Monastyrshchiner, to St. Petersburg to win a reprieve from the tsar's harsh punishment. With the help of a Jewish magnate in the capital, Itsele gains audience with the crown prince. Unnerved by fear and intense reverence, he faints. Waking up unconscious later, Itsele is told that he has been successful in saving the Jews of Mstislav because his fainting was taken as a sign of sincere devotion, and it convinced the tsar of the Jews' innocence. In telling the story, An-sky gave an idealized, colorful treatment of royal majesty. Led into a large hall, Itsele is waiting for the prince with the rabbi of St. Petersburg: The rabbi nodded his head in confirmation. Itsele also began to read prayers of mercy, "Confession" [vidui] .16 And he had barely finished his confession when the door immediately opened. And behind this door, on the other side in the next room, another door opened and then further a third door, and a fourth. And altogether twenty doors opened one after another. And at every door two soldiers stood with their swords exposed. And when the twentieth door opened, the crown prince himself appeared. He was dressed from head to toot in a golden robe, a crown on his head, and his whole figure shone. And the crown prince walked with a measured step through the long, long row of rooms, approaching the hall where Itsele and the rabbi stood. At first he seemed small, but as he approached he became

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Horowitz larger and larger, taller and taller, more and more terrible. "Reb Itsele! He doesn't touch the ground .... " Itsele suddenly heard the rabbi's whisper. And he himself saw that the crown prince was walking, his feet not touching the ground. Itsele's heart froze, his eyes turned dark. And the prince moved closer, closer, closer. 17 An-sky transformed his scholarly article into an opportunity to recount the entire story, transposing into Russian the intonation and structure of an authentic Yiddish folktale. He used the literary devices typical of folktales: the excessive number of doors and rooms, twenty in all; word repetitions (such as "dlinnyi-dlinnyi riad" [long-long row]; repetitive constructions (such as "stanovilsia vse bol'she, vse vyshe, vse groznec" [larger, taller, more terrible]; and the use of"i" (And) at the beginning of every sentence. His artistic rendition is surprising, because this version confirms the Romanovs' divine legitimacy-they walk on airand extends particular praise to Nicholas I for withdrawing his evil edict. Recall that this same Nicholas was involved in the evil recruitments of cantonists; Jewish boys as young as nine and ten were taken from their homes to serve in the army for often more than 25 years.

* In "Jewish Folk Art" An-sky arrived at a new conception of traditional Jewry. His new view reflected a commitment to all the Jewish people, religious and secular, regardless of class. This new view can be seen in both his fiction and his civic activism. In 1908, for example, An-sky became a strong advocate ofJewish solidarity, revealing his perspective on the question of a Jewish national language. At a time of heated battles among Yiddishists, Zionists, and integrationists, and just a few months after the Chernowitz language conference in which Yiddish was acknowledged as "an" official Jewish language along with Hebrew, An -sky defended trilingualism. At one of the first meetings of the newly established Jewish Literary Society in St. Petersburg, An-sky demanded equal status for Jewish literature written in Hebrew, Yiddish, or Russian. According to Dubnow, this position actually caused quite a scandal, and the society had to hold a series of evening debates on the reasons to include Russian. 18 An-sky's positive attitude toward traditional Jewry

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in "Jewish Folk Art" had an echo in his folklore studies, especially his recounting of Hasidic legends. 19 This new esteem, however, contrasted with An-sky's earlier position, especially as it was expressed in his fiction, which had been overwhelmingly negative. Having broken with traditional Jewry early in his life, his fictional sketches of Jewish life in Russia reflected ambivalence toward traditional Jews. In an early story from 1892, "Mendel the Turk" (Mendel Turk), An-sky featured a young enlightened Jew's perceptions ofshtetllife in the period of the Russian-Turkish War. The first-person narrator paints the Hasidic world in romantic hues, but the character of the Hasid Mendel is depicted in all its shortcomings. Mendel is shown as superstitious and intolerant. Although he has no reliable information, Mendel uses the Hasidic method of"gemetria" to predict that the Russians will lose the war. Furthermore, Mendel is unkind, refusing to greet the narrator in public because he has contempt for an apikoyres ( religious heretic). Because the narrator admires and feels repulsion toward pious Jews, the reader is left undecided about the author's judgment. Similarly, in works from the first decade of the nineteenth century, such as "First Breach: From the 187os" (Pervaia bresh': Iz epokhi 70-x godov; 1903) or "Behind a Mask: A Story of a Young Maskil" (Pod Maskoi: Rasskaz molodogo maskila; 1909 ), the negative depiction of traditional Jews has its mirror image in the moral lassitude of enlightened Jews. By criticizing both groups, An-sky emphasized the difficult historical circumstances that did not permit the health and well-being of Russia's Jews either in rigid traditional communities or the circles of militant secularists. Although his novel Pioneers (Pionery; 1905) has a slightly different emphasis-the maskilim in that novel are depicted in far more positive colors-ambivalence toward traditional Jewry remains. The progressive maskilim, represented by the character of Mirkin, remember with affection their earlier experiences as students of Talmud in kheyder and synagogue study rooms, but they nevertheless struggle against traditional Jews, considering them a scourge they must defeat. In his fiction even after 1905, for example in "Behind a Mask," Ansky's negative treatment of traditional Jewry has a parallel in his am-

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Horowitz bivalence regarding young Jewish adherents of the Haskalah. It is possible, therefore, to interpret his criticism ofJewish traditional figures as something other than a blanket condemnation of extreme religious ideology and behavior. An-sky condemned the cleft between the traditional and secular Jews and perhaps even before 1905 lamented this state of affairs. Such an interpretation of the paradoxes in viewpoint allows us to see even in An -sky's early fiction a presentiment of the reconciliation of traditional and secular Jews that he would depict later. In fact, An-sky depicted such a reconciliation in On a New Course (V novom rusk; 1906), the novel that one critic has called a "snapshot of the Revolution of 1905." 20 In that work An-sky underscored the moral and political unity of traditional Jews and their radical children. A monologue by a pious Torah scribe, the father of a member of the Bund's politburo, reflects the new solidarity: Three months ago a man from Gamel was here. He recounted how the Christians had attacked the Jews and wanted to brutalize and slaughter everyone, men, women, and children, just as in Kishinevbut God the all-merciful saved us. And the man told us that young Jews interceded ... from among those they say are not Jews, the apostates, those who have lost the divine spark.... They interceded and saved the entire Jewish community from destruction, defended women and children, and many of these youths died a cruel death .... For forty whole years I copied the scrolls of the Torah, I copied as God ordered, with trepidation, repentance, and pious thoughts. Each time, before setting the name of God on the parchment, I washed in the "mikvah" (ritual bath). During my life, without compromising as much as possible, I fulfilled all the commands exactly, but the Lord did not honor me with the heroic deed of praising His name ... the defense of his scrolls! But He honored them .... I was a scribe my entire life but did not inscribe anything in the great book. But they, in a single moment ... [were] inscribed. 21 Although the novel ends on a negative note-a group of Cossacks rides into the town to put down the uprising-the Jews have attained a huge internal victory. They have soldered the cleft between secular intellectuals and pious traditionalists that had opened with the arrival of the Haskalah at the start of the nineteenth century. By depicting

An-sky's Literary Imagination the ideological unity between generations, An-sky emphasized the reconciliation of families and, by analogy, the entire nation under the leadership of the Bund -that is, politically radical Jewish nationalists. Although in real life An-sky resisted joining the Bund, remaining in the PSR, he admired the Bund's national program. Therefore, he did not hesitate to write two songs for the Bund, "Di shvue" (The Oath) and "Tsum Bund" (To the Bund); the former became its anthem. Nevertheless, as a disciple of Petr Lavrov and loyal to the idea of the role of the conscious intellectual in history, An -sky could not accept the Bund's Marxism, especially the idea that the revolutionary struggle followed impersonallaws. 22 Instead of joining the Bund, An-sky hoped, albeit unsuccessfully, to create a Jewish national group within the PSR. 23 His positive attitude toward traditional Jewry-visualized in his depiction of harmony between traditional and secular Jews-reflected a desire to heal wounds caused by decades of antagonism. Just as the failure of the Revolution of 1905 led An -sky to see the need to reach out to larger groups in Russian society, so too he realized that the health of Jewish society depended on full social cohesion and solidarity. In his memoirs, Dubnow described the process by which An-sky shifted his viewpoint toward Jewish nationalism. Reflecting years later on their polemic in 1906, Dubnow wrote: During an argument An-sky confessed to me that, when reading several parts of my article, he was touched to tears, but still he was going to challenge me in Voskhod, especially with regard to the chapter "Slavery in Revolution." This chapter apparently wounded him as a member of the Russian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries. But already then I noticed that in An-sky's soul the Jewish revolutionary spirit [evreiskii revoliutsionizm] was struggling with the Russian. In general he had more of a political temperament than a fixed ideology; in a few years he entered our "Folkspartei," and later drew closer to Zionism. 24 An-sky's shift in thinking emerged from factors other than just his psychological makeup; he also encountered actual events and people that affected his worldview. Given a position in 1906 as a journalist tor the new PSR newspaper, Syn otechestva (The Son of the Fatherland), An-sky had a free assignment. He could travel where he wanted and write about what he wanted. As one might imagine, he spent a good

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Horowitz deal of time in areas with a high concentration of Jewish residents. In his travels through a Russia he had not seen since the early 189os, Ansky documented the physical ruin of Jewish life and the simultaneous blossoming of Jewish culture. 25 What amazed An-sky most was the ardent passion for knowledge among young Jews: Really, you know it is something striking, unbelievable! Literally all the young people, every one of them, spend their days and nights reading books and textbooks. They take pleasure in serious books; some of them are preparing for entrance exams somewhere. And it is both boys and girls, everyone. Poor, hungry, exhausted, they do not care about anything but intellectual interests and metaphysical questions [prokliatye voprosy]. It is really amazing! 26 These travels through the Pale of Settlement were truly an inspiration to An-sky. Surprised at the obsession with intellectual matters, Ansky claimed that Jewish essence was still alive in the shtetlach he visited. Although young Jews were not occupied with Torah, nevertheless their contempt for the physical side of lite, the engagement of all their energies in spiritual growth, revealed the "same orientation as the ancient national creativity." In "Jewish Folk Art" he wrote: Contemporary Jewish folk culture has not only mastered biblical forms, images, and terms but is also entirely suffused with the same orientation and basic tendency as the ancient national creativity, and it is namely this: that spiritual perfection, the good lite, and, above all, intellectual development are identified with the study of Torah. It is the natural aim of life and the highest good of a person in this world, and such perfection gives a person universal strength, raises him to a divine level, and brings to its knees the most powerful material, physical force, which is a synonym for crudeness and stupidity. In original tales and songs, just as in other works of folk art, the heroic element is entirely absent; motives of struggle on the basis of material, physical force are absent. 27 In his conception of old and new Jews, An-sky noted a parallel between the biblical Jew, strong in his faith before the manifold destruction of Jewish life, and the modern Diaspora Jew, spiritually uplifted by his own powerlessness. By connecting a Jewish essence across

An-sky's Literary Imagination time boundaries, however, An-sky removed the difference between sacred and profane, theological and secular. Refusing to recognize the specifically religious context of ancient Jewish texts, An-sky viewed Jewish creativity in any form as an expression of "Jewishness." Thus, secular Jews, such as An-sky himself, were every bit as Jewish in their study of folk culture as Orthodox rabbis or Hasidic tsadikim. Although the disregard for differences in religious feeling and observance was bound to lead to mistakes in understanding, it did have a pragmatic aim. One of the goals of An-sky's folklore studies was to rescue Judaism and the Jewish people for a modernity that was hostile to religion.

Although it would be easy to view An-sky's ideological transformation as emerging from the Jewish tradition and opposed to his work as a Russian revolutionary, that is not the case. In fact, An-sky's identification with Russian culture led him to attribute to the Russian people the same superlative qualities as the Jews possessed. In 1914-, when publishing new essays about the peasant reader, which he had written since 1900, An-sky added a new article entitled "The Folk and War" (Narod i voina). Claiming that the Russians too were characterized by spiritual values and that their folklore was spiritual rather than material in nature, An-sky cleansed the Russians of any military inclinations: The Russian people were not notable for their bellicose nature, did not look at war as an aim of life or a permanent activity and did not give it a halo of moral qualities. The ancient Slavs did not have their own "God of war." And if we turn to the works of poetic folk culture-that honest expression of folk views, thoughts, and strivingswe will not find there either military poems similar to "Chansons de Geste" or songs that emerge from the sweat of battle and that could incite military enthusiasm. 28 The contents of this essay from 1914- closely resemble the viewpoint An-sky expressed about the Jews in 1909. The idea of a spiritual Russian people certainly resembles the ideas of the Slavophiles, perhaps retouched here and there by An-sky's contemporaries Vladimir Soloviev, Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Pavel Florensky.

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Although Slavophile conceptions probably influenced An-sky, one must regard as absolutely irresponsible the assertion that the Russian people have no sagas or heroic stories; the "Lay of the Host of Igor" contradicts this claim, as do many examples of epic byliny. The byliny are all about battles with Tatars; all of the Russian folk heroes-Ilya Muromets, Alyosha Popovich, Dobrynya-are fighters. In addition, it is absurd to say that the Jews seek only spiritual enrichment. The stories ofJoshua, Saul, David, the Maccabees, and Samson contradict such claims. Under the likely influence of Tolstoy's ideas of nonresistance to evil, An-sky willfully misread the histories of these two nations. He made Jews and Russians into ideal nations, spiritualist as opposed to materialist. These two nations, morally superior to others, were linked not only by geography and history but by temperament as well. For Ansky the Jews and Russians were obviously meant to join together, perhaps for some important purpose as yet unknown to both nations. 29 It might seem surprising to discover a link between An-sky's Jewish and Russian writings, especially in 1914, when An-sky was engaged in his Jewish ethnographic expedition, but the two orientations are actually intertwined. The antimaterialism and idealism of his writings after 1905 show the influence of the Russian religious renaissance. Writers and thinkers associated with the symbolist movement expressed ideas about the spiritual essence of man and the mystical fate of nations. Moreover, An-sky himself \Vas close to the epicenter of literary modernism. He was friendly with the symbolist writer Fedor Sologub, he was read and critiqued by the poet Mikhail Kuzmin, and he contributed to Russkoe bogatstvo (Russian Wealth) at a time when the journal was veering away from the literature of populism and publishing writers associated with symbolism. 30 Yet it seems strange to find "The Folk and War" in a single volume with articles about teaching the peasant to read. Mter all, the difference between An-sky the populist and the An-sky of 1914 could not be starker. The An-sky of1914 was a Jewish nationalist, ethnographer, and writer associated with symbolism, whereas the earlier An-sky had been a convinced populist, devoted exclusively to the liberation of the Russian peasantry.

An-sky's Literary Imagination For Jewish intellectuals of An-sky's generation, the connection between Russian populism and Jewish nationalism was actually entirely understandable. As a populist devoted to working on behalf of the Russian people, once An-sky realized the Jews too were a nation, he easily transferred his emotions from the Russian folk to the Jewish folk. Vinaver summarized this view when he wrote that An-sky's entire life was the best example of this. The same passion, the same ceaseless energy that he showed in his work on behalf of the Russian people was apparent in his attitude toward the Jewish people. Here was the same faith in the people as a kind of embodiment of absolute truth, goodness, and beauty, the exact same love for this suprarational entity. 31 Changes in his worldview also affected An-sky's attitudes toward ethnography. Instead of regarding revolution as the motor of Jewish salvation, An-sky believed in the promise of ethnography. Convincedand he was probably right-that many modern Jews were alienated from religion and community, An-sky believed folk culture could have the same anthropological function as the Torah had had in earlier times. That is, folklore could serve as the spiritual source, the glueso to speak-keeping the Jewish people together and giving them a vision of the ideal that Judaism can be. Although such an idea was blasphemy, An-sky was convinced of its certitude. Moreover, because folklore was not exclusive to one nation, An-sky believed that it could draw other nations closer to the Jews. When World War I broke out, An-sky repudiated the spiritual values he had articulated from 1908 to 1914, sanctioning physical strength as a useful means of self-defense. In selections from his unpublished diary, An-sky speaks constantly and with considerable verve about forming a Jewish legion to liberate Palestine, ostensibly with the goal of establishing a Jewish homeland. 32 In fact, he spoke out in favor of a Jewish army at public meetings in St. Petersburg in 1916. His change of mind emerged from his work as a first-aid worker on the front lines in Russianheld Galicia, Bukovina, and Poland, where he witnessed the senseless and murderous persecutions of Jews mainly by the Russian Army. 33 Realizing that both the German and Russian sides had Jewish soldiers

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who were perpetrating violence on their own brethren, An-sky became convinced of Zionism's validity. In Zionism he discovered an ideology that stood up for Jewish interests first and foremost, as opposed to the other pro- Diaspora political ideas that asked the Jews to compromise political and national sovereignty in exchange for acceptance in a multinational state. Both sides of An-sky's identity became active in the last years of his life. When the Revolution ofFebruary 1917 caused the downfall of the Romanov dynasty and brought the Provisional Government to power, An-sky quickly went to work on behalf of the PSR. He was elected as a representative to the Petersburg Soviet and played a significant role in October 1917 by attempting to convince the Bolshevik representatives in the Soviet not to monopolize power as a result of their successful coup. He remained in St. Petersburg during the winter and was elected as a representative to the ill-fated Constituent Assembly, which Lenin never permitted to open. When an order was made for his arrest, Ansky, dressed as a Catholic priest, escaped to Poland, where in the final days of his life he organized a Jewish historical society in Warsaw. Although in these final years An-sky never returned to the dichotomy of spiritual versus material peoples, the ideas he expressed between the Revolution of1905 and 1914 proved exceptionally useful for his creative activities. He was extraordinarily productive in that period, writing important stories such as "The Sins ofYouth," "Behind a Mask," and "Go Talk to a Goy," plus articles on Jewish folklore such as "Children's Folksongs" and "Incantations from the Evil Eye, Sickness and Misfortune," the play In a Conspiratorial Apartment, and his major achievement, The Dybbuk. He also organized and carried out the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition. Inspired by a rarified view of the Russian and Jewish people, An-sky could discover what was ideal, profound, and unique in both peoples. Although he could not ultimately retain these views permanently, nevertheless they enabled him to have insights that, when translated into texts or cultural activity, created entirely new categories for understanding Ashkenazi Jewish history and society.

Six The Russian Jew as a Modern Hero:

Identity Construction in An-sky's Writings Mikhail Krutikov

S. An-sky's appeal to new generations of Jewish intellectuals lies, at least in part, in the unfading charm of his creative persona. As a role model, An-sky transcends the chronological and spatial limits of his own Russian-Jewish modernist milieu and becomes one of the few cultural heroes of the post-modern age on the "Jewish street." Like few other Jewish writers of his age, An-sky modeled his fiction on real-life experience while living his life according to literary models. No other Russian Jewish public figure has left behind such an ample legacy of correspondence, diaries, fictionalized autobiographical accounts, memoirs, academic and political journalism, and reflections in accounts by his friends and colleagues. An-sky's life and work can be usefl1lly perceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a complex "project" that incorporates literary activity, political activism, scholarship, and a nomadic bohemian lifestyle, where every idea and detail reappear in a multiplicity offorms. An-sky experienced each moment of his lite with high intensity, alert to all possible meanings that the world around him could produce. Lack of separation between the spheres of his engagement in art, politics, and private life was not untypical for other representatives of the Russian Silver Age culture. Yet unlike his more "advanced" contemporaries, such as Akim Volynsky, An-sky never quite felt at home in the Russian modernist culture of his age, and he remained, both ideologically and artistically, very much part of the narodnik (populist) culture ofhis formative years. Despite this cultural and political "conservatism" (which espoused, of course, most radical ideas of revolutionary socialism but remained tied to the aesthetics of realism and positivism of

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Krutikov the late nineteenth century), An-sky's work and life produced strong modernist impulses that profoundly affected the development oft:wentieth-century Jewish art, theater, ideology, and scholarship. An-sky was equally interested in the old and the new: in the eternal wisdom of the folk that found its expression in popular culture, and in the new revolutionary character that was forming under the static crust of that culture. The conflict between the old and the new often informs the plot of his fiction, whereas in its background one can sometimes detect traces of connection that unites the "new," as embodied by the radical hero, with the "old," represented through the ageless folk organism. Being rooted in his personal experience, An-sky's fiction can be fully appreciated only in the broader context of his life and work, but the universal meaning of its conflict is evident for everyone. An-sky is especially interesting when he shows us a rebellious young male character, obviously drawing on his own experience, or a female folk type, which is most likely based on his mother. Not only do these characters have autobiographical and historical significance, but, in some of them, An-sky also envisions certain psychological and ideological traits, both positive and negative, that would become prominent in socially active Jewish types in the years to come-in some cases many years after the author's death. Until World \Var I, An-sky was reasonably optimistic about the prospects of Russian Jewry to enjoy political and cultural autonomy in a new socialist and democratic Russia that would be free from any form of oppression. Today, as the notion of a specific Russian Jewish identity becomes increasingly popular among Jews in Russia (as the sociological surveys and the ongoing debates in the Russian Jewish press demonstrate) as well as among their observers abroad, 1 An -sky's fiction may acquire a new relevance and offer useful insights into the meaning of this somewhat perplexing concept. We still have no clear definition or even detailed description of this identity. \Vhat are the main characteristics of the Russian Jew? Is it a cultural, ethnic, religious, political, or geographical concept? By turning to An-sky for guidance, we might find that he was able to identify certain significant elements of this identity at a very early stage. Some of these elements have proven to

Identity Construction in An-sky's Writings be so resilient that they survived the harsh pressures of the Soviet period and are now coming back to life after more than half a century of hibernation. An-sky was probably the most Russian of all Yiddish writers. Although after 1900 he increasingly used Yiddish in his correspondence, creative writing, and even public speaking as part of his newly recovered Jewish persona, Russian remained his primary language throughout his life. Unlike his friend Chaim Zhitlowsky, who made a complete turn to Yiddish from Russian, An-sky never fully mastered the modern Yiddish idiom and had little interest in linguistic innovations. As Simon Dubnow noted somewhat caustically in his memoirs, An-sky spoke the "yevonishn [Russian in accent and grammar] Yiddish of a soldier retired from the army of Nicholas I." 2 In comparison to the superb stylistic achievements of the Yiddish writers of his age, some of whom, like David Bergelson, enhanced the authenticity and originality of their Yiddish style by infusing it with the new sensitivity of Russian and European modernism, An-sky's Yiddish was never truly artistic. His dialogues were seldom effervescent, with the speech of his characters usually dominated by the distinctly Russian syntax and intonation of the narrator's authoritative voice. This is hardly surprising considering the formative influence of the Russian narodnik writers of the r88o90s. By contrast, Sholem Aleichem's talkative folksy style, Mendele Moykher Sforim's ironic intellectualism, or Yankev Dinezon's sentimentalism left An-sky unimpressed because they did not correspond to his idea of Yiddish literature. It was the discovery of I. L. Peretz's nco-Romantic short stories that convinced An-sky that Yiddish literature had "entered the family of European literatures." 3 David Roskies explains An-sky's transformation into a Jewish writer in rational rather than emotional terms: An-sky turned to Jewish heroes, plots and symbols because of what he learned in the Russian cultural sphere. That which he valued as a Narodnik and as a student of Russian and French folklore-the truth of the folk as different from that of the intelligentsia, the people's ability to harness physical violence for spiritual ends-he then translated into the particular idiom of East European Jews. 4

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Krutikov In his first anthropological study, the young An-sky examined the effect of reading on the life of Russian peasants and workers. He presented the results of his extensive "participant observation" research in a series of "Sketches on Folk Literature," which originally appeared in the leading narodnik journal Russkoe bogatstvo in 1892. There An-sky formulated his idea of literature as the essential bond between the masses and the intelligentsia: "If our [Russian] people are to have a great future, this future cannot be achieved without literature; if the intelligentsia is to make a great and important contribution to the people's life, this can be done mainly by the means of the book." 5 According to An-sky, the "folk" ( narod) and "society" ( obshchestJJo) constituted two distinct groups within the Russian nation that were separated by a growing gap. Because each group lived according to its own system of moral values and philosophical ideals, their development went on in different directions. But that difference did not necessarily lead to antagonism. An-sky rather optimistically believed that "the ultimate ideals of the people are absolutely identical to the ideals of the progressive part of the Russian and European intelligentsia, and the question therefore is merely about the path ofdevelopment, by which the folk should arrive at the realization of those ideals." 6 In An-sky's view, "the people need neither an instructor nor a leader, but a helper and an educator," and it was the duty of the intelligentsia to take upon itself that role. The narod as a separate social entity consisted solely of peasantry that shared the idea of supremacy of the community ( mir, obshchina) over the individual. Those individuals who, for whatever reason, broke their ties with the peasant commune were destined sooner or later to join "educated society," regardless of how low their present social and cultural position actually was. The unskilled manual laborers who had left the village only yesterday were culturally closer to "society," the individualist ethos of which they already shared, than to the peasant "folk" steeped in its eternal collectivism. Therefore, the notion of a particular "folk culture" was relevant only for peasants, who by virtue of their communal lifestyle were excluded from the general culture of "society." But the peasants were apparently incapable of creating a literary variety of their own culture, and so the production of a special "popular literature" for peasants was the task of

Identity Construction in An-sky's Writings the progressive intelligentsia. As An-sky wrote in the conclusion of his first study of popular literature, The purpose of popular literature is not to transmit our culture as a whole to the folk, destroying the foundations of their lite in the process, but rather to understand, elucidate, and strengthen those foundations, to elevate the truth of the folk to the highest level and to clear out the natural way of the folk's development? It is not difficult to see that An-sky's concepts of "the folk" and "popular culture" could hardly be applicable to Jews: in the absence of a Jewish peasantry, no separate Jewish "folk culture" could be possible. Following this logic, An-sky portrayed Jews in his stories of the early 1890s not according to the Jewish tradition, as individuals endowed with the freedom of choice, but according to the narodnik deterministic view, as mere agents of capitalist exploitation devoid of free will. Jews, regardless of their own wishes, objectively bring about the destruction of the organic life of the people. In his early sketch (ocherk) "Hangover" (1892 ), An-sky probably utilized his own unpleasant childhood experience of growing up, together with his sisters, in a tavern run by his mother. 8 He enhanced his personal memories by evoking the widespread antisemitic stereotype of the Jew as the dangerous and manipulative purveyor of alcohol. The sketch focuses on fallen Russian women who depend for their daily drink on the mercy of a female Jewish tavern keeper and her daughter. The individual feelings of those rather sympathetic Jewish \Vomen are suppressed by their socioeconomic position as exploiters of the Russian people. Objectively, these Jews cause harm to the Russian people, though subjectively some of them may sympathize with their victimized customers. The author presents the situation from a social-deterministic point of view: the declasse gentile women will drink themselves to death, whereas the Jewish ones will carry on deriving their livelihood from their misery. The process of urbanization and modernization destroys the protective foundations of the folk life, killing the weakest and the most vulnerable. A later sketch, entitled "In a Jewish Family" (1900), is particularly interesting as one of An-sky's first attempts to look into the spiritual foundations ofJewish folk life. 9 This story, which marks the renewal of

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Krutikov An-sky's interest in the Jewish theme, is one of his few Jewish pieces published in Russkoe bogatstvo. Like "Hangover," this sketch is set in the familiar Vitebsk scenery of the author's childhood. But, whereas Ansky's earlier naturalistic sketches were straightforwardly deterministic "slices of life," "In a Jewish Family" represents a shift toward the psychological analysis of a conflict, the dominant theme of An-sky's fiction during the 1900s. The story depicts the struggle between good and evil as it unfolds within the narrow confines of an ordinary lower-middleclass Jewish family. The head of the family, Borekh, and his wife, Malke, desperately struggle to maintain a minimal bourgeois standard of life. Psychologically depressed and exhausted by losing the battle, they are unable to maintain a decent human atmosphere within the family. The ultimate evil is personified by the sinister figure of a Jewish moneylender who keeps the entire town in his hands. The leader of the forces of good is Khane, the family cook. Khane and Leybke, the nine-year-old son of Borekh and Malke, are natural allies, and Khane, an agunah (abandoned wife) who has been deprived ofhappiness by her runaway husband, gives Leybke all her unrequited motherly love. In return the boy provides her with moral support by telling the stories from the khumesh (the Hebrew Pentateuch-or five books of Moses) that he has learned in school (kheyder). An-sky transforms the simple act of storytelling into a reinvigorating spiritual experience. The child and the uneducated woman, the most underprivileged members of the Jewish community, draw their spiritual strength from the eternal source ofJewish folk wisdom: And the more the boy talked, the more inspired he became, and his voice became stronger. In this minute he felt big, strong, and invincible. He saw before his eyes not the stern and all-knowing rebe with a lash in his hand, watching, like a hunter, his every word and every movement .... Before him was a simple and uneducated woman, who listened to him with faith and love, with her open soul and reverential attention. He felt this, felt her love and her reverence, and he also felt his learned superiority-and this feeling elevated and intoxicated him with inspiration. 10 Now Khane sees in the boy "the image of a great, awesome and allknowing rabbi .... He would not forget her, the ignorant and sinful woman. He would warm her with his fire and enlighten her with his

Identity Construction in An-sky's Writings brilliance, he would rescue her from a terrible hell and prepare a bright paradise for her." 11 Inspired and reinforced by her vision, Khane stands up for Leybke when the boy comes home from kheyder unmercifully beaten by the teacher. She chases away this cruel teacher, who comes to complain to the parents about Leybke's behavior. Leybke's crime has to do not with his poor learning but with his playing and dancing together with gentile children. In their battle against f~1lse middle-class values, Khane and Leybke join forces with non- Jewish allies, the shabes-goy Ivan and the cat Eyze. At first their situation seems hopeless, because economically they are dependent on their masters. But the economic autonomy of Malke and Borekh is also illusory because they cannot pay their debt to the moneylender and face the possibility of eviction. Eventually they realize that Khane is the only person in the world they can trust and rely on: "Khane will manage, Khane will do it" are Malke's last words, which conclude the story. 12 The schematic ideological symbolism behind the story's realistic surface is quite simple. The declasse Khane embodies the values of the simple folk to the extent possible in the absence of the Jewish peasant class. The khumesh, the written monument of the folk spiritual tradition, forges a crucial bond between the future revolutionary intelligentsia (Leybke) and the masses (Khane). The khumesh represents genuine folk literature that is equally important for the simple folk and for the intelligentsia. The power of genuine folk solidarity transcends ethnic and religious boundaries and brings Ivan into the camp ofKhane and Leybke. Finally, the eat's silent approval indicates that the forces of nature are on their side as well. Their adversaries are disorganized and disoriented. Borekh is physically and emotionally exhausted by his hard work in the forest, which nevertheless does not enable him to support his family. His wife is devoured by worries about their growing debt to the moneylender. The lack of attraction between the spouses is subtly accentuated by a delicate detail that was likely to have been missed by the majority of non- Jewish readers of Russkoe bogatstvo: without Khane reminding her, Malke would have forgotten to visit the mikvah (ritual bath) on Friday before Borekh's return. According to Jewish law, the wife has to im-

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merse herself in the mikvah after the end of her monthly period, and only then are the spouses allowed to have sexual intercourse. Like the family, the school is also dehumanized and cut off from its spiritual foundations. The kheyder teacher is more concerned about preventing Jewish children from mixing with gentiles than about implanting in them true values ofJudaism. Finally, the entire Jewish society is controlled by the sinister usurer-here, as in "Hangover," An-sky employs a medieval antisemitic stereotype, but this time he takes care to stress that the majority ofJews do not press blood out of the gentiles but are victims of financial exploitation. The only hope is represented by Leybke, who will grow up free from fear, full oflove for his people, and with friendly working relations with the non-Jewish world around him. Despite all of An-sky's interest in the simple folk's life and creativity, the primary object and addressee of his writing was always the intelligentsia. As we can see from his conception of folk literature, he did not share the extremist view of the followers ofLev Tolstoy that the intelligentsia should unconditionally recognize the supremacy of the people (that is, peasants) and do its best to merge with it. Zhitlowsky positioned An-sky within the narodnik camp between those (such as N. N. [Nikolai] Zlatovratsky and V. V. [Vorontsov's pen name]) who believed that the intelligentsia should be a mere servant to the people, and those (such as the radical revolutionary group Narodnaia Volia and to some degree also Gleb Uspensky) who regarded the people as mere "clay in the hand of the master." Instead, An-sky believed that the relations between the intelligentsia and the people should be mutually beneficial: first, the intellectuals had to overcome their aversion to physical labor and join the folk in its everyday work, and then the peasants would accept their ideas as their own. Zhitlowsky adds, however, that "the future socialist-revolutionary propaganda and agitation in the villages did not confirm at all An-sky's theoretical assumptions," and An-sky later had to revise them. 13 During his lifetime, An-sky remained largely committed to the ideals of the Russian narodniki. This ideological dedication led him to participate in the creation of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, which became the revolutionary successor of the radical narodnik movement of the late nineteenth century. For the adherents of this

Identity Construction in An-sky's Writings

school of thought and action, the intelligentsia was the primary moving force of history. The future of Russia was dependent on the commitment of its intelligentsia to the ideals of justice and socialism and on its readiness to sacrifice its own group interests to the cause of the people. During the r89os, the historical role of the intelligentsia was the subject of intense theoretical debates between the narodniki and the young Russian Marxists. The latter group, led by Georgii Plekhanov, argued that the intelligentsia represented a mere by-product of class differentiation in the process of transition from feudalism to capitalism and therefore had no special historical vocation. 14 In addition to believing in the historical destiny of the Russian intelligentsia as a revolutionary elite, An -sky shared the widespread view that its great majority was positively disposed toward Jews. He believed that antisemitism did not have deep roots in Russian society. It was a spiritual disease deliberately disseminated by the tsarist authorities in order to distract the people from its revolutionary struggle, but these attempts were doomed to fail because of the good nature and inherent sense of justice of the Russian people. 15 Moreover, the Russian intelligentsia not only was sympathetic to Jews as victims of tsarist persecution but also shared the high Jewish moral standards. The short story "Go Talk to a Goy" (1912) provides an interesting illustration of this idea. 16 A committed member of the revolutionary Russian Social-Democratic Party (it is not clear whether of Bolshevik or of Menshevik persuasion) named Anastasia Stepanova secretly arrived in St. Petersburg from Switzerland on a talse "Jewish" passport, the best her revolutionary organization had been able to supply her with. Living as a Jewess with no residence permit, she was constantly bothered by the police. The revolutionary organization suggested that she convert to Christianity and thus stop attracting unwanted attention. This act would bear no significance for her since she was born Christian and did not believe in God anyway. And yet she could not force herself to convert: "My action will make a mockery and a sham of the sacred belief of millions of people," she explained to her party comrades. 17 An -sky portrayed here an idealistic gentile revolutionary woman as more genuinely "Jewish" in the moral sense of this concept than many real middle-class Jews vvho would convert out of practical convenience. From today's perspective, this story

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Krutikov can be read as a modern "humanistic" version of Jewish identity that can be constructed as a set of moral values and then voluntarily adopted by anybody regardless of their ethnic origins or religious beliefs. His admiration for the intelligentsia notwithstanding, An-sky was well aware of the possibility of a conflict between intellectualism and morality. In the short story "Behind a Mask" (1909 ), he offered a character study of an intellectual devoid of moral constraints. 18 Joseph Krantz, the son of an illustrious shtetl rabbi, made a scandalous public break with the traditional way of life at the young age of 15 and left his family and shtetl for good. Mterward his life was driven by hatred for "everything that smacked of religion and orthodm..y." 19 He joined a small commune of young rebels who lived in dire poverty at the outskirts of the town ofV-(yet another obvious reference to Vitebsk). Together they dreamed about ways of changing the world but in the meantime were suffering from hunger. As part of the elaborate scheme to get some money, Krantz decided to make a journey to the home shtetl of one of his comrades, hiding his true self "behind a mask" of piety. His plan was to convince the friend's parents that their son was continuing his study in yeshivah and needed their support. In addition to extracting money from the parents, Krantz was determined to transform a few shtetl youngsters into freethinkers. Despite his sympathy with radical youth, An-sky chose to portray Krantz as a purely destructive personality. Krantz enjoyed scandal, deception, and confrontation, whereas his commitment to the Haskalah offered no positive alternative to the traditional way oflife. Krantz's opposite number was his friend's mother Krayne, who gradually discovered the fraudulent nature of Krantz's behavior and confronted him with the evidence of his dishonesty. The story reached its climax in the final argument between Krantz and !(rayne. At first Krayne attempted to imitate Krantz's strategy of deception by pretending to be unaware of her son's real situation in V-. Then she suddenly revealed her cards and demanded that Krantz, as the gang leader, should order her son back home. She threatened Krantz with mobilizing the shtetl against him: "I'll stir up the whole town against you! They'll tear you to shreds! Jews will take my part for the blood you've shed." 20 But Ir the play: [M]akhmes vos, makhmes vos I iz di neshome I fun hekhster heykh I arop in tifstn grunt? 1-dos faln trogt I dos oyfkumen in zikh ... (prologue, p. 5 [Vilna, T9I9 ])

3. The text in English in the Joachim Neugroschel translation: Why, oh why, I Did the soul descend I From the highest height I To the deepest end? I The greatest fall I Contains the upward flight. (Neugroschel, Dybbuk,+)

+·

The text in Hebrew-using the Ashkenazic pronunciation-translated by Bialik from the Russian and Yiddish: [A ]l ma v lorna I yoredes haneshomo I me igra roma lbira amikto I yeridoh tsorekh aliyoh hi I yeridoh tsorekh aliyoh hi. 63 [To what and why I did the soul descend I from the heights to the depths I the descent is on account of the ascent I the descent is on account of the ascent. (my translation)]

5. In modern Israeli Sephardic:

Al mah velamah I yoredet haneshamah I meigra rama I levira amikta? I yerida tsorekh aliyah hi I yerida tsorekh aliya hi.

Inscribing An-sky's Dybbuk in Russian and Jewish Letters 6.

A Habad nigun, attributed to the first generation of Hasidim, a seeming variant on the first version or vice versa (in Ashkenazic pronunciation): Haneshomo yoredes lesoykh haguf I tsoekes, vay, vay, vay I yerido zu tsorekh aliya I ad shkol ze hu kday. 64 [The soul descends within the body I crying vay, vay, vay, I this descent is on account of an ascent I until everything is exemplary. (my translation)]

This short text chanted twice has a mesmerizing function, inviting the audience into the play and the Weltanschauung of these shtetl Jews. The use of the humming, with its other-worldliness in the darkness, creates the desired occult tonality and represents symbolically the Hasidic view that the immanence of the Godhead fills every space even in inchoate and "evil" darkness. The use of humming itself effectively creates a barrier between the world outside the play and the sacred quality of the play event itself, and it serves as a passage from the outside higher world into the lower world: a representation of Godly immanence. The chant is sung in Yiddish. This is an ideological statement on the part of An-sky; because we have before us the Hebrew original, the question arises, why place it in Yiddish? Not only is the text itself the quintessence of the existential Hasidic worldview that An -sky wanted to project, but it also opens up to interpretation the meaning of the chant. The chant was added quite late in the various redactions: it is absent in the surviving Russian version. The Hebrew would have been gibberish to the original Russian audience-as indeed the Hebrew version performed in Moscow in 1922 created a "mysterium"-but the words had no meaning to most of the spectators. An-sky wanted the words to be understood, and thus the Yiddish version insists on the Yiddish translation of the text and underscores the Yiddishist position that the language can bear theological discourse and bring across the complex worldview ofHasidism. The Yiddish Makhmes vos, which begins the chant, has the quality of placing the audience in medias res and proffers a typical yeshivah phraseology in a discussion: Because of what? It is a moment of demanding a prooftext or a convincing explanation. 65 The question is a

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theological one: why has the soul fallen from a glorious height to a deep abyss? 66 The interrogative sentence expresses human incomprehension, if not despair, facing this catastrophic cosmic event. We are in the world of kabbalistic and Hasidic myth: the Jewish soul, a spark ofthe divine, has been cast down into the gross animal world. Why? Hasidic thought interprets this fall as a necessary duty so that the dross of the animal soul may be purified and the pure soul can rise even higher and cling to the attributes of the Eyn-Sof, the Infinite. 67 An-sky's Yiddish text translates the yerida tsorekh aliyah in a matter-of-fact way, correctly, but devoid of the profound resonance of these words in the Hebrew. The translation of Bialik repeats this well-known oxymoronic phrase twice, emphasizing its potent meaning and resonance in Hasidic thought. (I suspect he already knew the original nigun.) Notice that, in the Lubavitch nigun, the pure soul weeps in the body for its descent, which underscores the difficult task before it and the loss of what was and must be again. The chant establishes the cosmic world in which the human (Jewish) players on Earth, the material world, are in fact central participants. The descent ofKhonen in the play and his final ascent-as it were-is both exemplary and cautionary. He falls by yielding to the sitra akhra, though as dybbuk-an evil spirit-he will emerge and ascend from the condition more devoted and loyal. But to whom? The central element affecting the dialectical falling and rising is devekut: the spiritual adherence and clinging to the empyrean, to the attributes of the Eyn-Sof. Devekut is the term that Gershom Scholem identifies as the distinct expression of Hasidic practice. 68 It is the mystical attachment to God and the essence of individual redemption. The entire effort in life is to cling and rise to the Source (or Spring) via devekut. (In the final Yiddish redaction, An-sky beautifully describes this quintessential Hasidic experience of devekut in the Messenger's first soliloquy of act 3.) "Adherence," "clinging," and "attachment" are the nouns and the possible verbs that are in the Hebrew root d/b/k/. Ironically, it is also the root of "dybbuk." The play is traversed by the Hasidic concern of devekut and spiritual clinging even as, negatively, the dybbuk clings to the body of Leah. Devekut is a vertical system in which the individual soul is constantly seeking to attach itself higher and closer to the Eyn-Sof. In the Hasidic

Inscribing An-sky's Dybbuk in Russian and Jewish Letters cosmology, the tsadik as an "intercessor" provides to ordinary men the means of attaching themselves to someone closer to the divine spirit, because the tsadik in his devekut receives divine vitality. The sinner who desires to ascend and be corrected comes to his tsadik, who "descends" and attaches the sinner to himself, and the sinner can be purified. (Khonen, in act r, makes this point clearly: "Our saints [tsadikim] all have the task of cleansing human souls" [p. I4/I9 ].) The tsadik as human being must continually seek to be in a state of devekut, but there is fluctuation as he too must experience yerida tsorekh aliyah to an even higher level. The tsadik must serve as funnel between his own high spiritual devekut and the uplifting of his entire community. An-sky gives the role of the tsadik, Reb Azrielke, such importance in the play because, as spiritual leader, he is in fact supposed to lead his flock to holiness, to the highest levels of devekut. His social role in the community is paramount because it leads directly to the intention that all Israel, the Jewish people, is a spiritual nation par excellence. This is the message of Reb Azrielke's major soliloquy (droshe or homily might be more appropriate)-"God's world is huge and holy"-in act 3 (p. 34/53) after the Messenger establishes the role ofdevekut. The Batlonim do appear as commedia deWarte figures in the play with their ecstatic appreciations of a tsadik's story, but they are indeed the Community of Israel, ordinary men seeking through the reb be, the tsadik, their spiritual growth. Their joy in the tale-whether told by Reb Azrielke or in the opening stories offamous tsadikim in act r-not only displays the spiritual powers of the tsadik but also knits the community of Israel together in their listening and appreciation. The tale and its delight are the initiatory steps of the audience into devekut. In fact, devekut is both the spiritual state of adherence to the supernal and a social bond among men, a platform for social action. 69 Khonen, a Hasid consumed by his interest in Kabbalah and Hasidic thought, has advanced in his studies to the seemingly radical position that "We must never wage war against sin, we should simply try to ameliorate it" (p. 14/I9 ). Khonen's companion is shocked. Henekh questions: "Holiness in sin?" And Khonen gives the position ofHabad thinking: "Who created evil? God too! Evil is second side of God. And given that it is a side of God, it must contain a spark of holiness" (p. 14/20).

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Wolitz The yerida tsorekh aliya for Hasidism occurs specifically to transform evil and restore it to its divine root. Evil is in fact higher than good in terms of its divine source. Evil is not challenging the Godhead. It is a kind of distortion or falsification of the divine holiness that occurs in the human soul. The divine soul surrounded by the animal soul, which often yields to the yeytser-hore, the evil urge, or lust, must be tamed and then transformed into holiness. "The alien fire of animal passion then becomes one with the divine fire of the love of God: man may rise up." 70 Thus the vitality ofevil transformed into good, with its intense love of God, brings the divine soul and the animal soul to higher ascent in devekut. Khonen uses lust as the worst sin -which, when purified, becomes the Song of Songs (p. 15j2o ). But Khonen has confused lust that has been transformed into the traditional allegorical interpretation of the Song ofSongs as the love oflsrael for God and vice versa (and the mystical interpretation sees the Shekhinah fusing with YHVH) with his own lust or passion for Leah, whom he has transformed, in romantic love fashion, into an object of noble esteem. Thus his singing of the Shir hashirim while he watches Leah kiss the Holy Scrolls reflects the confusion (p. 17/24-25). He desires her but believes he is also transforming this lust to the highest love of devekut. This is hubris! But she is unattainable because he is poor and Sender wants a rich son-in-law.7 1 In desperation, Khonen turns to the practical Kabbalah to alter the conditions in which he finds himself. Here is where the "slippery path" (glitshiker veg) begins about which Henekh warns (p. 18/26 ). Khonen uses the Sefer Raziel with its magic incantations and rituals based on the combinations of the letters of God's names in order to bring about the kabbalistic tikkun, the reparation of the world. By helping to raise the divine sparks (in Hasidic terms, pure souls entrapped in their animal souls [klippot]), he seeks to bring the unity of God's names into one unity (p. 18/25). It would also affect his hoped-for unification with Leah, as we shall see. The Seftr Raziel is considered a dangerous book, as Henekh notes, because of its practices (p. 18/25). It brings one into the very forces of creation of the cosmos. As the "master Proofreader" of the text prefaces the work: Illuminate the eyes. See visions come in abundance. Visions of the illuminations. Evil does not befall the righteous by understanding the

Inscribing An-sky's Dybbuk in Russian and Jewish Letters commandments of purification coming fi.1rth from the ten books .... The great prophets were not able to make prophecies until studying this book. 72 An-sky shrewdly chose to cite this book with its incantations and deep occult cosmic explanations so appreciated by the Jewish mystics-and even used to this day as an amulet against fire in one's house-because it was also believed to be the oldest book in the world. It reads: Everything was revealed to him [Adam] of the holy spirit [ Ruakh Hakodesh] of death and life, of goodness and evil. Also, the mysteries of hours and minutes of time and number of days. Calculate the seasons and the equinoxes and solstices until the end of the universe. Measure the time from the beginning until the end. Then serve his son, Seth .... Seth became wise by the secrets of the book and the letters of the holy name engraved therein. 73 The Sefer Raziel opens to Khonen's obsessed mind a means not only to bring the tikkun but also, on a lesser scale, to affect activities in life itself: "The words of the book proclaim works to perform when seeking to prosper in the world. For three days before the New Moon [Rosh Hodesh] prepare by fasting. Bathe in the sea before the rising Sun." 74 Khonen is constantly going to the ritual bath (mikvah) to purify himself and fasting to make himself worthy of the tasks before him. The Sefer Raziel instructs the reader of pure mind how to bring about rain if there is drought by specific ritual and incantation, and it taught, for example, Noah how to build an ark. It can also explain how, [w]hen seeking to locate hidden treasure, and bring forth silver and gold buried in the earth, take the gold tzietz, purified seven fold. Write upon it [making it a talisman] the letters of the name of holiness and purity [the Shem Hameforesh]. Bind it with a purple cord. Bring forth a white dove and tie the purple cord around its neck. Then it flies with the sign into the air. Follow the dove on t()ot. The place it descends is the secret place. Khonen is on two missions using the Sefer Raziel: first, holy, the bringing of the tikkun but confusing his love as devekut to the Godhead

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Wolitz when it is directed toward Leah; and, second, the obtaining of wealthobviously to buy off Sender: I want to find the rays of the Third Heavenly Temple, the Third Divine Emanations ... the Sphere ofTiferet-Beauty. I want .... Yes! I still have to get two small barrels of gold coins .... For the man who can only count money. (p. rS/25-26) Khonen uses the play of the letters of the various names of God in the Sefer Raziel, which combine and have at their base the tetragrammaton and the kabbalistic ten sefirot (the emanations) to produce his mystical incantations and actions. Tiferet is in the middle of the sefirotic organization, and the effort is to link it to the crown of the sefirot, understanding ( bina) and wisdom (khokhma) .7 5 The intention is to bring them all into unity: the great tik.kun. But he has not succeeded because his intention is not pure. Desire for Leah and the desire to win her from the difficult father with coins of the realm show his immaturity. He has confused his private desire with the fate of the cosmos. His use of the incantations for obtaining money as opposed to the raising of the sparks explains his seeming failure. Hcnekh, the bright but normative Hasid, recognizes that Khonen is crossing the line: HENEKR:

You won't get all those things by holy forces.

KRONEN:

And ifl don't use holy forces? Ifl don't use holy forces?

(p. r8j26)

With those words, Khonen reveals he is moving into sin. He is yielding to the sitra akhra. He believes the radical assertion of mitsvah haba)ah ba-)averah, the commandment fulfilled by means of a transgression, or holiness through sin. His pure soul is encountering the resistance of his animal soul to which he seems to be yielding. Here is a radical voice. The results lead to his shock as Sender indeed arrives with a bridegroom for Leah: Were all my efrorts useless-all my fasts [ taneysim ], my ritual ablutions [mikvot], and my spells [tsrufim-kabbalistic play of gematria, or kabbalistic numerology and letters], and the

KRONEN:

Inscribing An-sky's Dybbuk in Russian and Jewish Letters mortifications of my flesh [.f!Jufim]? Ah, ah! I see the revelation now.... The huge, twofold utterance of the Name. I've won! (p. 20/29) Khonen's massive efforts were not, in the end, strictly altruistic (for the sake of helping raise the sparks, of real repentance). His seemingly noble mortifications reveal an unpurified being yielding to his desires, the yeytser-hore, and performing for private interests. But suddenly, and dramatically, in the act of dying he believes himself victorious. Victorious in what? In bringing the unification of the "twofold utterance of the Name." Has he brought about the unification of the Shekhinah, the female aspect of the deity in exile and now liberated to fuse with the tetragrammation YHVH? This is what Khonen is stating. He has brought together in his prayers and mortifications the masculine and feminine potencies of the divine. By bringing them together, is this the cosmic rectification that begins on the individual level? Has he accomplished what is necessary to prompt the beginning of the ultimate redemption?76 But is this not the folly of Khonen who apparently sees himself and Leah as the hypostatization of this theosophy? Is he not confusing in the name of unity, the zivug or pairing, his frustrated desire even be it pure love for Leah and the supernal coupling? What has he won? He becomes a dybbuk!

By inhabiting the body ofLeah, Khonen has arrested the growth of the living Israel. What he pursues from act 2 to the conclusion is the fullest expression of his love, obviously limited to occupying the body. The rabbinic authority functions correctly in demanding his departure according to halakhah. This aspect of the drama holds-if not the most appeal to both the gentile and the Jewish audience-then the clearest and theatrically most effective moment. The presentation of the legal arguments with ghosts in attendance continues the otherworldly quality of the play and yet proffers the security of a familiar setting, a court room, albeit a rabbinical court. When, in act 4, Khonen is expelled as Reb Azrielke displays his theurgic powers, Khonen's return to Leah is not his accomplishment.

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He argues that he fought all barriers and conquered death for her (p. 51/81), but she alone reawakens who he is: KRONEN: LEAH:

I can remember only if you remember me.

I do remember. (p. so-si/81)

It is Leah who calls him back to her: "Come back to me, my bridegroom, my husband .... I'll carry you in my heart as a dead man, and in my dreams at night we'll cradle our unborn babies" (p. 52/82). And it is Leah who rebels against the patriarchal world, and the world of the tsadik by leaving the magic circle created by Reb Azrielke to protect her. She goes to join her beloved. This is the triumph of romantic love over filial duty. Khonen receives her, and they fuse. Ironically, it is the female who is active and the male who is passive. She proves the most devoted to her authentic love. She sacrifices her life to her love. It is Leah whose pure love redeems the dybbuk (a very Wagnerian conception): "A giant light is pouring down all around us .... I'm joined to you forever, my predestined love . . . . We'll float together, higher, higher, higher" (p. 52/83). The question of devekut emerges here significantly in the last moments of the play. We have seen that, in traditional Hasidism, it is avertical movement up and down (yerida tsorekh aliyah) with the clinging always directed up toward the unification with the Eyn-Sof or its emanations; we note here, however, that the love of Khonen and Leah is on a horizontal plane. It is man to woman, a human exchange oflove and cleaving. It is a commandment of the Bible (Genesis 2:24-); this cleaving is the first recording of the root d/b/k/, as verb, a devekut, or the communion with the mate. And it is a union not just of bodyfrom which Khonen was ejected-but of the soul. This is the yerida tsorekh aliyah on a higher level. The dybbuk, a figure from the sitra akhra, with its negative communion of a dead man in a living body, is transformed into a positive devekut. An-sky has made victorious the purified romantic love of man for woman and vice versa. This is the first devekut that contains both the presence and the legitimation of the love of God-oriented devekut of the Hasidic world. And this love is affirmed by the fact that, in their

Inscribing An-sky's Dybbuk in Russian and Jewish Letters

passionate life now fulfilled in death, in her sacrifice for love, there is an ascension. They are ascending because their human love is recognized as legitimate and purified and contains the divine. And this human love takes precedence over Jewish law. Nature is legitimized over arranged marriage. The tkies-kaf may be legally illegitimate but its fruit finds legitimacy in their reunion and apotheosis. Khonen's name is in fact t\.tlfilled here, because Khonen is an abbreviation of Elkhanan, or God pardons. Is this a defeat for the tsadik, Reb Azrielke, God's helper as his name implies? Yes. Romantic love is blessed by God. It is also the invasive force of modernity and personal autonomy that takes precedence. The old/new devekut must be first on the human horizontal level. Clinging to the tsadik is no longer necessary to ascend in communion with the Godhead. Purified human love, for An-sky, contains the divine presence. The intended Russian audience would have been most contented and even expected this victory of the lovers. But even the Jewish audiences, beginning with 1920, were sufficiently "secular modernists" to applaud their victory. If the Hasidic world and its devekut could evoke immediate nostalgia, the romantic love of the "doomed" lovers reflected the emergence of the new secular Jewish society. The last scene has an operatic intensity, and not by chance. The love that conquers through this sacred collectivity and undermines the halakhic authority represents the new. It places itself within the Western secular world of the Silver Age and its frames of cultural reference. 77 The final scene of Leah's resolve and joining her mate parallels the Wagnerian Liebestod of Tristan und Isolde, which every Western cultural artifact was imitating before World War I. An-skysucceeded in fusing Hasidic matter with the aesthetic parameters of the pre-war Russian high culture: the Wagnerian vision of passion as one that can only find fulfillment in death-this most-unJewish conception-is imbricated with the Hasidic mystical world. The final scene is an apotheosis of love. As Isolde sinks upon the corpse ofTristan, she sings: See him smiling, softly, gently, see the eyes that open fondly, ... don't you see? Ever lighter, how he's smiling borne on high amid the stars?

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Wolitz Is it only I who hear these gentle wondrous strains of music ... reconciling, sounding from him piercing through me rising upward ... in the world's spirit's infinite All. 78 The parallel in Leah's last words to Khoncn in the final moments of the Dybbuk are striking: "I'm joined to you forever, my beloved/We'll float together higher, higher, higher." In both cases, the heroines attach themselves to their mates and find fulfillment in death: Liebestod. Even the last stage direction in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde-"Mark invokes a blessing on the dead" as the curtain falls-finds its exact parallel in The Dybbuk with the Messenger declaiming over the deceased Leah (and Khonen) the only Hebrew prayer words in the Yiddish text-Borukh dayan hoemes (Blessed be the True Judge [May they rest in peace ])-and in the final stage direction: "the stage becomes pitch black." 79 This Wagnerianism (in its treatment oflove) allied to Hasidic mysticism reflects completely the prevailing taste of pre-war Russian theater: Art as rite in a Temple. The final repetition in the darkness of the original nigun returns the play to the higher world and provides the circularity of a rite with the introit and exode. This eternal return provides the message of hope that man falls but has the means to rise higher. The play has completed the illustration of this religious dogma. The repetition of the nigun serves as a guarantor of its content: a final heavenly chorus of assent. In a letter to his old friend Zhitlowsky, An-sky states: "In the entire play a battle takes place between the individual and the collective. And which is more correct-between the striving to individual happiness and the protection of the collective?" 80 An-sky believed he made the striving and the protection equal, but in fact he comes down on the side of the young lovers with their Liebestod, the fulfillment of their passion. Love and personal happiness do take precedence in terms of the play. The losers are the collective, because Israel will have no fruit from Leah's womb. Reb Azrielke loses too. His power is broken. This is the beginning of his Gotterdammerung. The truth of romantic love and personal autonomy is sundering a community. Sender is the greatest loser. There will be no kaddish for him. He has lost his daughter and accepts blame for his dear friend's son's death. Thegvir (rich and well-placed Jew) with an Achilles' heel, Sender is left like Creon of

Inscribing An-sky's Dybbuk in Russian and Jewish Letters

Antigone; he endures a full human tragedy: no wife, no daughter, no descendants, no friends. The dramatist is empathetic to these personages, but he does not live in their perception of the world. An-sky was a modern man. As wonderful as the performative moments are that envelop the stage with the rituals that enthralled the Jewish audiences hungering for collective security and a viable past, the staged rites from a textual perspective proved inefficacious in the end. An-sky uses the rites and exorcisms in the play to reflect the spiritual world of a people's inheritance but not to live by them. He was, after all, a socialist revolutionary. He supported secular individualism and Jewish collective identity. The Jewish audiences at the performance embraced and creatively reinterpreted the rites onstage as a national and possibly religious consciousness-building through the aesthetic frame. But the denouement of the play affirms the lovers' personal choice and autonomy. Their love and happiness takes precedence over the collective. 81 This too is deemed sacred by An-sky. Indeed, we sec how Western and modern An-sky is by using the theme oflove to join the secular to the sacred, the earth to the supernal in this play. That vision places An-sky squarely in St. Petersburg and not in some lost Hasidic shtetl. It reflects the ethical and political perspective ofRussian Silver Age liberals and the Weltanschauung of the Moscow Art Theater and its audience.

Because An-sky wrote the play first in Russian and for a Russian-speaking audience, he underscored its Jewish folklore, mysticism, and love, and he invited parallels to Russian culture. The Dybbuk defines that strange short moment in both Russian and Jewish cultural histories at the end of the Silver Age when they could rub together-as in a Chagall painting-and create a hybrid work, a hyphenated Russian-Jewish work of art. Later in the twentieth century, Jewish culture appropriated the play strictly as its own. And, given the f:Kt that the Russian manuscript was believed lost and no interest in it survived, the Soviet- Russian culture let it slip into amnesia. Nevertheless, The Dybbuk represents a moment of cultural symbiosis when its author could live and function in both cultures, Russian and Jewish.

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After 1920, with the empire gone, interest in producing such a play in Russian completely waned. Yiddish and Hebrew versions each developed a separate audience with its own interpretations and a distinct pertormative history. The destruction of European Jewry, however, brought an end to the Yiddish tradition and its performative history. The Hebrew tradition alone survives into the new millennium in the Habima as the National Theater of Israel. But its performative history is now in question. 82

The play itself represents today a creative voice of a subaltern functioning in the hegemonic culture of the Russian Silver Age. It thrived on the desperate embrace of its performance by a Jewish world squeezed in the interwar period. The potency of the play after the creation oflsrael, like the works of Chagall, may well be The Dybbuk's ability to evoke a world that is lost. It is more artifact than art. Its remarkable continuity has depended on the new interpretations teased from its dated form and plotting. An-sky had hoped that his play was saving a past world of the Hasidim while establishing the legitimacy of the new secular Jewish existence. All he believed in-socialism, Yiddish culture, Jewish diasporic authenticity, and legitimation in Slavic lands-have turned to dust in the century since the play's creation in a language that does not even remember the work or the writer. Ironically, the world he thought was doomed to disappearance, the Hasidic world, continues to thrive. If this play survives as an artifact of a lost Jewish \vorld, it also serves as a fascinating example of an attempt to bring Slavs and Jews together to celebrate art, spirituality, and a shared living space. The Dybbuk should belong to that shadowy world called Russian- Jewish literature because An-sky was a bilingual writer. Would that An-sky had succeeded in truly inscribing his Dybbuk in both Russian and Jewish letters! At the moment, it seems, like a dybbuk, the play is suspended between two worlds. To my mother) Gertrude Rubin Wolitz (I9IS-2003)

Nine The Musical Strands of An-sky's

Texts and Contexts Izaly Zemtsovsky A nation does not live by suffering but by a conscious rapture of Itself; by joyful creation, by pride in its culture, and by the poetry of its everyday life. Only by all these things. If all these things were not present, the Jewish people would have ceased to exist long ago.

-S. An-sky, from a letter to Roza Ettinger, Feb. 18, 1916

My first intention was to write a general article called "An-sky and Music," but as I worked I realized that this theme would soon take up an entire book. The theme "An-sky in Music," my first limitation, turned out to be no smaller in volume. The process of musicalization of Ansky's writings after his death has been almost endless, and new musical settings of his The Dybbuk, for instance, are under way even now. Therefore I decided to begin a musicological approach to An-sky's legacy depicting only certain instructive moments in his musical and paramusical activities. In other words, I begin with Russian Jewish music, heard and invented during An-sky's lifetime in his works and in connection with his works. I describe An-sky's musical strands, so to speak, but with no pretensions of exhausting the material or settling the question. Many efforts to reveal and to collect all the scattered relevant data are yet to be completed. Therefore I can offer here but seven drafts for a future book-a number of linked arguments given as a necklace of short sketches, a genre resonant with An-sky's own style of endless documentations, be it in tl1e form of a portrait, a story, or an artifact.

An-sky's Voice The farther we stand from an artist, our object of study, the fainter is his or her voice. History submits to a process that might be called desonorization. Real life, full of movements, gestures, smells, and voices,

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Figure 14. Iuly Engel and Solomon Yudovin examine the phonograph used on the expeditions. SOURCE: MAE RAN, "Snimki Evreiskoi Etnograficheskoi ekspeditsii im. barona Goratsiia Osipovicha Gintsburga" (July r- October 15, 1912), collection #2152, photograph 289; contributed by Benjamin Lukin.

is transformed into motionless texts . .A5 a result, the genuine anthropological object becomes rather a philological, historical, or even archaeological one. This process, as much inevitable as it is disheartening, is particularly distressing in the case of a musical voice. It is so easy to forget, after all, that our hero or heroine not only wrote but spoke and sang as well. In the Jewish case it is especially painful, for, as Arnold Zweig once quipped, a Jew even "thinks with his ear." 1 And if that Jew himself composed and recorded songs, it is our first and foremost duty to give him back his voice and ear, recontextualizing the author within his "sound context" and making an attempt to reconstruct the musical environment present during his lifetime. It is especially relevant in the case of An-sky, whose own ethnographic project was that of resisting desonorization.

The Musical Strands of An-sky's Texts and Contexts

Let us listen first to An-sky. His letters quoted below attest to his special gift for musical hearing. February IS) I9I6. He is in Galicia and meets Jewish girls, four to nine years old. "Sometimes they sing. They know a few soldiers' songs in Yiddish adopted from wounded Jewish soldiers. They sang one of them to me. It is a mother weeping over her son who is in the army.... I wanted to cry, hearing their high voices moan: 'Oy) vcy der mamcn, oy) vey dcr mutter."' 2 February4) I9I7. Again in Galicia. Suddenly he hears the "soft music of a mournful Jewish song .... A man with a fiddle stands at the door and plays .... Both of them are crying. Silent tears stream down from his eyes, and a plaintive lament streams from his violin. Both of them, the man and his instrument, are begging for help wordlessly. The scene was inexpressibly touching-the hungry musician mingled with his fiddle and expressed his needs." 3 In these emotional testimonies of close listening, poetic seeing, and inner attuning to the unique musical moments among the simple Jewish folk of the Pale of Settlement, we can see An-sky's personality. These musical impressions belong to a man with a special gift to catch life in its aural entirety. They are not just musical impressions, however-they are as much personal and artistic as anthropological and documentary, as is always true of his writings. Reading An-sky's words on "a musician mingled with his fiddle," I could not rid myself of the feeling that this depiction refers to a well-known drawing of Marc Chagall, the most musical of all Jewish painters. An-sky is a musician here as much as he is an essayist. His letters are full of similarly amazing sketches. It would be wrong to dissect him, to try to separate out his different abilities or personalities. I believe there were not several An-skys but one who was constantly chronicling and testifying, be it in the form of an artistic essay or an ethnographic field note, a dramatic play or a personal letter. An-sky was born to be a witness and a collector, at all times and in all places. In his artistic essays and ethnographic field notes, as well as his dramatic plays and personal letters, An-sky served as a constant witness and chronicler of Jewish life in its multifaceted whole. However, behind his enormous talent for the essayistic was much more: there was a special gift for musical hearing I call syncretic-that

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is, the ability to hear, to feel, and to vividly imagine the social and intellectual context in the sound text. It is this ability that is so crucial for an ethnographer or an author. I have no doubt that the greatness of Evgeny Vakhtangov's scenic reading of An-sky's play sprang precisely from his ability to extract and visualize that context, and thus to come closer to An-sky's own imaginative hearing. In his artistic way of hearing, An-sky followed a suggestion of the Baal Shem Tov that he had quoted in a 1920 article: "A melody is like a confession-and when a man confesses, one must listen to him." 4 Though a perennial observer, An-sky could also be a participant in artistic and particularly musical acts. At the beginning of 1917, at the house of Hillel Zlatopol'sky, a manufacturer and a patron, An-sky read The Dybbuk, then the master of the house began to sing "Mipney rna?" (Why?)-a remarkable song that became a leitmotif, a dominant recurring theme of The Dybbuk. He sang first in a whisper, and all the participants at the meeting joined in. Everyone, including An-sky, sang "Mipney rna?" "The song grew louder from minute to minute, our voices blended together and rose, climbing up to a peak of genuine inspiration." 5 I can vividly see An-sky singing the opening and concluding melody of his own play, united in ecstatic music-making ·with the future performers and spectators. Since that time, this tune has been associated not just with the Hasidic community he depicted but with An-sky's own voice as well. 6 I can hear the author's voice not only in the sung moments of The Dybbuk but also in the role of the quasi-mysterious Wanderer, Passerby, or Messenger, with his narration, announcements, and comments. The Dybbuk was originally intended for a Russian audience; probably for this reason, the director, Konstantin Stanislavsky, suggested that the figure of the Messenger be introduced in order to make the story more comprehensible to the Russian layman. In reply, consciously or subconsciously, An-sky brought himself into the play disguised as the Messenger. After his 1912-r4 ethnographic expeditions, he felt he was able to explain everything properly, and he speaks on behalf of the People, not as one of the ancient Greek Fates. This role is not a foreign accretion. An-sky used here, in the figure of the Messenger, his own fieldwork data

The Musical Strands of An-sky's Texts and Contexts

and, as David Roskies has pointed out, some passages from the "Tale of the Seven Beggars" by Nakhman of Bratslav, a renowned Hasidic storyteller in whose footsteps An -sky wished to follow. The questions from An-sky's ethnographic questionnaire have been published in Yiddish and partly translated into English-though the answers have not come down to us. My guess is that some answers were revealed in the remarks of the Messenger. An-sky himself, as an ethnographer, speaks through the Messenger, just as Khonen-the-dybbuk speaks through Leah. As an essayist, folklorist, and storyteller, he is present in the play, and his narrative voice is heard from the stage. In a way, An-sky's intonation creates the music of the play. Thinking of this, I was pleased to read in Menachem Gnesin's memoirs these acute words: "During the reading the S.R. [Socialist Revolutionary] and poet brought to mind the Passerby from his play. His voice, a bit muffled, penetrated into the listeners' hearts." 7 The voice ofAn-sky.

An-sky as a Musical Collector "To transcribe the old Jewish melodies into musical notation" was one of the main goals of An-sky's Jervish Ethnographic Pro._qram (1914). 8 The enterprise was unique in scope and could perhaps be compared with the publishing of the fundamental r6-volume jewish Encyclopedia in Russian in about the same period. The historical "Jewish Ethnographic Expedition in the Name of Baron Horace Guenzburg" was organized by Ansky through the offices of the Jewish Historic-Ethnographic Society in St. Petersburg in 1912-14. Its musical division, which worked mainly in Volhynia and Podolia, included two great musical researchers of the period: Iuly Engel (1868-1927), Jewish composer and noted Russian musicologist, and Zinovy Kiselhof (r878-1939), well-known pedagogue and untiring collector of Yiddish folk music. The expedition amassed, among other things, r,soo folk songs and plays, soo wax cylinders of folk music that were created tor use with a phonograph, and r,ooo melodies of songs and nigunim (Hasidic tunes without words). At least two more composers and members of the Society for Jewish Folk Music, Lazare Saminsky (r882-1959) and Hayim Kopyt (dates unknown),

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Figurers. A group of parquet-floor layers in Polonnoe prepare to sing. SOURCE: MAE RAN, "Snimki Evreiskoi etnograficheskoi ekspeditsii im. barona Goratsiia Osipovicha Gintsburga" (July 1-0ctober 15, 1912), collection #2152, photograph 288; contributed by Benjamin Lukin.

were also involved in the process of notation (that is, deciphering the phonographic cylinders). Mter the material was transferred to Kiev in the 1930s, the work of notation was picked up by Moisei Beregovsky (1892- 1961). An-sky had an ambitious plan to publish the expedition material in 40 volumes, including 5 volumes of musical data (nigunim, wedding tunes, instrumental pieces, folk songs, and liturgical music) as well as musical supplements to other collections. Sadly, this plan was never fulfilled. An-sky himself also collected Jewish music during and after the expedition. According to Engel and Kiselhof, after they had to leave in the middle of the fieldwork, An-sky took over all their musical duties, even dealing with the phonograph. (In the summer of1912, they were the first researchers in Jewish ethnomusicology to use one.) Mter their first trip into the field, An-sky came back to the capital to hand his phonographic

The Musical Strands of An-sky's Texts and Contexts collection over to Engel, apparently for transcription. Later on, Kiselhof and Engel collaborated in the preparation of musical material for An-sky's planned publication. 9 Although An-sky himself never published his musical data, some unique samples from his collection were published later by Beregovsky. 10 In particular, two records were transcribed by Beregovsky from cylinders made by An -sky. These tunes have a special significance because they were recorded and written down from the voice of the famous poet Hayim Nachman Bialik (1873-1934), the translator of The Dybbuk into Hebrew. What a combination of names-An-sky, Bialik, and Beregovsky, three classics of Russian Jewish culture joined together! 11

An-sky and the Society for Jewish Folk Music An-sky was a member of, or at least had close contact with, several Jewish organizations, including the Society for Jewish Folk Music. Indeed, the whole cultural renaissance among Russian Jewry was invigorated by the work and activity of An-sky. He served as a tilimvekker (a person whose duty it was every morning to call the Jews to prayer by a special song) for all the Jews who were ready to build the new house ofJewish culture. For instance, on the day of the founding of the Moscow branch of the Society for Jewish Folk Music (October 8, 1923), the chairman of the meeting, David Shor, made a speech in which he shared an episode from An-sky's Ethnographic Expedition that seemed to him symbolic.12 During their fieldwork, members of the expedition were at first suspected of making phonographic recordings in order to perform these songs in restaurants and other inappropriate places. As a result, one of the best tilimvekkers turned down the request to sing his song for the record despite the fact that he was offered a higher payment than usual for the performance. However, when Kiselhof pointed out that his song, once recorded, would call Jews to prayer not only in his own shtetl but also in many other places, he agreed to sing without payment. For the members of the society-to-be, it was An-sky the tilimvekker who awakened his fellow Jews to a new and nationally meaningful life. It seems, therefore, not accidental that An-sky's first article on Jewish

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folklore was written in 1908, the year of the official registration of the Folk Music Society. An-sky was invited to deliver a speech at the Grand Hall of the St. Petersburg Conservatory on March 5, I9II, before a concert sponsored by the Jewish Folk Music Society. 13 He began with a general statement about the antiquity of folk song among all peoples and about how folk song reflects the innermost thoughts and expectations of the people. Our era, he said, is marked by the declaration of its significance. As for Jewish song, it originated in the biblical Song of Songs, but folk creativity did not run dry in the course of the millennia. The modern Jewish folk song has its own motifs, both unique and common to other peoples. Jewish song sings of God, Torah, and Zion. It is deeply spiritual and often has an elegiac tone. An-sky finished his talk with a strong statement about the original and genuine character ofJewish music. In 1912, when An -sky organized a special meeting to discuss the status of the impending expedition, he invited Engel, who subsequently joined An-sky in Volhynia with a phonograph. Mter their preliminary trip, An-sky was elected a member of the executive board of the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music in October r, 1912, whereas Engel was elected a honorary member. In the summer of1913, another active member of the Folk Music Society and its official representative, Kiselhof~ took part in the expedition with An-sky. On February 2, 1914, Kiselhof delivered a paper entitled "Jewish Song ofVolhynia (Impressions from the Ethnographic Expedition of 1913)" at a meeting of the musical society. He spoke about the technique of musical recordings, the types of folk singers and musicians, and their treatment of the members of the expedition, and then he described a few outstanding folk musicians and the forms of their songs as well as the repertory in Volhynia and Lithuania. 14 A few months later, on April 13, An-sky was again elected a member of the executive board of the same St. Petersburg Society. Before that, Kiselhof began the time-consuming process of notating the music recorded in the field. On September 23, 1913, he asked An-sky to send him the cylinders kept by Engel and reminded him of the 13 or 15 cylinders An-sky himself took with him after the trip. Kiselhof reports he

The Musical Strands of An-sky's Texts and Contexts had already deciphered the material from 90 of the cylinders and that music data from another 8 or IO cylinders had been notated by Hayim Kopyt. 15 Kopyt was a member of the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music, and six of his compositions were published by the society in I9I2-I7. In 1916, Kiselhof delivered a paper about his field trip to Dubrovna in I9I4, during his last sojourn with An-sky, in which he describes the music of the synagogue as well as klezmer music and the music of cantonists. 16 On January 21, 1917, Kiselhof wrote of the plans to publish his work on the first volume of Hasidic songs. The I9I7 Revolution put an end to this work. The leader of the Society for Jewish Folk Music, Lazare Saminsky (I882-1959 ), composer, musicologist, and conductor, also claimed that he was in charge of deciphering and translating most of the An-sky expedition's musical recordings, from phonographic cylinders to musical scores. 17 At the end of I9I6, An-sky was invited to deliver a speech at the Moscow conservatory before a concert devoted to the memory of three great Jewish writers, Sholem Aleichem (I859-I9I6), I. L. Peretz (I852-I9I5), and Simon Frug (I860-I9I6), who had recently died. When An-sky was forced to go to Galicia, his text was delivered (on December 22 and 23) by Engel.l 8 In the speech, An-sky paid special attention to the writers' concern with Jewish songs and music and its folk creators. He focused on Frug, at the time a popular Jewish-Russian poet and journalist; Frug once figuratively called emancipated Jewry the "People of the Clarinet," opposing them to the "People of the Shofar"-that is, ancient Jewry. 19 In his speech, An-sky repeated the credo in the epigraph to this article: "A people, a nation does not live by suffering but by a conscious rapture of its genius." 20 An -sky spoke about music, musical images, and hero-musicians in the poetry and prose of all three writers, and about music as a symbol ofJewish culture in its "conscious rapture" of itself. Indeed, An-sky's efforts as tilimvekker to members of the society were fruitful. He inspired at least two works of music by members that can be seen as products of the new Jewish cultural renaissance. In April I9I7, the romance "Night" bySaminsky (op. I2,no. 2), a setting of a short poem by An-sky, was published by the Society for Jewish

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Zemtsovsky Folk Music in Petrograd. 21 On the first hearing, the music is not so emphatically Jewish, but in one particular place where the music speaks on behalf of the main character-un ikh, dayn zun (and I, your son)the character turns out to be definitely Jewish in musical style. (In the score is a fragment marked by the composer "Piu Iento assai" [slower].)22 The romance is dedicated to Leopold Sev (1867-1922), the editor of the magazine Jewish Week, a very educated person with a deep interest in the history of the arts. (It was he who, in 1910, gave a recommendation to Marc Chagall for matriculation into the Zantseva art school where Bakst and Dobuzhinsky taught.) This dedication speaks for itself, and, like another significant dedication of a romance in 1915"Shoyn nita der nekhtn" (Yesterday Is Over) by Moshe Shalit, a member of the society, to Chaim Zhitlowsky (1865-1943), a close friend of An-sky and a Yiddishist-they show the significant level of contact between Russian Jewish musicians and Yiddish writers, their contemporaries and, in a way, brothers-in-arms. 23 As for the Yiddish opera Di himln brenen (The Heavens in Flames) by Moisei Milner (1886-1953), another member of the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music, this is the most disputable page in the Ansky-Jewish music story. Several publications claim that Milner created his opera on the basis of either An-sky's play The Dybbuk or his poem Ashmedei. However, both assumptions are basically mistaken. 24 Milner definitely knew An-sky's Ashmedei (or Ashmedai, King of Demons), published in Yiddish (twice, in 1905 and 1928) as well as Russian (in part but also twice, in I9II and 1914). 25 He did indeed work with its theme but not so much in the opera as in a piano suite dated 1913-14 or 1916 and never published as a whole. 26 Two movements of four have similar subtitles: no. 1, "The Cave of Asmodei (From a Poem by An-sky)," and no. 3, "A Legend [in Russian, Skazanie] (From a Poem by An-sky)." The whole suite is dedicated to Kiselhof, who had introduced Milner to the Society of Jewish Music. The first movement ("Asmodei calls for the Spirits of Darkness") illustrates the text. The "Legend" (no. 3) has a lovely narrative tone that could be suggested by the verse form employed in An-sky's poem (unrhymed trochaic tetrameter, well known in Russia thanks to Ivan Bunin's translation ofLongfellow's "Hiawatha"). However, its music is not particularly original; it closely resembles

The Musical Strands of An-sky's Texts and Contexts the well-known piano piece "Consolation" by Felix Mendelssohn (from his Songs Without Words, op. 30, no. 3).

Unicus On the first Sunday of February 1915, an article written by Saminsky came out called "The Artistic Result of Recent Works of the Jewish Folk Music Society." 27 The author accused his colleagues of having a banal musical foundation in what he called the pseudo-folkloric, the repertory of ordinary people. Saminsky argued that, though religious music belonged to "the most characteristic and stately elements ofJewish folk art," we must rid ourselves of "a naive belief in the sanctity of everything that our people sings." 28 The gauntlet had been thrown down. It marked the start of a few years of vigorous polemic between the author and his opponents, first of all Engel, a defender of domestic songs, as they called them then, or songs of the everyday life of simple folk. From today's perspective, this discussion seems fairly naive, since we now know that even a truly banal source does not stand in the way of unquestionably great music-note Mahler and Shostakovich. Besides, within any given oral tradition, musical data cannot be understood without appropriate attention to their actual articulation in performance. An ethnically distinctive type of articulation (that is, the articulation of musical rendering in a broader sense, as a performing behavior) is the water oflife for any musical form. 29 However, in the I9IOS, the ideological atmosphere was quite different. People saw "sources" as the most important thing for ethnically identifiable musical style. The artistic result of a concrete musical work was largely defined for them by the quality of its musical source. 30 In addition to Saminsky and Engel, another, pseudonymous writer got involved in the discussion. Saminsky claimed: "Engel never again wrote on the matter. But a well-known Petrograd writer, not a professional musician, writing under the name of 'Unicus,' picked up the gauntlet and, in an article vox profani, very forcefully assaulted some of my statements." 31 Saminsky replied in the article "Words of an Uninitiated Person" in December 1916.

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Leonid Guralnik, who recently prepared and edited that whole discussion for publication, has cautiously hypothesized that Unicus might have been An-sky. I am in full agreement with this. Two short articles that came out in Jewish Week in May 1916 and in January 1917 under the name of Unicus sound very An-skian in form, style, and content-so An-skian, indeed, that henceforth I will call "Unicus" by the name of An-sky. An-sky interfered in the discussion not only to support his friend Engel but also to raise a new question, one more significant to him. "The argument concerning the elements offoreign influence in our folk melodies" he wrote, "seems strange to me." 32 Regarding national art, "it is not whence it comes that matters but where it is headed. 33 An-sky offers two principal and fundamentally connected premises that were underestimated by Russian Jewish musicians of his time. Saminsky was indignant at his statements, and though he felt in them "an art policy, as a matter of fact," 34 he did not realize their significance for moving the whole discussion onto another, more general level. Premise one. "In song, as in philosophy, it is not dead building material but animated spirit that defines its owner." 35 Premise two. "It is high time to differentiate two types of creativity, namely the creation of the people [narodnoe] and the creation of the masses [massovoe] in our songs .... The masses are only the physical outward appearance [fizicheskaia vidimost)] of the people, or at any rate only a small part of the people, whereas the creative spirit of the people [tvorcheskii dukh naroda] resides not always in that part of the whole." 36 The term "creative spirit" that Saminsky saw as a layman's formulation had a deep meaning for An -sky. In response, An-sky emphasized the deep ideological meaning of folk practice and music that could be found in the kabbalistic theory of "raising oflittle sparks" (vozvedenie iskorok) and "sanctifying of slivers" ( osviashchenie oskolkov). 37 An -sky believed that the whole spiritual Jewishness of his time had been based on such "sanctifying of slivers" and "raising oflittle sparks." An-sky did not develop his thoughts further in this article because he was limited by the genre-"in passing" (vskoFz)), as he diffidently entitled his text. He just briefly pointed out how significant the Jewish legacy would look to those

The Musical Strands of An-sky's Texts and Contexts

who understood it on a much more profound spiritual level than Saminsky did. An -sky was a dilettante in music theory but not as much in music history and ethnography. In a 1920 article (written as An-sky, not Unicus ), he correctly analyzed Hasidic folk melodies as "adopted from the neighboring people, reworked and Judaized .... The same things that were said about folk songs hold true for instrumental folk music, especially wedding music." 38 Earlier in the article, he had written that "Most of the Jewish klezmer music was borrowed from non-Jews," and such is the logic of "the encounter of Jewish culture with the peoples among whom they have lived over many years." 39 He mentioned that, engraved on the tombstone of the great Russian composer Modest Musorgsky (1839-81), there was a Jewish melody, that enchanting Hasidic song taken by the composer for his famous cantata "Joshua, the Son of Nun." An-sky wrote about this by way of historical anecdote, adding some truly legendary details about the composer's diary, 40 but he did have grounds for his statement. Indeed, in 1884 the Russian Jewish sculptor Il'ia Gintsburg (1859-1939) created a bas-relieffor the gravestone of Musorgsky, and this artwork can be seen even today at the Necropolis of the Masters of Arts in St. Petersburg. An-sky/Unicus was indeed a unique personality.

Music of the Jewish Workers Two songs created about a century ago, set to the texts of two poems by An-sky in Yiddish, became as popular as genuine folk songs. 41 They have been widely known as "Di shvue" (The Oath, or The Vow) 42 and "In zaltsikn yam" (In the Salty Sea). These songs have often been published and republished, both with music and without. "Di shvue" is sung at Jewish socialist gatherings around the world to this day. This song became the "Marseillaise" of the Jewish workers, the official anthem of the Bun d. Indeed, An-sky was an inspiration not only for music belonging to high culture (such as Saminsky and Milner) but also for the music of the "folk" as he understood it. An-sky composed these two popular

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Figures r6 and 17. Two musical versions of An-sky's protest song, "In zaltsikn yam fun mcnshlekhe trcrn" (In the Salty Sea of Human Tears). The first, in 3/8, is by J. Goldstein; the second, in 6/8, is by Joseph Achron. SOURCES: A. Z. Idelsohn, Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental Melodies, val. 9 (Leipzig, 1932 ); Joseph Achron, The Worker's Songs (Leningrad, 1930 ).

songs as well as a cycle of revolutionary verses in Yiddish. Some are known with music-for instance, "Der k.ranker shnayder" (The Sick Tailor), "Mir vandern" (We Are Wandering) with music by Mikhl Gelbart (r889-1962), and "Dos naye lid" (The New Song) composed by Israel Alter. 43 The music of all these songs belongs to the popular style of mass singing of the period, in which two basic rhythmic movements prevailed: march and waltz. They were sung as genuine folk songs and consequently shared their fate-that is, they did not have an absolutely stable sung form. In those cases in which we know a few variants of a popular song composed to An-sky's poems, we have a constellation of variants and versions typical for folklore. However, publications were conducive to the stabilization of one chosen variant over all others. Thus, soon after An-sky read his new poem In zaltsikn yam fun di mentshlekhe trern (In the Salty Sea of Human Tears) in I90I, this text spread orally with a minor tune in triple meter. In the meantime, the general musical structure of the song, its sung phrasing, changed. By

The Musical Strands of An-sky's Texts and Contexts

way of illustration, we can compare two versions of the song, one published first by J. Goldstein, 44 the other by Joseph Achron (1886-1943), one of the leading composers of the Society for Jewish Folk Music. Achron's original arrangement was published in 1930 as the opening song of his three-part cycle The Worker)s Songs (no opus number). The publication is remarkable in the history of Jewish music in Soviet Russia. It carne out in Leningrad as if by a miracle: it was published by the Musical Section of the Jewish Historic-Ethnographic Society, which had been practically liquidated in December 1929. It seems that Achron learned this melody from the oral tradition or received it from Kiselhof, but his composition was strongly marked by his individual style and sounds, perhaps, more like a romance than a song. Similarly, all the musical publications of "Di shvue" are slightly different. The most standard melodic variant carne out in the songbook of Eleanor and Joseph Mlotek. 45 A close variant was published by M. Gelbart in his songbook, also without an arrangement. The cornposer is unknown, and probably the song does belong to the oral tradition. The main publications are without any arrangement and are reminiscent in style to the tune of" Mir veibn, rnir veibn" [sic]. 46 There is yet another rare publication by Ephraim Shkliar, a pupil of Nikolai Rirnsky-Korsakov and one of the first members of the Society for Jewish Folk Music in St. Petersburg. This is a composition of his own based on another variant of "Di shvue" sung among the masses and arranged by Shkliar in order to mark An-sky's sudden death in November 1920; this song, arranged for choir and piano, carne out in December 1920 in Dorpat (modern-day Tartu, Estonia) and was designed and published by the composer himself, who by that time had left Petrograd. Indeed, it was a significant choice to memorialize the passing of such an author and public figure as An-sky. Other texts of An-sky's songs were also sung but were published without a rnelody. 47 Besides these original sung poems, An-sky twice translated from French into Yiddish the Internationale by Eugene Pottier. He was excited to be part of the Russian Revolution, both as a Jew and as a Russian. Ideologically speaking, populism (narodnichestvo) was his faith and confession. In a way, he continued the method and ideas ofPetr Lavrov (1823-1900 ), for whom he worked from 1894 to 1900. Composing

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Zemtsovsky revolutionary songs was an essential part of Lavrov's activity, too. He not only translated but essentially reworked the French "Marseillaise" and in 1875 published his Russian text, called Rabochaia Marsel)eza (The Worker's Marseillaise ). 48 Those who know An-sky as an ardent collector and as the founder of museums (that is, as a cultural builder and a creator par excellence) might be surprised that such a person was also a revolutionary (that is, a destroyer). Indeed, for many people this may seem to be a contradiction in terms or a spiritual paradox, but in the case of An-sky it is not. He was principally a social, public figure, both in writing and in scholarship. He was as sensitive to the past as he was to the future. For him, collecting meant looking forward. Moving to Jewish ethnography did not mean forgetting his revolutionary past. Let us take as an example two of his final letters, which testifY to the range of his projects from the political to the cultural. On August 15, 1918, he enumerated his projects at that time-the book Khurbn Galicia and an article about political song in the time of the French Revolution of 1789 (for the Russian journal Russkoe bogatstvo ). 49 On June 8, 1918, he added that after the book on Galicia he planned to begin work on his ethnographic collection as well as to prepare his artistic "Album" and, as usual, to write articles for the party newspaper Vozrozhdenie. This combination of contrasting themes and genres was normal for An-sky. This contrast of basic characteristics in An-sky's persona was evident in his appearance and behavior as well. At a revealing moment, he encountered his own poem as a popular song. This episode shows both his noble personality and the real fate of a folk song: An-sky's "roommate" in a prison cell, a young Jewish worker, a Bundist, sang "Di shvue" with great feeling but scandalously garbled its text. When Ansky tried to correct his mistakes, the lad was exasperated by his approach: "Whatever next! The bourgeois will teach me how to sing OUR songs!" 50 If we leave aside the humor, the story becomes symbolic. People accept the song but not its author, and perhaps after such unsuccessful attempts to struggle with folklore, An-sky the poet gave up and decided he would prefer to record folklore than to improve it. His confidence in the people won out. Mter all, we treasure the living folk variants more than the author's original script. The poet in An-sky

The Musical Strands of An-sky's Texts and Contexts made way for the folklorist. And even in his famous dramatic legend The Dybbuk, he emerged as an author and a folklorist, with no internal contradiction.

The Dybbuk of Jewish Music The preceding sentence about An-sky as the author and folklorist par excellence is only a slight exaggeration. The widespread opinion that The Dybbuk is a mystical play51 is wrong. An-sky himself wrote to Zhitlowsky: "My play, needless to say, is a realistic drama about mystics." 52 And Zhitlowsky later wrote: "It seems, in truth, as though the wall between the natural and supernatural worlds had indeed been removed, and both worlds merged into one." 5 3 An-sky created a text that might be called inter-generic because it has features of both storytelling and the ethnographic presentation of folklore data. This prose is as much documentary as fictional. However, the author called it, as we know, a dramatic legend-that is, he assigned it to the genre of folklore. But why should this legend be turned into a play and not into a prosaic story? Let us listen to An-sky's testimony about the source of The Dybbuk: The idea came to me when I was traveling in the Volhynia and Podolia provinces collecting Jewish folklore. Arriving with Engel at Yarmolinets, a small town in Podolia, we couldn't find an inn. The rich man of the town took us to his home .... The thought came to me that here in this house a tragedy was destined to occur. From that Sabbath evening, I began to imagine various ways in which the tragedy might unfold. 5 4 The whole recollection is important, but for us one moment is of special significance: the idea of the play came to An-sky when he was with Engel-that very Engel who later composed the music for the famous Habima production of the play. The composer and companion-in-arms in both field and stage was the only witness to the origin of An-sky's poetic conception. I do not wish to speculate whether An-sky discussed his idea with Engel or not. It does not matter. What matters is that An-sky did not write a story but gave preference to a stage form that required music.

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He was able to concentrate almost everything in one play: folklore and ethnography, ~ocumentation and music. It seems that he longed for a synthesis and by that time felt that he as a writer was mature enough to create one. A staged play was the only feasible synthetic and complex (total performing) art. Thus, An-sky decided to tackle the dramatization of a legend. At that time he was fully aware of the performative power of traditiona! Jewish art and its transformative ability (connected to the ancient Jewish concept of gilgul, or reincarnation) and potential to rework and Judaize even foreign sources. During his fieldwork he realized that the power of articulation or performance in the broad sense of the word is fundamental to Jewish art. Indeed, I would say that An-sky understood that the Jew is articulation and therefore that Jewish art should first and foremost be articulated. As a result, The Dybbuk turned out to be a play that could be performed successfully in Hebrew, a language unknown to its first audience at the Habima theater, a play "so saturated in music and dancing that the language is not critically important in its appreciation." 55 A remarkable statement, indeed. We know that the authorized text of The Dybbuk exists in three languages-Russian (the original version), Hebrew (in Bialik's translation from Russian), and Yiddish (in An-sky's translation from Russian and Hebrew)-and this corresponds to An-sky's own concept about the trilingual status of Jewish literature. Although An-sky himself~ by the end ofhis life, liked the Hebrew version best ("Bialik's translation of my play is nothing but music," he wrote to Roza Ettinger in 1918),56 language was not the main issue for the play's fate. It has been performed in many languages-even, in New York City, by the Theatre of the Deaf. Engel eagerly accepted the commission when it was offered to him and began to compose his music for the Russian version of the play (for Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theater, in 1916-17) and finished it completely for the Hebrew version (for the Habima Theater, by the premiere in January 31, 1922). The authenticity of the music had a crucial role in the play because many of the actors did not know Hebrew or spoke it with a heavy Russian accent. In a revealing memoir about their actual language in the performance, Theodore Bike!, an American singer, wrote: "Russian was and remained their workday tongue. So much so

The Musical Strands of An-sky's Texts and Contexts that in watching them perform a play in Hebrew it would seem-ifyou weren't listening too carefully-that they were speaking in Russian; the lilt was that pronounced." 57 This is reminiscent ofVakhtangov's remark during the rehearsal: "You do not feel the melodies of An-sky's speech and vocalizations. You speak in Nizhny Novgorod dialect [ nizhegorodskoe narechie]." 58 Yet the language of the play was a synthetic or even a syncretic one, where the blending of the various elements of the production, the acting, music, makeup, costumes, scenery-all expressive means-worked toward an artistic end. Odette Aslan particularly pointed out the role of Engel in the creation and staging of The Dybbuk in Vakhtangov's Habima Theater. 59 During the preparation of the play, Engel proposed a new musical theme almost every hour, thereby reducing the spoken text and increasing the number of fragments sung, chanted, or accompanied by music, even replacing them with music alone. Consequently, and not infrequently, the musical moments became the center of the action. As aresult, the merging of writer-director-composer-artist (An-sky, Vakhtangov, Engel, and Al'tman) produced a dramatic play of almost operatic power. This was the artistic synthesis that An-sky had desired. Samuil Margolin, one of the first reviewers of the performance in the period of its final rehearsals, wrote in 1921: "[E ]veryone in the Habima Studio acts in time and rhythm with the music of Iuly Engel, which is completely fused with the act ofperformance." 60 Engel's music to The Dybbuk was never published in full. We have only the instrumental suite created by the composer for the concert performance afterward, based on part of his theatrical score. There is also a solo piano version of it61 and, in parallel, his scoring for string quartet, double-bass, and clarinet, which sounds like a typical Jewish wedding klezmer band. 62 Judith Kaplan Eisenstein has arranged aversion of Engel's music for two pianos. 63 In 1974, S. Morris Engel summarized the story as follows: Joel Engel's music dates from 1912 when An-sky and Engel, who were close friends and collaborators, first heard the old folk tale from an innkeeper's wife. Basing his play on this folk tale, An-sky constructed the drama on the leitmotif of the Hasidic melody "Mipnei mah?" (Wherefore, 0 wherefore?). The melody ... [was] published in the Yiddish

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Zemtsovsky edition of the play and formed part of the stage music composed by Engel which he later published as his Suite ccHadibuF) (op. 35). 64 Engel's suite is well described by Albert Weisser in his pioneering book The Modern Renaissance ofJewish Music. 65 I will note here only its structure. The suite is in six parts: 1. a/ "Mipney rna?" (Why?) and b/ "Shir Hashirim" (Song of Songs); 2. Rikudim hakobtzonim (The Beggar's Dance); 3. Marsh-chathunah (Wedding March); 4-. Chipuy hakalah (Veiling of the Bride); s. Nigun Hasidim (Hasidic Melody); 6. a/ "Shir Hashirim" and b/ "Mipney rna?" Weisser rightly pointed out that both initial musical tunes were based on versions especially popular in the Vitebsk region (the birthplace of An-sky) and in the PolishLithuanian area of the Jewish oral tradition. In most movements, Engel used and reworked original melodic material from the region alongside the data from their joint expedition. Weisser believed that "in the theatre Engel's work is highly utilitarian" and "has become such an integral part of the Habimah production and so suits that production's needs that it is difficult to imagine the music being replaced by more formidable stuff." 66 One can even say that only in Engel's music was the authentic An-sky-the untranslated, so to speak, An-sky-present and heard. This living description illustrates the incredible interweaving ofEngel's music into the play. "In the first act of The Dybbuk there is an unforgettable scene," the Russian Jewish critic Akim Volynsky stated in 1923: A Jewish woman enters the synagogue weeping in a tune which makes one think of David's harp. This is ritual weeping; it has a specific melody, and yet it is most sincere and genuine. The woman approaches the Holy Ark with firm steps, pulls aside the curtain and in a voice full of sweetness and pleading pours out her troubles. The entire synagogue is filled with her voice. All disappears, all ceases to exist in a moment. Nothing remains save for that voice, half weeping, half singing. 67 Indeed, the musical score ofVakhtangov and Engel's stunning dramatic performance was so well worked out that, when one group of producers of this play needed to decide on the genre of their record, they decided to label it "opera." 68 The instrumental suite by Engel gives just a hint of what kind of syncretic musical performance this really was.

The Musical Strands of An-sky's Texts and Contexts

An-sky did not live to see his play performed, but the dybbuk of Jewish music was so vigorously awakened by his creative activity and especially by this dramatic legend that it has never ceased to exist. 69

An-sky, Engel, and Copland The stage history of The Dybbuk and its music is quite complex. The play became an inspiration and a source of]ewish experience for composers who lived in Eastern Europe as well as across the ocean. An-sky's heritage in general consists of discoveries and disappearances, unique acquisitions and unthinkable destruction, and this can also be seen in the musical fate of The Dybbuk, in which we find both important inputs and irreplaceable losses. Suffice it to say that, in 1929, George Gershwin himself signed a contract with the Metropolitan Opera to write an opera based on An-sky's Yiddish play, The Dybbuk. However, the musical rights to The Dybbuk were unavailable, and Gershwin, who had already begun composing, was forced to stop and to change his operatic theme completely. We can perhaps consider this loss for the history of Jewish music as almost equal to the loss of the original Russian version of the play itself. After the production of The Dybbuk in Hebrew and Yiddish, staging in German, English, Polish, Ukrainian, Swedish, Bulgarian, Italian, French, and other languages followed. Some of them used the original music by Engel; for others, different composers were commissioned. (In the appendix to this chapter, I have provided a preliminary list, in chronological order, of those productions and musical settings where-in most cases-I know the names of composers.) Rather than analyzing these diverse musical interpretations of The Dybbttk, I will discuss a unique musical opus composed in the United States in 1929 that is directly connected to both An-sky and Engel. This music was created based on that "Mipney ma?" melody which An-sky himself sang, as we now know, in the beginning ofr917, and which became the musical core tor all of Engel's music to the play. This episode in music history deserves our special attention. In the summer of 192 7, Aaron Copland (1900-1990 ), an outstanding American composer, began to compose his only work for piano

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Zemtsovsky trio, giving it the unusual title "Vitebsk (Study on a Jewish Theme)." Copland himself wrote a "Note on Vitebsk" as an introduction to the published score of his "Trio for piano, violin and violoncello," in which he explains why he decided to compose this opus: The Trio Vitebsk was completed in 1929 and first performed at a concert of the League of Composers in New York in February of that year. The Jewish folk theme, which is used as an integral part of the work, was heard by the composer during a performance of An-sky's play The Dybbuk. The particular version of the folk tune used in the play was first heard by An-sky in his birthplace Vitebsk. That circumstance supplied the composer with his title. This means that Copland attended the Habima performance of The Dybbuk that took place in 1927 in New York, and began to compose immediately thereafter.7° He told Vivian Pedis: It was always a musical stimulus that got me started, as when I heard the folk theme that the Polish-Jewish authorS. An-sky used in his play The Dybbuk. It appealed to me just as it had to him. Vitebsk, a small Russian town, was the playwright's home; it was there he had heard and transcribed [sic!] the tune. Years later when I traveled in the Soviet Union, the Russians were amazed that any composer would name a piece of music after the city ofVitebsk, a large industrial complex resembling Pittsburgh or Cleveland! 71 The Brooklyn-born composer said that he, like An-sky, "grew up in the Eastern European tradition." It is striking that Copland attributed the music of The Dybbuk not to Engel but to An-sky. This mistake might be read as the biggest compliment to both colleagues-to An-sky, whose name was associated as much with music as with many other aspects ofJewish traditional life in pre-revolutionary Russia, and to Engel, whose musical setting was so incredibly amalgamated with Ansky's original idea, actions, and poetics. In essence, the "Vitebsk Trio" by Copland reflects the significance of Engel's music. What Copland does in his trio might be called the only musical analysis of Engel's "intonational thesis" for the play. He named this unique musical genre, appropriately, "Study on a Jewish Theme." There is more evidence to document Copland's acquaintance with

The Musical Strands of An-sky's Texts and Contexts

Engel's music. The same tune was published in 1926 in the New York edition of The Dybbuk with a note on Hasidism by Zhitlowsky. The melody in that book is accompanied by a short comment-"Jewish melody sung in Vitebsk (birthplace of An-sky)"-which sounds familiar to readers of Copland's introduction to the "Vitebsk Trio." Apparently, Copland not only heard the music but also read this edition of The Dybbuk and thus saw these notations. Indeed, all the many composers who approached The Dybbuk after Engel commented on An-sky's play from the position of their own time and their way of thinking. Only Engel, from the very beginning an active participant in the creative processes of both An-sky (during their teamwork in the expedition) and Vakhtangov (during their rehearsals in Habima), worked practically in parallel with these creators of the first performance of the play. All of Engel's creative experiences before The Dybbuk can be seen today as an accumulation of music for the play. Engel bowed to An -sky's desire to create on the basis of ethnographic facts, to use the concrete folkloric data that they both so enthusiastically collected and recorded. They strove to express not themselves but the people as they saw them with their outer and inner eyes-they created, one could say, an artistic document of the epoch and place. Authentic melodic sources were prevalent in Engel's music, first and foremost the musical practice of the Hasidim. Let us concentrate now on the tune "Mipney rna?" with which the play opens and closes. In 1931, Abraham Zvi Idelsohn published a few variants of it in his collection, "Songs of the Hasidim." 72 Idelsohn knew that Engel used this melody in The Dybbuk, as indicated in his comments ("No. 21 is from the music to The Dybbuk. A variation thereofis no. 67") and added: "The tune no. 21 breathes ecstasy." 73 There are other ethnomusicological publications of this remarkable melody, including a version in the collection of Moisei Beregovsky.74 This collection is of special value to us because Beregovsky published several of the tunes recorded by Engel and An-sky during their joint fieldwork, in addition to "Mipney ma?" 75 Some are variants of a dance character but others are more song-like, which would be closer to Engel's interpretation of the tune. Among those melodies published by Beregovsky is one recorded by An-sky's expedition in 1913 in a Ukranian town, Ludmir in

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Zemtsovsky Yiddish (Vladimir Volynsky in Russian). Beregovsky selected two tunes from Ludmir/6 one with a striking similarity to the "Mipney rna?" melody heard in the Vitebsk area. It appears that both versions of the song used the same melodic idea, although they originated from two geographically different regions. This happens in the oral tradition and usually indicates especially stable and significant elements in the "musical vocabulary" of a given people. This coincidence-the affinitive melodies recorded at the same time, in 1913, in conjunction with An-sky's expedition both in Vitebsk and in Ludmir-is intriguing.77 The melody that is strikingly similar to the core tune of Engel's music to The Dybbuk provides more proof for the hypothesis that An -sky received crucial inspiration for his play in Ludmir. The construction of"Mipney rna?" in the version used by both Engel and Copland is worthy of further consideration. One must take the piece as a whole and especially look at its very beginning, which I call the "intonational thesis" of the tune. (See the first bar in the "Jewish melody sung in Vitebsk," presented here as an illustration.) Indeed, if the melodic interval of the fifth (as a musical intonation) is "the soul of Russian music" (according to Mikhail Glinka), then the rising sixth with the audible fourth might be called the soul ofJewish music. This is one of those melodies in which the beginning is constructed in such a way that it can sound equally like the beginning or like the end (the cadence). Both the question and the answer are contained in this simple structure. This phenomenon-an answer coinciding with a question-lies in the essence of that beginning, and yet, in a wider scope, it is realized in the general composition of the play. This modal intonation is polysemantic-it is narrative, interrogative, and affirmative. It is internally in conflict and yet sounds as though it rises above all conflicts and discrepancies, as though this song belongs not to the dramatis personae of the play but to an imaginary author or an imaginary audience. 78 Here, though intonationally independent, the Hasidic song "Mipney rna?" with its modal mutability presents the gist of the play. Copland fully understood the crux of the musical matter when he began his "Vitebsk Trio" by hammering out simultaneous major and minor chords on the same tonic. As he told Pedis, "the overall nature of Vitebsk is basically a dramatic character study." 79 Composing such a "dramatic study" was

The Musical Strands of An-sky's Texts and Contexts

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an excellent creative commentary on the main idea of An-sky/Engel. For me, this is the crucial reason why the "Vitebsk Trio" should be included in the story of The Dybbuk. Conclusion: The Benveen-Two- Worlds Paradigm When we look at the data presented, the general picture of An-sky's connections to music seems like a pretty mosaic. The only way to sec its inner logic is to go beyond the musical data proper and to find the unifYing factor that ran through An-sky's whole life and his varied social, scholarly, and artistic activities. If by The Dybbuk and "Di shvue" he marked the extremes of his interests, then by the Jewish Ethnographic Program and the expedition he marked his foundation, the goal, the golden mean, the only point of rest and buttress that was real to him. In thinking of An-sky, I proceed from the assumption that Between Two Worlds is not just the original title of The Dybbuk but a paradigm

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Zemtsovsky for his way of being and thinking. In other words, "between two worlds" is his mode of creative existence. The problem is how to understand this paradigm, how to interpret this "benveenness." In his own words, "many years of my life passed ... on the border between two worlds," and "I can't separate them, the Russian Russia and the Jewish Russia." 80 It is not enough to say that he served as a mediator between different worlds ofJewry. We must go to the very core of Ansky's personality. Generally speaking, he was first of all a storyteller. To collect and to document were his passions. He was a documenter in all possible forms and genres, because his overall idea was synthesis. He did go through several phases and turns in relation to all three languages of Russian Jewry of the period, but by 1908 he decided on a synthesis of all of them. This approach is revealed in the expedition as well. "It is like climbing a high mountain," he confessed in 1913 to Zhitlowsky, "from which you can see a larger area, the people, the nation." 81 This is the point: to go down to the people meant, for An-sky, to climb a high mountain. In this image we can see the very essence of An-sky in all his stature. Therefore, I believe, "between two worlds" should be understood not just in terms of An-sky's personal position or his appreciation of Jewish traditional lite in pre-revolutionary Russia; I am certain that a truly great artist is capable of much more. Indeed, in introducing the image, concept, and approach of"between nvo worlds," An-sky reached genuine philosophical depth and height. I believe that, artistically, An-sky anticipated the most important philosophical concept of our time-namely, the Bakhtinian approach: A cultural domain has no internal territory. It is located entirely upon boundaries, boundaries intersect it everywhere, passing through each of its constituent features .... Every cultural act lives essentially on the boundaries, and it derives its seriousness and significance from this fact. Separated by abstraction from these boundaries, it loses the ground of its being and becomes vacuous, arrogant; it degenerates and dies. 82 This quotation from Mikhail Bakhtin encompasses the best characteristics of An-sky the writer, the public figure, the ethnographer, and the inspiration for the diverse and amazing musical activity in Jewish life of the period.

The Musical Strands of An-sky's Texts and Contexts

Appendix: Musical Productions of The Dybbuk I920: Joseph Chernyavsky, Dem tzadiFs lied (The Sage's Meditation),

from "Der Dibbuk." New York: Yiddish Art Theatre (for piano solo). December I92S: The Dybbuk was presented in English in New York, by

the Neighborhood Playhouse, with Engel's music; they gave 120 performances. No exact date: According to the YIVO poster collection, there was a Yiddish production of The Dybbuk in Bucharest, by the Jewish State

Theatre, with music by Joel Engel and H. Schwartzman, probably in the 1920s. 83 I929: Bernard Sekles (1872-1934) composed an orchestral prelude entitled

"Der Dybbuk." Marchr934: The Italian opera "Il Dibuk: Leggenda drammatica" com-

posed by Lodovico Rocca (1895-1986) premiered at Teatra alla Scala Milano. Later it was performed in Genoa, Turin, Rome, Warsaw, Yugoslavia, and New York (at Carnegie Hall; see below). The score was printed by Ricordi Publishers in Milan and New York in 1934. In Milan the opera was part of the regular repertoire until the 1980s. Spring I936: This opera by Lodovico Rocca under the name The Dybbuk, Mystic Music Drama in Three Acts and Prologue (Libretto by Renata

Simoni, English version by Archie Coates) was staged at Carnegie Hall, March 15; Detroit, May 5; Chicago, May 7-9; New York, May 14-15 with an extra matinee on May 16. The American performers included significant Russian singers-Ivan Ivantzoff, Alexis Tcherkassky, Vasily Romakoff, and Ivan Velikanoff-and ballet mistress Maria Yakovleva. I937: The Yiddish film The Dybbuk was produced in Poland, with music

by Henekh Kon (1898-1972). Liturgical songs were sung by the celebrated cantor Gershon Sirota (1874-1943). I948: Erwin Jospe, Meditation (melody from the "Dybbuk Suite" by Joel

Engel, arranged by Erwin Jospe ). New York: Transcontinental Music Corporation (for mixed voices or organ solo). October I9SI: A musical drama in three acts, based on An-sky's play, The Dybbuk, by composer David Tamkin (1906 -75) with libretto by Alex

Tamkin. It was performed at the City Center Opera in New York; the

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Zemtsovsky vocal scores came out later. Reproduced by Brosey and Hawkes from the composer's autograph manuscripts in the Tamkin Archive (New York, 1985). Anna Sokolow ( I9IO -2000 ), a choreographer and performer, staged a theater-dance version of The Dybbuk, in New York. Music was commissioned, in all probability, from Kenyon Hopkins (1912-83).

1951:

Abraham Wolf Binder (1895-1966), an American musician, composed the "Dybbuk Suite."

1956:

No date: There is a record of a musical play based on The Dybbuk with music and lyrics by S. B. Potter. 84 Spring 1963: An opera entitled The Dybbuk, composed by Michael White (b. 1931), was presented in Seattle. (He composed the opera in 1960-62).

The opera «Dybue> was composed by Karl Heinz Fuss! (b. 1924) with a libretto by Helmut Wagner, and came out in the Universal Edition in Vienna.

1968:

The ballet The Dybbuk was composed by Leonard Bernstein (r9r8-90) and in 1974 was produced by choreographer Jerome Robins; in 1975 two orchestral suites by Bernstein-Dybbuk, Suite no. r, and Dybbuk, Suite no. 2-were recorded. They are now available also on a 1997 CD. In 1985, Alan Pearlmutter defended a dissertation about Bernstein's Dybbuk. In 2005, the ballet was also choreographed and produced in San Francisco by Jerome Robbins. 85

1972:

Pearl Lang presented a dramatic ballet entitled The Possessed, based on The Dybbuk, with music by Leon Adens, in the National Theatre in New York; repeated in 1977 and 1980.

1975:

An adaptation of The Dybbuk by John Hirsch was presented with Gordon Davidson as artistic director at the Music Center Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles.

I975:

The Dybbuk by Jeff Hamburg, LP disc by Attacca Records 8423-8, came out in Amsterdam; song texts to the play (called Dibboek in Dutch) were written by Judith Herzberg.

1984:

Eduardo Seineman composed "A danca do dibuk: Sonata para marimba, vibrafone e glockenspiel," which came out in Sao Paulo.

1988:

Moni Ovadia (b. 1946 as Salomon Ovadia) staged the play Dybbuk at the Italian TheaterOrchestra in Milan and produced a CD with his

1990:

The Musical Strands of An-sky's Texts and Contexts music to the play, including his own performance as a singer (Dybbuk, Etnica Record, no. L 64). June 1992: The Dybbuk, a modern play inspired by An -sky, was produced by Julia Pascal at the New End Theatre, Hampstead, London (in English, Yiddish, and Hebrew). March 199s: A Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds, text adapted by Tony Kushner, music by the Klezmatics, premiered at the Hartford Stage, Conn., directed by Mark Lamas. The Klezmatics issued both a tape and a CD entitled Possessed with much of their Dybbuk in 1997.

A modern-day reworking of An-sky's classic, with music by Rick Wentworth and Roger Waters, is the Swiss-German- Israeli film The Dybbuk ~{the Holy Apple Field, using hard rock and computergenerated imagery; it was presented at the Berlin Film Festival that year.

1998:

The only audio version of The Dybbuk in English, directed by Yuri Rasovsky with music by Shelly Hanson, came out as an audio book in an award-winning production.

1999:

May 1999: The Yiddish opera Dybbuk was performed in Beer Sheva, Israel, directed by Solomon Epstein.

An opera entitled The Dybbuk by composer Sulamith Kahn was produced in Chicago.

2001:

June 2002: A production of the play The Dybbuk (in Hebrew), adapted by Dr. Zvika Serpcr of Tel Aviv University and Prof Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei of UCLA, blended Jewish and Japanese elements. Music was composed and directed by Ofer Ben-Amots and performed by academy students of the Department of Theater Arts at Tel Aviv University. The production was funded by the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity based in Los Angeles and the Tel Aviv-Los Angeles Partnership, with the artistic collaboration of the UCLA Department of Theater.

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Ten "Fardibekt!": An-sky's Polish Legacy Michael C. Stein/auf

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On December 9, 1920, a new Yiddish play with a peculiar history opened at the Elizeum Theater in Warsaw. Its author, S. An-sky, pseudonym ofShloyme-Zanvl Rappoport, had begun writing it just before World War I, inspired by stories he had collected on an ethnographic expedition through the Jewish towns of western Russia. The play's text (or texts, because An -sky wrote versions in both Yiddish and Russian) had wandered along with its author through six years of war and revolution. In St. Petersburg and Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, and Vilna, An-sky had assembled writers, artists, and theater people and had read his play aloud for them. With few exceptions, his listeners felt the play was too "literary" or too "ethnographical" for the stage. 1 In 1920, convalescing from a heart ailment in the resort town of Otwock near Warsaw, Ansky was still attempting to interest a group of Jewish actors in staging his play. This was the recently organized company known as the Vilna Troupe, which had begun to attract attention among the Jewish intelligentsia for staging a new kind of so-called artistic Yiddish theater. But only An-sky's sudden death brought his efforts to fruition. Standing amid thousands of mourners at An-sky's open grave at the Warsaw Jewish cemetery, the director of the Vilna Troupe, Mordechai Mazo, vowed to open An-sky's play tsu sheloshim, at the end of the traditional 30-day period of mourning. Mazo quickly selected a cast and, above all, a stage director, David Herman, overwhelmingly committed to the exalted purposes of theater art. When, 30 days later, Herman's tribute to An-sky premiered in Warsaw, the idea of its popular success was not just unlikely but beside the point.

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Figure 19. An-sky reading The Dybbuk to the Vilna Troupe and Warsaw litterateurs. SOURCE: An-ski, Gezamelte shriftn, 15 vols. (Vilna, 1920-25), 2: frontispiece.

Between Two Worlds: The Dybbuk2 went on, of course, to an extraordinary career: from the Warsaw stage to all the cities and towns of interwar Poland, then into the repertoires ofYiddish companies, professional and amateur, throughout the world, and very quickly beyond the Yiddish stage. Crucial to this development was the Hebrew production by the Habima theater company, which opened in Moscow in 1922, and beginning four years later accompanied Habima all over the world. Staged for audiences that could rarely understand Hebrew, Habima's Dybbuk reached beyond language to a powerful and universally accessible theatricality shaped by gesture, sound, and spectacle. Subsequently produced in Polish, Ukrainian, German, English, French, Danish, Swedish, and Bulgarian, the subject of several movies, an opera, and a ballet,3 The Dybbuk- a play that is ostentatiously and inescapably East European Jewish-joined the ranks of that handful of masterpieces which seem to have escaped the time, place, and even language of their creation, and attained eternal life as a "classic." As a result, much like in recent years, for better or for worse, I. B. Singer has come to represent the whole of Yiddish literature to the non-Yiddish readers

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Steinlauf of the world, so An-sky's Dybbuk has become the accredited emissary of Jewish theater art to the world at large. I would like to discuss a perspective on The Dybbuk that its international canonization has tended to obscure: its link to a particular time and place and, most of all, to a particular community. Eight decades since The Dybbuk opened at the Elizeum Theater in Warsaw, I will investigate the meanings of this play for its earliest audience, the Yiddishspeaking Jews of what was then the cultural capital of the Jewish world.

* First and foremost, its earliest audience responded to The Dybbuk with wild and unprecedented excitement. "Everyone today talks about The Dybbuk," declared a journalist six weeks after the play opened, "the newspapers write about The Dybbuk, the Vilna Troupe performs only The Dybbuk, young and old lecturers read papers about The Dybbuk, in short, today in Warsaw we live under the sign of The Dybbuk." 4 Warsaw, one could say, had been "Fardibekt"-a neologism suggesting shot through with dybbuks, dybbuks all around. Reflecting on the play's fiftieth performance, another journalist wrote: The music of The Dybbuk accompanies the banging in the poorest Jewish workshop, and the same music entertains guests in the salon of the Jewish "magnate"; The Dybbuk has prompted discussions, research, parodies. Those running to see The Dybbuk include assimilators whose feet never crossed the threshold of a Yiddish theater, and also Hasidim, real Hasidim, who remember well the old proscriptions against all sorts of theaters and circuses. 5 Without any exaggeration, The Dybbuk now belongs among the most popular words in the Warsaw Jewish lexicon. 6 And the writer, as do others, concludes with a term from another newly popular lexicon: "Is it a psychosis?" "The days when the Jewish theater audience clamored, yelled and cracked sunflower seeds are gone," declared another journalist. "The Jew in his high hat and long kapote [black coat] as well as the bokhrim [young guys] and the bit of Jewish intelligentsia-all sit quietly and watch the stage with bated breath." 7 Trolley cars packed to bursting would approach the Elizeum Theater just before curtain time, and, according to one version of a popular anecdote, discharge all their

An-sky's Polish Legacy

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Figure 20. Cartoon published in 1921 by Henryk Berlewi, the artistic director of the Vilna Troupe. Top caption: "A Milkable Cow .... "The cow is labeled "Dybbuk," and the people milking and drinking from the cow are labeled "The Vilna Troupe." The figure to the right is labeled "Dovid Herman" and his words appear at the bottom of the page: "I prepared a cow for them ... [the milk] flows into their mouths .... Nu, and I?" This suggests that the wild success of The Dybbuk has brought benefits to its actors that have not extended to its director. The huge, powerfully muscled cow that seems to be glaring in Herman's direction suggests a dangerous creature that may well turn on its creator. souRCE: B. Kutsher, Geven a mol Varshe: Zikhroynes (Paris, 1955 ), 14.

passengers while the conductor called out: "Dybuk! Prosz~ wysiadac!"

(Dybbuk! Everybody out!). 8 Another columnist, writing some three months after the play opened, commented: Take a poll, and you'll see that out of 5 Jews in Warsaw, 12 have been to The Dybbuk. You'll probably give me a look and ask: how can that be? How is it possible that out of 5 Jews, altogether 12 should go see The Dybbuk? So you need to know that The Dybbuk is not something you go to once and it's over. God forbid! With The Dybbuk, if you go

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Steinlauf once you go again, and if you go again, you go again, and again .... And so it goes, easy as a psalm,9 at first you go three times a week, later you get used to it, and like a Jew to his prayers, go to The Dybbuk three times a day. 10 Behind this joke as well as much of the other testimony is the sense that the Vilna Troupe's production of The Dybbuk had something in common with religious experience. Two more examples make this even clearer. The first is from the memoirs of Avrom Morevski, the actor who played the Miropoler Tsadik, the play's most acclaimed role. Morevski describes how, after a performance in Lodz, in a dark corner backstage, he was approached by a traditionally dressed Jew who said over him the blessing she-halak mi-kevodo le-basar ve-dam ([Blessed art Thou, Lord Our God, King of the Universe,] who has shared Thy glory with mortal man): He didn't use the name of God, he said ha-shem, 11 because making a blessing over an actor fgadol she-be-teatron] was against the laws of Judaism, but I saw with my eyes and felt in my heart that in Jewish life [theatrical] spectacle had become not a matter of entertainment ... but of divine service [avode] ... that theater had become something holy for the Jewish masscs. 12 Or, as a journalist in a Warsaw daily put it: more than once during the performance of The Dybbuk he had shuddered with hadres koydesh.l 3 This expression, never used in a secular context, suggests awesome, holy beauty. It originates in Psalms: Hishtahavu le-Adonay be-hadratkodesh I Hilu mipanav kol-ha-arets (Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness I Tremble before Him, all the earth).l 4 This aspect of The Dybbuk's reception needs to be examined, first of all, in the context of contemporary European culture as a whole. At the end of the nineteenth century, traditional elites, threatened by the rise of mass audiences, began to fortifY a hermetic realm of high culture placed increasingly out of reach of the mob. A notion of art with a capital A-Art as a timeless realm of purity and perfection-was everywhere counterposed to vulgar creations that merely entertained. 15 For European theater, this meant Richard Wagner, his disciple Stanislaw Przybyszewski in Warsaw, and in Moscow Konstantin Stanislavsky,

An-sky's Polish Legacy

whose student Evgeny Vakhtangov directed the Hebrew Dybbuk. In the 1920s it meant expressionism, which sought to embody on the stage a visionary artistic linkage between theater and ritual. Such tendencies were further reinforced in East-Central Europe. For the stateless nationalities of multinational empires, cultural creation in the national language was a crucial affirmation of national identity and became the cornerstone of numerous movements of national renewal. For Poles, Czechs, and other neighbors of the Jews, this applied particularly to theater, where two sacred missions-that of Art but also that of the Nation-could be brought into spectacular union before a mass audience. These were especially difficult steps for Yiddish theater, rooted in the profane, carnivalesque traditions surrounding the Jewish holiday of Purim. The professional Yiddish theater, created by Avrom Goldfadn in the 187os, was popular among the Jewish masses, but, soon crippled by tsarist edict and ignored by the intelligentsia, it languished in the Russian empire for decades. In 1905, amid the First Russian Revolution, tsarist restrictions on the Yiddish daily press and the Yiddish theater eased, and overnight a Yiddish mass culture sprang into being. At that moment, from the pages of the new Yiddish press, the writer I. L. Peretz, the secular reb be of the new Jewish culture whose capital was Warsaw, declared war on the tasteless, vacuous, lower-class shund (trash) of popular Yiddish theater in the name of a future theater that he and his disciples described as "artistic," "literary," and "refined." With colossal (and typical) chutzpah, Peretz proclaimed Yiddish theater as much a link in the golden chain of the Jewish tradition (yidishkayt) as the shul (synagogue) and the kheyder (primary school)-and equally in need of reform. If, as Peretz and his disciples preached, the uniqueness of yidishkayt was that, within it, rooted in revelation, the holy and the national were one, then the call tor theater reform could become a summons to a sacred national mission. 16 Beginning at the turn of the century, An-sky, that quintessential Russian Jewish intellectual, 17 became deeply involved as well in the cultural politics of Jewish Poland. It was Peretz, first of all, who was the catalyst in An-sky's return from revolutionary internationalism to the Jewish world. Reading Peretz's stories, "[f]or the first time," writes David Roskies, "[An-sky J discovered a modern European sensibility

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Steinlauf expressing itself in the Yiddish language." 18 Moreover, it was precisely at this moment that Peretz turned to folklore as a creative source for his writing. His influential article "Dos yidishe lebn loyt di yidishe folks-lider" (Jewish Life According to Yiddish Folksongs) was published in 1901, the year that An-sky began reading Peretz's work. Ansky first met Peretz in Warsaw seven years later, just when the master had embarked on his theater campaign. In I9II, these efforts led to the formation, in collaboration with the writer A. Vayter, of a Yiddish theater society. Vayter spent the better part of a year traveling throughout Eastern Europe on behalf of the society, and he even arranged a fundraising reception for Peretz in St. Petersburg. When Peretz realized that the wealthy Jews in the banquet hall were only prepared to speak Russian, he insulted them and stormed out, thereby sealing the fate of the theater society. An-sky's fruitless search for a company that would stage The Dybbuk doubtless recalled Vayter's equally vain sacrifices on behalf ofJewish theater art several years earlier. When Vayter was murdered by Polish Legionnaires in Vilna in 1919, An-sky dedicated The Dybbuk to his memory. The association that began in life was sealed in death. An-sky was buried next to Peretz and Peretz's close friend Yankev Dinezon in the Warsaw Jewish cemetery. Just two months later and at the beginning of the meteoric ascent of An-sky's play, Morevski was already weaving Vayter, An-sky, and Peretz into a creation myth for the old-new Jewish culture. Vayter and An-sky were "tragishe ringen fun der 'goldener keyt' fun der yidisher kultur" (tragic links in the "golden chain" of Jewish culture). 19 The phrase "golden chain" resonates as the title of Peretz's celebrated play about four generations of a Hasidic dynasty. Indeed, Morevski's Miropoler Tsadik, whose flagging charismatic powers are only restored through the memory of his holy forebears, is a composite of the figures in Peretz's play. In 1925, on the tenth anniversary of Peretz's death, an ornate ohel (mausoleum) was raised over the graves of Peretz, Dinezon, and An-sky in the Warsaw Jewish cemetery. This monument, tl1e work of Abraham Ostrzega, was itself perceived as a link in the old-new culture it honored. In the words of Henryk Berlewi, who had been artistic director of the Vilna Troupe's production of The Dybbuk, Ostrzega's accomplishment was to "reflect various

An-sky's Polish Legacy

epochs of Jewish style, leading, like a golden thread, from Solomon's temple through the gloomy medieval Jewish cemeteries to the New Jewish Style being created today." 20 That New Jewish Style was incarnated on the stage in the Vilna Troupe's production of The Dybbuk, and not just through the efforts of Berlewi. It was the work of young people for whom Yiddish theater art and, indeed, the new Yiddish culture as a whole represented what Peretz had for An-sky: the way home. Morevski had abandoned a distinguished career on the Russian stage to play An-sky's tsadik. Miriam Orleska, who played the possessed Leah, had trained for the Polish stage; Alyosha Shtayn, who played her demon lover Khonen, had performed in Russian theater. And the play's director, Dovid Herman, who filled the stage with slow, solemn, ritualized speech and gesture, was a lapsed Polish Hasid who had begun his career in Warsaw 15 years previously as Peretz's most devoted theater disciple. "The better Yiddish theater," Herman later declared, "should be for modern Jews what the beys-medresh [study-house] used to be for the pious Jew." 21

What was the content of the experience? Here it helps to recall the play's plot. 22 Khonen, a poor yeshivah student, and Leah, the rich man's daughter, are in love. But her father prepares to marry Leah into a still wealthier family. Amid unsavory kabbalistic manipulations designed to win the hand of his beloved, Khonen falls dead. Then, just before the wedding, his spirit enters Leah in the form of a dybbuk (from a root meaning to cling, to adhere) and refuses to leave. 23 Before the miracle-working Miropoler Tsadik, the reason for the dybbuk's obstinacy is revealed: a vow, sealed by a solemn hand-clasp (tkies-kaf) made between Leah and Khonen's fathers before their children's births. The fathers had obligated themselves, should one have a son and the other a daughter, to wed them to each other. But Khonen's father had died, Leah's had forgotten the vow, and now the spirit of Khonen's father demanded justice, while his son's dybbuk possessed Leah. Summoned to a rabbinical court, the father's spirit is told that it must content itself with a compromise. To no avail: the ghost of Khonen's father rejects the compromise. Lighting black candles and blowing a shofar, the

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rebbe then excommunicates the dybbuk and drives it from Leah's body. Again to no avail: the son's spirit, banished from his beloved's body, returns and claims her soul. In Herman's production, the voices of the living and the dead mingle in the Song of Songs as the curtain slowly falls over Leah's body. 24 Here was a plot instantly recognizable to the contemporary Jewish audience: the poor young truth-seeker and his beloved, the threat of her arranged marriage to an unappetizing yeshivah student, climaxed by the lovers' escape or, in other versions, by their destruction. There is, however, a crucial difference in The Dybbuk. In conventional versions of this plot, in early Yiddish theater and popular Yiddish novels, the couple personifies a critique of the old Jewish world; they are linked to "progress" and "light," to a quest for "new paths" out of the so-called superstition and darkness of Jewish tradition. 25 But in The Dybbuk, in an atmosphere thick with the telling and re-telling of legends and lore, Khonen and Leah represent a complete thematic reversal: they stand squarely on the side of"superstition" and "darkness." VVho are the losers in this play? Certainly, Leah's father and his foolish lust for riches. More important, more subversive, the loser is the Miropoler Tsadik and normative Judaism, both legalistic and charismatic. Neither the attempt at mediation based on talmudic law nor the use of his hereditary spiritual powers to exorcize demons succeed in sundering what unites the lovers. What wins in this play? Love, of coursea love "strong as death," and therein lies the appropriateness of the Song ofSongs. It is a love that is fated [bashert], decreed in the higher worlds, as the reb be finally understands, 26 because of a human act: a handshake, a tkies-kaf. VVhat triumphs, ultimately, is the world offolk belief, that primal universe "between two worlds," in which good and evil, living and dead are intimate and awesome mystery inheres in the everyday. It is a world in which an ordinary-looking beggar may turn out to be a hidden saint, or a sinner condemned to eternal reincarnation, or Elijah the Prophet, or a demon whose gaze withers the unborn child in its mother's womb. It is a world that inevitably undermines normative religion. This vision reached the Yiddish stage at a historical moment that was itself poised between two worlds. Throughout the West, let us recall, it was World War I that most truly swept the twentieth century into

An-sky's Polish Legacy

existence. For East European Jews the transition was particularly traumatic. On one side, six years of war, revolution, and pogroms that had devastated three empires along with hundreds of Jewish communities; the centuries-old Jewish life rooted in the small towns of Eastern Europe was profoundly shaken. On the other side, the promise of a new, urbanized life within a modern parliamentary state, including, for the three and a half million Jews of Poland, both civil and national-cultural rights. At this moment, on the threshold of the unprecedented obstacles and opportunities of the two decades to come, the so-called superstitions that Herman wove into modern theater art on the Elizeum stage were precisely those things rooted in the most elemental Jewish sense of place: the cemeteries, synagogues, courtyards, marketplaces, and landscapes of Eastern Europe. Here was a pageant, a "mystery play" as it was commonly called,27 that proclaimed "We are here!"-an affirmation of cultural and national identity all the more powerful for being implicit. 28 Therein lies The Dybbuk's uncanny appeal to a mass audience even as it became, for the intelligentsia, a dazzling modern link in the "golden chain."

It was inevitable that The Dybbuk would be pulled into politics. Although lip-service was paid in the Soviet Union to the idea of Jewish national culture, it was in Poland, where three and a half million Jews lived under a more or less democratic system, that such aspirations had any chance of realization. This possibility hinged, of course, on the attitudes of the people in whose newly created nation-state Jews had been declared a national minority. But Polish attitudes to Jews and Jewish culture during the interwar period were nearly universally negative. The growing nationalist movement regarded the Jews as outright enemies and viewed the treaty that guaranteed them national rights as treason. Moreover, for most Poles the Jewish world was endlessly remote; Jews were said to exist behind a "Chinese wall"; the Jewish quarter was referred to as a "dark continent." 29 Even the liberal Polish intelligentsia was blind to the phenomenon of modern Jewish culture. To suggest that the stereotypical peyes-and-kapote-wearing jargon-speakers could develop a modern culture seemed absurd.

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Steinlauf Just one month after The Dybbuk's premiere, the activist Zalmen Reyzen, writing from Vilna, where Polish-Jewish conflict was particularly acute, launched the play into the political arena. Deciding against a conventional review, Reyzen chose to discuss "the great social significance that The Dybbuk will have for the Jewish people in Poland." The Dybbuk, proclaimed Reyzen, "is now the lighthouse in the dismal desert ofJewish cultural life in Poland." In this context, the desert was above all the popular Yiddish stage, the so-called shund theater of operettas and farces. The Dybbuk would show those lost in that desert the way to the land of liberated folk spirit. Face to face with this production, those who have begun to despair will draw courage for new work. Those who have left the fold will be seized by a feeling of repentance [teshuve] and remorse for their abandonment of the pure source ofJewish folk-creation, and the backbiters and plotters will feel ashamed of their vile lies and slander. 30 Furthermore, Reyzen points out, The Dybbuk was reaching Poles as well. Perhaps they would stop seeing Jews as "dealers, smugglers and speculators" and gaze instead into "the folk soul with its striving to create and reveal itself in the higher world of art." Polish critics and directors had indeed attended The Dybbuk and praised the production; there was even talk of a possible collaboration between the Vilna Troupe and Polish actors on the Polish stage. Such a development, insists Reyzen, would be of no less importance for the "normalization ofJewish- Polish relations" than the gains of parliamentary politics. And more: "Only on the path ofculture- building and cultural creativity ... will we attain victory in our war for national and human liberation." Not conventional politics, of little value for a Diaspora minority such as the Jews, but work of the spirit would bring Jews to their goal, and The Dybbuk was the most powerful expression yet of that spirit in its modern form. Both Simon Dubnow's and An -sky's insistence on the spiritual basis ofJewish nationalism echo in these words. To what extent did the Poles respond1 The creators of Polish dramatic theater in the interwar period were the inheritors of an exalted artistic and national tradition. In the nineteenth century, when the tsars attempted to stifle Polish culture, theater had been the last public domain

An-sky's Polish Legacy where the Polish language could continue to be celebrated. Theater, like the Church, became a crucial link in the perpetuation of Polish national identity, the subject of intense public preoccupation. In independent Poland, theaters became shrines in which the "national mystery plays" of the Polish Romantic tradition, from Adam Mickiewicz to Stanislaw Wyspianski, could at last be staged in spectacular modernist productions. At a time when Polish attitudes toward Jewish culture ranged from indifference to hostility, the creators of Polish dramatic theater, for the most part "progressive" artists with leftwing sympathies, proved notable exceptions. Beginning with the Vilna Troupe's Dybbuk and over the subsequent 20 years, they observed, supported, and occasionally collaborated in the work of their Yiddish counterparts. But this recognition remained marginal in relation to Polish society as a whole. It was also rather ephemeral. As Chone Shmeruk concluded in a parallel case, for over half a century"[ with] naive amazement ... successive generations of Polish writers 'discovered' Yiddish literature, happily unaware that its existence had already been uncovered, and more than once." 31 Nor were all Jews so taken with the Polish accolades. Responding to Reyzen, Mend! Elkin protested against the transformation of The Dybbuk into "a political demonstration." He declared: "They," the great art sages of the nations of the world [di groyJ·e kunst-khartumim fundi umes haoylem ], agreed to come see the amazing wonder [beyz vunder] and- o joy! [a simkhe! ]-they like The Dybbuk, "they" speak about it to each other.... You mean Jews think too? They also aspire to art? ... We never knew this (How should they know it?). Great! We can associate with them." 32 But for Elkin, it was only Herman's cold and un- Jewish stylization that permitted Poles to believe they had understood the play. And he concludes that Herman's true accomplishment was to have brought real Hasidim into the theater-and not Polish actors. In May 1925, the Polish-Jewish dramatist Mark Arnshteyn brought The Dybbuk to the Polish stage, first in Lodz, then in Warsaw. An attempt to stage the play on the Cracow Polish stage two years previously had closed after two performances because of bomb threats. Arnshteyn had to overcome a range of obstacles, from the unwillingness of Warsaw

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Steinlauf theaters to produce so "Jewish" a play, to rumors of planned attacks on the small theater that finally agreed. 33 Arnshteyn also had to labor against the ingrained tendency of his actors to zydlaczenie-that is, to perform using the traditional intonations and gestures associated with the stage Jew of Polish farce. 34 The performance succeeded artistically chiefly because Arnshteyn seems to have enabled the actors to find their own path, that of Polish Romanticism, into a world so alien to them. Jewish critics praised the production often with a touch of envy; Arn Aynhorn in Haynt, for example, pointed to "that large measure of old artistic culture to whose level our young poor [theater] has not as yet been able to attain." 35 But political controversy, especially on the Jewish side, threatened to overwhelm artistic judgments. "Flirting with the goyim" is how Herts Grosbard, a Vilna Troupe actor, described the production. 36 Even betore the play opened, Arnshteyn and his collaborators announced that the production was a "political act" furthering Polish-Jewish understanding, a kind of artistic complement to the political agreement or "Ugoda" then being negotiated between the Polish government and a group of Jewish parliamentary representatives. 37 This approach was amplified in the pages of the Polish-language Jewish press. The editor and chief theater critic of the Warsaw daily Nasz PrzeglCfd, Jakob Appenszlak, greeted the Polish Dybbuk as follows: The Dybbuk on the Polish stage. A Jewish masterpiece in a Polish theater in the capital city! For the first time in many, many years, a Jewish poet has been permitted to speak, and an honest artistic effort has been made to enter into the spirit of a work more foreign to Poles than the theater of faraway China. Does this not mean that a significant turning point has occurred in the attitude of the Polish intelligentsia to things Jewish ... ?38

To which Aynhorn of Haynt, even as he praises the production on artistic grounds, replies: Let's not make a political event out of it, and let's not think that The Dybbuk on the Polish stage signifies a break in the Chinese wall which divides the two peoples who have lived side by side for hundreds and hundreds of years, yet are still so totally strange to each other. Let's

An-sky's Polish Legacy especially not think ... that The Dybbuk on the Polish stage is evidence of our wealth [ashires], which strangers must now approach. If only it were so, but it would be very naive to think that it already is so. 39 He suggests that a much better indicator of Jewish cultural wealth would be support for the accomplishments of Yiddish theater. The subtext here concerns the audience for the Polish Dybbuk: it was apparently primarily Jewish. When Arnshteyn went on to stage other celebrated Yiddish plays in Polish productions, Yiddish cultural activists turned on him. The director Yonas Turkov, for example, warned that his work would draw Jews away from the "unclean" [ treyfener] Yiddish language and theater, strengthen assimilation, and "lead to the collapse (not much is lacking!) of the Yiddish [dramatic] theater." 40 Arnshteyn's enterprise, in other words, threatened to return high cultural aspirations to Polish-language theater, leaving only shund to Yiddish. Arnshteyn had hoped to "build a bridge between Polish and Jewish society." Instead, performing for Jews seeking yidishkayt in Polish, he wound up deepening the fault lines within Jewish society. By 1929, Arnshteyn had ended his activity in the capital and retired to Lodz. There he continued to direct theater, including The Dybbuk in both Polish and Yiddish, and was later recmited as artistic director of the Yiddish film version of the play.

It was not just the Polish Dybbuk that inspired controversy. Side by side with the accolades, the play itself and above all the entire "Dybbuk phenomenon" evoked doubts and even denunciations, and these seemed to increase with the passage of time. On the face of it, it is rather curious that a play about possession should become a vehicle for Jewish renewal. A dybbuk, after all, is an agent of dissolution; it confounds the borders between life and death and attacks the boundaries of the self Certainly, the notion of the dybbuk emerged from a world offolk belief in which living and dead interact in ways incomprehensible to modern societies. Nevertheless, and particularly in the traditional Jewish context, where maintaining borders-between kosher and treyf, sacred and profane, Jew and non-Jew-is so important,

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Steinlauf possession is hardly a good thing. Brought to the center of public discourse first on the stage of the Elizeum Theater and then, endlessly reproduced, in the pages of the mass Jewish press, to a public first encountering all the dislocations of twentieth-century urban life, the notion of possession began to reassume its primary associations. The dybbuk detached itself from The Dybbuk, so to speak; it stepped off the stage and onto the street. 41 Here it took on new life as an instrument of ironic laughter and parody. 42 Just five days after the play opened, one columnist described a visit from an emaciated figure who identified himself as the dybbuk that had been exorcized from Leah's body on the stage of the Elizeum Theater. Having wandered forlorn through the streets ofWarsaw, he had come to the journalist to demand justice, to insist that not just he but all the other dybbuks who infested Jewish institutions be expelled as well, without regard for their connections or yikhes [lineage]. In similar fashion, a column produced by the popular humorist Der Tunkeler (Yosef Tunkel) entitled "Der krumer shpigl" (The crooked mirror) published several months later, contains a poem that begins as follows: A dybbuk! a dybbuk! a dybbuk! a dybbuk! With dybbuks we now must contend ... Dybbuks, dybbuks of every kind, In our Jewish garden like mushrooms they grow, Creeping up to the very first row. 43 Succeeding stanzas identifY a red dybbuk in Russia that craves freedom, happiness, and Jewish blood; a dybbuk that writes for an antisemitic Polish newspaper in the body of a notorious Jewish convert; a dybbuk called futurism; a dybbuk that contaminates bread; and one that steals from American Jewish charities. 44 If The Dybbuk contaminates and corrupts, it does so particularly in relation to language, for it is, after all, a creature embodied in the human voice. As such it offers itself as an exceptionally appropriate trope for the anxieties evoked by a world in which the word too has become a commodity, subject to endless mechanical reproduction in print and in sound. A column entitled "Warsaw Talks a Lot," published several weeks into the "Dybbuk phenomenon," taps into these anxieties by

An-sky's Polish Legacy

n"lp:!., :'111" Ml"lllc':l np""=.., l"'lr..,:-~ n~;o,

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Figure 2I. Cover of the "transcript" of the public mock trial of The Dybbuk in Palestine in 1926. souRCE: Agudat ha-sofrim ha-'Ivrim be-Yisra'el, Mishpat «HadibuP: Din va-heshbon stenograji mi-moshve bet-ha-din ha-pumbiyim (Tel Aviv, 1926).

contrasting the number of telephones, newspapers, meetings, "newly founded committees ... burning appeals ... and shofar blasts" with the little that ever gets done, and concludes: "Not without cause has The Dybbuk, in which one mouth speaks for another ... had such success here." 45 This ironic usage of the notion of possession was also turned against the play itself. Along with critical acclaim, The Dybbuk inspired attacks, often from sources representing the very mission that Herman and the Vilna Troupe claimed to represent. In 1926 in Tel Aviv the play was put on trial and accused of being "an ethnographic museum" strewn with

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a hodgepodge of folktales and rituals, and of making a "'clearance sale' of Jewish folklore." 46 In Poland, within the fiercely political Yiddish secular culture, there were widespread attacks on what was described as a cult of "Dybbuk mysticism" that, it was feared, would undermine Jewish national fortitude. Voicing a characteristic criticism, the stage director and critic Mikhal Vaykhert, a leading activist of the new Yiddish dramatic theater, complains in his memoirs that the play "lulled its audience in dreams, transported it to far-off worlds, allowed it to forget the here and now," and thereby threatened to "weaken its energies" (opshvakhn di koykhes) in the struggle for its rights. 47 Jewish audiences, in other words, had been possessed by a dybbuk. The play was also accused of harming the development of Yiddish theater. Its success flew in the face of attempts within the fledgling dramatic theater to develop what was called a "modern European" repertoire, to have the new theater, in the words of Zigmunt Turkov, another of its activists, "free itself from the kapote and leave the Jewish street ... and rise to the broad highway of a 'world' -repertoire." 48 But for years after its first staging, only The Dybbuk and similar ostentatiously Jewish plays seemed able to sell seats. "Do we not possess," demanded one exasperated critic, "either in our life or in our history, any poetry other than the poetry of our corpse-cleaning room [taareshtibl]?"49 Yiddish theater, too, as more than one observer noted, had been possessed by a dybbuk. 5° This included the Vilna Troupe. Accustomed to a dedication typified in stories of idealistic performers swooning from hunger at rehearsals, suddenly these actors were eating their fill, dressing in style, and finding themselves the objects of a cult following. Beginning in 1922 the company toured Europe, staging The Dybbuk to wild acclaim as well as developing new material. But, increasingly, individual members of what was originally a uniquely interdependent ensemble began thinking primarily of themselves. In 1923 the company split in two, and by 1927 it had largely disintegrated. 51 By the end of the interwar period, with the appearance of a popular film version of The Dybbuk starring some of the original cast, 52 there were those who had begun to think of the entire Dybbuk phenomenon

An-sky's Polish Legacy as a plague. In his 1937 obituary tor David Herman, Nakhmen Meyzil, the editor of Literarishe bleter, the most influential Yiddish literary periodical in Poland, omits mentioning The Dybbuk. 53

What are we to make of these contradictory movements in the "Dybbuk phenomenon," the so-called cult, psychosis, and plague, the "Dybbukiada" that swept over Polish Jews at the start of a ne\v era in their history? On the one hand, The Dybbuk is canonized as the very pinnacle of national art, the holy of holies of Jewish creativity; on the other, it is pilloried by those who might have been expected only to extol it, and it inspires popular laughter and derision. In his memoirs, Morevski is unambiguous about the value of the play that was the apotheosis of his career. The way he conceptualizes its importance is instructive: Our assessment of what has been called "Dybbukiada" in the chronicle of Yiddish theater is built upon our strong certainty that, if theater by nature is not an instrument of vulgar entertainment and should bear the seeds of exaltation, if Yiddish theater with Goldfadn departed from the primitive "purimshpil" that were its swaddling clothes, if with Gordin and the Ester- Rokhl Kaminska chapter Yiddish theater turned in the direction of great theater art on a world scale and had to seek further forms that would synthesize the profundity of Jewish conflicts with the refinement and fullness of world theater, then the ccDybbuk)J chapter is the highest point in our Yiddish theater-hills. 54 For Morevski and many of his contemporaries, spiritual heirs of Peretz, the history of Yiddish theater, as indeed of modern Yiddish culture as a whole, was a ceaseless movement upward, toward the highest, the best, the most beautiful, the purest. In the case of theater, this movement was exceptionally discontinuous, as the image of hills [ higlen )5 5 suggests. What lay between the hills? Not simply the ground, as the image might suggest, but abysses. This becomes clear when Morevski reflects on both his own career and the fate of Yiddish theater in the aftermath of The Dybbuk. If The Dybbuk represented the "highest heights," it was toll owed by a descent "into the lowest depths." 56

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Steinlauf Morevski here makes ironic reference to the celebrated lines with which The Dybbuk begins and ends: Whyoh why Did the soul descend From the highest heights Into the lowest depths? 57 These "depths" were the popular Yiddish stage, the "vulgar entertainment" that Morevski and the rest of the Yiddish-speaking intelligentsia termed shund. During the interwar period, such plays continued to account for the great majority of Yiddish theater in Poland and indeed throughout the world. Yiddish popular theater cannot be evaluated by the criteria of high culture; it owed its extraordinary vitality to its roots in the carnivalesquc traditions of Purim. 5 8 Its perspective was not the spirit but the body; its pleasure was not in rising but in falling. Laughter, raucous and free, was one of its chief expressions, a laughter that drags down the high, undermines the ideal, degrades the spiritual. Given a theater with such a lineage and such ongoing traditions-and a language and culture so redolent of the marketplaceperhaps it should not surprise us that the attempt to transform the stage into sacred space inspired laughter as well as awe.

* In May 1935, the apotheosis of The Dybbuk-in the form of an opera by Ludovico Rocca that had premiered in La Scala the year before 59opened in Teatr Wielki, the sanctum sanctorum of the performing arts in Warsaw. Marshal J6zef Pilsudski had died just days earlier. Hardly a supporter of Jewish national aspirations, the marshal had managed, at least, to temper the antisemites. An era had ended; it was clear to Jews that whatever followed could only be worse. Reporting in Haynt on the opera rehearsals, Menakhem Kipnis could not resist irony: From II in the morning until 6 at night the work goes on. Orchestra, actors, choir, ballet dancers, property men, stagehands. One act down, the next one up .... The Polish theater director Boberski becomes hoarse in the second act alone, directing the male and female singers, male and female ballet dancers-cripples, beggars, who come

An-sky's Polish Legacy to Sender Brinitser for the wedding to grab a fat meat roll and dance a bit with the bride. 60 Reporting on the premiere, Kipnis is nevertheless impressed. This was "simply a historical event, over which one should say shehekheyonu." 61 The previous year, however, when Polish radio had beamed the opera's premiere from La Scala to Warsaw, Kipnis had written a different sort ofteuilleton. The piece is entitled "The Dybbuk in the Courtyard ... :A Tragi-Comic Mystery Play in One Act with a Prologue According to An-sky, Performed By One Person Bright and Early in the Courtyard on an Empty Stomach." 62 The performer is "a tall thin Jew with a large pointed belly extending a meter in front of him." "Jews, Jewesses, grooms, brides, madams and servant-girls [Yidn, yidenes, khosn-bokhrim, kale-meydlekh, madamishes un dinst-meydlekh ]," he announces to the residents of the surrounding buildings. "Open your windows and look down at the new play of The Dybbuk I present for you. The same Dybbuk that's so famous throughout the world and the Italians just last week performed on the radio. The same play as the Italians, Hitler should live so long." His version, however, he claims is superior, because for one thing he himself plays all the roles. Moreover, he is not just an actor with a fake beard but a former merchant. Mter performing pieces of the play, he demands money from his audience for the Miropoler Tsadik to exorcise the dybbuk from his belly. When his audience comes up short, he threatens to remain until the following day. Whereupon the Polish janitor gives him the money and then puts his broom to the Jew's behind. A minute later the Jew is performing in the neighboring courtyard.

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and The Dybbuk Vladislav Ivanov (Translated by Anne Eakin Moss)

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The stage history ofS. An-sky's play Between Two Worlds) or The Dybbuk shows how a little-known man ofletters paradoxically became a legendary and intriguing playwright of the twentieth century. An-sky wrote the play in Russian based on materials that were collected in ethnographic expeditions to the shtetls ofVolhynia and Podolia (I9II-I4), and he exerted no small effort in having it staged at the Moscow Art Theater. According to the recommendations first ofLeopold Sulerzhitsky, and then possibly of Konstantin Stanislavsky, the author made changes in the play. The first read-through in the Art Theater's "First Studio" took place as early as 1916. At that time it was suggested that Sulerzhitsky would head up work on the performance. His death demanded a change of plans, and the production went to Boris Sushkevich. It is possible to surmise that Sulerzhitsky, uniting "psychological realism" and the fabulous, would have continued work along the lines of the justly renowned performance of A Cricket on the Hearth, by Charles Dickens, staged at the First Studio in 1914. Grigory Khmar was named to the role of Khonen. The role of the tsadik Azrielke fell to Mikhail Chekhov. It is impossible to guess what this "tender and strange genius" (according to Pavel Markov) would have done with it had the production at the Art Theater been carried through. It seems certain that the part of the miracle-worker would have allowed Chekhov to enter the circle of"fantastic realism" without having to wait for the roles of Khlestakov and Eric XIV In an early 1917 issue of Teatrafnaia gazeta, the chronicler announced: "S. An-sky's play Between Two Worlds has been accepted

An-sky, Evgeny Vakhtangov, and The Dybbuk for production by the Art Theater." 1 The first announcements also connecting the play with Habima appeared during that same winter: "The new play by S. A. An-sky, Between Two Worlds, which has been accepted for performance by a studio of the Moscow Art Theater, has been offered by the author for production by Habima. The translation of this play into the Jewish language has been undertaken by H. N. Bialik." 2 But meanwhile, the fate of the play in the First Studio remained unclear. The actors had been attracted to the play because of its unusualness, but this very quality became a stumbling block. As Menachem Gnesin, one of the creators of Habima, remarked, it was difficult to "comprehend the internal feelings of the heroes, whose thoughts were alien and distant, like the west from the east. " 3 It was even more difficult to explain these feelings in the framework ofStanislavsky's "method." The dry report cited above supplements the memoirs of Gnesin about a read-through of the play at the home of the industrialist Hillel Zlatopol 'sky: Only now had our hearts and souls been revealed: inspiration, delight, ecstasy. Each person attempted to recall some Hasidic parable, legend. We resembled Hasids, sitting around the table of the Rabbi and awaiting his appearance .... Awaiting assistance, backing, in a war with an unclean power, in order to become clean and to ascend .... Awaiting a miracle. And at that moment, the door swung open, An-sky and Zlatopol'sky entered, and Zlatopol'sky announced that he had bought the play for Habima from An-sky under the condition that Bialik would translate it into Hebrew. This was An-sky's first condition, and Zlatopol'sky accepted it gladly. The condition that Habima would stage the play was proposed by Zlatopol'sky. 4 An-sky's play was first printed in Bialik's Hebrew translation in the first issue of the journal Ha-tekufah for 1918. Mter the conflict between the Bolsheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries broke out, An-sky, in danger of arrest, fled from Russia and headed to Vilna. Subsequently, for his final revision of the play in Yiddish, he seems to have made changes based on Bialik's Hebrew text. With Habima's appearance in the orbit of the Art Theater, the question of what to do with the play was resolved. To stage the same play at the same time at both the First Studio and Habima was impossible.

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Ivanov And, considering that work was not going well in the First Studio, it was decided to put an end to it. The first reports about the "studying of parts for An-sky's great drama The Dybbuk" appeared in the fall ofr918 in a review of"An Evening of Studio Works." 5 In the winter ofi9I8-I9, the Habima members put the first act into rehearsal. It should be noted that, despite the festive animation with which they got down to work, the attitude toward the play remained divided. The play reminded the Habima members of exactly what they wanted to forget: the degradation and the deprivation of rights of the Jewish ghetto. For Vakhtangov, The Dybbuk remained only a draft, a first step toward a "biblical" performance. Bialik also attested to his doubts: "I got down to work without particular confidence or desire. I myself didn't really like the play. And I didn't hide this from the author. " 6 Nonetheless, the play by "The Blessed An-sky" (as Bialik called him) possessed an inexplicable magnetism that banished all doubts. A resolution to these uncertainties in the production did not present itself right away. At first limiting himself to an ethnographic reproduction ofJewish everyday life, Vakhtangov reached a deadlock in his work on The Dybbuk. Local color answered neither his own strivings "to generalize everything to infinity, to experience all phenomena as phenomena of the world order" 7 nor the Habima members' biblical dreams. Nakhum Tsemakh, another one of Habima's founders, negotiated with Marc Chagall in hopes of recruiting him for the staging of The Dybbuk. Nothing came of these attempts. The meeting with Vakhtangov, about which one can read in Chagall's book My Life, left a bitter aftertaste in the artist's mouth. In the memoir, the artist lays out a sense of the situation fairly clearly. In 1918-19, Vakhtangov considered himself a strict adherent to that "method" of an actor's work and role worked out by Stanislavsky and that subsequently became famous tl1roughout the world. Precisely at this time, Vakhtangov was a more orthodox follower of the "method" than Stanislavsky himself. Having been turned down by Chagall, Vakhtangov and Tsemakh invited Natan Al'tman to participate, though Al'tman turned out to be just as removed from traditional psychological theater. When the artist came from Petrograd to see the run-through of the first act, sketches of

An-sky, Evgeny Vakhtango\', and The Dybbuk sets and costumes in hand, he was dismayed by the difference in their approaches. In his sketches, people were "tragically broken and bent, like trees growing in dry and infertile soil. The colors of tragedy were in them. Their movements and gestures were exaggerated." 8 But the students were still performing in an entirely ordinary and composed way, a fact that had already driven Chagall away. Yet Chagall's "poison" and the meeting with Al'tman played an important role. It became evident that all preexisting theatrical possibilities had been exhausted. Vakhtangov was still attempting to follow in his teacher's footsteps, but his intuition was leading him toward new shores. It was no accident that, while rehearsing The Dybbuk, Vakhtangov became interested in the Kabbalah as a sphere of magical, secret knowledge, capable of lifting the veil of the secret and the incomprehensible. Vakhtangov had found a way out, and work on the show continued "in a sort of incredible excitement, almost ecstasy."9 Sushkevich attested that, [f]or one and a half years, from the fall of1920 to 1922, when Vakhtangov created his greatest production, he was in a peculiar condition. There are conditions of enormous emotionality, which reach such a degree that they can be called a "supercondition" [nadsostoianie]. Vakhtangov was in precisely such a situation, one that he could not really handle. 10 This "supercondition" in which Vakhtangov found himself, a mixture of agony and enthusiasm, was caused not only by his knowledge of the inevitability of his fast-approaching and terrible death from cancer but also by the general situation of war and revolution. The pain ofloss and rapture of hopes mingled together, a heightened sense of the mortality of human flesh and of the power of the artistic impulse. Moreover, this "supercondition" offered an escape from the inertia of existence and access to a less transparent and higher order of creation. A more exact definition of this condition would be "ecstasy." Al'tman's sketches had revealed the possibility of transforming Ansky's play according to the laws of passionate, or ecstatic, composition. On January 29, 1922, the day of the dress rehearsal, Vakhtangov left a farewell letter for the Habima members: "I've done my job, my dear

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ones. Farewell. Perhaps we will meet agam. Where are you now? E. Vakhtangov." 11 Every word of this simple note bears an otherworldly tone. It would be difficult to imagine that Vakhtangov did not know where the Habima members would be on the day of the dress rehearsal. The very word "now" shifts the question to a different understanding of time. And, it seems, the neutral phrase "perhaps we will meet again" in the given context leads us out of the bounds of time. This is not a normal note but an existential message from a person who had seen into the beyond. In a certain sense, Vakhtangov himself became a "dybbuk." He died on May 29, 1922. For years afterward, the exhausted and successful Habima troupe cried out in Vakhtangov's voice. In the end, they would have to banish this spirit in order to return to normal theatrical life. The Dybbuk premiered on January 31. Even for the early 1920s, which abounded in strong theatrical impressions, Vakhtangov's show had an unparalleled aesthetic and emotional impact, the nature of which was clear yet inscrutable, striking yet escaping analysis. Inviting V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko to The Dybbuk ("the work cost me my health"), Vakhtangov wrote about simple, almost elementary things: "[i]t was necessary to resolve everyday life on stage theatrically and in an up-to-date fashion." 12 But the performance compelled critics to reflect on how the idea was repeatedly surpassed. Samuel Margolin sensed in it "a tragedy of the present day, burdened by the blood of war and revolution." 13 And there were many such accounts. In his marvelous and under-appreciated study "Nature Is Not Indifferent" (completed in the 1940s ), Sergei Eisenstein offered a deep analysis of the nature of ecstatic creation and passionate composition. He applied his "formula of pathos" to the fine arts (El Greco, Piranesi, Picasso), literature ( Zola), cinematography (Battleship Potemki n), even the sciences (the principle of the rocket engine), and discovers something universal. Eisenstein never used The Dybbuk as an illustration of any of the theses of his conception, but it nevertheless seems to me that the source of those ideas are impressions from Vakhtangov's show. In his conclusion, for example, he named the dress rehearsals of Eric the Fourteenth and The Dybbuk among the most important events of his life. 14

An-sky, Evgeny Vakhtangov, and The Dybbuk Vakhtangov used the "formula of pathos," the principle of ecstatic construction, in all elements of the show. The director endowed each state, each moment onstage, with the maximum fullness and intensity, making a transition to a new state, a new quality. In the first act, in an old synagogue where yeshivah students study Talmud and idlers sit in the darkness, a sobbing woman runs in and, lifting the curtain, falls down before the ark. She prays f(x the salvation of her dying daughter. Her speech is transformed according to the general laws of passionate composition. The intensity of feeling elevates ordinary speech to rhyme. The sorrowful rise and fall of her voice first becomes lamentation, and then it makes one more leap and rises up in song. Speech, as a reflection of a psychological state, executes a break from prose to poetry, and after that from poetry to music. The more ecstatic the feeling, the less descriptive and the less representative the means of its representation. At the end of the first act, Khonen, tormented by his passion, dies. His death is presented not as an absolute end but as a moment of passage to a new state. Having left his body, his soul languishes, yearning to return to an earthly existence. In the second act, the paupers' heightened emotional state can be expressed only by means of Cubist interpretive masks. Brightly colored circles, triangles, and rhombuses are surrounded by dark lines that endow them with a particular energetic clarity. Stage makeup outlines the protuberances of cheekbones. The eyes are thickly encircled with concentric zones of white and red. Noses are asymmetrical, colored white on one side and black on the other. Impetuous zigzags provoke mimicry and gestures. "Frozen lines possess a supernatural, mysterious brightness." 15 Against this background, the dynamic of the imbibing and praying mouths, the glittering and unseeing eyes, acquires a new quality. The image exerts an influence not by means of the schematic distribution of the open and closed, the frozen and the moving, the increasing energy of unity, but by the mutual transfer of oppositions. In the second act, "the curtain has not yet risen, but we already hear some kind of monotonous music and clatter." 16 Thus, in Sender's courtyard begins the wedding feast for the poor, which precedes the wedding by custom. Mentally deficient paupers, the blind, armless,

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Ivanov hunchbacked, and lame enjoy themselves and sing the praises of the generous host. The feverish gaiety is emptied of cheerfulness, colored by a "feeling of inescapable terror." 17 Vakhtangov puts the Jewish ritual through a fine theatrical filter, cleansing it of descriptive details. The director transposes the ethnographic motif to a different, generalized plan. Life itself as such "is presented in the form of a pauper's feast, an allegorical chain of illness, deformity, vile greediness, lascivious grimaces, repulsive guffaws. The ringleader of this 'feast of life' turns out to be a blind man: ugly and pompous, as if he had emerged from a grave." 18 Many of those who wrote about The Dybbuk in the following decade saw in the paupers' dance a class, if not a revolutionary, protest. They transformed Vakhtangov unwillingly into a practitioner of"socialist realism." Such a transformation rendered him a loyal Soviet director but an uncommonly banal one. It was certainly not this social idea that Pavel Markov, the greatest theater critic of the 1920s, had in mind when he spoke of Vakhtangov as "a relentless unmasker of the concreteness oflife." 19 Let us emphasize: he is referring not to concrete manifestations of life but to the concreteness of life as such-not to its historical changeability but to its ontological structure. By sharpening contrasts, Vakhtangov broke free from the boundaries of the human. Each pauper sought out his or her own "animal" characteristic and sharpened it with exercises in plastic improvisation. Eli Vin'iar endowed the hunchbacked Zundel with the habits of a beaten fox. Ben-Khaim saw in the old, deaf Sholom a predatory bird. Ben-Ari discovered a hyena in the lopsided beggar Dalfan. For the tubercular Dreyzl, Chayele Grober chose the threatening rhythmic motions of a hungry wolf. Inna Govinskaia discerned in the imbecilic El'ka an infuriated monkey. Aron Meskin in the role of the blind Rafael preferred an image from the plant kingdom, and described the trunk of a dead tree, on which he was a branch with his blind man's hands outstretched. 20 These "animal" characteristics were latent within the human body. They emerged in all their fullness and clarity only in the moment of

An-sky, Evgeny Vakhtangov, and The Dybbuk

theatrical metamorphosis, when the beast "leaped" out of the frenzied human. This striving tor fantastic deformity served neither comic nor sentimental goals. The spectator was deprived of a chance to be touched by the pitiful appearance of"the lowest of the low." "Despairing exaggeration" was a way out of the inertia of daily occurrences, from everyday forms of existence: "hysterical excitement, dreaming creatures, sickly gaiety, somnambulistic movement, dreams at the edge of the precipice, create an unusual picture of a soul which has broken away from all that is ordinary." 21 Satire presupposes distance. Vakhtangov's grotesque abolishes this distance, drawing the spectator into a new picture of the world. Vakhtangov's fantasy turned out to be inexhaustible in its shades of ugliness. A changing equilibrium of expressive deformity and "an unprecedented degree of concentration" was found in each figure. At the same time, the crowd represents a single body, which functions according to its own logic. Vakhtangov discovered a kind of magical power in the use of a monotonal rhythm and ritualistic repetition of changing movement. It is not by chance that accusations of "shamanism" slipped into reviews. Among the twisted, deformed bodies in gray tatters, circling ceaselessly, repeating one and the same movement, fixed f()f each individual, appears the snow-white vertical figure of Leah (played by Chana Rovina). The introduction of this contrasting element makes the composition sharply dynamic. Each pauper has the right to a dance with the bride. And Leah goes without a word from the shrew with the drooping lips to the hunchback and then to the blind man. The rhythm of "a round dance of some kind of sickly selflessness and regal poverty" 22 grows, departing from the rhythm of a theatrically worked-out ritual occurrence. But then the focus transfers to Dreyzl, the witch, who "hasn't danced for forty years." She catches Leah up in a fantastic, captivating, and now incomparable dance. Everyone is engulfed by this frenzy as by a wildfire: "Each joins the dance in their own way, is distinguished from the crowd for a moment, and again returns to it in a whirlwind of motion. This is Goya on stage." 23

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Ivanov The action leaps from the narrative exposition of the theme to a figurative one. A rhythmic metamorphosis takes place. The "ideal paupers" leave their human condition behind. They, "the dark dregs of life, blind chaos, primeval dark origins, become for a moment almost apparitions, phantoms, the tormented progeny of hell, personifications of a greedy, vile force, exploding lite from the depths and surrounding it with an indissoluble, tight circle." 24 The ecstatic dance turns them into a phantasmagorical "round dance of people-monsters." Vakhtangov "does not spare [Leah's] whiteness: he besmirches it with the hands of toads, the pawing of apes." 25 Zoomorphic characteristics are discovered in the individual, and a detailed image of the bestiary appears. But one more leap follows, and the action concludes on a nonrepresentational and objectless plane: "blind chaos, primeval dark origins." Iury Zavadsky, the Russian director who designed The Dybbuk for the screen, described the viewer's position in this framework: "it seemed as though, by the power of art, you were ripped from the bounds of time and space. You literally forgot where you were and what was happening to you. And when you woke up, you understood: yes, this was amazing theater." 26 This citation may be expanded: "It was as if you had come up against the secret of earthly existence, were lifted to spheres ofhitherto unknown experience, collided with terrible demonic powers. " 27 These observations are striking in their similarity to attempts to describe conditions achieved with the help of psychotechnical ecstasy in the Christian tradition, developed by St. Ignatius of Loyola, 28 or meditation in the Eastern tradition. The predominance of a terrible power in the eyes of those strict adherents to these traditions bears witness to a lack oflucidity. But Vakhtangov's dark ecstasies were genuine. This art did not function as a "reflection of reality" but as an introduction to a universal, infinite idea of coming into being, of destruction and rebirth, of a primal unity, in which there is neither life, nor death, nor space or time, and from which they all arise and to which they return. Here, the ritual was realized as a "window" into another dimension. In this form of theater, no single end could be conclusive, which allowed Markov to draw his conclusion about the "overcoming

An-sky, Evgeny Vakhtangov, and The Dybbuk

of the tragic" in The Dybbuk. 29 Max Reinhardt noted that "the paupers' dance, with all of its fantasy, is interpreted as a wild dance of witches, creatures not belonging to this world. Only absolute devotion to art can allow one to achieve such a level ofperformance." 30 The premiere of The Dybbuk confirmed Eisenstein's fundamental conclusions with literal exactitude: in the experience of ecstasy, a person "enters the most primal phase-he must thus inevitably enter into the experience of'essence' and 'etre'-offormation and the principle of formation." 31 Andrei Levinson saw in the production "the strangest amalgam of prophetic frenzy and discipline, the spontaneous and the artificial, fantasy and keen observation." 32 Nonetheless, one can also discern a measure of puzzlement in his response. Meanwhile, the critic discerned in Vakhtangov's art that understanding which directors with an avant-garde orientation repeatedly strove to achieve \Vhen they worked in the tradition of "sacred theater." Jerzy Grotowski thought that "spontaneity and discipline mutually strengthen one another; that which is elemental, and that which fits into the frame of the score leads to a mutual enrichment and becomes an original source of emanation in an actor's art." 33 Or, as Antonin Artaud wrote, looking at the problem in a different way, "cruelty is discipline and carefulness." 34 The cosmic ecstasies ofVakhtangov did not just anticipate Artaud's "cosmic trance." In fact, they possessed an indisputable advantage over the dreams and incantations of the French poet of the theater. They appeared in fully armed scenic facilities and were fleshed out in the material of art. Vakhtangov elevated his combination of irony and pathos to the level of principle. Ten of the most righteous Jews participate in the herem (excommunication) of the dybbuk. The decision, made in the name of the community, only has meaning in their presence. Vakhtangov gave all of these "righteous men" a common gesture and intonation. The flaps of their lapserdaks (a type of overcoat worn by Jews) were lengthened, which made the figures look exaggerated. In the "crowd scene" of the third act, the director was least of all interested in individual differentiation. Only a youth, practically a little boy, dressed like a clown, breaks loose from the unified pattern, acting out of place and attempt-

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Figure 22. Exorcism of the spirit of Khonen in The Dybbuk at the Habima Theater. Raikin Ben-Ari, Habima , trans. A. H. Gross and I. Soref(New York, 1957).

SOURCE:

ing to disrupt the general rhythm. The role of a youth was played by an actress who unwillingly became the reference and parallel to the image ofKhonen. Rovina, as Leah, communicated a protest of gentle beings, the strength of the weak, in a mysteriously laconic way. She united the transparent grace of a human with mechanical gestures that did not belong to a living being. A waxy paleness turned her face into a mask, excluding psychological "painting" and straightforward stage interaction. In a hallucination, the sharp cry of the dybbuk comes out of her, bursting the space and turning into measured lamentation. In this fantastic form, Vakhtangov grasped an essential existential problem. The intrusion of the dybbuk leads to the estrangement and deformation of her individuality. Leah is not in possession of herself. She ceases to be herself. She moves like one hypnotized. She cries out in another's voice. Her movement undergoes the same metamorphosis. She loses her wholeness and personal identity. But the attempts to expel the dybbuk and return everything to normal are just as catastrophic.

An-sky, Evgeny Vakhtangov, and The Dybbuk It is remarkable that The Dybbuk, which was counted among those performances that "served to form the spiritual legacy of the revolution," 35 actually sealed the irreversible estrangement of the individual that only death can overcome. The theme of Vakhtangov's performances in general, "the gloomy path of man-his salvation from suffering, pain and crime," 36 found its fullest incarnation in The Dybbuk. This "salvation" became possible only when the director "illuminated the concreteness of real life with reflections of the entire unbounded past and future life," 37 moved beyond the frame of concrete, empirical existence and found a new way of seeing, leaving the bounds of the visible world. For the creator of The Dybbuk, beauty was only acceptable if it were subjected to a process of exhaustive negation and destruction. In The Dybbuk, ugliness, brought to its maximum manifestation, bursts out into new and unexpected forms ofbeauty-beauty on the far side of the possible, beauty capable of objectifying chaos in a plastic manner, giving new form to the very beginning. Nikolai Volkov, who wrote about the "beauty of ugliness," grasped the essence ofVakhtangov's method. As an artist who avoided programmatic art to a rare degree, Vakhtangov did not become an adherent of any single concrete, pure trend. Instead, he created an intuitive synthesis of various trends: one can see a cubist decomposition of the human face as well as an expressionist tension in the depiction of the living and the dead. The scene in the middle of the second act, when "it suddenly becomes empty on the square, the paupers grow up from under the earth like fantastic creatures, just like chimeras, and throw themselves frenziedly at the empty table on which there is no wedding feast," 38 carried the energy of a surrealistic vision. The Dybbuk made it possible to find "a common denominator of expressionistic and futuristic lines" 39 in everything. Notwithstanding, it did not exclude "completely Rembrandt-like details." 40 The premiere of The Dybbuk brought the little-known Habima troupe to universal attention. Before, they were known only as the "biblical studio" of the Art Theater and, it seemed, were destined to exist in a corresponding framework. Yet it was known that the troupe was led by Vakhtangov, who had recently torn decisively away from the tradition of the Art Theater with his production of Eric the Fourteenth

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Ivanov by August Strindberg (First Studio, 1921 ), which gave the premiere added intrigue and tension. The performance that Moscow's theater-goers saw on January 31, 1922, did not just shake them emotionally but also led artists-from adherents of the psychological theater to militant formalists, including their master, Vsevolod Meyerhold- to a state of ecstasy. Vakhtangov's grotesque, uniting that which cannot be united, destructive in construction and constructive in destruction, denying the visible world in the name of its coming-into-being, accumulated the heterogeneous artistic tendencies of the 1920s and became a voice of the new art of the twentieth century. The success of The Dybbuk can be judged by the enthusiasm Western directors felt toward this previously unknown play by An-sky. For example, Gaston Baty offered three versions of The Dybbuk in Paris (The Studio of the Elysian Fields, February 1928; Theater "Avenue," April 1928; Theater Montparnasse, 1930 ). Lothar Wallernstain presented the opera by Lodovico Rocco at La Scala twice (1931, 1934). Later, The Dybbuk inspired the second wave of the avant-garde: productions by Henri Villiers (Paris, Theater in the Round, 1977) and Joseph Chaikin (New York, The Public Theater Shakespeare Festival, 1977). Vakhtangov's production was also echoed in ballet, such as the productions of Jerome Robbins (New York City Ballet, 1974) and Maurice Bejart (Bejart Ballet, Lausanne, 1988). In conclusion, I would like to return to the theme with which I began and say a few words about that strange and paradoxical place The Dybbuk occupied in the Habima members' utopian vision of "biblical theater." The Dybbuk was Habima's highest artistic achievement. This was evident as much to the troupe as to contemporaries. A document has been preserved that scrupulously lists the towns and theaters in which the play was performed on each occasion, continuing throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Wherever the troupe went-to Riga, Berlin, Warsaw, or any other city-the tour always opened and closed with The Dybbuk. The play became a symbol for Habima just as Anton Chekhov's "Seagull" was for the Moscow Art Theater. And yet the troupe's own attitude toward the play remained complicated. Habima members were even a little embarrassed by the ecstatic excitement with

An-sky, Evgeny Vakhtangov, and The Dybbuk which they worked on the play. Moreover, The Dybbuk was an "incorrect" play from the viewpoint of their program. On the surface, it had no relationship to biblical theater. The stuff of the play was that same despised life of the Jewish shtetl that the Habima members wanted to forget and supplant with the grandeur of biblical history in which Jews stride forward boldly, heads upraised. In a sense, however, The Dybbuk was a biblical performance, albeit not in Habima's terms. It demonstrated that everything in art is determined by the means of seeing it. Although The Dybbuk is not a play with a biblical subject, it has a biblical vision, a biblical way of seeing, and, arguably, a biblical anguish.

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Twelve An-sky and the Ethnography of

Jewish Women Nathaniel Deutsch

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During the nineteenth century, thousands ofJewish girls in the Russian empire mysteriously disappeared. Unlike their predecessors in Khmielnitsky's day, they were not kidnapped by marauding Cossacks or Tatars and taken as captives to live on the steppes. Instead, tor reasons that remain unclear, the births of numerous Jewish girls were simply not registered in official records. Thus, for example, in the newborns list from Mogilev in the 187os, we find a sex ratio of 210 Jewish boys for 100 girls-an astounding gap that even puts to shame contemporary China, where large numbers of female babies are aborted each year by disappointed parents. That these Jewish girls did not meet the fate of their Chinese counterparts is confirmed by the first all-Russian census ofi897, in which thousands of Jewish girls who lacked previous birth records miraculously appeared. 1 Not being registered at birth was only one of the ways in which the Jewish women of the Pale of Settlement were rendered invisible. 2 Despite the important economic, cultural, and religious roles that Jewish women played in their communities, male members of the traditional rabbinic elite and the newly emerging Russian Jewish intelligentsia devoted little if any attention to women in their voluminous writings. Emblematic of this phenomenon was Simon Dubnow's monumental History oftheJews in Russia and Poland, which basically ignored Jewish women in toto. 3 Nevertheless, as early as the middle of the nineteenth century, one body of literature did begin to discuss the lives of Russian Jewish women, albeit rarely in great detail. The ethnographic studies of Jewish communities were conducted under the auspices of the Russian

An-sky and the Ethnography ofJewish Women

Figure 23. Exhibit of artifacts, including traditional women's clothing, from the Baron Guenzburg Expedition in St. Petersburg (at house number 50, Fifth Line, Vasily Island) . Photo taken by Solomon Yudovin in 1914. SOURCE: An-sky archive, Petersburg Judaica.

government and its affiliated agencies, such as the Imperial Russian Geographical Society. 4 Although the authors of these works were t ypically non-Jews and were often unsympathetic to their subjects, one notable exception was Moses Berlin (r82r-88), a Jewish native ofShklov, in Belorussia, and critic of antisemitism, who was elected to the Imperial Russian Geographical Society following the r86r publication of his Survey of the Ethnography of the Jewish Population in Russia. 5 In its pages, Berlin briefly touched on a wide range of topics, including Jewish women folk healers, women's participation in religious rituals, the punishments women received for committing adultery, the types of work performed by women of different socioeconomic classes, and women's educational opportunities. 6 An-sky, therefore, was neither the first ethnographer nor even the first Jewish ethnographer to address the lives of Russian Jewish women

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in print. Yet his work in this area should still be considered pioneering. Unlike Berlin, who dismissed the Jewish tradition ofwomen dancing with women at weddings as an uncivilized "Eastern custom" andechoing Solomon Maimon-contemptuously referred to baale shem (folk healers) as "charlatans," An-sky rebelled against the Enlightenment critique oft(Jlk culture? Instead, he developed an empathic and creative ethnographic method that opened up new pathways in the study ofJewish folk culture, including those traditions that affected the lives cfJewish women, in particular. To return to the image with which I began this chapter, An-sky, more than any previous ethnographer, sought to make visible the Jewish women of the Pale of Settlement. Traces of An-sky's efforts to explore the lives of]ewish women in the Pale are scattered throughout his artistic and ethnographic writings as well as in the memoirs of colleagues such as Abram Rechtman, who accompanied An-sky on the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, and in the recollections of shtetl dwellers who observed An-sky's ethnographic work in situ. In the remaining pages of this chapter, I will examine Ansky's ethnography ofJewish women through three lenses: An-sky's play The Dybbuk and its possible relationship to the story of the Maiden of Ludmir; the material An-sky and his team collected on female healers and professional mourners during the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition; and the numerous questions concerning women that An-sky included in The jeJl!i.rh Ethnographic Program, his encyclopedic survey of Jewish folk culture in the Pale of Settlement. Together, these interrelated sources reveal An-sky's ongoing efforts both to document and to depict the traditional life ofRast European Jewish women before it disappeared.

The Maiden and the Dybbuk An-sky's artistic magnum opus, The Dybbuk, is a good place to begin exploring his ethnographic interest in Jewish women. On the one hand, by choosing to make the protagonist of his play a young woman, An-sky was bucking the traditional Jewish tendency to treat men as the dramatic center of attention. On the other hand, An-sky was drawing on a

An-sky and the Ethnography ofJewish Women

well-established genre in which Jewish women did play a prominent role: the numerous tales and popular pamphlets that recorded cases of dybbuk possession in the early modern period. 8 According to these sources, which, in some respects, functioned like the pulp fiction of their day, twice as many Jewish women were possessed as compared to men. The typical case of dybbuk possession involved a working-class teenage girl who committed a religious sin or social infraction that made her vulnerable to invasion by a malevolent male spirit. Following the purported possession, the victim was said to speak in strange voices, act bizarrely, avoid contact with holy books, and refuse to marry (or, if already married, to reject sexual relations). The only solution was to call on a male exorcist who could expel the spirit and return the victim to her senses. This profile suggests that dybbuk possession was sometimes employed as an explanation for psychological problems brought on by the stresses of early arranged marriages and other social conventions that took away the autonomy of young Jewish women. Yet within their own communities, some women labeled as victims of dybbuk possession may have also been venerated as charismatic visionaries possessing ruah hakodesh (the holy spirit). 9 Unfortunately, such cases are difficult to reconstruct because the stories of these women were told from the perspective of those in power-namely, male members of the establishment. As in a traditional dybbuk tale, An-sky's play focuses on the possession of a young Jewish woman (Leah) by a male spirit (Khonen). But, unlike the typical dybbuk account, the male authority figures in the play (the exorcist Reb Azrielke ofMiropolye and Sender, Leah's father) fail in their efforts to enforce the social norms of traditional East European Jewish society. Instead, in a modern twist, romantic love triumphs over an arranged marriage, and the spirits of Leah and her beloved Khonen are united for eternity. An-sky began to work on The Dybbuk during the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition of1912-I4 and continued through his relief efforts ofr9rs-r6. 10 One of An-sky's friends, Samuel Tsitron, remembered him saying that "The idea [for the play] came to me when I was traveling in the Volhynia and Podolia provinces collecting Jewish folklore." 11 I would like to suggest the possibility that among the folk traditions

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Deutsch inspiring An-sky during this period were stories of the Maiden of Ludmir, known popularly as the only woman rebbe or charismatic Hasidic leader. Although their overall narratives are very different, An-sky's play and the story of the Maiden of Ludmir share a number of important parallels that revolve around the abortive marriages of their respective protagonists. According to the various accounts of her life, the Maiden of Ludmir, whose birth name was Hannah Rochel, was raised by her father after her mother died prematurely. At a young age, the Maiden was betrothed to a boy whom she loved intensely. In the period before her wedding, the Maiden frequently visited her mother's grave in the town's cemetery. During one of these visits, the Maiden fainted after crying on the grave and was carried home by the cemetery's caretaker. Upon recovering, the Maiden refused to marry her fiance and her behavior changed dramatically, inspiring some in the community to accuse her of being possessed by a dybbuk. Eventually, the Chernoblcr Rebbc was brought in to exorcise the spirit. As in the Maiden ofLudmir's story, An-sky portrayed Leah as visiting her deceased mother's grave before her wedding. While crying in the cemetery, Leah collapsed and was brought home by her aunt Frade, who declared to the waiting wedding guests, "She tell into a faint-it was all I could do to revive her. I'm still shaking." In response, Leah suddenly cried, "You are not my bridegroom!" and pushed her fiance away, refusing to marry him. When Leah then began to speak in the voice of a man, the Messenger expressed what many at the wedding already suspected: "A dybbuk has entered the body of the bride." Word was then sent to Reb Azrielke to save the girl. 12 The structural similarities between these scenes are enough to raise the possibility that An-sky drew on the story of the Maiden of Ludrnir-along with many other folk traditions-while writing The Dybbuk. This hypothesis is made more likely by An-sky's two visits to the town of Ludmir. An-sky first visited Ludmir (or, as it was known in Russian, Vladimir-Volinsky) in 1912, during the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition. An-sky did not record his impressions of this first visit, but Mendel Lipsker, a resident of Ludmir at the time, later wrote in the Pinkas Ludmir, a "memory book" published after the Holocaust, that

An-sky and the Ethnography ofJewish Women An-sky "photographed all of the tombstones, collected legends and other historical material," which "was never published because of the First World War." l3 An-sky visited Ludmir for the second time in the summer of 1915, a stay that he documented in his monumental Yiddish travelogue Khurbn Galicia. 14 In simple but moving prose, An -sky described the depredations of Russian soldiers in Ludmir as well as his own efforts to ensure the physical survival of the town's ancient Jewish community and its precious cultural artifacts. He mentioned nothing, however, about the Maiden of Ludmir. Yet, according to Moshe Sheynbaum, who later recalled An-sky's second visit in the Pinkas Ludmir, An-sky had asked to see the Maiden ofLudmir's grave in the town's cemetery. Sheynbaum added that he gave An-sky a note to take to Yossele Dreyer, the head of Ludmir's Hevrah Kadishah (Burial Society), who supposedly told Ansky the following story: In r8rs a girl named Hannah Rachel was born to a certain R. Monesh Verbermacher in Ludmir. While she was still a child she studied the Bible and learned to write Hebrew. Later she became well versed in aggadot from the Talmud and midrash and in musar [ethical] books. She prayed like a man, three times a day, with such enthusiasm that people couldn't take their eyes off her. The exceptional qualities of the girl, moreover, meant that when she was a little older, people began to talk about matches. Before long Hannah Rachel was engaged to a boy from the same town. This event caused upheaval in her spiritual life. Knowing her fiance since childhood, she loved him with all the zeal of her fiery soul. She strived to see him in private but, according to the customs of the time, this was strictly forbidden. From great longing, Hannah Rachel became ill; during the same period, her mother died. Hannah Rochel began to withdraw from people and to live a solitary existence. From time to time she would go to her mother's grave, where she would cry out her bitter heart. People say that once when Hannah Rachel was sitting at her mother's grave, she was overcome by sleep. When she awoke it was already night. She was badly frightened and began to run through the old cemetery, where the great tsadikim of generations past rested. On the way, she tripped on one of the holy graves. She began to cry and fainted. The watchman, when he heard the cry, ran to her, and after

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Deutsch she came to, he brought her home. She was sick for several weeks and the doctors gave up hope. [But] one day she called out to her father and told him: "I was just now in heaven, in a meeting of the heavenly court and they gave me a new lofty soul." A few days later she returned to health. From then on she wore a tallis katan [fringed garment], prayed in a tallis and tefillin (Rashi's and Rabbenu Tam's). She returned the tnaim [engagement agreement] to her fiance and decided never to marry. Meanwhile R. Monesh died and he left her a big inheritance. She purchased a beys-medresh, called thegornshtibl [the "second story shtibl"], with a special room where she prayed and studied. The entire region buzzed with [news about] the Maiden ofLudmir. Not only men and women but also scholars and rabbis from the surrounding towns used to come to her as to a holy person, so that she could bless them. She used to sit in her room near open doors and everyone would stand in the beys-medresh and listen to her derashot. A group of Hasidim formed around her, whom men called: "The Hasidim of the Maiden ofLudmir." Tsadikim from this time came to take a look at this wonder-woman. They tried to convince her that she should change her way oflife and get married. Around that time, the eminent tsadik R. Mottele of Chernobyl set out to plead with her to marry. She yielded and was married to a rabbi. However, they quickly got divorced. Soon thereafter she left for the Land of Israel, and there she died. 15 Despite their seemingly straightforward character, the memories of An-sky's visit to Ludmir are problematic for several reasons. First, according to an essay on the Maiden of Ludmir published by Samuel Abba Horodetsky in the journal Evreiskaia starina in 1909, the Maiden passed away in Palestine rather than in Ludmir. 16 Because An-sky was on the editorial board of the journal, he was almost certainly aware of this detail. If so, then why did An-sky supposedly search for the grave in the town's cemetery? Equally provocative are the striking similarities between Dreyer's story in the Pinkas Ludmir and Horodetsky's essay in EJJereiskaia starina. This raises the possibility that someone translated Horodetsky 's Russian work into Yiddish and retroactively attributed it to Dreyer in the Pinkas Ludmir, or, alternatively, that Dreyer and Horodetsky both drew on a common source.

An-sky and the Ethnography of Jewish Women In light of these complexities, we cannot be certain what actually happened when An-sky visited Ludmir. Whether or not Dreyer really told An-sky the story attributed to him in the Pinkas Ludmir, however, it is likely that An-sky read Horodetsky's essay on the Maiden ofLudmir in Evreiskaia starina before he began to write The Dybbuk. Indeed, as we will see below, The Jewish Ethnographic Program contains explicit evidence that An-sky did know about the Maiden of Ludmir and was interested in collecting traditions about her life. Taken together, these factors increase the likelihood that the story of the Maiden of Ludmir-like the study house in the shtetl ofGorlice that inspired the setting for the play's opening act-was one of the elements that helped to shape The Dybbuk.

The Jewish Ethnographic Expedition In addition to exploring the widespread theme of the possessed woman in Jewish folk culture, An-sky also sought out information on another less documented but no less important phenomenon: the Jewish woman healer or exorcist, known in Yiddish as the vaybersher opshprekherke. According to Rechtman, An-sky's colleague on the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, "Almost every shtetl in Ukraine had its old women whom people went to for advice in times of crisis." 17 Rechtman's memories of An -sky during the expedition reveal him to be acreative ethnographer, one who fully appreciated the performative dimension of the ethnographic drama. They also convey the challenges that An -sky and his team encountered in their pioneering efforts to record the folk practices of East European Jewish women. Unlike male Jewish healers, who exchanged "manuscripts of charm amulets, spells, remedies and oaths," Rechtman noted that the female healers "were very careful not to divulge their secret spells and remedies to others; they even refused to tell members of their own family." 18 The great pains that these women healers took to preserve the secrecy of their spells and charms increased the aura surrounding them and probably helped to compensate for the fact that, unlike male healers, who employed Hebrew and Aramaic spells derived from manuscripts,

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the women typically recited incantations in Yiddish and/or Ukrainian. Despite this disadvantage in a culture that greatly prized literacy in loshen koydesh (the holy tongue, i.e., Hebrew), Rechtman observed that women healers were more popular than their male counterparts; as he put it, "people always seemed to trust the women more than the men and so men were less frequently approached." 19 In order to break down or, at least, to get around the barriers put up by these women, An-sky and his fellow ethnographers employed a variety of stratagems. An-sky was particularly adept at portraying himself as a once successful man who had fallen on hard times and now needed the women's help to get back on his feet. Moreover, An-sky always emphasized that, despite his troubles, he would pay handsomely for their services. As Rechtman recalled, "One day I joined in just such a session. We claimed that An-sky was unable to write and was almost blind, he took me along as a scribe. And I remember that when we left the old lady blessed An-sky and promised him that God would be generous in giving him what he was looking for." 20 Another category of charismatic Jewish women pursued by An-sky's team was the klogmuter or professional mourner (also known as a bavaynerin in some communities). 21 As Rechtman wrote in his memoir, "Besides the usual type of healer, who is found in every town and village-you will also find, however in a much smaller number, a remnant of a rare type of old woman: 'wail mothers'- professional mourners whose job, their calling, was crying, wailing, making other laments and spilling tears." 22 These women performed a number of functions, all related to interceding with the dead on behalf of the living. When someone fell ill, for example, the klogmuter might burst into the synagogue, open the holy ark containing the Torah scroll, and pray for mercy, or go to the cemetery and drape herself over the graves of the sick person's dead relatives while entreating them for help. On the happier occasion of an orphan's wedding, the klogmuter would go the graves of the deceased mother and father and invite them to participate in the celebration. By far the busiest time for these women was the holy month ofElul, when pious Jews would visit the graves of their ancestors and pay a klogmuter to mourn on their behalf. Rechtman noted that "[ t ]he

An-sky and the Ethnography ofJcwish Women

professional wailers used to only ask the name and the mother's name of the dead person and suddenly, without special preparations, abruptly break out in a mournful wail, beat their heads violently, strike their hearts-improvising their own particular tkhines [supplicatory prayers typically written for and, sometimes, by women] and requests." A good klogmutcr took pride in composing her own laments on the spot, never relying on a printed tkhines or siddur (prayer book) for inspiration. The length and intensity of her dirges depended, according to Rechtman, on the sum given to her. The higher the payment, the longer she listed the good qualities of the dead individual and pleaded on behalf of the living. In his memoir, Rechtman reproduced a photograph of three professional women mourners in the Ukrainian town ofNemirov, where Ansky and his team observed them during the month ofElul. The ethnographers "followed them the whole day recording their improvised wailing and litanies. At the end of the day we obliged them with a fine payment and from their mouths recorded a number of versions of their dirges for common and out of the ordinary occasions." Concerning this material, Rechtman wrote that it would "certainly be a great contribution to the treasure of folklore and ethnography." Once again, we are given access, if only elliptically, to some of the ethnographic methods employed by An-sky in the field. An-sky and his team spent long hours observing their subjects and were clearly not adverse to paying them when necessary.

The Jewish Ethnographic Program The most important source for reconstructing An-sky's general methodological approach and his particular interest in the lives of Jewish women is a Yiddish document called The Jewish Ethnographic Program: Man, published in 1914. 23 Intended as the first of a multivolume work, The Jewish Ethnographic Program was composed by An-sky with the editorial help of L. I. Shternberg, an important Russian Jewish ethnographer who made his reputation with research on Sakhalin Island. In his foreword to this still-untranslated work, An-sky began by emphasiz-

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Deutsch ing that "the sefer, the book, has been and until today remains the most important foundation of Jewish life." 24 This observation was hardly revolutionary, because the image of Jews as "People of the Book" dated back to antiquity. With the statements that followed, however, An-sky intended to radically shift the perception ofJewish culture from one entirely bound by its relationship to a literary corpus to one in which written and oral traditions (which he defined broadly, as we will see) had always coexisted: Yet on a par with the sefer, with the great toyre shebiksav [the Written Torah] ... we also possess another toyre, a toyre shebalpe [the Oral Torah], which the same people, above all the masses, have kept on creating during their long, hard, and tragic historical existence. This toyre shebalpe consists of folk tales and legends, proverbs and aphorisms, songs and melodies, [and] customs. 25 In melodramatic language that echoed the phrasings of the Yiddish stage more than the dry prose of a standard social scientific work, Ansky added that, like the "Written Torah," these folk traditions reflected the "beauty and purity of the Jewish soul, the gentleness and nobility of the Jewish heart, the exaltedness and profundity of Jewish thought." An-sky had ingeniously redefined the traditional categories of written and oral Torah in order to include the Jewish folk traditions in which he was so interested. To appreciate An-sky's intervention, it is important to understand that "Written Torah" customarily referred to the Bible, whereas "Oral Torah" indicated normative rabbinic traditions such as the Talmud, which had once been transmitted from mouth to mouth but were eventually written down (a process recorded in the Talmud itself). By describing Jewish folk tradition as "Oral Torah," An-sky implicitly located biblical and rabbinic writings within a single category of "Written Torah" while expanding the Jewish canon to include the tales, songs, beliefs, and customs of the Jewish folk. An-sky, who had received a religious education as a youth, realized that for his ideas to have an impact within Jewish as well as secular, scholarly circles, it was necessary to frame them in traditional categories. The result was nothing less than a radical redefinition ofJewish culture itself, whereby folk traditions now formed a kind ofliving midrash (traditional interpretation).

An-sky and the Ethnography ofJewish Women

The remainder of The Jewish Ethnographic Program consists of a set of rules for respondents and an exhaustive list of 2,087 questions constituting five sections: 1. The Child. 2. From the Kheyder [School] to the Wedding. 3. The Wedding. 4. Family Life. 5. Death. Each of these main sections is further organized into more specific categories-pregnancy, the midwife, the teacher, the bar mitzvah, the wedding jester, the widow and widower, the cemetery, the funeral-to name just a few of the 55 subsections. The document was intended as a questionnaire to be distributed to Jewish communities throughout the Pale of Settlement. Individuals were instmcted to answer the questions according to Ansky's specifications and to mail in their written responses to the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society in Petrograd. There was a sad irony in An-sky's Herculean efforts to record the folk traditions of East European Jewry. In so doing, the "Oral Torah" that he so valued would become inscribed in writing, thereby losing its defining quality. Yet An-sky was painfully aware that these traditions were being eroded as modernity, pogroms, and other forces took their toll. Although the Jewish people as a whole would suffer greatly from the loss of these folk traditions, Jewish women's lives would be disproportionately affected because most women lacked direct access to the sacred Hebrew and Aramaic writings that constituted the patrimony of Jewish men. Therefore, the "Oral Torah" handed down to Jewish women by their foremothers held special significance for them. 26 Ansky does not appear to have explored the particular implications of this cultural loss for Jewish women (at least I have not come across such a discussion), but he did attempt to preserve a written record of Jewish women's folk traditions. Many of the questions in The Jewish Ethnographic Program directly or indirectly relate to women's experiences. Even in the absence of responses (an issue I will return to below), these questions reveal a great deal about the lives of East European Jewish women as well as An-sky's encyclopedic knowledge of Jewish culture. A complete translation of The Jewish Ethnographic Program remains a scholarly desideratum. Although such a task is beyond the scope of this chapter, I will paraphrase a large number of the relevant questions below.

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Deutsch In a section entitled "The Midwife," among the 18 questions that Ansky asked were how women became midwives, whether they learned from their own mothers, whether only older women served as midwives, whether it was possible to make a good living, whether they ever had middle-class backgrounds, and whether Jews ever went to Christian midwives. The next section, called "Childbirth," included questions on what kind of medicines and remedies were employed to help the woman through labor, whether the midwife washed her hands or changed her clothes before delivering the child, whether certain prayers or tkhines were recited, and whether the men were sent out of the house during childbirth. The longest and most important section for the study of Jewish women's lives is called "The Upbringing and Education of a Girl." Here we find 78 questions concerning how girls received their names, which songs and stories were taught specifically to girls, what kind of games girls played, when they were taught modeh ani (the prayer recited upon waking), at what age girls learned to be modest, when they learned to light the Sabbath candles and make hallah (braided Sabbath bread), how they learned the rules concerning menstruation, whether a girl's loss of virginity was recorded in the pinkas, whether children were ever raped during pogroms, when girls were taught to read Hebrew script, whether they ever studied in the same kheyder with boys, whether girls had special male teachers or female teachers, whether such female teachers visited their students at home, ·whether they ate at their students' homes, whether they taught girls how to pray, recite tkhines, or read the Pentateuch (or the entire Hebrew Bible), what punishments existed specifically for girls, how often girls were taught Russian, other languages, or music, and when a girl was considered an "old maid." It is within a series of questions concerning old maids that An-sky asked his respondents which stories they knew about the Maiden of Ludmir, the only explicit reference to her in all of his published works. This is significant for a number of reasons. First, it indicates that Ansky was aware of and interested in the life of the famous holy woman. Second, An-sky expected that at least some of his respondents would know traditions concerning her life. And, finally, the question's context suggests that An-sky considered the fact that the Maiden was an "old

An-sky and the Ethnography of Jewish Women

maid" to be her defining feature, or, at least, the feature that would most resonate with his respondents. Significantly, in my interviews with former residents ofLudmir, many referred to her simply as di maid (the maid) or di alte maid (the old maid) and remembered her longtime refusal to marry as the most noteworthy aspect of her story. Other questions about women's lives are sprinkled liberally throughout the different sections of The Jewish Ethnographic Program, though it should be noted that the majority of the questions concern men and their experiences. Some of the questions concerning women include whether musicians accompanied a bride to the mikvah (ritual bath) before her wedding, who helped her put on her wedding outfit, who accompanied her if she were an orphan, and who asked the women at the wedding to dance. Concerning married life, An-sky asked whether men took advice from their wives, whether men and women argued and cursed one another in public, whether it was common for men to beat their wives, whether women would go to the synagogue to complain in such cases, under what circumstances women would be called loose (if they wore their own hair, sang, or spoke with men1), what kind of punishments a sinful wife (or husband) would receive, and whether people knew of stories involving beautiful Jewish women abducted by Christian noblemen. Other questions involved barren women, those who only gave birth to girls (what remedies could be employedr), divorcees, widows (when could they remarry?), women healers, and women possessed by male dybbuks. The wide range and character of these questions testify to the seriousness of An-sky's interest in the lives of Jewish women. Alongside questions about women's traditional religious responsibilities (such as lighting candles), An-sky did not shy away from asking tough questions about domestic violence and sexuality. It is not obvious to me whether An-sky intended women themselves to respond to the survey in writing, whether he hoped that they would serve as sources for male respondents, or whether he expected that men would provide all of the information, even when it came to describing women's experiences. The fate of The jewish Ethnographic Program remains somewhat mysteriou~. According to Alexander Kantsedikas, 200 copies of the questionnaire were distributed to correspondents in Jewish communities

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Deutsch throughout Russia_27 Apparently, the outbreak of World War I prevented these surveys from being completed and returned to An-sky, although it is also possible that some of the questionnaires were returned and are currently located in the An-sky materials scattered throughout various archives. Such a discovery (and perhaps it has already been made but remains unpublished) would be of great significance. In the absence of completed questionnaires, however, we can begin to reconstruct what the responses might have looked like by examining the surviving An-sky materials, including the folk traditions (jokes, songs, stories) that were written on postcards and mailed to An-sky and his team of ethnographers by people throughout the Russian empire. Some of these postcards are currently in the YNO archives in New York. Another possible source are the "memory books" produced by the survivors of Jewish communities decimated during the Holocaust. In the book for the town of Sokhatshev, for example, I discovered an essay by a former resident named Yaakov Friedman, entitled "An-sky's Ankete [An-sky's Questionnaire]," in which he writes that "[i]n 1913, An-sky sent to all the Jewish communities a questionnaire under the name: A Local Historical Program." 28 That this was different from The Jewish Ethnographic Program which An-sky published in 1914 is confirmed by its much shorter length -according to Friedman, there were "r66 questions in the survey." Among the questions was "Arc there women healers, mikvah workers, and mourners in your community?" To which the community responded "Yes, [but] only mikvah workers and mourners. [Their names are] Eydel Pese, Rine Gittl Sheiser, Miriam Sokhtshevski." An-sky's efforts to produce an ethnography of East European Jewish women should be seen as part of his larger effort to preserve traditional Jewish folk culture before it disappeared. Unlike so many of his predecessors and contemporaries, An -sky understood that Jewish women's experiences formed an integral part of this cultural universe. As with so many of his other projects, this one was tragically cut short by historical circumstances and by his own premature death. Yet his legacy survives in those who continue to reconstruct the largely unwritten history of East European Jewish women.

T h i r t e e n "An Academy Where Folklore

Will Be Studied": An-sky and the Jewish Museum Benyamin Lukin (Translated by Marion Rosenber;_q)

The first call for a collection of items of Jewish artistic antiquity in Russia came from the well-known Russian art critic Vladimir Stasov in 1878. Having seen a collection of Jewish ritual objects exhibited at the Trocadero Palace during the World Exhibition in Paris, he published a detailed report about it in the Russian Jewish periodical Evreiskaia biblioteka (The Jewish Library). Fearing that the Jewish intelligentsia would not be interested in their people's cultural heritage, Stasov declared: "A Jewish Museum is one of the special needs of this century, its ethos, and of the current intellectual climate." 1 The next big exhibition ofJudaica in the West, in 1887 in the Albert Hall, was publicized in the Russian press. 2 The language Stasov used found no response among Russian Jews of the time. There was not yet a "critical mass" of the Jewish intelligentsia in the capital to demand and create a secular national culture; 3 Russian-Jewish culture at the time was sufficiently assimilationist that the idea of establishing a Jewish museum received no material support from Jewish cultural leaders and sponsors. Nor were Stasov's words heard by the 15-year-old Shloyme- Zanvl Rappoport, the future Russian-Jewish writer Semyon Akimovich Ansky, who founded the first Jewish Museum in Russia decades later, when the public and cultural outlook had changed radically. The very language Stasov used to address the Jews was then inaccessible to the young man from Vitebsk. Before him were his rebellion against his parental home, his enthusiasm for the literature of the Haskalah and later also for Russian literature, teaching, "going to the people," "embarking on a literary career" under the auspices of Gleb U spensky, political emigration, secretaryship to the leader of the Russian socialists,

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Lukin Petr Lavrov, and active participation in the Socialist Revolutionaries Party. Such a great distance from Jewish problems, it seems, did not leave S. An-sky any chance of return. However, from the beginning of the century, his stories and essays about Jewish life appeared in Russian, Russian-Jewish, and Yiddish journals. During the pogroms that erupted between 1903 and 1906, he published anti-pogrom agitation in the revolutionary press and spoke for Jewish self-defense. But when he saw the indifference of Russian party circles to this Jewish tragedy, Ansky decided that it was essential to create a separate "Jewish National Socialist Revolutionaries Party." 4

Return to Russia At the height of the 1905 Russian Revolution (at the end of the year), An-sky, like many other political emigres, returned to Russia, explaining in a letter to his closest friend, Chaim Zhitlowsky: "In Russia (in Russian and Jewish Russia, which I cannot separate) a revolution is taking place, which we must not miss. The situation is not yet clear, but for that very reason, that it is not yet clear, it is essential to go, in order to facilitate its resolution." In spite ofhis declaration that "Russian and Jewish Russia" are inseparable, An-sky concentrated on Jewish problems and saw the political situation in a traditionally Jewish manner: The Kishinev pogrom was Tisha B'Av. Now, there are others. We are living in one of the most awe-inspiring moments of human history.... Now, there should be one mood, one goal. Either to die as a great people, leaving to history the trace of a sun which has set, or to be reborn as a great people .... We must not weaken the people's energy, which has been raised to fever pitch-otherwise, we are threatened with death ... as in Tet and Tach [the massacres accompanying the Khmielnitsky invasions of 1648 and 1649]. His plans for national reconstruction smacked of revolutionary populism: For a normal life for the Jews, first of all, what is needed is not territory but a normal, national-state organism. There is a lack of peasants,

An-sky and the Jewish Museum a lack of a proper working class, a lack of organs of national life. Up till now, the Jews had a unifYing national idea, which prevented disintegration: the Talmud, messianism. We must not exchange this steel corset for a Palestinian messianism, or the idea of a homeland. We must educate the people for national life. Then, as with any healthy organism, the desire tor their own land and national life will come from the people itself. 5 Singling out the "national education" of the people as the center ofhis program for national and cultural autonomy, he proposed, on arriving in Russia, "to convoke a small congress of Jewish writers and scholars, who would form a union, and take the initiative of immediately convoking an all-Jewish congress." 6 An-sky arrived in Russia (on December 31, 1905) in a period of political reaction, after the arrests of his closest party comrades/ but his fervor did not abate. He accepted what happened as "the beginning of a new epoch in the history of the Jewish people" 8 and said he was "eternally happy, that I am at last in my native land. I have been in touch with editors, publishers, personalities-lots of literary acquaintances and matters." 9 In his letters to Zhitlowsky, An-sky admitted that, when he was an emigre, he had an "utterly crazy image" ofRussia. 10 Now, however, he was "trying to absorb the new moods, speeches and to come closer to the workers" and to continue his literary work, writing a tale of contemporary lite "V vodovorote" (In the Maelstrom). 11 Gradually, however, the tone of the letters changed; literary creativity in the (for him) new Russia came hard to An-sky: "I am not satisfied with this work. I don't know contemporary life well enough, and it's difficult to write about it, ... it is necessary to drag out every line, as if out of tar. There is no passion or inspiration." 12 In April 1907, he complained again: "All my time goes on a mass of plans, running around, but the problem isnever any inclination to write. I'm tired, worn out" 13-and after some months he wrote about a literary failure, an article about Petr Lavrov. 14 He tells his closest friend of a personal and a literary crisis: "It's sad. My soul loses its life more and more with every day, and my life loses its point." 15

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Lukin The New Career of the Jewish Folklore Scholar It is precisely this creative crisis that helped An-sky to understand and formulate his chief task in life: he turned to Jewish folklore. We know from his letters to Zhitlowsky that, in the autumn of 1907, with financial help from the oil magnate Samuel Moiseevich Shryro, An-sky "gave up lucrative work" on his literary career so as to "devote himself entirely to Jewish ethnography," to "work on collecting Jewish songs, sayings, stories etc." 16 An -sky's enthusiasm for his new career promoted his romance with the young pianist Edia (Esther) Glezerman, culminating in marriage (March 7, 1908) and family life in Vilna (until May 1908)Y In An-sky's turn to Jewish folklore, we can trace two tendencies that had been assimilated by the Jewish writer educated in the school of Russian literary populism ( narodnichestvo). One of them reflects the view of folklore as the repository of the distinguishing features of national consciousness. This tendency drew on the work of the German romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, as the creators of the first collection of Jewish folk songs, Saul Ginzburg and Piotr Marek, stressed:

Herder's contribution, which pointed to folk poetry as the most important source for understanding the folk psyche, was great. Reflecting in an unsophisticated form the imagination, outlook, understanding, and despair of a given people, their everyday approach and relationship to the surrounding conditions, a folk song leads us into the intimate world of folk life and presents valuable material for the historian and the ethnographer. 18 An-sky's works on the sociopolitical attitudes of Russian and French peasants and workers express the same attitude toward folklore. 19 Another tendency characterizing the relationship of writers to folklore is as an inexhaustible source of artistic images. This approach had many followers among Jewish writers at the turn of the century, especially I. L. Peretz. The public and critics admired An-sky's Yiddish poem on a theme from folklore, "Ashmedei." During An-sky's first year of work in Jewish folklore, he collected up to 100 old folk tales and legends printed in Yiddish and Hebrew, "as many songs as Ginzburg and Marek, and about 1,000 proverbs, which

An-sky and the Jewish Museum were not in Bernstein's collection." 20 In addition, An -sky wrote the article "Evreiskoe narodnoe tvorchestvo" (Jewish Folk Art), summarizing and commenting on the material he had collected. 21 An-sky sent a description of this article to Zhitlowsky: In Jewish folklore ... the main features of European folklore do not appear: the idealization of physical strength, the Herculean epic, the heroic tales, the poetry about battles. Their place is taken by the idealization of the spiritual and a belief that the spiritual is stronger than the physical. Tracing this characteristic in the whole of Jewish national art, in the Bible, in the Prophets and the Talmud (beginning with Jacob, who prevails over Esau, the strong man, the Jews over Amalelc and the giants, David over Goliath etc.-and all this exclusively with the help of spiritual force-of the right hand of God), I pass on to modern stories, songs, legends, proverbs etc., showing how far they are successively linked both in form and in spirit with folk creativity (biblical and, in part, talmudic personalities appear as heroes). I follow up here also the tendency to idealize the spiritual and the negative, almost contemptuous, attitude to physical might. 22 Here we hear the voice of a public figure, called upon to "educate his people." An-sky's article, the first attempt in Russian to give a meaning to Jewish folklore, may seem dated to twenty-first century scholars, but it laid the foundation ofJewish folklore studies. 23 Besides systematically collecting printed sources, An-sky recorded oral folklore. Materials collected in 1907-08 lay at the base of his research on Jewish proverbs and songs, published in 1909 in the journal of the Jewish Historic- Ethnographic Society (JHES ), Evreiskaia starina (Jewish Antiquity). On December ro, 1909, at a meeting of the society, An-sky read his first public lecture on Jewish folklore, "Social Elements in Jewish Folk Creativity." He argued that Jewish parables, proverbs, and sayings were more concerned with social justice than folktales. 24 Hoping for modern Jewish culture to be rooted in folldore, An-sky "prepared a volume of Jewish folktales for printing." (In the same years, Hayim Nachman Bialik and Yehoshua Chane Ravnitsky compiled "Sefer Ha-Aggada," an anthology of Jewish legends and traditions for the secular reader with a knowledge of Hebrew or Yiddish.)

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Lukin Unfortunately, this collection was apparently burned in a fire in 1909 that destroyed the Northern Hotel in Terioki (where An-sky was living) and, with it, his entire archive. 25 During his folklore research, An-sky wrote a series of literary interpretations of folk themes in the spirit of neo- Romanticism. In Evreiskii mir (Jewish World), 26 he published the first of these, the Russian poem "Sud" (Trial), and variations on the theme of "Ashmedei," leaving for future literary re-working others, including "Gei hinom" (Hell), "Gan eden" (The Garden of Eden), and "Mashiach" (Messiah). The medieval legend about "Yosef de Ia Reine," who struggled with the Angel of Death, was the basis of An-sky's final, unfinished play intended to be in that series. 27 By publishing his folklore research and the literary reworkings of Jewish folklore in Russian Jewish journals, An-sky was addressing himselfprimarily to Jewish readers ofRussian. With his choice oflanguage he tried to counter the assimilationist tendencies among the Russianspeaking Jewish intelligentsia. An-sky expressed his position in print in response to the Yiddish criticS. Niger, who had accused Jewish writers writing in Russian of"inconsistency" and even "moral bankruptcy": 28 Niger, of course, has in mind not only fiction writers and journalists, ... but a much wider circle of persons, belonging to the liberal professions. All of these entered the ranks of the "intelligentsia" via Russian schools, Russian universities, Russian culture. With this culture they continue to live, ... 90 percent of our graduates work on the soil of a culture other than their own, serve on district councils, bring lawsuits in Russian courts, work in Russian factories and workshops. Not one of our intelligentsia, however nationalistic, even chauvinistic, he may be, lives in his everyday life with elements of Jewish culture, nor is he satisfied with Jewish art, Jewish science, or even Jewish literature .... And the reason for this ... lies in the fact that there is no such Jewish culture, with which the intelligentsia could live .... The intelligentsia has not yet worked out its own national culture, albeit imbued with the bases of European universalism .... Before us for now there is only rich building material, a plan of the work in outline, but so far no building in which one could live .... It's not that we should dissociate ourselves from the half-assimilated intelligentsia, but we should try with all our might to attract them toward Jewish

An-sky and the Jewish Museum interests and Jewish culture. And we can only do this in the language that is the only one accessible to them [that is, in Russian]. 29 It was precisely in folklore that An-sky saw the basis of "building" a secular Jewish culture. Fascinated by ideas of "folklorism," which begin to spread among the Jewish intelligentsia in Russia, he decided to leave writing and become an ethnographer. Of this decision, taken literally on the eve of the jubilee celebrations in honor of his 25 years ofliterary activity, An-sky informed Zhitlowsky:

These last years-years whose value has been overestimated-have forced me to think seriously about my literary activity, about the value of what has been done, about the question of the future .... Already in the very word "overestimated" lies a large element of negation of the worth of my former work. So I have decided to devote the rest of my life to the Jewish task, which I consider colossally important for the creation of a Jewish culture. This is the creation of Jewish ethnography, the collection of objects of Jewish folklore, etc. 30

On the Way to the Expedition In seeking financial backing for the ethnographic work, An-sky applied to the JHES, stressing in his address at the society's first meeting that "relevant material is gradually disappearing." 31 He entered into negotiations with the chairman of the society, Maxim Vinaver, who "initially reacted favorably, but when it came to the financing, withdrew"; he "turned to the wealthy people in Moscow, but also there, nothing came of it"; he tried to reach An1erican donors through Zhitlowsky. 32 An-sky knew from his study of modern ethnography that only a special expedition would be able to create the discipline ofJewish ethnography. Perhaps he was also driven to this conclusion by the loss of his folklore archives. Thus, in telling Zhitlowsky about the fire that had destroyed "all the manuscripts, all the books, a whole lot of things, a rich archive," An-sky explained his plans: "I shall do my best to persuade the Jewish Ethnographic Society to send me on a mission to collect, throughout Russia, Jewish folk songs, sayings, tales, proverbs, etc., in short, folklore. Ifi am successful, I shall willingly devote all the rest of

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Lukin my life to it. It's worth it. It is a colossal cultural task." 33 Since An-sky saw folklore as the main subject of ethnographic work, the expedition's main task was that of recording musical and oral lore. In approaching the JHES committee in the autumn of 1909 with a proposal "to organize an expedition to collect folk songs and materials related to history and ethnography," 34 An-sky did not mention "visual" folk art, and he was apparently still far from thoughts of a Jewish Museum. At that time, he wanted to collect "materials about history," which also reflected his genuine interest in Jewish memory. He saw the long history of the Jewish people as first and foremost the development of mass consciousness and the formation of a national culture. In his words, "Jewishness lies in 4,ooo years of psychology and in 4,000 years of culture." 35 (For present-day scholars, his field would be defined as cultural anthropology.) An -sky's standpoint differed from the historiographic ideas of Simon Dub now, who appeared to him conservative and old-fashioned, and he allowed himself, in a letter to his closest friend, this criticism: "I am now rereading Dubnow and positively blush for him. Compared with him, Ilovaisky is a real Mommsen!" 36 Lecturing in 1910 for the Jewish Literary Society in the cities and small towns of the Pale of Settlement, especially in the Kiev and Volhynia provinces, An-sky recorded local historic traditions-"very old memories" and "living traces from the era of the Khmielnitsky massacres." 37 An-sky's interest in historic materials from the point of view of cultural anthropology subsequently found expression in "A Program of Research into Local History," on which he worked in 1913, together with Abram Iuditsky, a student of the Orientalist Courses in St. Petersburg.38 The questions of this "program" concerning various historic events were aimed at revealing the traces they left in folk consciousness and folklore. In this initial period ofhis scholarly work (1907-10 ), An-sky brought out articles and reports commenting on different kinds ofJewish folklore, characteristic themes or works. His research on "children's folksongs"39 was becoming a milestone, not only in Jewish but also in Russian folklore studies. In singling out the childish element in folklore and traditional festivals, and in analyzing children's "literature," An-sky

An-sky and the Jewish Museum discovered the childish theme in Jewish folklore, just as Sholem Aleichem discovered it in Jewish literature. In Vinaver's words, in 1910, An-sky's leap into ethnography made him "the first researcher into Jewish folksongs, the first Jewish folklorist ... thanks to his artistic flair, succeeding in penetrating the very soul of the people." 4 ° Crowned with success, An-sky set himself"the task of a lifetime," to write a book, "Jewish Ethnography." 41 The outline for this unrealized project, "Jews in Their Daily and Religious Life," 42 preserved in draft form, suggests the systematization of this mass of material, which went far beyond the framework of folklore. An-sky probably used it later in drawing up his ethnographic questionnaire, "Jewish Ethnographic Program," 43 and, to an even greater extent, in preparing the museum exhibition. An-sky proposed looking in detail at the whole traditional life cycle, morals and manners, religious life, the development of traditional and modern literature, folklore, community, the legal system, the formation of a secular culture, the rise of political movements, and so on. Given the lack of material for such an ambitious project, An-sky decided he needed to implement a complex ethnographic expedition around the Pale of Settlement. It~ in his youth, the search for folklore led him to a coal mine, he was now planning to seek out the remotest parts of the world of provincial Jewry, where the Jewish way oflife had not yet undergone modernization. It may be that the final push that stimulated An -sky's efforts to realize a long-premeditated plan was the 1910 expedition to collect exhibits and facts concerning the ethnography of the peoples of the Amur river region by the Russian ethnographer Lev Shternberg. 44 Along with the worry about financing and organizing the first Jewish Ethnographic Expedition began the new "expeditionary" phase of An -sky's life ( I9II-14). He reported his first successes to Zhitlowsky in February 19n: I have managed to interest several Moscow and Kiev millionaires, especially the Kiev Baron V G. Guenzburg, Brodsky's son-in-law, in the question of Jewish ethnography and folklore, and they have promised me up to 30,000 rubles to organize an expedition to collect these materials. I am hoping to start the job in the summer. It is an enormous task, on which it is well worth spending the rest of my life. 45

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Lukin The importance of the expedition took on a new light with the eruption of a blood libel case in 19n. The "Beilis affair" became for Ansky yet another confirmation of the pressing need for ethnographic research: The systematic collection oftolk art and the comprehensive investigation of economic life have for the Jewish people, over and above general artistic and scientific significance, a further topical interest. If antisemitic theories are based on a slanderous portrayal of the Jewish character, and such a slanderous definition of the economic role of Jewry as harmful, we must be armed ... with materials that clearly depict the spiritual aspect of the Jewish people, its attitudes, beliefs, hopes, and despairs, which folk art offers to us directly. 46 The need to protect and legitimize the Jewish tradition played an important part in the creation of many Judaica exhibitions and Jewish museums. 47 Although when An-sky went on to set up a Jewish museum the motif of "defending" the Jews was not obvious, he expressed "the necessity to be armed with folk art materials, in order to counter antisemitic theories" in his reaction to the Beilis affair. An-sky's 1912 article inspired by it, "Blood Libel in Jewish Folk Lore," 48 written for thenarodnik journal Russkoe bogatstvo (Russian Wealth), acquainted the Russian reader with the folklore of the Jews: "It is a folklore of confusion and horror, showing us the spiritual state of a whole nation, persecuted, shocked, and helpless." 49 The idea of creating a Jewish Museum probably came to An-sky in the course of defining the tasks of the expedition. The concept of a "Jewish Museum" appears first in his rough plans for the first expedition: "collecting articles ofJewish Antiquity (for the future Jewish Museum): ancient books, manuscripts, documents, Jewish artifacts, ... ritual objects, women's antique jewelry, old costumes, relics, objects associated with the memory of outstanding people and events, etc." In his estimated budget for the first expedition, among other items, Ansky planned his outlay "for the purchase of antiques for the museum." 50 In the objectives of the forthcoming expedition were the collection of Jewish applied art-domestic and ritual objects-and the photographing of "memorials, ancient or exceptional buildings, and

An-sky and the Jewish Museum so on." 51 An-sky proposed increasing the sources of Jewish ethnography, within the sphere of which, together with folklore materials, visual objects would also be included-objects of daily life and folk art. Obviously, a museum would be needed to house them. In early 1912, with financial backing for the expedition, An-sky set to working out a program and recruiting staff. He tried to attract Jewish writers, musicians, and artists to take part in it, so that they would find a "source of creativity" in folk materials and not "flit among the works of other nations like pale shadows" but "live with their own forms, drawing inspiration from their own source." 52 Presenting the expedition as a matter of significance for all Jews, An -sky convoked a conference of Jewish scholars to discuss the program, collecting methods, and the route and status of the expedition. Participating in the conference, which took place in St. Petersburg on March 24-25, 1912, were "Jews, specialists in ethnography and anthropology, people who were known for their work in the sphere offolklore or ethnography, Jewish historians, specialists in Jewish folk literature, bibliographers and persons who had taken an active part in the work of putting together the Expedition." 53 It was not possible tor the writers Men dele Moykher Storim, Bialik, and Ravnitsky to come to the capital from Odessa, but, in a telegram, they emphasized An-sky's goal: "Surely the results of this work will serve as a new beginning of the highest creativity in a genuinely folk spirit." And the chairman of the session, Mikhail Kulisher, compared this "at first sight far from newsworthy" scientific expedition with the academy of the talmudic rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai in Yavneh, thanks to which the people and their culture "were preserved throughout the millennia." 54 In the heated discussions between representatives of the different disciplines, An-sky advocated, as the primary task of the expedition, recording oral and musical folk art, stressing the decisive role of folklore and folk music in "national" education: From the scientific point of view it is hard to decide which tasks are more, and which less, important. However, for us at present not all branches of investigation of the Jewish population are equally important at this point in time. Collecting folklore is for us not only a scientific task btrt also a "national" and highly topical one. In order to

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Lukin educate our children in the Jewish national spirit, we must give them a folk tale, songs; in brief~ what is fundamental to children's education among the other nations. 5 5 These thoughts about the significance of folklore in Jewish national education of children and in creating children's literature continue throughout An-sky's speeches promoting his ideas. Thus, in the article "Assimilation from the Cradle" on "the very real assimilation" that goes on even in nationalistically minded families as a result of the "systematic exposure of the Jewish child to a foreign culture," An-sky argues for creating "the means for the Jewish child to defend himself and forms of Jewish primary education: before school, in school and out of school." 56 Yet not all of the conference's participants shared An-sky's views about the place of folklore in modern Jewish culture. Opposed to him were Saul Ginzburg ("One cannot impute to folklore this kind of significance for national education. However many stories we collect, the epidemic of christenings will not be curtailed by them"), Vladimir Iokhel'son ("Folklore, contrary to An-sky's opinion, will not have any educational significance. We must direct our youth on the path of progress, but folklore is a remnant of former times, a throwback"), and Samuel Weissenberg ("The folklore collected will have limited circulation, and thus not exert any influence on our youth"). 57 Whereas the recording of folklore, as the central task of the expedition, called forth fierce polemics among the conference participants, collecting and preserving Jewish artifacts was not discussed by them at all. Among the conference participants, who, according to Kulisher, were "the cream of the Jewish intelligentsia," 58 there were no scholars ofJewish art or specialists in museum management (except the leading official of the St. Petersburg Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology, Lev Shternberg, who spoke as an ethnographer and anthropologist). This reflected the fact that Jewish art studies was in its infancy in Russia and did not have its own official bodies. Non-Jewish specialists were not invited to the conference, because An-sky considered the expedition an exclusively Jewish affair and did not want to make too much noise about it. (Thus, not one newspaper reported on it.) Moreover, collecting antiques and products of folk art for the future museum, and

An-sky and the Jewish Museum

likewise photographing monuments, seemed to the participants secondary to the scholarly objectives of the expedition. Weissenberg's idea that "as a result of the expedition's work a whole museum might be formed" 59 was not pursued by the participants. For Weissenberg himself, this was not a chance phrase. A doctor and anthropologist, well known in Europe for his articles in German journals on anthropology and the folklore of the Jews and the Karaites, he was the only Jewish scholar in Russia to raise the subject of a museum in the press. His article "Jewish Museums and Judaica in Museums," published in 1907 in the most important German-Jewish ethnographic journal, gave an overview of the matter of a Jewish Museum in Europe and concluded with a call for the foundation of such a central museum.60 Weissenberg stressed the indifference of the Jewish intelligentsia and bourgeoisie to their national heritage, as witnessed by the absence of a Jewish pavilion at the current Universal Exhibition. This article elicited no response among the Russian Jewish intelligentsia. However, in light of the preparations for the expedition, Weissenberg mentions it in a letter to An-sky immediately after the St. Petersburg conference: "May I draw your attention to my article about Jewish Museums? Give it to Vinaver to read, maybe it will sow a seed and bear fruit. Couldn't Dubnow print a translation?" 61 Weissenberg's article was not subsequently printed in Russian; An-sky probably read it in the original.

From Expedition to Museum At first, the expedition concentrated on oral and musical folklore. However, as the researchers progressed through the cities and shtetls of the southwestern region, they came across various artifacts. It seemed that the folklore tradition was preserved not only in oral and musical works but also in various kinds of plastic art, in various crafts, and in architecture. 62 Objects of"material culture" occupied a prominent place among the expedition's finds: "about two hundred objects, bought for the museum," 63 hundreds of photographs "of synagogues and their internal

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adornments, gravestones, historic buildings, artistic ornaments," 64 and drawings of fanciful folk motifs by the expedition's photographer and artist Solomon Yudovin. 65 An-sky's growing interest in material objects tound immediate expression in the "Program of Research into Local History," drawn up after the first expeditionary season. This list of questions paid special attention to synagogues and other community buildings, synagogue furniture, murals, and ritual objects. However, the interests of the authors of the questionnaire concentrated not on the artefacts themselves but more on the effect they had on mass consciousness, reflected in oral folk creativity. At that time, the visual materials collected and photographed by the expedition had not yet become the object of An-sky's analysis and interpretation, but were used to illustrate his lectures about Jewish oral folklore. At a lecture about Jewish folklore, showing "toggy pictures" (slides) of synagogues, their interior decoration, and gravestones, An-sky established links between different kinds offolk art as well as between folklore texts and visual materials. 66 An-sky's interest in visual talk art was developed during the second expedition season. 67 In spite of the limited schedule, in June 1913 he made a point of leaving the group working in Volhynia to look at and photograph the paintings of a wooden ("unheated") synagogue in Mogilev (on the Dnepr). 68 On the whole, in the course of the 1913 season, the expedition group managed "to take about four hundred objects for the Museum, about twenty manuscripts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries." 69 As a result of An-sky's study of visual materials, they become the subjects of his public lectures. Thus, the lecture "Legends of the Old Stones (Jewish Folk Creativity in the Field of Plastic Arts)" accompanied the showing of r6o slides "of old synagogues, ornaments from their walls and ceilings, Torah-arks and platforms for Torah reading [aronot kodesh and bimot], ritual objects and miniatures, decorated household utensils, historic buildings, artifacts, memorials, cemeteries and tombstones." 70 Entering the new (for him) field of art criticism, An-sky demonstrated, in the products offolk art, "elements ofJewish style." He continued these "discoveries" ofJewish national characteristics in his report of 1918, "Jewish Folk Art," 71 also "illustrated by photo-projections." In his presentation of the work of

An-sky and the Jewish Museum Jewish folk artists, An-sky indicated the presence therein of "their own characteristic drawing, their own colors, etc." In another lecture, "The Legends and Beliefs of Jews in the SouthWestern Region," An-sky presented in a single row antique objects and creative oral works, essentially extending his view of folklore as a reflection of folk consciousness to objects of "material culture." Showing slides of old cemeteries with carved tombstones, ancient synagogues with wall paintings and artistic synagogue appurtenances, and illustrated lists from pinkasim, An-sky recounted folk traditions connected with these antique objects. The conclusion of this lecture of An-sky, being full of Jewish art and architecture, was that "it was essential to organize a Jewish museum." 72 Noticing substantial changes in the relationship to the visual materials of An-sky and the other members of the expedition during the fieldwork, the leading Israeli folklorist Dov Noy affirmed that An-sky had found his place in the history of science, as the discoverer of folk culture, including antique objects, which form an integral part of Jewish tradition; as a researcher, who has done great work in collecting, preserving and studying material, which many Jewish activists failed to recognize as the creative work of "the people of the book"; and finally as the scientist who laid the foundations ofJewish ethnography. 73 From the position of"educator of the people," An -sky undoubtedly appreciated the value of the examples ofJewish folk art-as compared with folklore, which required translation for the Russian-speaking public. According to the recollections of the chairman of the JHES, Maxim Vinaver, "An-sky read reports and showed pictures of his expeditions, but his main effort was directed toward the creation of a museum." 74 Whereas at first An-sky saw the main significance of a museum in its function of housing the exhibits, he later realized that the museum was an important organ of Jewish "self-knowledge." In An-sky's opinion, there "the most complicated and contentious questions of national identity" could be resolved "by studying the principles, thoughts, and expectations of the mass of the people, expressed in its beliefs, customs, and creative work."75

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The Establishment of a Jewish Museum in Petrograd At that time of intensive development of a secular Jewish national culture in Russia, the creation of a Jewish Museum really became the most important objective. In the Russian capital, as in many great cities of Western and Central Europe, a small museum exhibition arranged at the beginning of the century on the premises of the main (Choral) synagogue preceded the establishment of a separate Jewish Museum.7 6 The Jewish Historic-Ethnographic Commission was invited to set it up. 77 When the archive and museum collection of the commission was handed over to the JHES, formed in 1908, the small exhibition was disbanded and suitable synagogue premises were taken. Later, on February 3, 1913, a museum in the name of Baron Horace Guenzburg was opened at a synagogue, where "items presented to the Baron on his seventy-fifth birthday, as well as wreaths laid on his grave, were exhibited." 78 When the JHES was formed, "responsibility for the establishment of an ethnographic museum" was laid upon its Ethnographic Commission. The subject of arranging an archive and museum was not taken off the JHES agenda, but a decision was always put off for lack of suitable premises and because of other more pressing matters. 79 Among the JHES leaders, attitudes toward the archive and the museum varied; for example, Dubnow, from the very first days of the society's operation, insisted on the creation of an archive, notwithstanding the absence of suitable accommodations, but the proposal for a museum had no such convincing proponents. 80 In 1910, An-sky became a member of the JHES Committee but, until the expedition took place, even he did not raise the question of setting up a museum. At the beginning of 1913, the well-known St. Petersburg merchant and philanthropist Moisei Ginzburg placed at the JHES's disposal special premises for housing the archive and museum in a Jewish almshouse built by him on Vasil'evsky Island (Row 5, No. so ). 81 This revived the question of organizing the society's archive and museum. In the summer of 1913, Isaac Lurie, the keeper of the JHES museum and archive collection, went on an expedition to Palestine and brought back folklore and ethnographic finds, among which were museum exhibits. 82 At the end of the year, Lurie wrote an article for the Russian Jewish weekly

An-sky and the Jewish Museum Rassvet (Dawn) entitled "About a Jewish Museum," which enthusiastically promoted the conservation of "material relics" of our time. "Now, when we are at the turning-point, when the old ways are being ever more intensively replaced by ne'v ones, we must, more than ever, take steps to preserve for posterity and history the relics of our present existence, which is disappearing into the depths of time." As if reviving Weissenberg's call for the establishment of a central Jewish Museum and anticipating An-sky's own plans, Lurie declared at the end of his article: "For those of us who believe in the uniqueness and the renaissance of the Jewish people, there can be no place for the establishment of a Jewish Museum except Jerusalem." 83 (Incidentally, this withdrawal might have been the result of a compromise between the author, the curator of the society's museum collection, and the editors of the Zionist weeldy, who did not see the point of a cultural institution in the Galut [Exile].) In St. Petersburg, even the formal opening of the Jewish Museum was delayed in view of the undefined status of the expedition and its collection and the absence of essential museum equipment. The collected exhibits were temporarily kept on the museum premises of the JHES. In the end, the society's committee timed the official opening of the museum to coincide with An-sky's report on "the work of the Baron Guenzburg Ethnographic Expedition, in investigating more than 6o points in the Volhynia and Podolia regions," which took place in the hall of the Ginzburg almshouse on April 19, 1914. 84 An-sky's report probably began witl1 the following declaration, preserved in his notes:

Before every nation, living its historic life, stands first and foremost the duty of self-knowledge. The most important, if not the only means of achieving that aim is by studying the life of the people, its past and present, its way of life, beliefs, poetic and artistic creativity. With that in mind, cultured nations of both hemispheres began long ago to pay close attention to the spiritual treasure created in the course of millennia by the masses. At the present time, there is an enormous ethnographic literature, and a multitude of ethnographic museums, giving a more or less complete picture of the daily life and creativity of nearly all the peoples on earth. 85

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Lukin Going on to note the backwardness of Russian Jews in this respect, Ansky convinced his listeners of the necessity to expand ethnographic research, "the systematic collecting of works of folk art, ... ethnographic objects and relics for the future Jewish Museum." Opening the museum exhibition, An-sky stressed the educational significance of the ancient Jewish relics that had been collected: "Acquaintance with our past, in which there is much that is beautiful, can serve to make our youth conscious of their nationhood." 86 He repeated his most cherished idea: "Among our masses there are untapped sources of national creativity, which can enrich individual creativity." And he emphasized proudly that some of the Jewish traditions and legends collected by the expedition "had already influenced the artistic work ofJewish artists, such as Sholem Asch, Peretz and Bialik." 87 In May 1914, Sholcm Aleichem visited the museum exhibition on Vasil'evsky Island. The synagogue and everyday objects collected in the shtetls and exhibited there rebuilt in his imagination the traditional Jewish world he had left behind. This feeling is reflected in his address: "I was shown things that transported me back to the happy time of my youth." In his parting words, he situated the museum in relation to Jewish identity and Jewish education: "I would like to hope that every Jew will visit this museum, when there are better and happier times for Jevvs in this country, and this museum grows, flourishes, and turns into a really rich Jewish Museum." 88 Only local Zionist circles failed to support the opening of the Jewish Museum. The account of the event in Rassvet reveals party ideas about the methods and tasks of Jewish education. An anonymous correspondent, briefly mentioning "a menorah and synagogue lights of the seventeenth century, an ancient vessel from which the Levites poured water over the hands of the Cohanim before the priestly blessing," recounted in detail the silent reminders of the bloody history of the Jews: ... here on a yellowed parchment an ancient memorial prayer for those killed at the time of Khmielnitsky, a broken skull, torn out of a communal grave of that epoch .... And here a reminder of the nightmarish past: part of a Torah scroll, torn and desecrated at the time of the 1881 pogrom in

An-sky and the Jewish Museum Kiev, and a memorial prayer for those killed during the pogroms of recent years. 89 Another Rassvet journalist, D. Samoilov, denied the museum any educational significance. Writing about his visit to the Jewish Museum and then to a Jewish school, he set one institution against the other: "There-in the Museum-our past and present, here-in the school-our present and future .... I have nothing against the Museum, but that is not where I expect Jewry to be saved or Jewish creativity reborn. In the school [is] ... one of the inexhaustible sources ofJewish life and Jewish creativity." 90 The last stage of An-sky's biography (1914-20) was set in the years of war and revolutions. By the summer of1914, when World War I interrupted the work of the expedition, there were, in the collection, "700 antiques of value as relics for a museum as well as artistically, forming the basis of the Jewish National Museum, which will open soon in Petro grad." Also intended for the museum was "a collection of ancient original drawings, title-pages of pinkasim, mizrah plaques, ketubot and other items, about 1,500 photographs of ancient synagogues, their interior decorations, Torah-arks, hi mot [pulpits], artistic ritual objects, tombstones, Jewish types, scenes and so on." 91 The urgent task of the JHES was "to save national sacred articles." A former member of the Vilna Society of friends ofJewish Antiquity, Boris Rubshtein, did this in communities in the area of the northwestern front, and An-sky did it in the South-Western Region. Thanks to them, the museum collection of the JHES was filled with new exhibits, including those bearing witness to the war-time Jewish tragedy. 92 In 1915, the formal owner of the expedition's collection, Baron Vladimir Guenzburg, who had financed the expedition, donated all the museum exhibits to the executive of the JHES, on the condition that the society would start immediately transferring the expedition collection to the museum. 93 As An-sky did not have resident permission for St. Petersburg, the group setting up the museum took on the manager of the JHES archive, Salvian Goldshtein,94 and the archivist, Isaac Lurie, became the curator of the museum collection. 95 An-sky coordinated the work of setting up the exhibition. By the spring of 1917,

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Figure 24. Exhibit of artifacts from the Baron Guenzburg Expedition in St. Petersburg (at house number so, Fifth Line, Vasily Island). Photo taken by Solomon Yudovin in I9I4. SOURCE: An-sky archive, Petersburg Judaica.

about a thousand items were placed in the showcases of the spacious hall of the Jewish almshouse, and the museum was finally opened to the public. 96 One can only guess at the exhibition concept of this first Jewish Museum in Russia. In accordance with widespread museum practice at that time, and judging by those photographs of the 1914 exhibition still extant, the artifacts were divided up according to their function in the synagogue or home, and then put together in groups of exhibits according to the material of which they were made-metal, cloth, paper. In one exhibition were groups ofHanukah lamps, Torah shields, synagogue reflectors, Sabbath candlesticks, spice-boxes and so on; in another, mizrah and shiviti97 plaques, title-pages of pinkasim, books, and so on; and in a third, synagogue cloths, silver-embroidered ladies' and men's adornments, festive garments, etc. In accordance with museum

An-sky and the Jewish Museum

norms of the time, groups of exhibits were placed in vertical glass showcases. Articles of the same kind, exhibited near one another, demonstrated the inexhaustibility of the fantasy and artistic modes of the folk craftsmen. This arrangement of the exhibition underlined the significance of the exhibits as products of folk art. Yet their original functions could be divined from the way they were presented. One may suppose that, for Ansky, imagining the museum as "an academy where folklore will be studied,"98 it was important to demonstrate not only the skill of the folk artists but also the links between the objects and the traditional annual and life cycles. The strategy of showing the J udaica collection derives from the same structure of ethnographic knowledge as the "Jewish Ethnographic Program" drawn up by An-sky and the students of the St. Petersburg courses in Oriental Studies in 1914. This questionnaire consisted of two parts: the first contained questions related to the Jewish life cycle from birth to death and the rituals, traditions, and customs accompanying it; the second (unpublished) part of the program included analogous questions about annual festivals and fasts. 99 A similar plan is reflected in An-sky's manuscript "Jews in Their Daily and Religious Life." It is possible that the organizers of the 1917 exhibition wanted to follow this plan. According to the JHES report, when the Jewish Museum opened again in Petrograd on June 17, 1923, there was a "synagogue complex" and a "section on Jewish daily life, with subsections about the Sabbath and festivals" and there were also sections on "communal life (charitable matters and suchlike), Hasidism, children's games" and "a section on art with a musical subsection and another on imaginative art." 100 Although the Petro grad Jewish Museum was being set up anew, it seems that its structure resembled in many ways An-sky's museum of 1917. We find indirect confirmation of this in the list ofsections of the exhibition of the so-called Aboriginal-Jewish Museum in Samarkand, many of which duplicate the corresponding departments of the Leningrad Jewish Museum. 101 The director and founder of the Jewish Museum in Samarkand, Isaac Lurie, was a colleague of An-sky and his assistant in setting up the museum. It is not surprising that, in arranging his museum, Lurie made use of the experience he gained with An-sky.

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Both of these Jewish Museums, in Petrograd and in Samarkand, included art departments that combined the handicrafts of folk artists with the work of modern artists and sculptors. Even if the art in Ansky's museum was not arranged in a similar manner, the principle of combining traditional with modern art was close to his ideas. The Jewish Museum opened by An-sky in revolutionary Petrograd was open for only a few months. In the autumn of1917, the museum's staff, fearing robberies, hid most of the exhibits in a safe place, apparently before they managed to catalogue them. 102

Building Up the Jewish Museums The scope of the program for the Jewish Museum testifies to the role An-sky assigned to it in the task of Jewish education. Possibly, the undated draft of the program for establishing Jewish museums was an outline for a speech before the organizing committee of the AllRussian Jewish Congress. 103 Among the other tasks in developing Jewish cultural and national autonomy, the congress was to examine Jewish education in and out of school, problems close to An-sky's heart. Consider "School and Kheyder," his report to the Jewish Literary and Scientific Society in April 1913, at a time when, as was much discussed, young Jews were converting to Christianity to avoid school quotas. With no fear of appearing conservative, An-sky defended the traditional kheyder against criticism. This had allowed "the Jews to survive as a nation throughout the millennia." He stressed the significance of the kheyder as the only institution teaching Jewish subjects: "The task of the Jewish school is to educate our children in the Jewish spirit, but we are trying to destroy the kheyder, the sole source ofJewish education, and substitute for it the kind of school where only instruction, as distinct from education, takes place." 104 In the first months following the fall of the tsar in February 1917, the new political environment inspired hope for broader Jewish cultural autonomy. An-sky hoped the Museum might become the "bulwark," the central institution in a Jewish education system outside of school hours.

An-sky and the Jewish Museum In planning his speech before the delegates of the All-Russian Jewish Congress, it seems, An-sky stressed the "urgency" of educational issues and defined the role ofJewish Museums as exhibiting "those collections that gave expression to Jewish material and spiritual creativity." From an "unlimited number of possible museums," he distinguished three types: "ethnographic, artistic, and museums of national historic relics" and then defined the general principles of each one. An ethnographic museum should present such aspects of traditional Jewish culture as "religion, beliefs, superstitions" and "daily life." It should illustrate "every religious ritual. Even the nonreligious should know about it. A secular school should teach" religion -without knowledge of national "traditions, one cannot know literature." No less important than the establishment of the ethnographic museum is the exhibition about "daily life," including "men's and women's clothing, domestic decorations, furniture." An-sky assigned the task of Jewish education to the ethnographic museum, which should be established "in every town." The museum exhibits, including traditional Jewish scrolls and books, examples of Jewish folklore, ritual objects, and products of folk handcrafts, should acquaint the visitors visually with the religious foundations of Jewish culture. In stressing the pedagogical and educational functions of the ethnographic museum, An-sky was apparently putting off for the future the organization of scholarship. 105 The "art museum," which, according to his plan, was the next in the museum hierarchy, should reveal in its exhibitions the theme of the "struggle" of folk artists against religious "prohibitions and persecutions." "After the land was lost," these prohibitions became "even more severe"-architecture and sculpture were "excluded," but Jewish masters proved themselves in drawing and in malting ritual objects. Art "penetrated the synagogue," where "artistic creativity was in everything: the Torah ark, bimah,parokhet [Torah ark curtain], kaporet [Torah ark valance], mizrah plagues, seven-branched candlesticks, Torah crowns, menorah, spice-boxes" and so on; "drawing" also found a place in "drawings on walls, mizrah and shiviti plagues, pinkasim and ketubot [marriage contracts]." Circumventing the prohibition on depicting "figures," the masters created three-dimensional images

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on tombstones-matsevot-"they engraved animals, plants, ornaments." An original "Jewish style" arose, and specifically Jewish motifs: "menorot, blessing hands of Kohanim, magen-davids, lions, deers, leopards, eagles with human expressions." (An-sky does not always distinguish elements of iconography and style.) In "the struggle for people and figures," artists fought over "illustrations in the Haggadah, then, portraits in houses, books and on objects." An-sky mourned the fact that these works of applied art were not valued as art; instead of museums or other repositories, they were housed in synagogues and in houses of the tsadikim (Hasidic leaders) and wealthy people. Products of folk art had "perished" in many disasters, so it was "so essential to collect" them, they were important for "the history of art," they were the "basis of future art." An-sky reconstmcts the context of the development of Jewish art as a continuing struggle by folk artists with prohibitions and persecution. The idea of overcoming religious prohibitions by means of "the universal artistic instinct"-characteristic of Jewish art studies in the epoch of emancipation -was mentioned in the catalogue of the Trocade~o Palace exhibition in Paris in 1878. The examples of traditional Jewish art from the collection oflsaac Strauss were described as showing that "artistic instincts-a universal attribute of mankind-were sufficiently strong to counter ways of frightening people created by religious prohibitions and historic circumstances .... Denial of the Jews' artistic feeling ... would, according to the catalogue, be tantamount to the denial of'the universal human instinct."' 106 Thus, a folk art museum, while strengthening the national identity of the Jews, would appeal at the same time to the non-Jewish visitor, demonstrating the universalism of Jewish art, its significance for general art history, and its contribution to the achievements of civilization. According to An-sky's program, "in every town, ... as far as possible, Jewish ethnographic museums" should be set up; "in each regionJewish art museums," and, finally, a "Jewish History Museum" should be opened in Palestine. "A museum of historic relics, historic monuments," crowning a whole system ofJewish Museums, should recount the people's entire history, "of all the Inquisitions, of all the torments,"

An-sky and the Jewish Museum

but also "of all the historic times of rejoicing" and of "the great figures" of the Jewish people. This concluding point of the program, specifying the creation of a Jewish History Museum in Palestine, reflects an important stage in the evolution of An-sky's ideas. Let us remember that in1915, when the expedition's collection was given to the museum of the JHES, An-sky proposed to draw up a special list of exhibits destined for a Jewish Museum in Palestine, "if a safe refuge is created there for the Jews," 107 and in his will he arranged to sponsor "an institution for ethnography or archaeology in Jerusalem . . . objects and books, which have artistic value, ethnographic value or antique value." lOR

Conclusion Although the creation of a Jewish museum was not among An-sky's most pressing plans when he returned to Russia, given his evolution from writer and revolutionary to ethnographer, it was natural that he arrived at the idea of a museum. Whereas initially An-sky needed the museum chiefly as a store-house for the expedition's collection, as he absorbed the visual materials he came to appreciate the museum's great potential for his vision of creating a secular Jewish nation. According to An-sky, the museum should not only fill the gap in the Jewish education of the Jewish urban masses but also provide examples off()lklore for artists creating a secular culture. Aiming at the creation of a traditional national culture, An-sky overturned the hierarchy of cultural priorities. Instead of showing off the cultural achievements of the intelligentsia, thus facilitating their influence on the culture of the "lower classes," An-sky's museum presented folk culture for absorption by the intelligentsia and for their creative processing as literature, art, theater, and music. The exhibits of the ubiquitous ethnographic museums, according to An-sky's plan, acquired added significance in presenting the regional peculiarities of local communities. Recognizing that the exhibits of ethnographic museums did not cover many important visual aspects of Jewish culture, An-sky had the idea of organizing a whole network

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Lukin of specialized Jcwish museums. Thus, it was appropriate to use antiques and the works of Jewish craftsmen, whose cultural significance was not limited to ethnography and regional history, as well as the works of traditional and modern Jewish art in educating the people. And finally, this museum hierarchy should be crowned by the Jewish National Historic Museum, founded in the historic homeland of the Jews. In planning the Jewish museums, An-sky envisioned a future Jewish secular culture based on Jewish folklore and folk art. In spite of the fact that An-sky could not realize his dream in his lifetime either in Petrograd or in Vilna, 109 where he was forced to flee from Bolshevik Russia, his experience as a collector, researcher, and organizer affected the Jewish Museums and Judaica sections in regional studies and ethnographic museums that were created in Soviet Russia in the 1920s. Today, in the post-Soviet republics, where acute problems of Jewish identity and Jewish education have revived plans for the creation of museums, An-sky's experience a century ago acquires a special urgency.

Fourteen Ethnic Loyalty and International

Modernism: The An-sky Expeditions and the Russian Avant-Garde John E. Bowlt

The ethnographical expeditions that An-sky supervised in 1911-14 and the Jewish artifacts that he examined and described have received substantial attention in the form of publications, exhibitions, and conferences. Although lost from view for many decades as a result of political and racial prejudice, the An-sky collection survives, albeit in fragments, including the vintage photographs of types, rituals, and artifacts and the recordings of songs and voices. The variety of An-sky's acquisitions, the diapason of his professional interests, and his constructive contribution to the "Jewish Renaissance" in Imperial Russia merit recognition and respect. However, the connection between An-sky's endeavors and intellectual and artistic debates beyond the pale of local ethnography and anthropology is much more difficult to assess: the An-sky materials were known to a comparatively intimate group of specialists, and the functions and applications of these materials were not always comprehensible to the public at large. Nevertheless, An-sky undertook his investigations at a moment that was especially opportune, because they coincided with a new and broad Russian awareness of, and fashion for, national antiquities; they also paralleled a growing Russian nostalgia for traditions that were fast disappearing in the face of intense capitalist growth and accelerating "Westernization." If, in a very general sense, An-sky's promotion of the Jewish heritage was consonant with Russia's newfound patriotism in the 1910s, then its appeal to Jewish intellectuals and artists was not universal. Of course, associates of An-sky's expeditions such as Solomon Yudovin shared their mentor's enthusiasm and experienced the immediate impact of the

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Bowlt subjects of their research (rubbings from Jewish tombstones, photographs of synagogues, etc.) on their own creative output (for example, Natan Al'tman's graphic cycles and Yudovin's woodcuts). Yet most Russian-Jewish artists and critics did not understand or even respond to the An-sky enterprise, either because they were ignorant of, and indifterent to, its discoveries and results or because they preferred to look elsewhere for inspiration (French Cubism, Italian Futurism). In addition, as in the case of the critic Abram Efros, many felt that An-sky's amassment of things, from Torah scrolls to vestments, was mechanical, eclectic, and indiscreet, a compilation of bric-a-brae that precluded any attempt to establish objective criteria, to draw up an aesthetic hierarchy, or even to define the "Jewishness" ofJewish visual culture. At best, it would seem that, for the majority of the Jewish artists active within Russian modernism, the An-sky phenomenon-and the upsurge of a new Jewish self-determination in pre-Revolutionary Russia -played a brief and somewhat minor role in their careers. Ultimately, innovative artists such as Al'tman, Boris Aronson, Robert Fal'k, El Lissitzky (Lazar' Lisitsky), and David Shterenberg seemed to identify their artistic progress not with the evaluation and evocation of ethnic ceremony, motif, and ornament but rather (as will be emphasized at the end of this chapter), with the overcoming and transcendence thereof. An effective point of entry into the issue of An~sky and modern Russian art is provided by a statement that Efros made in his remarkable essay of 1918, "Aladdin's Lamp," because it alludes to a fundamental dichotomy that distinguishes the subject of Russian-Jewish modernism in general: Either our aesthetic rebirth will not come to pass or it will go forth from the two roots wherefrom comes all the art of our timemodernism and popular creativity. Our aesthetic "leftism" is indisputable and very broad, but we don't need enthusiasts such as An-sky.... We are leftist because of our talmudic blood .... If the Jews want to live artistically and if they are concerned about their aesthetic future, then this presupposes a universal and totally active link with popular creativity, [although modern] Jewish art should not rush in to copy prints, frescoes, etc. 1

The An-sky Expeditions and the Russian Avant-Garde The issue of the relationship between the An-sky ethnographical expeditions of I9II-14 and the development of the visual arts in Russia, especially painting and graphics of the avant-garde, is a complex and curiously inconclusive one. 2 If the expeditions and their collections did play a considerable role in the strong awakening of interest in the Jewish legacy as a whole just before and after 1917-above all, in the theater, literature, and material culture-then their particular impact on the Russian or Russian-Jewish fine arts was limited and often indirect. Of course, we can refer to occasional masterpieces ofJewish modernism such as Al'tman's folio Evreiskaia grajika (Jewish Graphics, 1923) and his sets and costumes for The Dybbuk in 1921 or to other experimental scenographies that seemed to draw upon the ethnographical rediscovery of Jewish artifacts, such as Fal'k's resolutions for Jacob)s Dream at the Habimah Theater in 1925 or Marc Chagall's, Isaak Rabichev's, and Isaak Rabinovich's for various productions at the Jewish Chamber and State Theaters in the early 1920s. But, by and large, any immediate, tangible connection between the An-sky expeditions, their collections, and the consequent Jewish National Museum in Petrograd/ Leningrad-and the other major players in modern Russian-Jewish art (Boris Anisfel'd, Aronson, Lev Bakst, Osip Braz, Isaak Brodsky, Iosif Chaikov, Lissitzky, Leonid Pasternak, Nisson Shifrin, Shterenberg, and Aleksandr Tyshler)-is elusive, to say the least. Perhaps An-sky himself bears part of the blame for this lacuna, because, as the sculptor Il'ia Gintsburg maintained, An-sky was interested in ethnography but not the fine arts, and his Jewish National Museum was an anthropological, not an aesthetic display; in fact, Gintsburg (who, as a matter offact, was director of the Jewish National Museum in 1924-26) lamented that the Jews did not have a parallel Jewish Art Museum that could show "purely artistic works" by modern Russian-Jewish artists. 3 It would seem judicious, therefore, to pinpoint and analyze the reasons for this apparent hiatus rather than to undertake a desperate attempt to establish links where there were none, a deduction that may come as a surprise. After all, two major exhibitions ("Tradition and Revolution" at the Jewish Museum in Jerusalem in 1987 and "Russian Jewish Artists" at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1995-96) dealt precisely with the question of the Jewish artistic renaissance in Russia

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and the avant-garde, making copious reference to the ethnographical heritage and to the An-sky endeavor. 4 The "Tracing An-sky" exhibition at the Joods Historisch Museum in Amsterdam in 1992, the 1994 commemorative booklet Semyon An-sky: The Jewish Artistic Heritage, and more recent appraisals also imply that the items registered and inventoried by An -sky and his colleagues were of vital significance to painters such as Al'tman, Chagall, Fal'k, and Lissitzky. 5 However, the impact was secondary or, at least, circuitous-and perhaps the most telling example of this disengagement was the radical group of Jewish artists led by Kazimir Malevich in Vitebsk in 1919-22 (Il'ia Chashnik, Anna Kagan, Lazar' Khidekel', Nina Kogan, Lissitzky, Efim Roiak, and Lev Yudin)-none of whom, with the exception of Lissitzky, seemed to profess any artistic interest in their Je'Ornament HebreuY furthermore, if we place the An-sky expeditions in their wider anthropological context, we find that they were part of a well-established trend (if not vogue) in late Imperial Russia and that there were many important precedents, especially the activities at the various art retreats that flourished in Russia toward the end of the nineteenth century, in particular Abramtsevo and Talashkino. Abramtsevo and Talashkino contributed much to the development of an Arts and Crafts movement in Russia. Owned and sponsored by a railroad tycoon, Sawa Mamontov, and a princess, Mariia Tenisheva, respectively, Abramtsevo (near Moscow) and Talashkino (ncar Smolensk) attempted to revive and propagate the traditional crafts such as embroidery, woodcarving, icon-painting, and pottery by sponsoring specialist workshops, by exhibiting and selling their wares, and by encouraging

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modern studio artists to inspect and paraphrase the motifs and styles of ancient Russia. Although the association of Abramtsevo and Talashkino to the Jewish Silver Age is philosophical rather than practical, the tvvo centers anticipated An-sky's mandate and methods; in addition, Mamontov's and Tenisheva's wide circles of acquaintances included several Jewish artists, including Mark Antokol'sky, Bakst, Isaak Levitan, and Valentin Serov. Mamontov and his wife, Elizaveta, undertook haphazard sallies into the Moscow countryside, assembling a vast array of furniture, textiles, and pots and pans, which they showed to visiting artists such as Elena Polenova, Viktor Vasnetsov, and Mikhail Vrubel'.' 3 Here were aesthetic objects, deprived of their original function, that, immediately and organically, contributed to the rebirth of the Russian decorative and applied arts at the turn of the century, informing book, stage, and dress design. Buoyed by her enthusiasm, Tenisheva even established a private art and ethnography museum in Smolensk consisting of over one thousand pieces of local material culture (icons, candelabras, vestments, balalaikas ). 14 Tenisheva filled her museum, called Russkaia Starina (Russian Antiquity), on Tcnishev Street with a vast conglomeration of traditional handicrafts in wood, metal, ceramics, and textiles that, in diversity and rudimentary categorization, remind us of An-sky's own distributions in the Jewish National Museum several years later. Tenisheva propagated her enterprise with unceasing energy, and some of the leading studio artists of the time, including Nicholas Roerich and Vrubel', visited Talashkino-and that inquisitive teenager in Smolcnsk, Lissitzky, may well have relished her extraordinary assemblage of curios as he passed by on his way to school between 1906 and 1909. Several other important champions of Russian folk art tried to save and register their indigenous culture from deformation and neglectsuch as Aleksei Bobrinsky, Sofiia Davydova (Sophie Davydoff), and Petr Shchukin (brother of the more famous Sergei)-but to discuss their individual achievements would go beyond the immediate perimeters of this chaptcr. 15 Even in the specific Jewish context, other cognoscenti before An-sky had been collecting artifacts, such as Nisenbaum with his photographs of Jewish gravestones (some of which he gave to An-sky) or the lawyer and politician Maksim Vinaver, champion

The An-sky Expeditions and the Russian Avant-Garde

of the Jewish Historical and Ethnographical Society that opened in 1909, not to mention the strong promotion in journals such as Voskhod and Novyivoskhod, Novyi put', Perezhitoe, and Evreiskaiastarina. Suffice it to say, however, that in all cases these earnest amateurs were making the same noble mistake as An-skywas-that is, in trying to rescue a culturallegacy, they released it from its organic environment and exposed it as an aesthetic curio or quaint antiquity. Here was an inherent contradiction that also colored much of the debate around icon preservation and "museumification" in the 1910s, and An-sky must have been well aware of the pros and cons. But if this kind of ethnographical approach secularized and neutralized the object, it also crossed hallowed boundaries and enabled the new artists to appropriate foreign signs and subjects without penance or prejudice. This would explain why, for example, the Orthodox Natal'ia Goncharova had no qualms in dedicating a suite of paintings to Jewish life (such as jews. The Sabbath [1912]), why Al'tman could move easily from painting Catholic Saint in 1913 to designing the cover ofVIadimir Markov's Iskusstvo negrov (Black Art) in 1919,! 6 or, for that matter, why the Jewish Chagall could find inspiration for his Pregnant Woman (1913) in the Orthodox rendering of the Virgin of the Sign or why the publisher and collector, Nikolai Vinogradov, champion of the Moscow Cubo-Futurists, made sure to include Jewish folk prints (lubki) in his collection of Russian and Asian artifacts. Of course, this replacement of perceptual contexts-transferring the object from its traditional application to an aesthetic one-paralleled the fundamental shift that was taking place in Russian-Jewish society as a whole. Vinaver, one ofChagall's early sponsors, pointed out in a speech to the Jewish Society for the Encouragement of the Arts (JSEA) in Petrograd in 1916 that the Jews as a race had already moved away from the synagogue to more mundane centers, whereas An-sky, in a 1909 essay on Jewish folk art, had observed that the actor, the professor, and the writer were replacing the rabbi as the axis ofJewish spirituallifeY Indeed, the steady diet of "palm trees, Stars of David, emaciated, tired faces of Old Jews, and exalted, elongated faces of youths" 18 that distinguished "Jewish art" was even regarded as a mark of immaturity and parochialism by those who sought a new Jewish aesthetic.

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The Timing of the An-sky Expeditions Essentially, the expeditions came too late to leave a deep imprint on the artistic bohemia; they elicited no response in the fine art market (Natal'ia Dobychina, the Jewish owner of Russia's primary art gallery in St. Petersburg, ignored the issue); and the potential impact missed the major Jewish painters who, in an adjacent milieu, might have reacted positively and creatively in ca. 1910- ca. 1914, at the time of the expeditions. Anisfel'd and Bakst were working for Sergey Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris; Al'trnan, Chaikov, Chagall, and Shterenberg were grappling with the niceties of synthetic Cubism; Fal'k was in Moscow, playing a leading part in the thoroughly profane Jack of Diamonds group; Lissitzky was traveling in France and Italy; Rabinovich, Shifrin, and Tyshler were only at the very beginning of their artistic careers. In any case, by 1914, the Russian avant-garde (Pavel Filonov, Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin) had already passed beyond their obsession with the primitive, even if the neo-Primitivist manifesto did appear only in 1913. 19 As they explored the exciting systems of French Cubism and Italian Futurism, collage, reliefs, and the first syntax of abstract painting, these artists must have found the actuality of a Dymkova toy or a Torah scroll to have been much less enticing than in 1908-9. If anything, by 1914 the Russian avant-garde was thinking in terms of rejection rather than assimilation of the domestic tradition -something that, once again, Efros was quick to emphasize in his "Aladdin's Lamp" (which he wrote as a promotion for An-sky's projected Al)bom evreiskoi khudozhestvennoi stariny [Album of Jewish Artistic Antiquity]): a pinkus blossoming with patterns or the astonishing swirling spiral of a tombstone; we say that our entire artistic future lies latent here; that we have been considered worthy to begin a new, unprecedented epoch in the Jewish plastic arts, and that there is no price we would not pay, so long as we can cling on avidly, fiercely tenacious, to the world of natural beauty that has been revealed to us. And if there is one thing more than another that we fear, it is that Jewish thought ... might, on hearing the cry, "Who will exchange old lamps for nnv?",

The An-sky Expeditions and the Russian Avant-Garde give up the precious old junk of Aladdin in exchange t()r some glittering, fashionable utensil.2°

Limited Accessibility Obviously, the An-sky materials were well known to the members of the expeditions such as the musicologist Iuly Engel, the ethnographers Zusman Kiselhof and Abram Rechtman, and the artist Solomon Yudovin, and it is reasonable to assume that they spread the word among those who cared to listen. In any case, just how ambitious the expeditions were and how extensive their findings is clear from An-sky's own descriptive letter to the editor of Evreiskaia starina (Jewish Antiquity) in 1915: Suffice it to say that the Expedition received 23,000 rubles for organizing a Jewish National Museum. It visited Volhynia, Podolia, and part of Kiev Guberniia, exploring more than 6o towns and settlements. The Expedition consisted of me, a photographer, a folk music specialist, and, at times, a secretary.... We assembled the following materials: I.

2. 3. 4.

7. 8.

More than 2,ooo photographs of ancient synagogues and interior decorations, Jewish historical buildings, monuments, types, domestic scenes, etc. We registered ca. 1,8oo folk tales, legends, parables, etc. We registered more than 1,500 folk songs and misteria. We recorded more than 1,000 folk motifs and "songs without words" on cylinders and scores .... We collected about so ancient manuscripts and pinkassim. For the National Museum we have acquired ... more than 700 objects, almost all antique (silver, bronze, wood), some religious (ca. So spice boxes and the same number ofHanukah lamps, candelabras, chandeliers, arcs, Torah decorations, etc.), everyday use, women's ornaments, vintage clothing, engravings, paintings, etc. 21

In spite of this remarkable diversity, the collections (artifacts, books, manuscripts, photographs, sound recordings) became accessible only in 1914 at the brief specialist exhibition in Petro grad and then in 1916, still

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Bowlt in a very controlled capacity, at the Museum of the Jewish Institute of the Ethnographical Society in Petro grad (that is, the Jewish National Museum to which An-sky transferred the expeditionary materials). Ansky's magnum opus, his catalogue raisonne of the collection, was never published, and the museum soon closed because of the threats of theft and expropriation (though it opened again in 1923). As an aesthetic resource, therefore, the physical collections in Petrograd and Moscow (Jewish or otherwise) and especially the photographs-had they been dVailable-might have served as an important visual aid. Mter all, that is how many of the Russian avant-garde artists found out about their own folklore as well as international directions, as the poet Benedikt Livshits recalled in his 1933 memoirs: "[A] photograph ofPicasso's latest painting ... will occasion a thousand responses and imitations and will lay the foundation of a new movement." 22 An -sky himself hoped that his museum, established to house the objects and photographs, would cater to "Jewish writers, poets, and artists who henceforth would not reject their roots, who would not lose themselves in their search for motifs and whose worlds ... would not wander among those of other nations like pale shadows, but would like their own forms." 23 However, most of the ca. 2,ooo documentary photographs in the collections were of people and buildings rather than of works of art, and, for reasons that are still unclear, few if any of them were published at the time. There was not a unanimously positive response on the part of young Russian Jewish artists to the museum-or vice versa. Renderings of synagogue ornaments and tombstones by Yudovin (who, in 1920, incorporated them in his folio on Jewish ornament)24 as well as the documentary photographs were an indefinite component, and it is reasonable to assume that the designs inspired the graphics (rather than paintings) of Al'tman, Chaikov, and Lissitzky. As a friend of An-sky and active member of the JSEA, Al'tman seems to have examined the Ansky sources with particular attention in preparation for his Evreiskaia grajika. The several experiments in Jewish typography that Al'tman undertook in I9I3-I6, such as his logos for the Judaica Publishing House and the JSEA, demonstrate his serious interest in the traditions of Jewish decoration and script. Al'tman paid homage to these initiatives in his Portrait of Mrs. Gintsburg (1918-20) in which the Recum-

The An-sky Expeditions and the Russian Avant-Garde

Figure 25. Photograph of gravestone and the proud stonecarver who made it, taken during the Baron Guenzburg Expedition by Solomon Yudovin. SOURCE: An-sky archive, Petersburg Judaica.

bent Deer from his Evreiskaia grafika is prominently displayed on the wall. In fact, Efros identified these ornaments with the beginning of Al'tman's "national populism" after his "Parisian frenzies," 25 contrasting them with what the critic described as Pasternak's "worthless and condescending copies of heraldic beasts from synagogue screens and the mantles of Torah scrolls." 26 Later on, Al'tman appropriated a large portion of the An-sky ethnographical photographs, though they seem to have had no resonance in his artistic output-beyond Evreiskaia grafika. Indeed, this elephantine portfolio oflithographs (Al'tman compiled them in the mid-1910s before publishing the collection in Berlin in 1923) is the clearest, if

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Figure 26. Natan Al'tman, bookplate forM. M . Persits, from the "Jewish Graphic Art" series, 1914-. SOURCE: Mark Etkind, Nathan Altman mit Beitriigen von Nathan Altman und seinen Zeitgenossen (Dresden, 1984-), 27.

exceptional, borrowing from the An-sky archive, and, though he did not take part in the expeditions, Al'tman was inspired enough to spend the summer of1913 in Gritsev (Volhynia District), copying reliefs from Jewish tombstones and ornaments and from synagogue textiles that he then incorporated into Evreiskaia grajika. For his part, Lissitzky seems to have had An-sky very much in mind as he made his renderings of the ceiling and ornaments in the Mohilev Synagogue. Although not part of the An-sky team, he did take part in an ethnographical expedition financed by the Jewish Ethnographical and Historical Society so as to study the synagogues along the River Dnepr in 1916 (with Issachar Ryback and perhaps Engel)-just as he was preparing his illustrations for The Legend of Prague. Judging from the An-sky photographs of rabbis and traditional ceremonial wares, Chagall was also looking at-

The An-sky Expeditions and the Russian Avant-Garde tentively at this kind of material-manifest in his Praying Jew (1914-) and Cemetery Gate ( 1917). Still, Chagall, as usual, is devious, and he seems to have had very mixed feelings about the An-sky materials: "I was positively frightened," he wrote after seeing Purim ritual rattles in the An-sky collection. 27

The Conceptual Problem ofJewish Art These examples are spare and hardly central to the evolution of the avant-garde in Russia, but there is still reason to rejoice, even if this may be alien to An-sky's own understanding of visual art as a medium of illusion, narration, and doctrine. The argument can be made that, in secularizing Jewish material culture and religious rites, An-sky transformed them into a play of device and a complex of forms, something that, in any case, the photograph, with its formal and aesthetic emphasis, also tends to do. If An-sky, the venerable champion ofJewish tradition, did this, then surely there was every license for the younger generation to develop An-sky's perception to its logical conclusion-abstract artwhich is what happened. Perhaps Aronson and Ryback were thinking of this predicament when they wrote in their Yiddish article in 1919: Form is the essential element of art, whereas content is evil. The composition of a painting is more important than its idea, and the richness of color means more than the realistic rendering of objects .... Pure abstract form is precisely what embodies the national element. Only via the principle of abstract painting, free of any literariness, can the expression of one's own national foundation be achieved. 28 There is an optimistic ring to Aronson and Ryback's assertion, for it takes us beyond the confines of an ethnic tradition, an impulse that may also inform Lissitzky's Prouns (his architectonic exercises in abstract painting). While locked within the perimeters of defined time and defined place, Jewish art aspired toward a universal height, where "form is good and content is evil." We might extend the notion, therefore, by contending that the ethos ofJewish art is to be found in its abstraction and universality, just as the Jewish time is timelessness and the Jewish fatherland boundless.

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Fifteen An-sky's Legacy: the Vilna Historic-

Ethnographic Society and the Shaping of Modern Jewish Culture Cecile E. Kuznitz

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S. An-sky came to the city ofVilna late in his life, in the fall of1918, and left less than a year later. Yet the locale made a profound impression on him, and he on it. During his stay, he participated in a wide range of communal and cultural undertakings: the work of the relief organization EKO PO, the creation ofVilna's first democratically elected kehillah (Jewish communal authority), and the founding of the Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists. As a colleague later recalled, "in a short time An-sky became the most popular and beloved figure among the Jews ofVilna." 1 An-sky reciprocated this affection, writing on the day of his death, November 8, 1920, "I long for Vilna as for my home." 2 An-sky's stature as a public figure and his inclusive approach to Jewish affairs left their mark on all the projects in \Vhich he participated during his sojourn in Vilna. As the head of the election committee for the Vilna kehillah, a role for which he was chosen because of his reputation for impartiality, An-sky reminded those on the right that the Russian Revolution had made possible a democratically elected body and those on the left that the Orthodox had preserved the community's institutions of self-government. 3 He then insisted that kehillah announcements be printed in both Hebrew and Yiddish, and he similarly argued for including those who wrote in European languages in the Vilna Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists. 4 The memory of An-sky's "worldview at once broad and pragmatic," as one writer put it, remained in Vilna long after he departed the city. 5 Of all the projects An-sky undertook at this time, his "favorite child" was the Vilna Jewish Historic-Ethnographic Society. 6 An-sky was the moving force behind this organization, which preoccupied him literally until the end of his life: his remark about Vilna quoted above is from a

An-sky's Legacy

letter to the writer and communal activist Moyshe Shalit, the society's long-time head, asking about its unfinished business. Moreover, both An-sky's catholic approach to cultural work and his concern for Jewish tradition continued to shape the society throughout its history. The Historic-Ethnographic Society grew out of a desire to preserve the record of the Jewish past, an impulse widely in evidence at the time in Jewish Eastern Europe and epitomized by An-sky's own pioneering ethnographic expeditions of 1912-14. Moreover, just as An-sky transformed the raw material of folklore into the modernist drama The Dybbuk, attempts to document Jewish history went hand in hand with the effort to create a new type ofJewish culture. In the wake of the destruction ofWorld War I, Jewish activists hoped that they would find a conducive setting for their work in the newly independent states of the region, most notably Poland, which were bound under the Minorities Treaties to support the institutions of their ethnic minorities. In the interwar period, the city ofVilna proved a particularly receptive setting for these initiatives. There the Historic-Ethnographic Society grew alongside organizations such as the younger YIVO Institute for Jewish Research as part of a flourishing ofJewish cultural life in the two decades that followed. Yet as the government subsidies promised by the Minorities Treaties failed to materialize, such institutions came to rely increasingly on the Jewish community. The society's often stormy relations with YIVO and its warmer ties to the Vilna Jewish kehillah reveal differing conceptions of the Jewish culture that Vilna activists sought both to preserve and to reconstruct. They also shed light on the contours of the Jewish public that was called upon to support this culture, refining earlier notions of the role of ideological divisions in Jewish life. In all of these matters, the society was guided by a distinctive view ofJewish culture and community, one animated by An-sky's legacy.

Precursors: The Lovers of Jewish Antiquities and the Historical Commission The interest in Jewish history and folklore can be traced to 1891, when the historian Simon Dubnow published an appeal to document the

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Kuznitz Jewish experience in Eastern Europe. Dubnow lamented not only the lack of historical writing on the subject but also the failure to collect and preserve important materials that would make the work of future scholars all the more difficult? Dubnow's Russian essay and a revised Hebrew version led to the first organized efforts to gather valuable Jewish books, records, and objects. 8 They also inspired the creation of an institutional basis for Jewish scholarship in Eastern Europe, the HistoricEthnographic Commission founded in 1892 by the Hevrah Mefitsei Haskalah (Society for the Spread of Enlightenment) and known after 1908 as the Jewish Historic-Ethnographic Society of St. Petersburg. From 1909 to 1918, the society published Evreiskaia starina (The Jewish Past), a journal of Russian Jewish history which Dubnow edited, and in 1912-14 it sponsored An-sky's seminal ethnographic expeditions. In March 1913, concerns similar to Dubnow's led a group in Vilna to found the Lovers of Jewish Antiquities, a body dedicated to "collect[ing] the treasures of Jewish historical culture in order to save them for coming generations." 9 This organization set about gathering Jewish ritual objects, household items, crafts, and artwork as well as folklore, printed material, and historical records. It justified this eclectic approach by arguing that in all that "throws light on our past life and creativity, on our sufferings and joys, laws and customs, there is ... a spark of our spirit, a brilliant drop from the cup ofholy tears, a recollection and a comfort." 10 Many of those active in the Lovers of Jewish Antiquities later became leaders of the Vilna Jewish HistoricEthnographic Society, including Jacob Wygodski, Abraham Virshubski, L. V Frenkel, and Ben Zion Rubsztein. During the course of World War I, most of the organization's collections were sent to Moscow for safekeeping, and the Lovers of Jewish Antiquities essentially dissolved. Paradoxically, the destruction of World War I itself spurred new efforts to document Jewish history and contemporary life. In the years just prior to the outbreak of war, a number of such initiatives began, including not only An-sky's ethnographic expeditions and the founding of the Lovers of Jewish Antiquities but also the pioneering work of Yiddish scholarship, Der pinkes (The Record Book).ll Following

An-sky's Legacy Dubnow's lead, those who undertook such projects felt that the changes wrought by modernization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries threatened both the traditional culture of East European Jewry and the evidence that could later be used to study that culture. Such feelings of imminent loss, already a powerful force, were galvanized by World War I. The war had a disproportionate impact on the Pale of Settlement in general and on Vilna in particular, as the city lay near the Eastern front and was subject to repeated occupations. A sense that they were living through momentous historical events inspired Vilna activists to record their city's wartime experiences. Moreover, it seemed to many that the destruction, displacement, and impoverishment of these years hastened the end of long-established if already declining patterns of Jewish lite. 12 They thus felt it an urgent task to chronicle both the events of the war itself and the traditions the war threatened to obliterate. Following the precedent set in St. Petersburg, in the summer of 1917 the Vilna branch of the Hevrah Mefitsei Haskalah founded a Historical Commission. The commission set about gathering material relating to the period of war and occupation, including not only books and newspapers but also copies of regulations promulgated by the military authorities, records of relief activities, and war-related folklore. It paid particular attention to the shulhoyf (synagogue courtyard), the heart of Vilna's Jewish quarter. During these unsettled times, the shulhoyfwas plastered with announcements of the latest news and military decrees as well as necrologies of prominent individuals, information from charitable organizations, and rabbinic advice on upholding kashrut (Jewish dietary laws) during periods of food shortages. 13 Such materials were deemed by the leaders of the commission to be of great importance, because, as they astutely noted, these "popular rJolkshtimlekhe] sources" had "a psychological value" for depicting the conditions of everyday life. Jewish activists argued that every aspect of the city's wartime experience, no matter how seemingly trivial, deserved to be recorded. "We must not allow the smallest scrap of paper to be lost," they wrote, during this "entirely new, enormously important, and epoch-making upheaval in our lives." 14

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Kuznitz The Founding and Early Years of the Society The work of the Lovers ofJewish Antiquities and the Historical Commission set the stage for the new organization that An-sky founded about six months after his arrival in Vilna. On February 20, 1919, the writer and ethnographer called together a group of local communal leaders. Like a Hasidic rebbe addressing his followers, as one participant later described it, An-sky delegated tasks to the attendees for the creation of a Historic-Ethnographic Society. 15 He planned to model this new body after the similarly named St. Petersburg society that had sponsored his expeditions and later housed the material he had then gathered. Perhaps An-sky hoped to t(mnd a home in Vilna t(x these collections, since the Bolshevik government had shut its predecessor in St. Petersburg in 1917. 16 The new Vilna organization also served as a successor to the Lovers ofJewish Antiquities and the Historical Commission, inheriting both the collections of the two earlier groups and many of their leading members. 17 These included its first chairman, Virshubski; its long-time head, Shalit; and the communal leaders Wygodski and Zemach Shabad. In June, An-sky gave a public reading of his play The Dybbuk, with the proceeds of the evening benefiting the fledgling society. 18 Although he left Vilna shortly thereafter, An-sky continued to demonstrate great enthusiasm for the project and to offer its leaders his guidance and support. From the first, the Historic-Ethnographic Society was shaped by Ansky's cherished principles of pluralism and inclusiveness. As society secretary Khaykl Lunski noted, at An -sky's behest the organization's board was "non -partisan and included persons of the most varied [ideological] directions." Thus, while the leadership of the Historic-Ethnographic Society was dominated by figures associated with the Zionist movement, such as Virshubski, Shalit, and Wygodski, it also included members of the Yiddishist left, such as the journalist and scholar Zalmen Reyzen and the Bundist leader Pavel Rosenthal. Supporters were drawn as well from the more traditional segment ofVilna Jewry, including Lunski, the librarian of the famed Strashun Library, and the prominent rabbi Chaim Oyzer Grodzienski. Abraham Moyshe Bernstein, the cantor ofVilna's modernized Choir Synagogue, was chair of the Music SectionY'

An-sky's Legacy

An-sky's values influenced not only the personnel affiliated with the Historic-Ethnographic Society but also the scope of its work. The society organized sections devoted to Jewish history, folklore, music, art, and literature as well as a library, archive, and museum. Its rich and diverse collections included not only documents, pinkasim (communal record books), photographs, and press from the modern period but also items such as ancient Jewish coins and copies of medieval charters granted by Polish kings. It acquired manuscripts and rare editions of classical Yiddish authors Mendele Moykher Sforim and I. L. Peretz as well as of important rabbinical figures, including the Vilna Gaon and Shneur Zalman of Liadi. Local printing houses such as the renowned Romm Press also donated material from Haskalah writers Shmuel Yosef Fuenn and Isaac Meir Dick. In addition to an art collection boasting works by well-known painters and sculptors, including Maurycy Gottleib and MarkAntokol'sky, its museum included more humble objects of religious ritual and household use. The records of local institutions, such as the Russian governmentsponsored Vilna Rabbinical School and Teachers' Seminary, also eventually came into the society's possession. To all this it added an An-sky Section to commemorate its founder after his death. Thus, as it began its activity the Historic-Etlmographic Society seemed well situated to serve as a "treasury where there is collected everything with a relation to Jewish history, art, and ethnography," as it described its mission. 20 Indeed, the society's founders prided themselves on the eclectic spirit that marked their work. Lunski compared the society to the Strashun Library, which was filled with rabbis, halutsim (young Zionist pioneers), and political activists of every stripe. 21 In this way, through the breadth of its collections, its supporters, and the constituency it served, the Historic-Ethnographic Society sought to perpetuate the ideals that An-sky brought to Jewish communal affairs in Vilna. The society also drew inspiration from An-sky's efforts to preserve historic and folkloric material such as he had gathered on his expeditions. Like the Historical Commission before it, the Historic-Ethnographic Society took as its starting point the changed reality of Jewish life in the wake of World War I. As its leaders wrote, they were keenly aware of living in a "new period [when] every event has a historical

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Kuznitz significance." Thus, they set as their first task to supplement the collections they had inherited with additional documentation of the war and its aftermath. They sought to cast as wide a net as possible so that future researchers who wished to "ascertain the traces of the past . . . will find all the material ready and waiting." In such a critical period of history, they believed, "nothing must be left out, everything must be recorded." These communal activists shared with their predecessors a sense of the urgency of their mission, believing that "now, in the time of destruction [khurbn ],"there was "a holy duty ... to make every effort to rescue at least the remnants [sheyres hapleyte ], the remains of the spoil" ofJewish culture. 22 Yet far from wishing simply to document the traces of a fading past, they saw their work as contributing to the creation of a vibrant new type ofJewish culture. For the leaders of the Historic- Ethnographic Society, the very process of recording Vilna's legacy was a key element in the effort to reconstruct Jewish life in the postwar, Polish city. This dynamic is made clear in Reyzen's comments on the traditional Jewish melodies collected by the society's Music Section. According to Reyzen, this material revealed "a world of old-time yidishkayt [Jewishness ], a world of old-time beauty which sends its last greeting through the already halfforgotten sounds of wonderful musical compositions." Yet the goal of the section's work was not simply to record a dying Jewish folk culture. Reyzen noted that Tchaikovsky had based some of his greatest pieces on "primitive and simple" Russian folk songs, and he added that the true value of the society's musical collection would not be known until future Jewish artists would evaluate it for their own works. 23 Thus, activists like Reyzen saw the ultimate worth ofJewish tradition in its utility for the modern culture they hoped to build. These dual concerns with the Jewish past and future informed the society's first major project: a massive collection of articles, memoirs, and historical documents entitled Pinkes far dergeshikhte fun vilne in di yorn fun milkhome un okupatsye (Record Book of the History ofVilna in the Years of War and Occupation). 24 This volume contained much of the material that the Historical Commission and the society had collected on the everyday experience ofVilna's Jews during wartime, such as the texts of announcements posted in the shulhoyf. 25 It was only one of

An-sky's Legacy

several such works produced in Vilna even as fighting raged and then as the city struggled in the long process ofrebuilding. 26 As with the effort to document Jewish folk music, these publications reflected not only a preoccupation with history but also a desire to demonstrate the continued vitality and creativity ofVilna Jewry. As Shalit wrote, the authors of the Pinkes and similar volumes sought to create "a historiography that truly proceeds right with the pulse of the time, a history that is written right with the tempo of the event itself." 27 In this way, through these publications "as with an outstretched hand, the old Vilna draws towards the new-the past becomes united with the present." 28 Despite its broad mandate, then, the society's early activities focused on its most immediate and best documented area of activity: the recent history and culture ofVilna and its region. In addition to compiling the Pinkes, the society organized exhibits on the experience ofVilna Jewry during World War I and displayed the work oflocal Jewish artists. 29 Following in An-sky's footsteps, in 1922 Frenkel led an expedition to nearby towns to document historic architecture and artifacts. 30 In these years the society sponsored a successful effort to have several streets in the Jewish quarter renamed after Vilna Jewish notables. 31 It also helped to publish a collection of folklore edited by Shloyme Bastomski but was unable to realize several other book projects it discussed, including a second volume of the Pinkes, a vvork in An-sky's memory, and an illustrated album on "old Jewish Vilna." 32 It is hardly surprising that the society did not carry out all of its proposed work, for it operated on a modest annual budget of a few thousand zlotys, the equivalent of roughly a few hundred dollars. It had its founder to thank in part for even this modest sum, because one of Ansky's lasting legacies to the society was a bequest of one-sixth of his estate, which included a share of royalties from the sale and performance of his works as well as part of his folklore collections and personal archive. 33 In addition, the society received support from the Vilna kehillah, which provided not only occasional subsidies but also "large comfortable rooms" to house its activities, allowing it to expand from its initial cramped quarters in the shulhoyf. 34 In this way, the society derived very concrete benefits from its continuing connection to Ansky as well as its ties to the representative body ofVilna Jewry.

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Figure27. The entrance to the Vilna kehillah. Undated. SOURCE: From the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, Record ID 10709, Collection PO, Catalogue No. 5031, Frame 35334.

The Historic-Ethnographic Society attempted to expand its budget in other ways, for example by recruiting paid members. In a common strategy for impoverished East European Jewish organizations, it also sought to tap the relatively affluent American Jewish community by appealing to "American Jews, American writers, and Vilna landslayt [fellow townspeople]" in the United States as well as American aid organizations such as People's Relief. 35 Nevertheless, in a telling sign of the material constraints faced by Vilna Jewish activists of the interwar period, the society's income covered less than half its expenses. 36 Virshubsk.i, the society's chair in these early years, described the organization beginning its work with a burst of energy due to the galvanizing presence of An-sky and the effort focused on producing the massive Pinkes. By the time the volume appeared in 1922, the society's activity had become intermittent, with its museum barely functioning and work virtually grinding to a halt for months at a time. 37 Three years later the society had closed down entirely and could not afford to pay a staff person since "membership dues have fallen to

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nothing." 38 At a meeting in April 1925, Virshubski defended his tenure as chairman and described how he and Lunski had devotedly continued to catalogue the society's collections without pay. 39 His explanation did not satisfY the assembled members of the society, who blamed the current leadership for the weak state of affairs. 40 They elected a new board headed by Shalit, who remained the moving force behind the organization for the rest of its existence. 41 Under Shalit's direction, the society began to revive, reopening its museum to visitors for two hours each weekend. 42 Thus, in the spring of1925, the Historic-Ethnographic Society looked forward to the start of a new, more active phase in its history.

Cooperation and Competition: YIVO and the Ethnographic Commission While the leaders of the Historic-Ethnographic Society had cause for optimism in the spring of 1925, they soon faced competition from a new organization that also established its headquarters in Vilna. The Yiddish Scientific Institute, known by its acronym YIVO and today as the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, originated with the plan of the linguist and literary critic Nokhem Shtifto create a central body for scholarship in Yiddish and on the history and culture of Yiddish-speaking Jewry. Although Shtifwas living in Berlin at the time he set forth his ideas, his vision began to become a reality after it was taken up by the Vilna scholars Max Weinreich and Reyzen and formally approved at a meeting of two local educational institutions on March 24-, 1925. 43 YIVO's mandate overlapped with that of the society, since it included the collection and publication of historic and ethnographic material. In addition, both organizations drew their support from the same circle ofVilna cultural and communal activists. Hence, several of YIVO's founders also participated in the society's work, including Weinreich, Reyzen, and Shabad. Yet YIVO saw itself as more than simply one link in the chain of Vilna Jewish institutions. As a center for scholarship, which it described as the most advanced form of cultural activity, YIVO hoped to further the development ofYiddish as a whole while symbolizing its highest achievements. The institute would thus

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Kuznitz serve as the "crown of the building ofYiddish secular culture," 44 as one writer put it, elevating the prestige of the language and, implicitly, of its millions of speakers as well. Thus, YIVO aspired to reach far beyond its Vilna headquarters and its immediate circle of scholars to serve as a focal point for cultural and educational work in Yiddish throughout the world. In keeping with this sweeping vision, the institute established sections not only for History and Philology-which included the study of language, literature, and ethnography-but also for such social science fields as EconomicsStatistics and Psychology-Pedagogy. In addition to an archive for older documents, it created a Bibliographic Center to record current Yiddish publications in Eastern Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. It also set about gathering up-to-the-minute information on Jewish demography, pedagogy, and contemporary language use. YIVO planned to support research and publishing in all of these areas as well as a teaching program to train the next generation of scholars. 45 As YIVO's leaders set about implementing this ambitious program, they began relations with the Historic-Ethnographic Society on a friendly basis. Weinreich and Reyzen continued to solicit donations for the society even as they worked to establish the fledgling institute, yet the potential for rivalry as well as cooperation between the two organizations was soon apparent. 46 In the fall of 1925, YIVO wrote to the Historic-Ethnographic Society in what might have seemed a somewhat imperious tone. The newly founded institute described its wide-ranging plans but offered reassurances that it did not seek to "push aside or replace the existing scholarly work, but just the opposite, to coordinate its efforts and give it a unified direction." 47 The Historic- Ethnographic Society apparently found no cause for concern and accepted YIVO's suggestion that the two collaborate by jointly sponsoring an Ethnographic Commission. 48 They reached an agreement stipulating that all material collected by the commission would be stored at the society's premises but remain the joint property of both parent bodies. 49 The Ethnographic Commission began its activity by recruiting zamlers (collectors) to gather folklore in their hometowns, primarily in Poland but throughout Eastern Europe and the Yiddish-speaking Diaspora. Its appeals recalled the urgency of earlier efforts to document

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traditional Jewish culture: "Help usgather together the treasures ofJewish folk creativity! ... Don't let them be lost! Gather them together, these remnants of the possessions that past generations have left us as an inheritance." 50 The response to such entreaties soon outpaced anything the commission's founders had anticipated. By the spring of 1926, 100 zamlers had sent in 3,000 items of folklore, and YIVO reported that "in many cities and shtetls we have devoted correspondents who send us mountains of material, above all for the Ethnographic Commission." 5 1 A teacher in Kaunas, Lithuania, pledged to spend his entire summer vacation seeking out folklore in a nearby shtetl, and a man from Grodno, Poland, wrote how "good and joyful in [his] heart" he felt to see young zamlers "who poke and rummage everywhere and in every corner." 52 Ironically, the collaboration of the Historic- Ethnographic Society and YNO was soon undone by the very success of the Ethnographic Commission. After a promising start, relations between the two organizations quickly deteriorated as the society failed to meet its monthly payments toward the commission's expenses. 53 In May 1926, YIVO quadrupled the commission's budget to accommodate its growing momentum, and the society fell ever further in arrears. 54 These tensions boiled over in October of that year, by which time the commission had received over 1o,ooo items but only cataloged 6,ooo. 55 When YIVO demanded the society's half of the commission's budget, the society responded by accusing YIVO of violating their agreement by conducting the work of"the Ethnographic Commission ofyour institute" without consulting its partner organization. It further charged that YIVO hoarded the collected folklore in the institute's offices. The society would no longer contribute its share of funding, it wrote, if the commission were to function solely as an arm ofYN0. 56 For its part, YIVO admitted that it had stored the material at its own premises to keep it more accessible but denied that it had acted unilaterally. 57 After this failed attempt at cooperation, conflict with YIVO persisted over other matters such as the disposition of material that the society had received from the widow of the writer I. L. Peretz. In a move orchestrated by YIVO, in 1927 Helena Peretz wrote the society requesting that her donation be transferred to the institute for its planned Peretz Museum. 58 When not distracted by such disputes, the

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Kuznitz Historic-Ethnographic Society continued its work independently. It sponsored lectures by local Jewish figures and in 1927 published the Muzikalisher pinkes (Musical Record Book), edited by Abraham Moyshe Bernstein. 59 It laid the greatest emphasis on its museum exhibits, which became its best-known component. The society prided itself on sponsoring "the only public Jewish museum in Poland," which was "visited by excursions, students, researchers, etc." 60 Yet, though it continued to receive small sums from An-sky's estate, the society functioned with a minimal budget and could not afford to pay its staff regularly. 61

The Society Eclipsed: The Controversy over An-sky's Bequest In 1928 the leaders of the Historic-Ethnographic Society and YIVO made another attempt to reach an accommodation. This effort was plagued from the start by controversy, however, in part because by this time the institute had come to overshadow its older cousin. Some feared that YIVO had achieved undue influence over the society's work and was aiming to absorb the smaller institution. The society and YIVO agreed to form a joint committee to draft a statement delineating the scope of each organization's work, yet before the committee even met some society members denounced it as a ruse to allow a takeover by YIVO. When the society announced at a February 1928 meeting that it had refrained from distributing an appeal "in order not to disturb the great work of the Yiddish Scientific Institute," a "heated debate" ensued over relations between the two institutions. 62 Shalit, the society's head, reassured those present that a merger would be impossible and that the joint committee's task would be "a matter of nothing more than normalizing and regulating the work of these two important societies." 63 Nevertheless, the apprehension expressed by some members of the Historic-Ethnographic Society seems not to have been entirely groundless. Shortly prior to the meeting of the joint committee, Weinreich and Reyzen, who were to represent YIVO on this body, were elected vice presidents of the society. 64 Some saw this as an attempt to pack the society's board with YIVO supporters, thus paving the way for

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the latter institution to dominate and ultimately take over the former. 65 At the same time, YIVO leaders discussed among themselves the desirability of merging the two groups, presumably under their control, and the possibility that this end could be achieved through "private influences." 66 In May 1928, the two did reach an agreement stipulating that the society and the institute would remain legally independent but create a joint body to oversee their museum, library, and archival collections. The society would become the custodian of all museum objects, while YIVO would take charge of all library and archival materials. They would collaborate on collection and fund-raising efforts but produce their own publications. 67 With this division oflabor, the two organizations hoped to perform complementary functions. As Shalit explained, "the Historic-Ethnographic Society possesses a large Jewish museum and has a special interest in all material and objects suitable for a Jewish museum. The institute is more concerned with collecting and analyzing scholarly material." 68 Thus, the society would focus on its strongest area, its public exhibits, while ceding to YIVO the documents central to the mission of a research institution. Despite the symmetry of the agreement, it was clear that YIVO would be the dominant member of this partnership. Just a month earlier the institute had founded a Building Committee to oversee the creation of its permanent home in Vilna. 69 Leaders of both organizations agreed that this new facility would be a more suitable locale for the society's collections than the rooms the kehillah currently provided. They thus anticipated that the future YIVO headquarters would also house the society and perhaps the Strashun Library as well. Shalit supported such a move, arguing that this arrangement "would create the possibility of concentrating in one place in Vilna a great scholarly and artistic treasure with conditions for further growth." 70 Thus, he foresaw a time when the society and YIVO would operate side by side as partners in an impressive new building, albeit one owned and run by YIVO. Despite this new agreement, tensions between the Historic-Ethnographic Society and YIVO soon resurfaced. The flashpoint this time was the long-delayed disposition of An-sky's bequest to the society, specifically the one-sixth share of his personal papers and the folklore

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gathered on his expeditions. An-sky left behind this archive when he fled the Russian Revolution, and thereafter it was essentially trapped in the Soviet Union. Mter his death in 1920, the society pressed its claim to this bequest, arguing that it had both a legal and a moral right to it as the only institution named in An-sky's memory. 71 It took years of effort by Shabad and the other executors of An-sky's estate to fulfill their late friend's wishes by securing a portion of the material from Russia via Lithuania, where it was stored for several years in a bank in Kaunas, finally bringing it to Vilna in the spring ofi929. 72 As soon as the An-sky bequest made its way to Vilna, it became a fresh source of controversy between the society and YIVO. Reyzen complained that, once it finally arrived due to "our efforts," Shalit immediately took possession of the coveted shipment on behalf of the society and would not allow YIVO affiliates to examine materials earmarked for them. 73 When Ber Rozen, a representative of the body overseeing Ansky's estate, came to Vilna to examine the society's collections, YIVO leaders took the opportunity to agitate for control of the An-sky archive. They prepared a memorandum describing how Rozen discovered the materials "in a horrible condition; the valuable objects wander in the damp, half-dark, stagnant, and dusty kehillah locale; rare books and manuscripts are eaten by mice, rot, and mold." As a result of the findings described in the memorandum, An-sky's executors asked the society to move its collections to YIVO's facilities. In response, Shalit and Wygodski refused to even discuss the matter. They stated that Rozen and his colleagues had no authority over the society and that the collections should, if anything, instead be transferred to the kehillah. YIVO leaders then charged that the society would rather see its precious materials destroyed through neglect than come under the institute's control. Countering the society's claim to be An-sky's legal and spiritual heir, they argued that for this valuable bequest to remain "in the possession of the inactive, fictitious, usurping society" amounted to "a dishonoring ofAn-sky's legacy" as well as a "screaming communal scandal." YIVO, they said, was entitled to the collections on both practical and moral grounds as the only body that could properly care for them as well as "the only institution that carries on broadly

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An -sky's lifework." 74 The matter was resolved with yet another document signed in December I930, whereby the An-sky material would be stored at YIVO but with safeguards acknowledging the society's ownership. Both organizations would approve an inventory of the archive, which would remain together as a clearly labeled unit, and society affiliates were assured unfettered access.7 5 Yet this outcome, clearly favorable to the institute, must have done little to reassure those who feared a ploy by YIVO to gain control of the society and its collections. Whatever detente this latest agreement might have promised, continued antagonisms were probably inevitable as the HistoricEthnographic Society was increasingly eclipsed by its younger rival, the YIVO Institute. This was the period of the institute's greatest growth; it established support groups throughout the world and seemed on its way to creating a stable financial base. In October 1929, its first conference drew thousands of participants, demonstrating both YIVO's status as a leading institution of Yiddish culture and its mass support among East European Jewry. At the conference, the institute laid the cornerstone of its new headquarters, a large modern building on a treefilled plot.76 Meanwhile, the society continued to occupy rooms provided by the kehillah in its building at 7 Orzeszkowa Street. In I925 the nascent YIVO had turned to the society for storage space. Four years later the society implicitly acknowledged the institute's dominant role when it agreed in principle to relocate to the new YIVO building and, in the meantime, to store its prize possession, An-sky's bequest, at YIVO's better equipped offices. In contrast to tl1e dynamic picture presented by YIVO, the budget of the Historic-Ethnographic Society did not increase in these years and remained a small fraction of the institute's_77 The society continued to hold occasional lectures and to gather folklore material, which it placed "on deposit" at YIVO, but its plans for a journal once again failed to bear fruit.7 8 It continued to focus on its function as a museum, displaying its collections in the modest rooms provided by the kehillah. Yet even this limited activity was sometimes beyond its financial means, and the society was eventually forced once again to close its exhibits to the public.79

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Figure28. The exterior and front yard of the YIVO building on Wiwulskiego Street, Vilna. SOURCE : from the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, Record ID II403, Collection PO, Catalogue No. 5814, Frame 37082.

The Search for Support: Building Ties to the Kehillah In the winter of 1931-32, the Historic-Ethnographic Society made a fresh attempt to revive its work. It elected a new leadership, one apparently without the close ties to YIVO that had earlier generated controversy, although some charged that YIVO did not willingly give up its position of influence on the society's board.8 0 School excursions, researchers, and the general public could once again visit the society's museum, archives, and library of several thousand volumes. 81 At the same time, university students with an interest in Jewish history established an "academic seminar" at the society where they met for lectures and discussions. 82 Citing these signs of renewed vigor, the society's leaders asserted that their organization had "risen from the dead"

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and was proceeding in a "terrifically energetic and intensive" manner. 83 Others seemed to concur, because the society's membership expanded to about 300 individuals, and its main sources of financial supportthe executors of An-sky's estate and the Vilna Jewish kehillah-agreed to continue their funding. 84 As they attempted to regain their momentum, the society's leaders sought a niche in a cultural landscape dominated by YIVO as well as a firm financial footing in the worsening poverty of 1930s Poland. The strategy they adopted was to build on their long-standing ties to the Vilna kehillah. They asked the kehillah to provide them with larger and more frequent subsidies and to renovate the society's offices, ironically echoing YIVO's earlier argument that poor conditions there were endangering important documents and artifacts. The society based its appeals on the claim that the kehillah was responsible for these collections since it was, in fact, their owner. The society's statutes specified that, were it ever liquidated, the Tsedakah Gedolah (Great Charity), Vilna's main charitable organization, would be its legal heir. Since the property of the Tsedakah Gedolah had passed to the kehillah in 1931, so too had the obligation to care for the collections should the society prove unable to do so-which would be the case were additional funding not forthcoming. Thus, the society's leaders concluded, "the library and archives of the Historic-Ethnographic Society must be considered [the kehillah's] factual and legal property." 85 Moreover, they maintained, the kehillah had not only a legal but a moral duty toward their organization. These materials ultimately belonged to the Jews ofVilna, through whom and for whom they had been gathered. Since the kehillah was the representative body ofVilna Jewry, it had an obligation to safeguard the society and its collections. Such claims to communal support echoed arguments made 20 years earlier by the society's predecessors. Before World War I, the Tsedakah Gedolah had agreed to provide an apartment for the Lovers of Jewish Antiquities for its "Jewish national museum." 86 In a funding appeal of I9I8, the Historical Commission had described itself as the "archive of the kehillah" as well as the "central archive of Lithuanian Jewry." 87 The society adopted a similar approach in 1925 when it asked the kehillah for a subsidy, arguing that it functioned as a municipal museum and archive

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Kuznitz "without which a Jewish national community [kehillah] cannot exist."88 The same logic now impelled the historian Israel Klausner, then a young member of the society, when he complained that the HistoricEthnographic Society as well as the Strashun Library had been "shoved into the shadows." The problem, according to Klausner, was that they were not were funded, as they rightly should be, by the "institution of Jewish autonomy," the kehillah, and the "national[ly minded] intelligentsia." They were thus forced to rely on the goodwill of individuals when they required the systematic support of the Vilna Jewish population and its leadership. 89 Such arguments reflected the disappointment ofJewish activists who had originally hoped to receive government funds for their cultural and educational institutions as stipulated in the Minorities Treaties. When Polish authorities failed to fulfill their obligations, these institutions were forced to find alternate means of covering their budgets. In essence, tl1e activists argued that organizations such as the HistoricEthnographic Society served a public function and thus deserved public support. If they did not receive monies from the Polish government, and if Jews did not have a government of their own to provide funding, then Jewish individuals and their representative bodies had a collective duty to maintain such organizations voluntarily. Significantly, a similar argument was already being used by YIVO's leaders in their own quest for financial solvency. In 1928 they began a campaign to attract regular annual subsidies from both Polish city governments and Jewish kehillahs. To the former, they argued that YIVO deserved a share of the tax dollars paid by Polish Jewish citizens. To the latter, they wrote that YIVO's work was "a matter of organized Jewish society [gezelshaftlekhkayt]" that functioned "in the interest of the entire Jewish public." In the case of a sovereign people, a national academy, library, and university would be publicly funded. Since YIVO filled all of these functions, they argued, it too should be supported by all Yiddishspeaking Jews. 90 Such appeals met with some success among both Polish municipalities and Jewish kehillahs, at least until the impact of the worldwide economic depression of the 1930s made itself fully felt. 91 In the case of the Historic-Ethnographic Society, the Vilna kehillah agreed to its request

An-sky's Legacy for additional subsidies and a renovation of its facilities. 92 Furthermore, the kehillah took this argument to its logical conclusion and decided to assume not only responsibility for but also ownership of the society's collections. In November 1934 the society voted to approve this plan, and a few months later its holdings were legally transferred to the kehillah, which agreed to pay tor their upkeep. 93 No longer able to function as an independent institution, the society's leaders apparently preferred the control of the kehillah to that of their long-standing rival, the YIVO Institute. The stature of Wygodski, the head of the kehillah as well as a prominent member of the society, no doubt facilitated the alliance between two bodies in which he played a leading role. In contrast to the Yiddishist YIVO, moreover, both the society and the kehillah were dominated by those with Zionist leanings. 94 Now under the auspices of the kehillah, the Historic- Ethnographic Society carried on its work in its renovated locale. During the 1930s it suffered the effects of the Depression along with other East European institutions, and, although it still received occasional funds from An -sky's estate, its income dropped to a fraction of its modest budget of the previous decade. 95 The society continued to spar with YIVO in these years even as it made plans to take back collections still stored at the YIVO premises. 96 In 1935, for example, it responded indignantly to the institute's long-standing claim to its Peretz documents, retorting that An-sky materials remained improperly "on deposit" at YNO years after having been "borrowed" by Weinreich and Reyzen. 97 The society likewise took offense at a YIVO questionnaire on pinkasim, arguing that it had already announced a similar project and thus that the institute was once again impinging on its prerogative. 98 Despite these distractions and material constraints, in the late 1930s the Historic-Ethnographic Society continued to catalog its collections, welcome school groups to its museum, and hold lectures on historical topics. Its library grew to 7,500 books while its archives received important new materials such as records of the Vilna kehillah. 99 It also sought to preserve historic resources in Vilna, coming to the aid of a venerable kloyz (small prayer room or study house) in danger of losing its important artifacts in a bank foreclosure. 100 In 1937 the society finally realized long-standing plans to publish its own periodical. Fun noentn

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over (From the Recent Past), edited by Shalit, claimed to be "the first attempt at a cultural-historical journal in Yiddish." Focusing on Jewish life in Eastern Europe during the preceding hundred years, it featured original research as well as historical documents and memoirs drawn largely from the society's own collections. 101 Although it maintained sections devoted to folklore and literature, the society remained best known for its exhibits; indeed, it was sometimes referred to colloquially as the "An-sky Museum." 102 Thus, throughout its history, the Historic-Ethnographic Society continued to serve as a fitting memorial to its founding father.

Conclusion: Defining Jewish Community and Culture The Historic-Ethnographic Society and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research shared a similar vision as they began their activity in Vilna in the wake ofWorld War I. Both took up An-sky's work of documenting traditional Jewish culture, a task that seemed increasingly pressing as the destruction of war compounded the effects of urbanization, secularization, and modernization. Yet, like An-sky himself, they were equally committed to using folklore and history as the building blocks of a fully modern Jewish culture. In their attempts to establish a secure financial base, both the society and YIVO argued that the vibrant cultural life to which they aspired could only be sustained when assured of regular funding. In the absence of a government of their own, and with the failure of the states of Eastern Europe to abide by the Minorities Treaties, they turned inward to their constituency among Yiddish-speaking Jews. Organizations such as the society and YIVO functioned as de facto national institutions, their leaders argued, and thus deserved support from the Jewish community as a whole. Sharing these common assumptions, and with an overlapping roster of active members, the Historic- Ethnographic Society and YNO might have seemed poised to bolster each other's work. Vilna Jewry in this period was known for its vitality and variety-what the scholar Arcadius Kahan terms a "hypertrophy of organization"-with a number of institutions, often of different ideological stripes, fulfilling similar func-

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tions. Kahan argues that this multiplicity was in fact highly productive, leading to a spirit of friendly competition that inspired Vilna activists to greater heights of dedication. 103 Yet rather than welcoming duplication of effort as a spur to increased activity, the leaders of these two organizations each diverted considerable energy to undoing their rival, energy that could conceivably have been put to more useful ends. It is difficult to imagine that the recurrent, often bitter quarrels between the society and YIVO ultimately advanced their shared goals. Rather, their many failed attempts at cooperation, as well as the apparent efforts ofYIVO to dominate and potentially absorb the society, suggest that Vilna activists saw themselves as competing for a limited pool of resources: materials such as the An -sky archive, the funds forthcoming for cultural work, and the energies of an overwhelmingly volunteer labor force. Ultimately, the Historic-Ethnographic Society and YIVO reached an accommodation by delineating distinct but complementary roles. One such attempt \vas the decision of the society to concentrate on museum work and leave to YIVO the functions of a library and archive. Another was the unofficial understanding that the two organizations would serve separate constituencies. Both the society and YIVO argued that the Jewish public had an obligation to support their work, but they defined that public in different terms. While it often described its headquarters as the pride ofJewish Vilna, YIVO leaders insisted that "the Yiddish Scientific Institute is no local instihltion," but rather an international center for Yiddish cultural and educational activity. 104 They thus appealed for support throughout Poland and Eastern Europe as well as emigrant communities from North America to South Africa. As the highest authority ofYiddish culture YIVO aspired to fill an almost governmental function for all of stateless Yiddish-speaking Jewry, what Reyzen called "the intellechlal ingathering of the exiles for the international Jewish nation." 105 Whereas YIVO cast as wide a net as possible, the HistoricEthnographic Society chose a different route. It happily embraced the title oflocal Vilna institution, then argued that, as such, it deserved the support of the local community. By this term it meant both the aggregate ofVilna Jewry and more specifically the Vilna Jewish kehillah, the democratically elected representative body that An-sky himself had

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Kuznitz helped to create. True, the pride of the society's collections, its share of An-sky's archive, originated not in Vilna or Lithuania but in other parts of the Pale of Settlement. Yet it also possessed many artifacts gathered in Vilna and the immediate region, in particular its rich documentation of the years ofWorld War I. The society also came to function as a municipal archive, housing the kehillah's own records as well as important collections generated by the city's renowned institutions such as the Vilna Rabbinical School and the Romm Press. Its journal, Fun noentn over, featured many articles on Vilna's history and notable personalities. Moreover, as the society came to focus on its museum collections, its emphasis on material culture tied it tangibly to its particular time and place. The ritual, art, and household objects on display in the An-sky Museum illustrated more vividly than could documents alone the rootedness ofJewish life in its specific, East European setting. When the Historic-Ethnographic Society chose this focus, it was perhaps making a virtue of necessity, because it originally planned a broader scope for its work. In 1921 the society's leaders hoped that their first major publication, the Pinkes, would include several cities in the region ofLithuania. 106 Yet as they faced the reality oflimited resources, they increasingly set their sights closer to home. When, in 1922, Frenkel set out to document Jewish antiquities in other Polish cities, Shabad argued that the society should deal first of all with endangered artifacts in Vilna itself. 107 By 1925 the society concluded that "Vilna . . . is the most suitable location for studying Jewish history and ethnography." 108 At that time it officially changed its original name, the Jewish Historic-Ethnographic Society for Lithuania and White Russia, to the An-sky Vilna Jewish Historic-Ethnographic Society, reflecting its close ties to both its hometown and its deceased founder. 109 Yet if the Historic-Ethnographic Society narrowed its focus by stressing its links to Vilna, it would be wrong to label it the parochial cousin of the cosmopolitan YIVO. The institute may have had the broader geographical reach, but it was the work of the society that bespoke the more inclusive vision of Jewish culture. YIVO leaders often affirmed their interest in treating all areas of Jewish life and sometimes went to great lengths to ensure that their research and collection efforts were comprehensive in scope.U 0 Nevertheless, they devoted most of

An-sky's Legacy their attention to topics related to secular Yiddish culture, and they largely drew their support from adherents of the Yiddishist left. l l l Opponents frequently accused the institute of an anti-Zionist stance, among them Klausner, who portrays the society as a Zionist counterpart to the Yiddishist YIVO and describes the interactions between the two organizations as driven by ideological rivalry. He casts their repeated conflicts as attempts by YIVO to take control of its competitor by packing the society's predominantly Zionist leadership with Yiddishists. ll2 Certainly, political as well as personal animosities exacerbated tensions between the society and YIVO, just as the overlapping personnel and orientation of the society and the kehillah must have facilitated their collaboration. Moreover, such divisions became starker by the early 1930s, when Jewish life in Poland became increasingly polarized and YIVO supporters left the society's board. Nevertheless, ideological conflict cannot fully explain the stormy relationship between the two organizations. Klausner's stress on the hostility between the Yiddishist and Zionist camps yields a view ofVilna Jewish life as lacking in nuance as Kahan's overly sanguine portrait, where such hostility is virtually absent. 113 Ironically, Klausner's description of the Historic-Ethnographic Society, an institution he championed, fails to do it justice. While a majority of its leadership had Zionist sympathies, it included Yiddishists as well as Zionists, traditionalists as well as secularists. Similarly broad was the scope of its collections, which documented all periods of Jewish history from ancient to modern as well as intellectual, religious, and daily life. The society boasted that its reading room was the only venue in Vilna where one could peruse the Jewish press in Hebrew, Yiddish, and European languages from Poland, Israel, and the United States, while its Literature Section comprised separate divisions for Talmudic, Hebrew, and Yiddish material. 114 The Historic-Ethnographic Society was much more than a Zionist organization; to the extent possible given its very limited means, it sought to reflect the entire Jewish experience. Paradoxically, it was in part the society's very rootedness in its local setting that made possible this more catholic approach. The city of Vilna was long renowned as a center ofJewish intellectual activity as embodied in the figure of the Vilna Gaon, the leader of the Mitnagdic

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Kuznitz opposition to Hasidism. Since the Mitnagdim were more open to secular learning than their Hasidic counterparts, the transition to the Haskalah and later to modern Jewish culture was less contentious in Vilna than elsewhere in Eastern Europe. In addition, its location in the multiethnic region of the Polish kresy (borderlands) historically precluded the emergence of a single dominant non-Jewish culture, discouraging assimilation and hence preserving the use of Yiddish among all social classes. With its relative absence of either Hasidim or assimilated Jews and its acceptance ofYiddish as a lingua franca even among Zionists, the Vilna Jewish community enjoyed a relative lack of internal division. 115 In the interwar period, communal activists attempted to build on this heritage by embracing all the disparate elements ofVilna's past and present. One author asked rhetorically what represented the true essence of the city: the rabbi, the maskil, or the Bundist? He replied that all were links in the "golden chain" ofVilna Jewry, all equally important parts of "nusekh vilne [the Vilna style]." 116 The leaders of the Historic-Ethnographic Society fully concurred in this view, for they themselves helped to create it. Shalit described his hometown as "oldnew Vilna ... the Vilna of Torah and Haskalah ... [and] of the Jewish labor movement." 117 In practice, of course, these very real divisions were not bridged as easily as in the rhetoric ofShalit and his colleagues. Yet, as we have seen, the conflicts that did emerge were often the result of clashing personalities as much as of political ideology. Moreover, the concept of such a synthesis ofJewish tradition and modernity, however idealized, was firmly rooted in the city and its own self-image. Ifits Vilna setting was one key influence on the work of the HistoricEthnographic Society, the other was the figure of its founder. Indeed, one writer attributed the tone ofVilna's communal affairs in this period in part to the moral authority of An-sky's presence during his brief sojourn there.l 18 An-sky's insistence on inclusiveness and impartiality continued to reverberate in Vilna long after his departure from the city. The founders of the Historic-Ethnographic Society never forgot that it was An-sky who first demanded that its leadership be nonpartisan and who established its broad mandate to document all areas of Jewish life. 119 Mter his death, friends recalled him as a man who drew no

An-sky's Legacy

distinctions based on political or religious affiliation, a man imbued with "honor and love for everything that flows out of a Jewish source." 120 At a meeting to discuss the Balfour Declaration, one wrote, he dismayed the Bundists present with his support of Zionism and the Zionists with his praise of the Bund. 121 Lunski described An-sky's rising to defend yeshiva students by announcing, "I love my entire people, all of its classes." Other former colleagues remembered the day he delivered a eulogy for a murdered Jewish communist-despite his own persecution at the hands of the Bolsheviks-then went home to write an impassioned obituary for a deceased Zionist leader. 122 As Shalit wrote, An-sky could not abandon "a single Jewish national-cultural value, a single ring in the thousands-years-old culture of the Jewish people and its creative sprit." 123 If An-sky underwent many transformations in the course of his career, refashioning everything from his name to his political loyalties, he ended his life as a symbol of"true kol-yisroel [pan-Jewish] politics [and) unity." 124 It was this image that lived on among those who had known him in Vilna and those who followed in his footsteps, carrying on the work that he had begun. In the end, it was his expansive vision ofJewish culture and community, one that transcended ideological, political, and religious boundaries, that An-sky bequeathed to the HistoricEthnographic Society and that remained his most lasting legacy.

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Sixteen The Father of Jewish Ethnography? Jack Kugelmass

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It is commonplace to consider S. An-sky the father of Jewish ethnography. Yet, when asked to discuss the impact of An-sky on Jewish anthropology, I was hard pressed to come up with a solid genealogical connection between so ostensive a progenitor and the field as it exists today. The fact is that anthropology in this country is historically influenced primarily by West and Central European scholarship (though there was some contact \Vith others outside that region) 1 with a strong sense of a founding ancestor in the form of Franz Boas, himself a German Jew who arrived in the United States in 1884 at age 26, and who became a permanent resident four years later. 2 Under Boas, anthropology saw itself as scientific and comparative in orientation. Its primary agenda was to counteract racism by disputing the existence of any intrinsic links between language, culture, and race. Given Boas's own experience with antisemitism in German universities,3 and given similar experiences by members of his circle at American universities, these founding anthropologists had ample reason to shy away from Jewish subjects. 4 Boas's one foray into a Jewish subject stemmed from his early physical anthropological work-a pilot study in 1908 of East European Jewish boys in New York schools. The project demonstrated that, contrary to accepted belief, the structure of the skull was not impervious to environment and that the heads of immigrant children were growing longer in the American environment. 5 Boas, however, had no interest in Jews as a culture, relegated his concern for salvage (that is, collecting specimens of material culture and expressive behavior) to the primitive tribes (in a technological sense) who were

The Father ofJewish Ethnography?

Figure 29. Old men in the synagogue in Annopol have a drink and tell An-sky stories of the miracles ofZusia of Annopol. Photo taken in 1912. SOURCE: MAE RAN, "Snimki Evreiskoi Etnograficheskoi ekspeditsii im. barona Goratsiia Osipovicha Gintsburga" (July r- October 15, 1912), collection #2152, photograph 290; contributed by Benjamin Lukin.

threatened with extinction, and saw civilized culture and its proper direction in universalist rather than particularist terms. If he identified himself in terms of nationality, it was as a German American rather than a Jewish American, something not uncommon for German-Jewish Americans before World War I. 6 Because Boas died in 1942, we do not know what impact, if any, the Shoah would have had on his thinking. But we do know that he, and other Jewish members ofhis circle-many of whom were Jews-were very active in the struggle against Nazism.7 The sources of influence are somewhat different in the case of folklore studies, in part because the discipline has greater credibility in East and Central Europe where the question of nationhood- one of the key issues the field has served8-remained a more persistent problematic and where Johann Herder's concept of romantic nationalism kindled by folk poetry had considerable influence well beyond the borders of

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Kugelmass Germany. 9 In the West, and particularly in America, despite evident interest in the field by Boas himself, the study of folklore has been significantly eclipsed by anthropology and particularly so when the concern for description (the transcription of authentic cultural texts and language that characterized Boas and his circle) was itself eclipsed by an increasingly scientific model and the search for regularitiesparticularly process and structure within and across cultures. Moreover, like An-sky's work, folklore studies never built its foundation upon a concept of the Other. Quite the contrary. The folk as repository of authentic national or regional traditions is central to the field, and practitioners see themselves as engaging in significant acts of salvage if not out and out redemption. (Hence the early interest in American Indian folklore, a type of concern that European folklorists would relegate to their ethnographer colleagues under whose purview "savage" peoples fell.) 10 But even beyond its tie to a "folk," folklore, in the words ofRoger Abrahams, "carries an acknowledgment of the past into the present." 11 This is not to say that salvage is absent from anthropology or that it does not share with folklore a certain discomfort with what Boas called "the overbearing self-sufficiency of modern culture." 12 Nevertheless, anthropology is rooted in cultural contact, particularly the colonial encounter and its repercussions on subject populations, including the struggle of postcolonial cultures-and certainly in regard to its European proponents-and less commonly seeks its Other from within. Yet with large numbers of indigenous peoples still living concurrent with the birth of anthropology in the United States, American anthropology's subject at first was a domestic Other whose cultures were threatened and therefore needed the intervention of a concerned profession to engage in the work of salvage. 13 As George Stocking, the foremost historian ofAmerican anthropology, remarked: Thus the special character of "salvage ethnography" was largely the product of a generalized tradition of ethnographic assumption, the limitations of funding, the object-orientation of museums, the document-orientation of humanistic science-as well as the condition of American Indians, who after three centuries of ethnocidal conflict had been reduced to a marginal reservation existence, their traditional

The Father ofJewish Ethnography? cultures surviving more vividly in memory than in the drab reality of daily life. 14 The purview of American anthropology extended outward in conjunction with the growth of American hegemony during and after World War II. Stocking noted some evidence of research beyond North America during the interwar period, certainly into the Pacific, but cautioned that Robert Lowie, the editor of the profession's prime publication, American Anthropologist, provided figures in 1934 on the areal distribution ofarticles published in the journal indicating that only onefifth concerned areas outside North America and that many of these were not based on field research. 15 A decade later, the situation had changed. The war years generated a tremendous need for applied anthropology: academic- based anthropologists trained military personnel or engaged in war-related research while others served with the armed forces in the field. The period witnessed a tremendous boom in employment opportunities for anthropologists, both in applied fields and in the emerging area studies programs. 16 Even after the war, the field itself was still very small. In 1947 there were only 408 members of the American Anthropological Association. By 1976 that figure had reached 2,526. The increase was partly the result of the GI Bill, which paid for many veterans without the means to get a college and sometimes graduate school education; later, the veterans' baby-boomer children would inundate American universities and generate a tremendous need for institutional expansion through faculty recruitment. The new era also brought changes in how Americans thought about the world. The war exposed millions of Americans to other lands and cultures that, in the words of Robert Murphy, "broke the insularity of the American population." 17 Americans were awakened to cultural diversity, and some developed a longing to understand other cultures. But the prime areas of anthropological research that would follow from this (the Pacific, Latin America, and Africa) were not significant sites ofJewish settlement-certainly not in the rural areas of Latin America that interested anthropologists, nor in the continent's urban slums on which a later generation would focus some attention.

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Given the above trajectory, it is not surprising that, though Jews were prominent among America's first circle of anthropologists, their output on Jewish subjects was extremely slight, with only scattered publications on Jewish subjects and these mostly outside the central journals of the field. One very rare exception to this was the I952 volume by Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, Life Is with People-a work that is ostensibly about salvage in that it sought, through the use of refugee informants, to recreate the quintessential East European Jewish settlement type, the shtetl. Published by the leading Jewish publisher of the day and in print ever since its first appearance, the book can make a fair claim as a key text in American Jewish culture. 18 By this I mean that the text itself is revelatory of the historical moment that produced itnamely the Shoah and an initial American Jewish response to the loss of its East European Jewish mother culture. Yet the book's impact is much more evident as an American Jewish cultural text than it is as an American Jewish anthropological text. 19 The project grew out of a confluence of anthropological concerns-refugee populations and the cultures they represent-and the significant presence ofJews among them, particularly among the more gifted informants. The resulting text managed to create a land imaginaire, a yiddishland whose primary settlement type was the shtetl, conceived here as a preindustrial backwater hermetically disconnected from larger polity and majority population. To some degree, that land imaginaire represents the limitations of anthropology of its day-certainly of Margaret Mead, who supervised the research team and whose ideal research site was the village or small community. 20 In the way this project conceived of East European Jewry, there is some parallel with An-sky's principal expeditionindeed, even its sense of salvage. But whereas An-sky collected material in situ and framed the collecting in time and space, Life Is with People did nothing of the kind. What it produced instead, as Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblett has suggested, was "a celebration of a lost world ... more literary than historical in character." 21 Anthropology subsequently moved on to other peoples and other crises-living people who could still be studied in situ. Life Is with People was the tail end of a kind of Boasian anthropology. The comparative thrust of Boas's work would soon be joined to other schools

The Father of Jewish Ethnography? of thought and theoretical orientations, particularly those from Britain and, later, France. Some anthropologists would foray into Jewish subjects by applying new methodologies to old subjects (analyses ofJewish texts and customs, for example). And some would treat the new State of Israel, its developing institutions, and its social and cultural diversity as legitimate areas for anthropological research. Most of that work would lead to academic careers within Israel itself. The reasons for this are complex, stemming in part from the uses of anthropology in an immigrant state and in part from the continuing absence of Jews elsewhere as a subject of anthropology. In this regard I can only surmise that the absence comes from the configuration of anthropology's subjects in terms of area studies and indigenousness, whereas the counterconstruct of diaspora emerges as anthropology's subject very late and is tied to postmodern theory such as hybridity and poststructuralism. Nevertheless, in a field in which funding is so closely tied to area studies, the disconnection between Jews and area is a longstanding and continuing source of Jewish delegitimation as an anthropological subject.

Originating in East and Central Europe, the field of Yiddish studies was much more partial to folkloristics than to anthropology. An-sky's ethnographic work entered my consciousness as a young graduate student at the Max Weinreich Center. Influenced by the works of Mary Douglas and Victor Turner, I remember trying to write a paper on Jewish magic and looking for ethnographic material on incantations and practitioners of folk medicine, so I turned for information to Abram Rechtman's Yidishe etnografye un folklor. The section on exorcists is as fascinating now as it was back then: Generally in every city and town in the Ukraine there were old women to whom people would turn in time of trouble, for specific misfortune. Almost all pregnant women, especially first timers, were under their purview and influence. People even believed they not only could foretell whether a child would be a boy or a girl but also possessed the means to affect the sex of the child, to determine whether it would be a boy or a girl. These women were familiar with various incantations,

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Kugelmass and for every problem they knew charms and potions tried and true. They could counteract an evil eye, treat tooth ache, or cure a sprained foot, an abscess, roseola, a dog bite, epilepsy, and other ailments; they did magic with knives, with socks and combs; they poured wax and lead; they "rolled eggs" tor the frightened, tore the "waist" from undershirts, and had hundreds of other charms and remedies. The expedition succeeded in recording and collecting a significant number of incantations, charms, and talismans for all kinds of ailments. Considerable difficulty accompanied the collecting and recording of this kind of material. The exorcists were very reluctant to teach anyone, even close relatives, any of their incantations, or to reveal a single remedy or charm. There was a belief that, as soon as an incantation is learned or a charm is revealed to someone who does not believe in it, the power of the incantation is nullified, and there is even danger that when the revealer tries to use it again she herself will be hurt. We used various means to retrieve the incantations from the exorcists. Often one of us would pretend to be ill, lie in bed, and call for a healer. Sometimes she poured wax, sometimes counteracted an evil eye, etc. One of us sat in a corner and, to the degree he could, transcribed the incantations. The photographer could almost always take pictures. Sometimes, An-sky would go to one of the old women and complain to her about his hard luck; he would relate that he had once been a prosperous merchant but now, alas, he has fallen on hard times and has no source of livelihood. He, therefore, has come to her so that she might teach him some of her incantations and give him some of her charms and remedies so that he might earn a living. An-sky indicated that he was not looking for a freebie and could pay something. An-sky's quivering voice and straight talk generally worked. Theelderly women took to him, showed pity, and, since they were earning something and wanted to receive even more, finally agreed that Ansky could transcribe the incantations that they related to him. One till!e I was present during such negotiations. An-sky took me with him under the pretext that, since he could not write legibly and had problems with his eyesight, he was bringing his nephew so that I would do the writing. I remember that, when we were seated with the old woman, she blessed An-sky and made a wish that God should send him income from afar. 22

The Father ofJewish Ethnography?

I have long thought about this passage, particularly because as an aspiring anthropologist I believed the very brazenness and deception was so far from my own character-at least at that time. Years later, however, when I began to do a series of ethnographies of life in New York City, I would borrow from it-particularly the work I did among psychics. Unlike An-sky, however, I went a step further. I learned to practice the very techniques of the psychics and tried them out on the people I was studying. Although the study had no connection to anything East European or Jewish, I felt An-sky's presence throughout it, almost as a legitimation of what otherwise seemed a rather silly endeavor of study. What made much less of an impression on me at the time I first read Rechtman, but seems much more poignant in rereading the book now, is not so much the elements of folklore that the An-sky expedition recorded but the fact that they were interspersed among a sustained inquiry into the social history of the various localities, their institutions, and material culture. I seem to have remembered the Rechtman volume not as a summary of the ethnographic work of the expedition but as an ethnographic counterpart to The Dybbuk. Indeed, what surprises me is just how relevant the An-sky material is to contemporary ethnographic inquiry-certainly in regard to recent interest in social history-albeit minus the sense of practice and agency that has, since the 198os, become the hallmark of anthropology. 23 (Indeed, in this sense, the material is undoubtedly very dated.) The fact that the expedition apparently produced considerable material that goes well beyond the folkloric suggests just how distinct the ethnographer/scholar (who worked within a larger collectivity that included scholars from various disciplines)24 is from the ethnographer/playwright (who works alone within his own imagination) and how readily we conflate the two. If An-sky's actual impact on Jewish anthropology is negligible, why do we remember him as a progenitor? Clearly the actual texts of the expedition do not create the synonymy, because they have been inaccessible for most of the past century, the available material in Yiddish is beyond the linguistic competence of most, and the nature of the material-annual and life-cycle customs-is not of much interest to contemporary anthropology. The reason lies in a series of other factors.

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Figure3o. Hanukkah menorah collected during the expedition. Photo by Solomon Yudovin. SOURCE: An-sky archive, Petersburg Judaica.

Certainly the most significant one is the very existence of the expedition and its documentation. And so there remains a sense of salvage and of repository or kind of treasure trove - very powerful images for a culture radically altered by historical circumstances and for a long time cut off from the successor centers ofJewish cultural and social life outside ofEastern Europe. It is interesting to note that, though Jewish anthropology emerged piecemeal, without a central school, archive, or journal,2 5 in subsequent decades it has not been a project of salvage. This is probably because of a lack of overarching sense of crisis vis-a-vis its subject. In that sense, schisms exist between the origins of Jewish ethnography in the East European Jewish context, the emergence of a sustained Jewish anthropology in Israel, and the rather recent development of an increasingly prolific though still disjointed Jewish anthropology in the United States, each of which have responded to very difference impetuses and influences. Neither the American nor the Israeli segments of the field profess any sense of going back to the folk, and salvage in the Israeli context runs absolutely contrary to the origins of its anthropologynamely, the promotion of settlement and adjustment within a modern-

The Father of Jewish Ethnography?

izing state or in the analysis of the problems of its prime utopian institution: the kibbutz. An-sky's stature as progenitor probably has more to do with his pseudo-ethnography than with his ethnography. This points to the rhetorical style of The Dybbuk, its use of ethnographic realism, 26 and the canonical status of the play in Jewish literature, particularly because as a performed and rather stark theatrical piece it is far more accessible than any other classic Jewish literary text. Yet its subtext of death makes the piece effective as a representative work of European Jewish literature-both pre- and post-Holocaust, with love universalizing an ostensibly Jewish text. So it should not be surprising that contemporary cultural productions, including musical performances that evoke the Old World, frequently make use of the play's subtitle and sometimes, too, of its style of representation.U A final point about the disjuncture between An-sky and contemporary Jewish anthropology has to do with the enormous difference between the cultural climates in which they emerged. The mission or charge of An-sky's ethnographic expedition and the lack thereof of Jewish anthropology today speaks volumes about the transformation in cultural self-awareness of Western Jewry over the past century-and, along with it, a peculiar transformation not just of collective memory but more particularly of what and whom are designated as its repository. Clearly, in the early twentieth century, the notion of cultural crisis and the anticipation of catastrophic loss brought on through emigration, pogrom, and assimilation generated a peculiar kind of ethnographic work. 28 That crisis was highlighted by the social position of the Jew within East and Central European society, the increasing sense of self as pariah, the lack of state support for Jewish culture, and, therefore, the necessity of creating support by an emerging Jewish social and cultural elite. None of these conditions prevail today. Rantings by some sociologists notwithstanding, contemporary Jewry scarcely sees itself as being in jeopardy-though if cultural literacy were any indication, the predicament is much more acute at the beginning of the third millennium than it was at the end of the second. Why no sense of crisis? The reasons are multifaceted: first, because various state agencies for cultural intervention do exist today; second,

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the public and private institutions of a very powerful state have also become agents in the preservation and dissemination ofJewish culture via Jewish studies programs and federal grant agencies; third, because traditionalist forms of Judaism have proven themselves quite resilient; fourth, because the relative wealth of Western Jewry has enabled the emergence and sustenance of a large number of communal institutions that promote and preserve Jewish culture, such as museums and publishing houses; and fifth, because contemporary trends of multiculturalism have created new markets for Jewish cultural activity. All of these factors today mask what would otherwise be considered a significant crisis of cultural continuity. My point is that the critical disjuncture between An-sky's anthropology and American, West European, or Israeli anthropology is not really methodological, theoretical, or even the cultural gulf between an East European and a West European social science. The real gulf lies in the very idea of cultural crisis and return that underlay An-sky's work and in the resulting fusion of Jewish folk culture with extra-ethnic populist politics. In his eloquent summary of An-sky's evolution from Jew to Russian populist to Jewish literatus, David Roskies concludes, "his return, in all its complexity, was the paradigm for the Jewish cultural renaissance as a whole. The hero of the modern age was a bornagain Jew in a Judaism of his own remaking." 29 Although apparently not inspired by him 30 (and this confirms my argument about the disjuncture between An-sky and the emergence of Jewish anthropology), at least one major Jewish anthropological work closely parallels An-sky's-in its formulation as "return," its concern for salvage, and its transmission to us via the rhetoric of ethnographic realism albeit through dramaturgical techniques that make the work as much one of fiction as it is ethnographic. Indeed, the work's heavy reliance on literary techniques hints, I believe, at the underlying project the author undertakes to be born again in a Judaism of her own making. Here I am speaking of a key text in American Jewish culture, Barbara Myerhoff's Number Our Days. Compare, tor example, Ansky's description of Jewish ethnopoetics-the Oral Torah of Jewish folklore that "places spiritual integrity above the material, and certainly above the physical" 31-with the following observation Myerhoff makes

The Father ofJewish Ethnography? early in her study. It is typical of the strategy she uses throughout the text: As usual, Basha had a myseh [story] on the subject, told to her by her grandmother. Paraphrased, it went as follows: Once there was a rich man who decided he would give all his money to his son as soon as the boy was grown instead of following the custom of making the boy wait till the father's death to inherit. He did this, but soon the son began to neglect his elderly father, and one day the son put him out of the house. The old man left and came back many years later. He saw his little grandson playing outside the house and told the child who he was. "Fetch me a cloak, child," he said, "because I am cold and poor." The little boy rummaged in the attic for an old cloak and was cutting it in half when his father came in. "What are you doing, child?" he asked. "Father, I am going to give half of the cloak to my grandfather and keep the other half for you for the time when I am grown up and you have grown old."

Myerhoff then notes, What the Center people taught me went beyond knowledge about old age. In addition they provided a model of an alternative lifestyle, built on values in many ways antithetical to those commonly esteemed by contemporary Americans. The usual markers of success were anathema to them-wealth, power, physical beauty, youth, mobility, security, social status-all were out of the question. Lacking hope for change, improvement, without a future, they had devised a counterworld, inventing their own version of what made "the good life." It was built on their veneration for their religious and cultural membership and it was full of meaning, intensity, and consciousness. This they had managed on their own, creating a nearly invisible, rundown, tiny world, containing a major lesson for any who would attend it. It was not the first time that an anthropologist had found in obscure, unworldly folk a message of wide applicability for the larger outside society. It was especially their passion for meaning that appealed to me so deeply, this the Center folk valued above happiness or comfort. Their history and religion provided them with ample raw material for enacting their celebratory attitude toward their lives. "It's good to be a Jew. It's hard to be a Jew. What else is new?" laughed Basha when

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Kugelmass contemplating the pros and cons of her contemporary situation and past history. The word Jew in this context served as a metaphor for being human. She used it the same way other people might have said, "That's what life is like." 32

The similarity that I have noted between Myerhoff and An-sky speaks not to a linear descent because there is none: Myerhoffdid not have the linguistic skills to access any of the material related to An-sky's ethnographic work, and An-sky does not even figure in the bibliography of her writings. Jewish anthropology remains to this day a rather serendipitous field without dear Jewish genealogy except in regard to Israel, whose founding father was the Manchester-trained anthropologist Max Gluckman. 33 I believe the connection in Myerhoff's case to Ansky is entirely fortuitous, based on the following factors: there is a parallel longing between them for the witejmother34 and the husband/ father (Number Our Days is a feminist text in which the key figures are almost all men); both produced key texts written as much for non-Jews as for Jews; 35 both evoke the chronotope of an Old World to the New or modern; and, finally, there is the striking parallel between the shocks and jolts of Southern California ethnic and cultural politics during the late 1960s and afterward that, like the Russian revolutionary period for An-sky (and for so many Jewish intellectuals ofhis day) 36 propelled Myerhoff toward a "return" to her own people rather than a study of the elderly Chicanas as she had initially intended. (Indeed, many consider the late 1960s to be a turning point in American Jewish self-awareness, resulting in considerable cultural self-assertion and creativity in succeeding decades.) Anthropology was the universal language Myerhoff used to forge her own Judaism, and she invented an autonomous Jewish universe with a language that had the look and feel to it of a Jewish vernacular within which she herself could write, and in that way speak. 37 Finally, let me return to something I noted earlier in this chapternamely, the notion of ethnographer as supplicant that struck me at my first reading of Rechtman's Yidishe etnografye un folklor. If, as James Clifford argues, salvage is the underlying metaphor of an ethnography that presumes its subjects moribund, then that metaphor has limited

The Father ofJewish Ethnography?

value in explaining the kind of ethnography that An-sky-and, given the parallel I just made, Myerhoff as well-undertook. Why? Because both turned to their Jewish subjects not so much to save them but to save themselves (this is especially apparent in MyerhofF's final film, In Her Own Time) and ultimately to find the voice tor their own literary output. Was An-sky feigning when he asked the exorcist for a remedy? I wonder. But in this regard he would not have been alone, since "anthropology, abstractedly conceived as the study of man," so argued Stanley Diamond, "is actually the study of men in crisis by men in crisis." 38

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Appendix S. An-sky, Between Two Worlds

(The Dybbuk): Censored Variant Introduction by Vladislav Ivanov (translated by Anne Eakin Moss)

S. An-sky's The Dybbuk has gained a reputation as one of the most famous Jewish plays of the twentieth century in its Yiddish and Hebrew versions, but the original of the play, written by An-sky in Russian, was long considered lost. In 2001, the original Russian text was discovered in the St. Petersburg Theater Library, 1 among the collection of plays passed through theater censorship. It is published here in English translation for the first time. An-sky wrote the play Between Two Worlds, or The Dybbuk (Mezh dvukh mirov [Dibuk]) in Russian, based on material collected during his Jewish Ethnographic Expedition from 1912 to 1914. According to one source, the idea came even earlier: "An-sky said that the idea of the play Between Two Worlds (The Dybbuk), which he wrote first in Russian, and then in Yiddish, came to him in the year 1911. The first act of the play was written in Tarnov, the second act in another shtetl in Galicia, and the last two acts in Moscow." 2 The subject of the play came from a banal event that An-sky observed in the shtetl Yarmolinets in Podolia during 1912-13: "The head of a family decides to give his daughter in marriage to the son of a wealthy neighbor against her will, as she is in love with a poor religious school student whom she worships. The grief of the seventeen-year-old girl was so expressive that it stuck in An-sky's memory." 3 It is essential to note two elements here: the importance of direct life experience, and the desire to lift it out of everyday melodrama into the world of legend and tradition.

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The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

The document that first mentions An-sky's play-and can be seen as its first review-is a letter by Baron Vladimir Guenzburg of January 30, 1914, addressed to the author: I thank you heartily for your letter of January 24/February 6 [new style] and for the manuscript that I received the other day. I found in it that which I sought-a bright, inspired picture of the spiritual life of the people, to the study of which you have dedicated so many years of your life. It positively captivated me, and I could not tear myself away until I had read to the last page. The Dybbuk represents for me the expression in artistic, poetic, but realistic colors of all that has interested you and me so vividly over the past two or three years, set forth on a few pages. Thus it is unsurprising that I was in ecstasy. However, that which I have said above relates to a general appraisal of your work. You demand of me something else, and expect a thorough analysis of the play both from an artistic and from a technical-theatrical point of view. In other words, I must do that which is called for from a literary-theatrical critic. But I have neither the requisite experience, nor the knowledge, nor, moreover, the necessary impartiality. I am already too much inclined to find your work perfect, and I find myself too much under the general enchanted impression of the picture you have created. Desiring nonetheless to fulfill your wishes and forcing myself to unearth failings in The Dybbuk, I will allow myself to say that the piece is designed more for a reader than for a viewer. For a theatrical piece, it is missing one serious element (for the most part in the first act)-it is missing movement. The interest of the drama is focused too much on that which the characters say, and not transmitted enough by that which they do .... It seems to me that your attitude toward individual characters is too one-sided, and presents an apologia that is too whole and almost entirely inviolate. The only element that is somewhat negative is that of the prosaic commercial attitude of the synagogue servant and the others to the recital for a fee ... of the psalms ... and of the battle with the enchantment. If you rely on the description of life to create an artistic picture, then, like any instrument, life also must reveal its negative aspects. You have enough characters that you can assign some of them actions that are not imbued with the spiritual whole of the drama's unfolding. I can also say that I do not believe in your tsadik. Your exposition does not leave any

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

doubts that those surrounding him arc filled with belief in his supernatural power, but nothing points to honesty, sincerity, and belief. I see on his part the ability to utilize the condition of the minds ofhis flock and a desire to preserve his authority, to settle [the matter] in the interests of those with whom he happens to have dealings, a goal in pursuit of which he is prepared to do injustice to the victims, the dead. I do not see that he is filled with the greatness of his role, that he is to some degree a slave to his great calling. How would you have written if you wanted to show us a sanctimonious charlatan, and not a sincere prophet? Have you found that I've already digressed too much? All the more so, as in all points of criticism I have restricted myself to pointing out that which seems to me imperfect, and I am not telling you with what it would be possible to replace these lacunae, but it is not for me to give you advice. It is enough for me that I brought myself to search out what could be called shortcomings and set forth to you what I found. Ifi was over-diligent, then it is you who are to blame, and not 1. 4 Baron Guenzburg proved a perspicacious reader and identified the basic lines along which An-sky would eventually rework the play. In any event, the first variant of the play already existed in February 1914. Ansky, however, did not rush to publish it, and most likely he attempted to take these observations into consideration. According to the evidence we have, the author did not take steps to offer the play to Yiddish troupes, which, because of historical circumstances and restrictions, were in shambles. An-sky's attitude can be judged by a diary entry that he made in Rovno on January r, 1915: "The new year was born in deep mourning. Neither desires nor hopes, as though you were standing before a corpse. I spent the day in a melancholy state. At night I went to the 'Yiddish theater.' They were offering the most senseless operetta, Khontse in America. The most untalented of the untalented performed. But the theater was packed and the public was in ecstasy." 5 The writer was 51 years old at the time, and his ambitions and social temperament compelled him to aim high. At first he thought of the Aleksandrinsky Theater and asked Semyon Afanas'evich Vengerov, the famous historian of Russian literature, to talk with Fedor Dmitrievich Batiushkov, another philologist and at that time the chairman of the

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Theatrical-Literary Committee of the Aleksandrinsky Theater. According to An-sky's diary note of September 12, 1915: [H]e [Vengerov] answered that he would willingly do this, but did not expect that it [the play] could go to the Aleksandrinsky. After the performance there ofiushkevich's play Mendel' Spivak, the director received a telegram from a Grand Duke (I don't remember which one): to what had the Aleksandrinsky Theater come that it was staging a Jewish play. In general, he said, in order to write a good play, one must have talent, and to stage it, one must be a genius. In passing he complained to me that his son, who had been born after he, Semyon Afanas'evich, converted, was not being promoted to officer. I did not express any sympathy. 6 In An-sky's theatrical hierarchy, after the Imperial Theater came the Moscow Art Theater. Undoubtedly, he was drawn not only by the troupe's artistic authority but also by its liberal social reputation and its sympathetic attitude to the "Jewish theme." Vladimir NemirovichDanchenko's production ofthe play Anatema (Anathema, 1909), with Leonid Andreev's symbolist presentation ofJewish life, had great societal resonance. A year later, Nemirovich-Danchenko directed the play Miserere by Semyon Yushkevich, "the Jewish Chekhov." But the road to the stage was winding and inscmtable. An -sky turned to Nikolai Aleksandrovich Popov (1871-1949 ), a prominent director, who knew Konstantin Stanislavsky, the head of the Moscow Art Theater, through the Society of Art and Literature? He began with a letter to Popov on August 13, 1914: Returned from Kiev the other day and probably will return next week to the south, closer to the theater of war. I would very much like to see you. How can this be arranged? Perhaps you will be in Petersburg during this time. If not, would it be possible for me to stop by for a little bit? I will be sincerely grateful if you would give me your answer as quickly as possible. 8

As was to be expected, Popov was at his dacha, and An -sky was ready to head out of town if the meeting in St. Petersburg could not be arranged. Although there is no mention of the play in this letter, An-sky's

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haste can be explained by the play. Later, a note was made on the envelope in Popov's hand: An-sky (Rappoport), Semyon Akimovich, literary figure (author of The Dybbuk, which was performed later by Habima in Hebrew). Dukh Banko ( Glikman) brought An -sky to me at my dacha to read The Dybbuk. We made ourselves comfortable in the garden. The play interested me very much because of its talent, and I told Stanislavsky about it. 9 A long path still lay between the reading of the play at Popov's dacha and the meeting with Stanislavsky. An-sky attempted to approach the Art Theater from another side as well. A letter from Grigory Vysotsky, of the well-known tea-trading family, attests to this: "My daughter, N. G. Vysotskaia, agrees in principle to invite over V. I. Kachalov and to acquaint you with him in order for him to hear your play. However, this unfortunately cannot take place earlier than the middle or end of October." 10 Mter the New Year, in 1915, activity with regard to the play came to a halt. 11 An-sky was spending most of his time traveling in the war zone, organizing relief aid for Jews. From time to time, he tore himself away and went to Moscow, where, above all, he worked on behalf of his play. For example, on January 5, 1915: "I telephoned Nik[olai] Al[eksandrovich] Popov. He promised to take me to Vl[adimir] Iv[anovich] Nemirov[ich- ]Danchenko in a couple of days and arrange that I read him the play." 12 In a week he was again in Moscmv: I saw Popov yesterday and today, and he took me to see Georg[ii] Serg[eevich] Burdzhalov, an artist at the Art Theater, having promised to take me to see Nemirov[ich- ]Danchenko, but nothing came of it, as Nemirovich is hard to catch. I saw the journalist Iv[ an] Vas[il'evich] Dzhonson, whom I had met at Popov's in the spring. He promised to try to have Nem[irovich]-D[anchenko] read the play after I lcave. 13 Time passed, but things moved extremely slowly at the Art Theater, and prospects were dubious. Then An-sky decided to pursue other possibilities. The artist Nikolai Nikolaevich Khodotov, with whom he had become acquainted at the Russian writer Fedor Sologub's dinners, gave

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him a recommendation letter to Aleksandr Akimovich Sanin, who was at that time director of the Sukhodol'sky Dramatic Theater. On September 20, 1915, An-sky wrote: Spent two days in Moscow. Sanin, a rather short, stout, middle-aged Jew, or man of Jewish descent, received me well, took an interest in my play from Khodotov's letter and arranged a reading in the presence of all the directors for the next day. "Although," he added, "the timing is unfortunate. We just accepted a play by Andreev, and four plays by Naidenov, A. Tolstoy, Yushkevich, and another has been 8o% accepted. We will listen to your play nonetheless. But what is this completely new, never-before-described everyday life about which Nik[ olai] Nik[ olaevich] [Khodotov] writes?" "It's from the life of the Jews-mystics, hasids, and tsadiks," I answered. "Ah, really ... " and he knit his brow. "And what is the subject?" I told him in a few words. He knit his brow even more. "Yes ... This is very interesting, but it completely doesn't suit the present moment. Right now the public wants joie de vivre [ zhizneradostnoe], something bright [svetloe], so they don't have to see and hear what is going on, in order to forget about all these scum (he named names). And your play is heavy ... If you want, we will read it, but I am certain in advance that it won't work. If you can spare the time, we will read it tomorrow.... " I took my leave. That evening I spoke with I. V. Dzhonson. He spoke with L. A. Sulerzhitsky, who read the play last year for the Art Theater and gave some instructions. Now I have worked it over according to his instructions. We arranged to read it the next day. It was read yesterday. Sulerzhitsky found it acceptable in its entirety, but indicated that the first act in which the love of Khonen and Leah ought to be clearly introduced was lacking. As it is, one can only guess about it. I refused to add an act, but promised to add some strokes here and there to the first act which would bring out the love of the young people. When I do this I will inform Sulerzh[itsky] and he will set up a general reading and will summon me by telegram. 14 It follows from the entry that Leopold Antonovich Sulerzhitsky first read the play in the fall (the winter at the latest) of1914--that is, after

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the August reading at the dacha. Two scenarios are possible here. Either Popov, as he wrote on the envelope, spoke with Stanislavsky himself, and he in turn entrusted the play to Sulerzhitsky's care. Or the reverse: the path to Stanislavsky lay through Sulerzhitsky, who took upon himself the trouble of the preliminary evaluation, preliminary selection, and shepherding the play to a point at which it was possible to show it to Stanislavsky. On October I, writing about a meeting with Sologub and Anastasiia Chebotarevskaia, An-sky noted: I recounted that I had made changes in my play according to Sulerzhitsky's suggestions: among other things, made the scene of the court with the corpse more realistic. The corpse does not speak from under the bed-curtain, rather it is the rabbi who transmits his words. Sologub reacted negatively to this change. He said that I had made a mistake, that I spoiled this part. 15 Just a month or so earlier, An-sky had begun to work on obtaining the censor's permission for his play. The publisher, Zinovy Isaevich Grzhebin (1877-1929 ), acted as his intercessor and delivered a copy to Baron Drizen. On September 30, An-sky noted down unpleasant news: "Grzhebin told me that Bar[ on] Drizen found in the banishment of the dybbuk in my play an analogy with the Gospel story about the banishment of demons. Thus it is difficult to pass it. Asked me to visit him tomorrow." 16 The meeting took place on October z: Was at the Central Administration for Dramatic Publishing, at the office of Comrade Director Bar[ on] Drizen, to whom Grzhebin gave my play for censorship. Drizcn is a gentleman, very elegant, pleasant, bears himself simply. It seems he is a literary man, publishes some historical journal and organized in his time an "Old-Fashioned Theater." 17 He informed me that he cannot pass my play, since the scene of the banishment of the dybbuk is reminiscent of the Gospel parable about the banishment of the demons. However much I tried to prove to him that the dybbuk is not a demon, and the analogy is remote, he stood by it. Finally, he took me and the play to Director Pr[ince] Urusov, to whom he set forth his doubts. Urusov noted that in general he did not like to look for analogies, but not knowing the play could not say anything. Promised to read it. 18

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The Dybbuk: Censored Variant Mter six days, on October 8, a new meeting followed: "I was at Bar[ on] Drizen's. [He] declared for a second time that he could not pass the play in this form and proposed I rework it in this manner. How? Banish the banishment of the spirit? Then the play would be destroyed. For my part, will try 'to banish the spirit [ dukh ]' and instead put the word 'soul' [dusha ], 'man's shadow' [ten) cheloveka ], etc." 19 Mter the meeting with Drizen, An-sky "was occupied the whole day with the 'banishment of the spirit' from the play." 20 The results of his rewriting according to the censor's demands are reflected in the variant published here. It mu~t be said that they seem entirely cosmetic. Drizen was ready to be satisfied by little. The final verdict came on October 10: "Baron Drizen was satisfied with my rewriting of the play, the replacement of the word 'spirit' with the word 'soul' or 'shadow,' asked also for an angel to be banished in one place ('Tsadik of Tartakov! I know that you are commanded by angels!'), and passed the play." 21 The authenticity of An-sky's description is confirmed by the fact that on the censor's copy it is written: "Permitted for performance. Petrograd, October 10, 1915. Censor of dramatic compositions [illegible]." The censor's signature is illegible, but it is clearly not that of Drizen, who probably passed the permission down to one of his subordinates. However, the textual problem is not settled with this variant of the play passed for presentation. It is joined by one more notebook, which also required the permission of the censor. In it are included supplementary fragments: an updated list of the cast of characters, the prologue, epilogue, and second act (the wedding), which did not raise any doubts with the censor and do not contain any signs of corrections. This notebook bears the censor's permission dated November 30, 1915. Undoubtedly, it was this addition that An-sky had in mind in his entry of October 21, relating his conversation with Sulerzhitsky: "Saw Dzhonson, spoke on the phone with Sulerzhitsky. They all can't find an hour to read my play together. They assure me this not just an excuse. They are now [completely] absorbed in the staging of a play, The Flood, it seems. They promised to set an evening by November 15, when the performance will have concluded. I told Sulerzhitsky that I plan to add another act after the first-a wedding-and he said that

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Figure3r. A. Prudkin as the Messenger in The Dybbuk at the Habima Theater. SOURCE: Berdhand Diebold, Habima: H ebriiisches Theater (Berlin, 1928),

I.

then the play might be better suited for the Art Theater and that Nemirov[ich-]Danchenko must be at the reading." 22 Unfortunately, in the archive the writer's diaries end with this notebook. Judging by his careful enumeration, the total number of notebooks was far larger. Whether the reading of the play took place at the Art Theater's troupe or in the First Studio, which An-sky expected, if Nemirovich-Danchenko was present, how Stanislavsky received the play (theatrical legend holds that, based on Stanislavsky's advice, An-sky turned the episodic role of the Wandering Old Man from the first act into the central figure of the Messenger)-none of this is recorded in the extant diaries nor in the archive of the Art Theater. It is clear only that Stanislavsky was already familiar with the play in December 1915, and

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people close to An-sky persistently tried to arouse the great director's interest in staging it. Thus on December 19, 1915, Zinovy Grzhebin, the publisher who had interceded for An-sky with the censor, wrote to Stanislavsky: Deeply respected and dear Konstantin Sergeevich! Semyon Akimovich An-sky has written a wonderful play based on the curious everyday life of the "Hasids." Ecstasy, mysticism, ethnography-everything is presented here convincingly and with a teel for theater. This is not just my own opinion. Everyone who has heard the play, Russians and nonRussians, is of the same opinion. I consider it my duty to inform you of this. I believe that the "Studio," which shows such love for its works, will be able to use all the material of this play, and bring out the most subtle scent of this everyday life. I beg of you, Konstantin Sergeevich, give the author the opportunity to read his play to you, and I hope that you will then agree with me. 23 Stanislavky's letter to Popov of December 30,1915, serves as the sole documentary evidence for his participation in the play's fate: "Please tell Rappoport to send me his play, under the following conditions: (1) I may say whether or not the play is suitable for the studio. (2) I must be given time for my reading. ( 3) I will not set out to make a critique." 24 Popov made an important note on this letter by Stanislavsky: "Letter about Ansky's (Rappoport's) play The Dybbuk, written first in Russian." 25 In the winter of 1916, the first issue of the Moscow weekly paper Jewish Life (Evreiskaia zhizn)) published a fragment of the play Between Two Worlds, specifically the dialogue between Khonen and Henekh in the first act, ending with the appearance ofLeah. This scene follows the text of the censored variant with rare but characteristic exceptions. An-sky selects words in an attempt to transmit nuances ofJewish demonology that were important to him. Instead of"satan" (satan) he writes "devil" (d)iavol), and introduces Samoel', one of the names of Satan. These attempts are not reflected in the final draft. It is clear only that discussion and possibly the rewriting of the play went on for the entire duration of 1916, after which a decision was made. The chronicler of The Theater Newspaper ( TeatraPnaia gazeta) announced in the January 8, 1917, issue: "S. An-sky's play Between Two Worlds has been accepted for performance at the Art Theater." 26

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The first announcements also connecting the play with Habima appeared in February: "The new play by S. A. An-sky, Between Two Worlds, which has been accepted for performance by a studio of the Moscow Art Theater, has been offered by the author for production by Habima. The translation of this play into Hebrew has been undertaken by H. N. Bialik." 27 It should be noted that Naum Tsemakh's historic meeting with Stanislavsky, after which Habima unofficially became known as the "biblical studio" of the Art Theater, took place on September 26, 1917. Thus in January and February, the Art Theater and the Habima studio, which at that time still existed only in the imaginations of Tsemakh, Chana Rovina, and Menachem Gnesin, found themselves in a curious state of competition. But in the fall, with the appearance of Evgeny Vakhtangov at Habima and his virtual adoption of the studio, the question resolved itself as if on its own. The text that Bialik received for translation can be considered the author's final redaction-a text that had taken shape after An-sky's active collaboration with the Art Theater. This redaction, in Bialik's Hebrew translation, was published in 1918 and later translated into English and other languages. It differs significantly from the 1915 text. For example, it is missing the prologue and tl1e epilogue; An-sky instead introduces an extended Hasidic tune that penetrates the whole play. The three old men from the first act are turned into the three synagogue idlers (bat/ens). The tsadik Shloymele Tartakover becomes the tsadik Azriel from Miropolye. The figure of the Wanderer is made stronger and becomes pivotal and mystical. The changes then introduced by Vakhtangov were made along the same lines, but with particular decisiveness. He transformed the play into a 30-page script. Eliminating the profusion of details, he cut out entire subject and thematic lines: the newlyweds who had been killed during a pogrom long ago, the invitation of the dead mother to the wedding, and so forth. In his interpretation, the action does not unfold but rushes forward, tearing up the air. People do not speak but shout their words, carried away by this whirlwind. An-sky was not a natural dramatist, and it seems that he understood the theater poorly. His previous work in politics and ethnography did not dispose him to drama. However, An-sky's inexperience and naivete

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as a dramatist coincide strikingly with the naivete of the folkloric material. Reveries about certain medieval forms of naive theatrical spectacle were widespread in the Russian theatrical sphere in the I9IOS, influencing, for instance, the stylizations of Aleksei Remizov. In An-sky's play, the tradition of the primitive came to life almost on its own, without estranged theatrical reflection. This may be what explains its attractiveness to many directors of the twentieth century.

* One of the peculiarities of the texts discovered in the archives results from the fact that the typewriter used by An-sky was missing the question and the exclamation marks. In the first notebook the author conscientiously filled in the missing punctuation, but in the second he did not. We have placed these marks according to grammatical rules as much as possible, though this cannot transmit the characteristically emphatic syntax of An-sky, who was inclined to double and at times treble exclamation points in the most unexpected ways. Our reunification of the first and second notebooks into a complete design has naturally required us to change the numeration of the acts: the second and third acts of the first notebook have correspondingly turned into the third and fourth. The two notes indicated as such are An-sky's. Underlined words or phrases were inserted by the author above those deleted on the censor's orders. Deleted words and phrases have been restored and are printed in brackets.

Translators' Note Craig Cravens with Gabriella Safran

In translating the Russian D_vbbuk into English, we have tried to create a usable text and at the same time to preserve the distinctions between this version and An-sky's better-known Yiddish version of the play. When An-sky referred to Jewish rituals, objects, or beliefs using Russian words that would have been familiar to the audience of the Moscow Art Theater, we have used English words that would be familiar to an analogous (sophisticated, urban) audience today. When An -sky highlighted

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the exoticism of his material by using Yiddish or Hebrew words, we have used those same words in our translation. When possible, we have resisted the temptation to bring this translation closer to the Yiddish version. For example, An-sky uses the Russian word zavsegdatai to refer to the old men who spend so much time in the synagogue. Instead of calling these men battens or batlonim, as Ansky does in the Yiddish text, we have translated the word into English as "regulars." When a phrase would probably have been mystifYing to its original audience, such as when we learn that Khonen has decided to adopt the mystical ascetic practice of wandering in order to attain redemption, which An-sky refers to as spravliat) izgnanie, we have given the equally suggestive but mystifYing "go through Exile." Nonetheless, we have felt compelled to make a few exceptions to the above: - We have spelled the characters' names in a way that seems closest to their Yiddish pronunciation. Thus we prefer "Shloyme" to "Shloyma." An-sky calls the heroine "Liia," perhaps because that is the common Russian form of the name, but we translate this with the familiar English equivalent, "Leah." - We spell Hebrew words according to contemporary usage, or the "Sephardic" style, rather than the Ashkenazic style, which was utilized by An-sky and most other East European Jews of his time: Ben Zoma, not Ben Zoyma; Sitra Akhra, not Sitro Akhro; Borukh Dayan Emet not Boruch doyon emes. - In two cases, we replaced an unfamiliar Yiddish or Hebrew word with one we thought might be more familiar to our readers: we give the East European bima instead of the more German Jewish almemor, and badkhen instead of marshalok. An-sky uses the Russian Rabi in cases when the Jews he describes would have said either "Reb" (an honorific form of address for any man) or "Rebbe" (the title for a Hasidic leader). We have attempted to distinguish between these two categories and translate appropriately each time.

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Between Two Worlds (The Dybbuk):

A Jewish Dramatic Legend in Four Acts with Prologue and Epilogue S. An-sky (edited by Vladislav Ivanov; translated from Russian by Craig Cravens)

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

In the Prologue and Epilogue:

SECOND OLD MAN-synagogue regular

OLD MAN

THIRD OLD MAN-synagogue regular

HIS DAUGHTER

OLD WANDERER

In the Drama: REB SHLOIMELE TARTAKOVER-

Old Man, a tsadik MIKHOEL-his main attendant (gabai) REB SHAMSHON-a Rabbi in

Tartakov

OLD HASID ELDERLY JEWISH WOMAN BADKHEN ALTER (SERVER) GRANDMA KHANA-midwift COOK

FIRST HOLY JUDGE (dayan)

WEDDING GUEST

SECOND HOLY JUDGE (dayan)

A POOR HUNCHBACK

A RABBI IN BRINNITS

A POOR MAN ON CRUTCHES

SENDER GEWIRTZMAN-

A POOR LAME WOMAN

a Hasidic merchant in Brinnits

A POOR WOMAN WITH ONE ARM

LEAH-his daughter

A POOR OLD WOMAN

FRADA-her aged nanny

A POOR TALL PALE WOMAN

GITEL- Leah's niece, recently arrived

HASIDIM, YESHIVAH STUDENTS,

BASIA- Leah's niece, recently arrived

SYNAGOGUE MEMBERS, MERCHANTS,

KRONEN-yeshivah student

WEDDING GUESTS, SERVANTS,

in Brinnits

POOR MEN AND WOMEN,

ENEKH-yeshivah student in Brinnits

PASSERS-BY, WOMEN, CHILDREN,

CHAIM-yeshivah student in Brinnits

WATER-CARRIER, SECOND COOK.

MEYER-Brinnits synagogue employee

Acts One and Two take place in Brinnits, Acts

FIRST OLD MAN-synagogue regular,

Three and Four in Tartakov, in the house of

maintained by the synagogue to

Reb Shloimele. Three months pass between the

perform prayers when needed

first two acts.

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant Prologue

A large, well-furnished room. A table stands in the center covered with old folios. A plump sofa stands near the wall. An old man in a dark topcoat and bowler hat stands near the entrance door preparing to leave. He warmly shakes the hand of the Old Man accompanying him, who is carrying a lamp, and slowly and mournfully exits with bowed head. The Old Man begins to step forward, as if wanting to detain the man, but remains in place. Then he passes a hand across his brow, slowly returns to the table and places the lamp upon it, takes a seat in the armchair, opens a folio, and buries himself in his reading. Pause. His pale, frail Daughter enters softly from the inner rooms, wearing a white nightdress. She stops by the door. DAUGHTER

oLD

MAN

(indecisively):

Papa ...

(turning toward her, alarmed):

What is it, my daughter?

I can't sleep ... I'm frightened. And I can't breathe very well. Let me sit with you awhile.

DAUGHTER:

OLD MAN

(alarmed):

The doctor said you should lie down.

Don't worry. Just for a little while ... Let me sit here on the sofa. (She clambers onto the sofa and sits in the corner.)

DAUGHTER:

OLD MAN:

I'll bring a blanket or shawl to cover you up.

Don't worry, Papa, I feel better ... You go on reading as you were before. I'll sit here quietly and won't disturb you. (Pause.) When I was a child I used to love to watch you studying your tomes. I would sit motionless for hours in this very spot watching you softly rock back and forth, uttering the unfamiliar words in a strange, melancholy murmur. It seemed as if the folio were also alive and wise, and that you were whispering secrets to one another, secrets no one was allowed to overhear ... (In a soft, restrained voice.) That was so long ago ...

DAUGHTER:

OLD MAN (dropping his head):

A very long time ... (Pause.)

Then it seemed that no one could understand what you whispered about with the folio, nor should they have been able to ... But now I'd like to know what is written there. What arc you reading about?

DAUGHTER:

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OLD MAN

And Reb Yose said: "And once during my travels I entered one of the destroyed houses ofJerusalem to pray. When I emerged I saw Elijah the Prophet standing by the door. He asked me, 'My son, what sort of voice did you hear in this empty house?' And I answered, 'I heard the sobbing voice of a dove, which said, Woe is me. I destroyed my house, burned my temple, and condemned my children to wander among foreign people.' And Elijah said to me, 'I swear upon my life and your head that not only now, but three times a day this very same sobbing voice cries out-the voice of the Lord ... .'" (astonished): Is that really what it says? God repents? God cries? That's something I never expected. I've always imagined the God oflsrael as terrible and unbending. And suddenly he has human feelings, repentance and tears ...

DAUGHTER

The Lord loves those who repent.

OLD MAN: DAUGHTER:

And forgives them?

It is written in the Talmud: "The halls prepared for repentant sinners are inaccessible to even the most righteous."

OLD MAN:

(suddenly in a completely different tone. Loud and austere): God forgives, but you do not.

DAUGHTER

OLD MAN

(confused):

What did you say?

I said you do not forgive. (Despairing) Why are you silent all the time?

DAUGHTER:

OLD MAN:

My daughter, what is it? Relax, don't get excited. Who is

silent? It's been a month since I returned, ailing and broken. And you still haven't uttered a word to me.

DAUGHTER:

OLD MAN:

What should I have said? What can I say?

What can you say? Your one and only daughter disgraced your good name by fleeing from beneath the wedding canopy with

DAUGHTER:

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

someone you wouldn't even let cross your threshold. She vanished without a trace for five years ... Suddenly she returns home ... And you have nothing to say to her? oLD MAN

(hoarsely):

No . . .

You didn't drive me out, you didn't curse or reproach me. You sheltered and nursed me, but you erected a wall of silence between us, which nothing can tear down. You've taken all hope of forgiveness from me ...

DAUGHTER:

OLD MAN

(in a suppressed voice):

But I have forgiven you.

That's not how one forgives ... That's not how one forgives a living being ... You think I don't understand why you are so careful around me?

DAUGHTER:

(jumping up and shouting): Keep silent! You understand nothing. You don't understand, I don't understand, and the doctor doesn't understand. The only one who knows is He Who Knows All.

OLD MAN

(more softly): Yes ... We do not understand. Therefore, perhaps, we cannot forgive ... (With bitterness.) But why didn't you at least make an attempt to understand me?

DAUGHTER

(pleadingly): My daughter, let us not speak of this. I cannot understand you.

OLD MAN

You can, you must understand me. You must understand that I fell in love with this man wholeheartedly and insanely ...

DAUGHTER:

Wholeheartedly ... Insanely. You had known him only a few weeks, perhaps only a few days ... And there was another man whom you had loved for IS entire years, also, it seemed, wholeheartedly. A man who likewise had no one in the world but you. Why did your second love surpass your first?

OLD MAN:

It did not surpass it ... I continued to love you as before. But it was an entirely different kind oflove .. .

DAUGHTER:

OLD MAN

(softly):

A different kind of love? ... I don't understand.

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The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

Father. You were young once, too. Didn't you ever love

DAUGHTER:

someone? (sadly): Of course I did. I loved your dear departed mother very much. I loved everyone who was worthy of love ...

OLD MAN

(despairingly): Oh, that's not what I mean ... (In a different tone.) Father, you used to tell me when you were young, you studied in a yeshivah. There were hundreds of young men there. Didn't anything similar ever happen to any of the students there? Did anyone ever fall in love with a woman? Fall in love. Do you understand?

DAUGHTER

Fall in love with a woman ... No. There were libertines there, but they're not worth speaking about ... And we never heard anything about love. We were occupied with other thoughts entirely ...

OLD MAN:

(extremely agitated): Father. That can't be true, youth is the same everywhere. Think about it, try to remember ...

DAUGHTER

Please, for God's sake, don't upset yourself! (Hastily.) Well, I remember, there was a case ... But this was something completely different.

OLD MAN:

DAUGHTER

(joyously):

There was a case!

When I was a young man they told us a story in the synagogue about a yeshivah student. But this isn't what you mean.

OLD MAN:

DAUGHTER

(avidly):

Go on, please!

It's a long and sad story involving supernatural powers. With your modern ideas you won't believe that this all really took place. But I heard the story from people who witnessed everything firsthand.

OLD MAN:

DAUGHTER:

Please tell me! I'll believe everything.

(closes the folio, sits down across from his daughter, and begins in a story-telling tone of voice): The tsadik Reb Dovidl of Talna, of blessed memory, possessed a golden throne upon which was carved, "David, King oflsrael, lives eternally ... " (Upon these first words, the curtain begins to descend.)

OLD MAN

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

Act One An ancient, low-ceilinged, wooden synagogue blackened with age. A pair of bronze chandeliers descend from the ceiling. In the center of the anterior wall behind a curtain stands a Holy Ark containing sacred scrolls. Near the ark to the viewer's right is a lectern, upon which burns a thick wax funeral candle. Low-backed benches line the wall. A bima covered with dark cloth stands in the center of the synagogue. To the right, nearer the viewers, a door leads into a separate prayer room. Several small windows on the right wall and above the doors open into the women'sgallery. Along this wall stands a long wooden unpainted table strewn with old folios. Tallow candle-ends burn in two candlesticks. Yeshivah students sit around the table in various poses, softly reading the Talmud in an ethereal chant. Enekh, absorbed in a folio, is sitting apart from the others behind a reading stand, near the lectern. On the left wall closer to the viewers, a door leads to the street, and next to it a washbasin juts from the wall with a towel ofcoarse cloth hanging beside it. A large white oven and a long plain wooden table covered with folios and tallow candle-ends stand beyond the doors. The First, Second, and Third Old Men are seated around the table in discussion. The Old Wanderer lies on a bench near the oven with a densely packed knapsack at his head. A shelfofbooks stands behind the table, and Khonen, deep in mediation, stands next to it, leaning against the wall and resting his hand atop the bookshelf. Meyer squats by the open bima putting away the prayer vestments. Dark twilight fills the synagogue with shadows, and heavy sorrow sits upon the brows of all. (Long pause.) (slowly, entranced, as if relating a legend): The tsadik Reb Dovidl ofTalna, of blessed memory, possessed a golden throne upon which was carved, "David, King of Israel, lives eternally . . ." (Pause.)

FIRST OLD MAN

(in the same tone): The Holy Reb Israel ofRuzhin behaved like a true monarch. An orchestra of 24 musicians played continually at his table, and he never went out with fewer than six horses in tandem.

SECOND OLD MAN

ow MAN (with emotion): And it is said of Reb Shmuel of Kaminka that he wore golden slippers ... golden slippers!

THIRD

(rises, then sits down. In a tone ofprotest): But Holy Reb Zusia of Anopol was poor his entire life; he collected alms and wore a coarse peasant shirt girded with rope. Nevertheless, he

OLD WANDERER

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performed as many miracles as the Talne or Ruzhin tsadikim, perhaps even more ... (annoyed): Excuse me, but you don't understand the matter at hand, and you butt in anyway. When we speak of the greatness of the Talne or Ruzhin tsadikim, do you think we're really talking about their wealth? As though there weren't enough rich people on earth! You must understand that in the golden throne, in the orchestra, in the six horses, and in the golden slippers there lies a profound secret.

FIRST OLD MAN

THIRD OLD MAN:

Of course! Of course!

He whose eyes were open could see it. It is said that when the great Rebbe of Apta met the tsadik ofRuzhin, he hurled himself to the ground and kissed the wheels of his carriage. And when asked what this could mean, he exclaimed: "Are you blind! Can't you see this is the chariot of heaven?"

FIRST OLD MAN:

THIRD OLD MAN

(in ecstasy):

Ay-ay-ay!

The point is that the golden throne was actually not a golden throne, the horses not horses, the orchestra not an orchestra. All this was merely for appearance, a reflection of the tsadikim's greatness-a physical disguise concealing their great power.

FIRST OLD MAN:

THIRD OLD MAN:

What power they possessed! It knew no boundaries!

Yes, their power is no small matter! Did you hear the story of the whip of the Holy Rebbe, Reb Shmelke ofNikolsburg? You must! Once a poor man called upon him to settle a dispute with the richest man in the neighborhood, who was close to the tsar and before whom everyone groveled. Reb Shmelke called them to trial, thought through the matter, and found the rich man in the wrong. The rich man grew angry and began shouting he would not abide by the decision. Reb Shmelke said to him calmly: "You will obey. When a rabbi gives an order it must be followed." The rich man grew even angrier and shouted: "I scoff at you and your decisions!" Reb Shmelke pulled himself up to his full height and bellowed: "Submit to my decision this instant or I will be forced to resort to the whip!" Here the rich man utterly lost his temper and set about cursing and insulting the rabbi, whereupon Reb Shmelke

FIRST OLD MAN:

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

opened a drawer a little bit, and out leaped the Primordial Serpent, which wound itself about the neck and shoulders of the rich man and began strangling him. Well, you can imagine the things he started saying. He started yelling, beseeching the rabbi to f(xgive him and humbly promising to do everything according to the decision. Then Reb Shmelkc said to him: "Command your grandchildren and great-grandchildren to fear the rabbi's whip." THIRD OLD MAN:

Ha-ha-ha! Now, that's a whip! (Brief pause.)

(to the First Old Man): Reb Wolf, I think you're mistaken. It couldn't have been the Primordial Serpent.

SECOND OLD MAN

THIRD OLD MAN:

Why not?

It's simple: Reb Shmelke would never have made usc of the Primordial Serpent-that's the Other Side-the Sitra Akhra (spits).

SECOND OLD MAN:

THIRD OLD MAN:

So? Certainly Reb Shmelke knew what he was doing.

I'm sure there are no such holy names and kabbalistic incantations capable of summoning the Sitra Akhra (spits).

SECOND OLD MAN:

What are you saying? I told you a story that actually happened. Dozens of people witnessed it firsthand, and you 'rc saying it couldn't have happened?!

FIRST OLD MAN:

(confidently): It could have happened! Anything can be done with effective Kabbalah. I'm certain of this. Once there was a conjurer in our village, a great wonder-worker who could summon a fire by uttering one Holy Name and then douse it with another. He was able to see what was going on thousands of versts away, draw wine from walls, and even become invisible. And he explained it all to me. He said that with effective Kabbalah, you can resurrect the dead, summon demons, even the Sitra Akhra itself (spits). I heard it all from the lips of the conjurer himself.

OLD WANDERER

(who has been listening attentively to the words of the Old Wanderer, steps up to the table. In a distant voice): And where is he now?

KHONEN

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382

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant OLD WANDERER KRONEN:

(glances in his direction, surprised):

Who?

The conjurer.

OLD WANDERER:

Where else would he be? In our village, that is, if

he's still alive. KRONEN:

Is it far from here?

ow WANDERER: KRONEN:

The village? Very far. In the depths of Polesia.

How long does it take to get there on foot?

On foot? At least three weeks. Perhaps a month ... Why do you ask? Do you want to go see him? (Khonen remains silent.) The village is called Krasnoe, and the conjurer's name is Reb Elkhonon.

OLD WANDERER:

Elkhonon. (To himself) El-Khonen ... El Khonen ... The God of Khonen ... Strange.

KRONEN:

You really should see him, that is, if he's still alive. His miracles are simply amazing! Once using kabbalistic incantations ...

OLD WANDERER:

One shouldn't speak of such things at dusk, especially in the synagogue!

THIRD OLD MAN:

One shouldn't speak out loud about kabbalistic incantations at all. Someone might unintentionally blurt out one of those spells and summon disaster. I've heard of such cases! (Khonen slowly walks out of the synagogue.)

SECOND OLD MAN:

(following him with his eyes): man. Who is he?

SECOND OLD MAN

What a strange young

A yeshivah student ... Quite a remarkable young man. An extremely refined vessel.

FIRST OLD MAN:

SECOND OLD MAN:

A genius. He knows almost the entire Talmud by

heart. The old rabbis used to turn to him to resolve difficult questions.

FIRST OLD MAN:

OLD WANDERER:

Where is he from?

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant (walks up to the table): From somewhere in Lithuania. He studied here for several years and was the pride of the yeshivah. Then he was made a rabbi and suddenly disappeared. They say he set out to go through Exile. He recently returned. He's become strange somehow ... always immersed in thought. He fasts from Sabbath to Sabbath and goes often to the ritual baths, sometimes spending entire hours there. (Softly.) The yeshivah students say he's absorbed in the Kabbalah.

MEYER

These are the rumors in town, as well. I know people have already asked him f(x some talismans, but he wouldn't give any.

SECOND OLD MAN:

Who knows who he is! Perhaps he's one of the great ones ... Who can tell? And we can't spy on him-that would be dangerous. (Pause.)

THIRD OLD MAN:

(yawns): It's time to go to bed ... (Smiles.) It's too bad your conjurer isn't here right now to tap us some wine from the wall. I could use a glass right now. I haven't had a bite to eat all day.

FIRST OLD MAN

It's been like a fast-day for me too. Nothing but a buckwheat cake this morning.

SECOND OLD MAN:

(secretively): Just wait. I'll bet we'll be eating and drinking soon-vodka, pastries, cakes ... Sender went to look at a bridegroom for his daughter. He's meeting with the family in Klimovka. If there's a betrothal, Sender will surely invite us to a celebration.

MEYER

Oh, he'll never marry off that daughter of his. Three times he's gone off to look at bridegrooms, and they always return empty-handed. He doesn't like the bridegroom or the family isn't distinguished enough or they can't agree on the dowry. That's not how to choose a bridegroom!

FIRST OLD MAN:

Sender can afford to be choosy. Thank God, knock on wood, he's rich, distinguished, and his daughter is a real beauty.

MEYER:

I love Sender! He's a real Hasid! A Tartakov Hasid-full of fire and verve!

THIRD OLD MAN:

It's true he's a good Hasid, but he should betroth his only daughter differently ...

SECOND OLD MAN:

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384

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant THIRD OLD MAN:

What do you

mean~

In the olden days, a rich and prominent Jew who needed a bridegroom for his only daughter looked for neither wealth nor pedigree. He would go to a famous yeshivah, present the head of the yeshivah with a gift, and choose the best and most capable student as his son-in-law ... Sender should also choose a yeshivah student for his daughter.

SECOND OLD MAN:

And he wouldn't have to go far. Wouldn't Khonen be good enough for his daughter~

FIRST OLD MAN:

Yes, and everyone thought he would be the one. Sender housed and fed him in his own home for a year ... The servants looked upon him as one of the family.

SECOND OLD MAN:

(smiling): I went to Sender's once. As usual, Khonen was sitting alone in a separate room chanting the Talmud, and in the next room Sender's daughter Leah sat listening, silent and unmoving, as if enchanted. I couldn't hold back and blurted out: "What do you think, Leah, would you like a bridegroom who studied the Torah so sweetly, with such emotion and understanding?" She blushed, lowered her eyes, and whispered timidly, "Yes." Ha-ha-ha!

FIRST OLD MAN

And when Sender was offered a bridegroom along with ten thousand golden coins as a dowry, he went to consult with the family. That's not how a Tartakov Hasid should act.

SECOND OLD MAN:

Now, now, we shouldn't judge others. It didn't come to pass, which means it wasn't meant to. As it is said: "Forty days before the birth of a child, the voice of God commands: 'The daughter of such-and-such is destined for the son of so-and-so."' (An elderly Jewish woman runs in dragging two children by the hand.)

THIRD OLD MAN:

(screaming and in tears): Almighty God! Help me! (Runs toward the ark.) Oh, children, children! We'll open the ark and prostrate ourselves before the Holy Scrolls. We will not leave this place until we have obtained a cure for your mother. (Draws back the curtain, opens the ark, and buries her head in the scrolls. In a sobbing prayer-like voice.) God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob! Behold my great woe! Have pity upon my only daughter! Behold

WOMAN

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

the sorrow of her poor children! Holy Scrolls of the Torah! Go and intercede to the Lord God for my daughter! Holy Patriarchs, Holy Matriarchs, hurry to the Almighty's throne, pray, beg that the young tree not be torn up by the roots, that the peaceful and harmless creature not be chased from the herd, that the gentle dove not be cast out from its nest! I will not leave this place! I will lie at the foot of the ark and rouse the heavenly spirits! I will rend the heavens till my pride and glory is restored to me. (The children cry.) MEYER (approaches the woman and gently lays his hand upon hers): Shall I summon ten men to recite the Psalms? JEWISH WOMAN: Oh, yes, yes! But quickly, quickly! Every second is precious! She's melting like a candle! She's been lying speechless for two days, battling with death. MEYER (hastily): This very instant! I'll have ten men here at once .. . (Pleading.) But we must give them something ... They're poor .. . JEWISH WOMAN: Of course! (Gives him some coins.) Here's a zloty. I have nothing more. MEYER:

That's not very much ... Three groshen apiece ...

JEWISH woMAN (without hearing him): other synagogues! (Exeunt.)

Children, let us go to the

MEYER (returning to the table): So God has sent us a zloty. We'll read the Psalms, have a drop to drink, pray for the recovery of the sick woman-and if God wills it, she will recover. FIRST OLD MAN: Let's go to the prayer room. (Loudly, to the yeshivah students.) Boys, who wants to read the Psalms? You'll get a cake each! (Several students approach. Exeunt the Old Men, the Old Wanderer, and the yeshivah students into the prayer room. «Blessed is the Man'' soon resounds loudly from the room. Khonen enters.) KRONEN (walks about slowly, wearily, aimlessly. Then he notices the open ark and halts, astonished): The ark is open? ... Who drew back the curtain? ... Who opened the ark? ... Who could it have been opened for in the middle of the night? ... (Steps closer.) The

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scrolls ... They look as if they were alive, nestling close to one another, calmly, silently ... And all the secrets of the universe from the beginning to the end of time are contained therein ... Every secret, every Holy Name, every incantation! But how difficult it is to divine their secrets! ... (Counting.) 1, 2, 3, 4-, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Nine scrolls. The word "Truth" according to the minor numerical system. And in each Scroll, four "Trees of Lite" ... Again 36 ... Not a day goes by that I don't stumble across that number, but what does it mean? I have the feeling that everything lies within this number ... Leah's name comes to 36 according to the numerical system. Three times 36 is Khonen. 36 is pronounced "Lo." Lo means "to him." To whom? ... And Leah? (He shudders.) Once again that terrible thought. Lo-ha. Not God, not through God ... What a strange thought-but how it entices me! ... (raises his head and looks long and intently at Khonen): Khonen, you always walk around as if you were asleep.

ENEKH

(looks around, sees Enekh. Mechanically walks toward him. Sits down. Talking to himself): Hints, hints, and more hints, but the right path is nowhere to be seen ...

KHONEN

ENEKH:

What?

(surprised): (Pause.)

KHONEN

Who, me? Nothing. I was just thinking ...

(shakes his head): You've gotten too deep in Kabbalah. You haven't opened the book since you've returned.

ENEKH

KHONEN

(trying to understand):

Not opened the book? What book?

What do you mean, what book? The Talmud, the Laws. What is wrong with you?

ENEKH:

The Talmud? The Laws? I guess I haven't ... I guess the Talmud is cold and dry. The Laws are cold and dry ... (As if suddenly awakening. First he speaks slowly and thoughtfully) then gradually becomes more himself) Beneath the earth lies a world identical to the one above it, with deep seas, bottomless abysses, enormous terrifying deserts, dense impassable forests. And tremendous ships sail across the seas upon horrifying billowing

KHONEN:

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

waves. Mighty winds and hurricanes rage through the deserts, and a terrible magnificence reigns throughout the drowsing forests. Only one thing is lacking. There is no soaring sky, no bright sun, no blinding lightning, no thunder. Such is the Talmud-great, terrible, and limitless. But it fetters you to the eartl1, it won't let you fly upward! And the Kabbalah! The Kabbalah! It throws open all the heavenly gates before your very eyes, illuminating thousands of worlds with blinding lightning, and hurling the soul in great bursts into the infinite! It leads to the inner chambers of the most exalted mysteries, to Pardes, 1 and lifts the edge of the Great Curtain. (Collapses.) I cannot speak. My heart is growing weak. (very serious): This is all true, but you're forgetting that you must approach the heights slowly and with care. And the higher you fly, the harder it is to remain aloft, and the more horrible could be your fall into the abyss. The Talmud raises the soul to the infinite slowly, gradually, but it protects you as well. It takes hold as if with an iron coat of armor, allowing you to veer neither to the left nor to the right. It watches over you like an eternal sentinel who neither sleeps nor drowses ... And the Kabbalah? Remember what the Talmud says of those who dared to lift the Great Curtain? (Intones in talmudic fashion.) Four entered into Paradise: Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Akher, and Rabbi Akiva ... Ben Azzai glanced in and was stmck down, Ben Zoma glanced in and lost his mind, Akher cut down the plants, renouncing God. Only Rabbi Akiva entered and left unharmed.

ENEKH

Don't try to frighten me with such names. We don't know why or by what means they tried to enter Pardes. Perhaps they were stung because they went only to look and not to purifY. Mter all, other great ones went in after them-the Holy Ari and the Holy Besht, for example, and they were not harmed.

KRONEN:

ENEKH: KRONEN: ENEKH:

1.

You're trying to compare yourself to them? I am not comparing myself to anyone. I go my own way.

And which way is that?

Paradise. (An-sky's note).

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The Dybbuk: Censored Variant KRONEN:

You wouldn't understand.

Yes I would. Within my soul also lives a longing for higher planes.

ENEKR:

(after some hesitation): The activity of our tsadikim, the giants of our generations, consists of directing human souls, of tearing from them the chains of sin, and raising them toward the radiant source. The battle is extremely difficult, for "sin lies at the door." As soon as one sinner is cleansed, another appears in his place; as soon as one generation is cleansed, another appears in its place, once again full of sin. And everything must begin again. And the generations become more petty, and the sins become stronger, and the tsadikim weaker ...

KRONEN

So, what do you think we should do?

ENEKR:

(softly, but with determination): We shouldn't engage in battle with sin; we should purify it. Like a goldsmith refines gold from slag in a flame, like a farmer separates the wheat from the chaff. Thus must sin be purified of its filth, and only the sparks of holiness will remain.

KRONEN

ENEKH

(surprised):

Sparks of holiness in sin?

Indeed. There is no sin entirely devoid of a holy spark. Everything created by God must have holiness at its base.

KRONEN:

What are you saying! Satan created sin, not God!

ENEKR:

(calmly): And who created Satan? God! Which means that in Satan there is also something holy.

KRONEN

ENEKR

(frightened):

In Satan? In the Sitra Akhra? Holiness?!

The Sitra Akhra is the other side of God. And if it is an aspect of God, it must have a spark of holiness within it.

KRONEN:

(stunned): I cannot! Let me think! (Covers his face with his hands, leans against the reading stand, and rests his head upon it, remaining in this pose.)

ENEKH

(in a trembling voice): Which sin is the most terrible and the most difficult to resist? Lust for a woman, correct?

KRONEN

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant ENEKH

(without raising his head):

Yes!

(in trembling rapture): And if you purify this sin with fire until all that remains is the spark of God-then the greatest filth becomes the greatest Holiness, the song of songs, the "Song of Songs." (Straightens up, covers his eyes, and, slightly tilting back his head, softly sings with rapture:) Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; Thou hast doves' eyes within thy locks: Thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead. Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, Which came up from the washing; Whereof every one bear twins, And none is barren among them. (A soft knock at the door, which then opens soundlessly. Leah enters irresolutely, leading Prada and Gitel by the hand. All remain standing by the door. Meyer enters from the prayer room.)

KHONEN

(recognizes them and is surprised. Deferentially): Sender's daughter? ... Leah?

MEYER

Look! Reb

(timidly): Remember how you promised to show me the ancient curtains of the ark? (At her first words, Khonen breaks off his song and stares bedazzled at Leah. The whole time he either looks at her in reverent rapture or stands with eyes closed.)

LEAH

(to Meyer): Show her the ancient curtains! Leah has vowed to sew curtains for the ark to mark the anniversary of her mother's death. She will embroider the holy curtains with soft velvet and pure gold, as in the olden days, with lions and eagles. They will bring joy to her mother's heart in heaven when they are hung on the ark. (Leah looks around the synagogue uneasily. When she notices Khonen, she lowers her gaze, takes a step back, and remains standing, tense and trembling, eyes cast down.)

FRADA

(obligingly): Of course, of course! I'll bring in the oldest and most expensive curtains we have immediately. (Opens a wardrobe.)

MEYER

(taking Leah by the hand): synagogue at night?

GITEL

Leah! Aren't you afraid to be in the

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The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

I've never been here at night. And only once have I been here during the day. Girls don't go to the synagogue ... How sad and sorrowful it is here ...

LEAH:

A synagogue cannot be otherwise, my children. The dead come to pray here at midnight, and they leave their sorrow here ...

FRADA:

Granny, don't talk about the dead. I'm frightened ...

GITEL:

FRADA(without hearing her): And at daybreak, the Almighty weeps over the destruction of the Temple, and his tears fall in the synagogue. That's why the walls of old synagogues are tear-stained and cannot be whitewashed. If you try, they become angry and throw their stones down ...

How old the synagogue is. I didn't notice it from the outside ...

LEAH:

Yes, extremely old. No one knows when it was built. They even say it was discovered beneath the earth already complete ... How many fires there have been, how many times the entire city has burned to the ground, but the synagogue has remained whole. Only once the roof caught fire, and a whole flock of doves flew down, encircled the roof, and beat their wings till the fire went out. (To Gitel.) And did you see the mound enclosed by a fence next to the synagogue? That's a sacred grave.

FRADA:

LEAH

(sighs):

The grave of a bride and bridegroom ...

(mournfully): As they were being betrothed, Khameliuk attacked and killed them during the wedding. Here is where they were buried. And now, when a rabbi betroths a bride and groom next to the synagogue, he hears laments from the grave ... And after the wedding feast, everyone goes and dances around the grave to cheer and comfort the deceased bride and groom.

FRADA

(without hearing her, speaking as if to herself): How sad it is here ... and how wonderful. I would never leave this ancient, poor synagogue ... I want to caress it, press myself against it, and ask it why it is so sad and pensive, so tear-stained and silent ... I want to ... I don't really know myself, but my heart is rent with pity and sorrow ...

LEAH

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant (moved): When you speak like this, Leah, I think I hear the voice of your grandmother, the virtuous Rochele.

FRADA

(brings the curtains and spreads them out): Here is the oldest one, more than 200 years old. We use it only on Passover.

MEYER

(delighted): How beautiful! Look, Leah! Two trees with doves on them embroidered with heavy gold on stiff crimson velvet. And two lions down below holding the Star of David. You can't get such gold nowadays, nor such velvet.

GITEL

How soft it is and how sad ... (Kisses the curtain and stares at it lovingly.)

LEAH:

(unfolds another curtain): And here is the pearl curtain. At the top are tiny flowers of diamonds. And all the words of the blessing are embroidered with pure pearl. We hang this one on the Day ofJudgment. (Leah and Gitel examine the curtains.)

MEYER

(to Meyer, pointing at Leah, softly): A wonderful child. A pure dove! And God is punishing her by sending an illness upon her. She's become so thin and weak, and at night she weeps continually. So I suggested she sew curtains for the ark. It might help ... (More softly.) Is it true that Khonen has returned?

FRADA

Yes, several weeks ago. He's here. Would you like me to call him?

MEYER:

No. If he doesn't come to see us himself, we shouldn't bother ... How is he?

FRADA:

Completely changed, extremely pensive. He's buried himself in the Kabbalah ...

MEYER:

Really? (Takes out of her pocket a handful of beans.) Here, give him these, he should enjoy them.

FRADA:

MEYER:

He doesn't eat. He fasts from Sabbath to Sabbath.

From Sabbath to Sabbath? If only his fasting would restore Leah to health.

FRADA:

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The Dybbuk: Censored Variant (seeing Khonen,grabs Leah by the hand and whispers): Leah, look! That young man by the reading stand is looking at you. How strangely he's staring at you!

GITEL

(without raising her eyes): It's a yeshivah student ... Khonen. He used to eat at our table ... and live with us ... He hasn't been here for a long time ...

LEAH

He's staring at you with such sparkling eyes.

GITEL:

He always stares at me like that. His eyes are so ... And when he used to speak with me, he'd lose his breath ... and I would, too ... It's a sin, after all, for a young man and woman to speak to each other ...

LEAH:

It's as if he's calling you with his eyes ... He wants to approach you, but it wouldn't be appropriate.

GITEL:

LEAH:

Why is he so pale? He must have been ill.

Meyer, will you allow us to kiss the Holy Scrolls? It is not right to be a guest in the house of God and not kiss His Torah.

PRADA:

Certainly, this way. (Meyer leads the way. Prada leads Gitel by the hand, followed by Leah. Meyer opens the ark, takes out a few scrolls, and gives them to Prada and Gitel to kiss.)

MEYER:

(stops as she passes Khonen, raises her head, looks at him, and once again drops her eyes): Good evening, Khonen ... You've come back?

LEAH

KRONEN LEAH:

(whispers):

Yes.

You don't come to see us ...

KRONEN

(barely speaking):

I ca1mot ...

Your room is not occupied, and all the books are in their previous places.

LEAH:

KRONEN:

I know. (Wants to say something more, but cannot.)

It's so silent in our house. Nobody reads the Talmud, nobody sings the prayers as you did ... It's grown so quiet ...

LEAH:

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant KRONEN:

I no longer read the Talmud ... or sing ...

Leah, come here and kiss the Scrolls! (Trembling, Leah kisses the Scrolls passionately for a long time.)

FRADA:

(alarmed): Enough, my child. It's forbidden to kiss the Torah for too long. It is made of fire-written with black fire upon white fire ... (Flustered, she suddenly begins to hurry.) Let us go home, children. Oh, how late it is! (Exeunt quickly.) (Meyer closes the lectern and sits motionless, gathers the curtains, then exits. Khonen sits motionless with closed eyes. A long pause.)

FRADA

(continues to sing the Song of Songs from where he left off): Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely: thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks.

KRONEN

(raises his head and listens): What are you singing? (Khonen stops singing, opens his eyes, and stares unseeingly and motionless.) Your hair is wet again. Have you been to the ritual baths again this evening?

ENEKH

KRONEN

(mechanically):

Yes.

When you perform your ablutions, do you continually recite the incantations and Names according to the Book ofRaziel?

ENEKH:

KRONEN: ENEKR: KRONEN: ENEKR:

Yes. And aren't you afraid? No. And you fast from Sabbath to Sabbath. Isn't it hard?

It's more difficult for me to eat on the Sabbath than fast during the week. I have lost the desire for food. (Pause.)

KHONEN:

ENEKH:

Why are you doing this? What do you hope to obtain?

(pauses. As if to himself): I want ... I want to take possession of a bright and sparkling diamond, to melt it, transform it into shining tears, and absorb it into my soul. I want to summon the rays of the Third Temple, the Temple of Beauty. (Agitated, he can speak no more. Suddenly, very agitated.) Yes, one more thing! I

KHONEN

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The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

want to acquire two barrels of gold coins ... (Whispers.) For one whose soul can only be enticed by coins, golden coins. So that's it! (Shakes his head.) Beware, Khonen, you will not attain these things by the proper means ...

ENEKH:

(agitated): I've already achieved so much. Three times. (Whispers.) Listen, I'll tell you a secret. Last night in a dream I formulated a Question-and in my dream I received an answer. Now I know what to do. I only have to guess the secret of a single word, which has the numerical value of 36.

KHONEN

Beware, Khonen. The enemy is powerful! (Rises.) It's almost midnight. I'm going to the large synagogue to observe the midnight vigil.

ENEKH:

(Enekh leaves. Meyer enters. First Old Man enters from the prayer room.) (to Meyer): We recited eighteen psalms. That's enough. You don't have to read all of the Psalms for a single zloty. But you try and talk to them. They love to sing the Psalms. (Chaim enters.)

FIRST OLD MAN

(excited): I just saw Baruch, the tailor. He's just returned from Klimovka where Sender went to look at a bridegroom. Apparently the whole thing has fallen through. Besides the dowry, Sender wanted the family to feed the couple for ten years. They only agreed to five, so the whole thing is off. (Exits into the prayer room.)

CHAIM

MEYER:

For the fourth time! What a disappointment!

(straightening up, in rapture): Once again I've done it. (Khonen falls exhausted onto the bench and remains sitting with a frozen expression of victory on his face. The Old Men and yeshivah students enter from the prayer room.) KHONEN

OLD MEN

(to one another):

SECOND OLD MAN:

May the Lord send her healing!

Now I wouldn't mind something to eat and drink.

I've prepared some cakes and vodka. (Takes from his sidepocket a bottle and glasses.) Come, let's go out into the antechamber and have a drink.

MEYER:

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant (The door opens with a bang, and Sender walks in, accompanied by several Jews.) (stops, looks around merrily. Loudly): Aha! I thought they'd be sitting around engrossed in the holy books or sleeping, but they're about to have a little celebration. True Tartakov Hasidim, Ha-ha-ha!

SENDER

(going to meet him joyfully): Ah, Reb Sender! An unexpected guest! Come drink with us.

EVERYONE

You dummies, the drinks are on me. Congratulate me. It's a lucky time for me, I've betrothed my daughter. (Khonen sits up; he looks at Sender, shattered.)

SENDER:

EVERYONE

(merrily):

Congratulations, congratulations!!!

But they just told us everything had fallen through, and you were coming back empty-handed. We were very sorry to hear it.

MEYER:

It almost did-because of the food for the young couple. But at the last minute they gave in, and we signed the agreement.

SENDER:

(gasping, in a whisper): Betrothed! Betrothed? ... That means it was all in vain ... the fasts, the study, the ablutions, the incantations. But? Now everything has become clear. (Ecstatically.) Everything! Now I know what the number 36 signifies! What the name Leah signifies-Lo-ha. Not God, not through God. (Choking with rapture.) Victory! I ... (Falls to the ground with a feeble shout.)

KRONEN

(pointing to the bottle in Meyer's hand): What kind of rubbish are you drinking? (To Chaim.) Chaim, run to my place and say that I've ordered you to bring a bottle of good spirits, cakes, radishes in honey, and bring it all quickly. Run! (Chaim runs out.)

SENDER

oLD MAN (whispering to Meyer): handy tomorrow. (Meyer stashes the bottle in his shirt.)

FIRST

Hide the bottle. It'll come in

Why is it so dark in here, Meyer? Light some candles. Let's liven the place up. (Meyer lights some candles.) Until the

SENDER:

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396

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

refreshments arrive, someone tell us something about our tsadik, Reb Shloimele. Does anyone know anything new about his deeds? Perhaps his sayings, his parables? Every word of his is a pearl. (Everyone sits down at the table.)

If you'd like, I'll recount one ofhis parables. Once a very wealthy man came to see him. Reb Shloimele looked at him with his radiant eyes and at once discerned he was a miser. He took him by the hand, led him to the window, and asked: "What do you see?" The rich man peered out the window and said: "I see people." Then Reb Shloimele led him to a mirror and asked: "And now what do you see?" The rich man answered: "Now I see myself." Then Reb Shloimele said to him: "Both are made of glass. But this one is slightly silvered, and as soon as the glass is slightly silvered you begin to see only yourself."

WANDERER:

THIRD OLD MAN:

Ah! Ah! Ah! Sweeter than honey!

Divine words! (Pause.) How about a song! Mendel, you know the songs of Levi Yitskhok of Berdichev. Come on, sing something!

SECOND OLD MAN:

SENDER:

Yes, yes!

Sing what? You really want to hear "You"? (Sings:) Creator of the universe, (repeat) For you I will sing "You." (repeat) Where can I find You, Where can I not find You? Wherever you look-there is only You, And there is nothing without You. Everything is You, only You, the only one, You, You, You, You! If everything is good-it is You, And if it's not-it is You, But if it's You-it is good. Everything is You, only You, the only one, You, You, You, You! You are the North, You are the West, The South, the East-yes, You, You are in the heights-and in the depths.

THIRD OLD MAN:

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

Everything is You, only You, the only one. You, You, You, You! SECOND OLD MAN:

A divine song. Simply divine!

And now a dance! What? Sender is betrothing his only daughter and no dance?! What sort ofTartakov Hasidim would we be?! (Sender and the old men form a circle, arms on shoulders. Tilting their heads to the side and rolling back their eyes, they slowly begin to circle, intoning a monotonous, sad, mystic melody. Chaim enters confused and alarmed.)

SENDER:

MEYER

(approaches Chaim):

Well? Where's the vodka and food?

(whispering): Who cares about vodka and food! Sender's daughter has passed out, and no one can bring her around ... I was sent to tell Sender to go home.

CHAIM

What? You have no business bothering Sender. He won't like it. And you'll get a couple of slaps, on top of it. He's about to go home himself.

MEYER:

(exiting the circle): All right, now a merry dance. Come on, boys! Where are you? Where are you? (Chaim and the yeshivah students approach Sender.)

SENDER

Where are the rest? Where's Enekh? Where's Khonen? Bring them in.

THIRD OLD MAN:

(confused): Oh! Khonen?! My Khonenke is here! Where is he? Find him! He's going to get it! ...

SENDER

MEYER

(seeing Khonen):

Here he is asleep on the floor.

Wake him up, the rascal! (Several people approach Khonen.)

SENDER:

(frightened): He won't wake up! (All approach Khonen and bustle about him.)

MEYER

(exclaims): He's dead!!! (Picking a book up off the floor, in horror.) He was holding the Book of Raziel! He's been struck down!!! Struck down ...

FIRST OLD MAN

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398

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

Act Two A square in Brinn its. To the left a tall wooden synagogue, blackened with age, with an elaborate system of rooft, one atop another, and with doors as large as gates, recessed somewhat. In front of the synagogue to the right is a small enclosed burial mound and gravestone with an inscription in Hebrew. Beyond the synagogue is a lane with a few small houses, merging into the backdrop. To the right is the large ancient wooden house of Reb Sender. Beyond the house, broad gates open onto a courtyard, a lane, a city gate, a row of shops beneath a stone arch, all of which likewise merges with the backdrop. Also on the backdrop is an inn with a tall broom beside it, and behind it a park and a large palace of a landowner. A wide road descends to the river. On the opposite precipitous bank, is a Jewish cemetery with several gravestones of various sizes. To the left on the backdrop, a wooden bridge stretches across a river. There is a windmill and, somewhat closer, a bathhouse and a well with a pole and bucket leaning against it. In the distance is a dense pine forest. The gates of Sender's house are open wide. Long tables stand in the courtyard, extending into the square. The tables are laid with food, and the poor, the cripples, the old men and women, and the children are sitting close together on benches at the table and eatinggreedily. Servants come out of the house with large platters, which they carry high above their heads, and they distribute bread and other types offood. In front ofthe house near the porch and closer to the footlights stands a table laden with bottles of wine and various kinds of baked goods. Alter the Server is sitting at the table without a coat and with sleeves rolled up arranging wine and food on platters. The Cook and her assistant sit on the ground. The former is plucking a turkey, and the latter is crushing something in a mortar. Women sit on benches before the shops, knitting stockings and watching the activities at Sender's house. Women with baskets, workmen, and the Watercarrier with buckets on a yoke walk across the stage. Jews exit the synagogue carrying their prayer shawls in bags beneath their arms and head for the houses and shops. From Sender's house wafts the sound of music, dancing, and voices-all very lively. It is midday. The Wedding Guest, an elderly Jew wearing a satin caftan girdled with a black satin belt, a fur hat, white socks, and shoes stands on the square before the synagogue. Next to him stand the First and Second Old Men, the synagogue regulars.

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant (with hands tucked behind his belt) looks around the synagogue): What a wonderful synagogue you have, so large and beautiful. The spirit of God rests upon it. It must be quite old.

WEDDING GUEST

oLD MAN: Very old. The old people say that even their grandfathers can't remember \vhen it was built.

FIRST

(noticing the grave): And what's that? (He approaches the grave) reads the inscription.) "Here lie the holy martyred bride and groom, who praised God with their death."

WEDDING GUEST

OLD MAN: This is an ancient grave. \'Vhen Khamcliuk, God protect us, attacked our town and slaughtered many Jews, he killed the bride and groom who were just being led beneath the canopy. They were both buried as saints on that spot, in a single grave, which we call the "holy grave."

FIRST

(whisperinJJ): And now when the rabbi marries a young couple, he sometimes hears moans from the grave. We've had a custom since ages ago: whenever someone gets married, everyone dances around the grave to cheer and comfort the dead bride and groom.

SECOND OLD MAN

WEDDING GUEST:

An excellent CUStom.

(Sender and Meyer approach from the courtyard.) MEYER (excited~y):

What a feast! What a feast! Never in my life have I seen such a feast for the poor.

WEDDING GUEST:

It's really no surprise! Sender is marrying off his

only daughter. (The Guest slowly leaves and stops at the first and then at the second house to look back at them.) Each received a portion of fish, a plate of roast meat, and then dessert. And each man received a glass of vodka before the meal, and everyone had cakes.

MEYER:

Sender knows what he's doing. If you don't please an invited guest, there's no great harm in it. At worst he'll take offense and maybe grumble a bit. But if you don't satisfy the poor, the danger can be very great.

FIRST OLD MAN:

399

400

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

SECOND OLD MAN: Yes, that's the main thing. With the poor, you never know who you're dealing with. An ordinary Jew could suddenly turn out to be a rabbi, a landlord, a merchant. You never know who could be hiding beneath those rags. It could be an ordinary pauper or one of the great ones-a tsadik who has not yet been revealed to the world, a holy man going through Exile, or even one of the 36 hidden righteous ones, without whom the world would be destroyed. FIRST oLD MAN:

Or even the Prophet Elijah.

SECOND OLD MAN: [He] The hidden righteous ones always [appears] appear dressed as [a pauper] paupers or [a peasant] peasants. The Besht, of blessed memory, would always see [Elijah the Prophet] them at weddings and find [him] them in the company of the poor. They say that once the Besht came to a wedding, but he was very upset about something and kept looking for someone among the guests. Then he began smoking his pipe and started to sing, and one of the guests emerged from the crowd wearing a caftan and holding a thick cane. He approached the Besht, slapped him on the shoulder, laughing, and said in Ukrainian: "You sing beautifully and thus will be rewarded." Then he disappeared. No one had any idea what was going on. And many years later the Besht revealed to his disciples that this was [Elijah the Prophet] the Holy Ari himself, of blessed memory, who came to tell the Besht that with his singing he had averted a terrible misfortune that was to have stricken the Jews ... SECOND OLD MAN (sighs): What more is there to say. It is written in the Talmud: "Behave carefully with the poor." (The poor exit the courtyard, singly or in pairs, and gather into small groups. The First and Second Old Men and Meyer approach the table behind which stands Alter. They exchange a few whispered words with Alter, who pours them each a glass ofvodka. They drink and have cake.) LAME WOMAN: didn't. HUNCHBACK:

They said we would each get a bowl of soup, but we And they gave out only small slices of bread.

MAN ON CRUTCHES: Such a rich man. It wouldn't hurt him to give a whole loaf to each of us.

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

He could have given each of us a piece of chicken. (Points at the cook sitting on the ground.) For the rich guests they're cooking chicken, turkey, and goose.

TALL PALE WOMAN:

(walks up to the table and looks over the food inquisitively): are you putting out the food so early?

GUEST

Why

This isn't for the guests. Reb Sender is sending these platters to our landowner.

ALTER:

GUEST:

Aha, the landowner ...

ALTER:

The best wines and the most expensive food.

MEYER: GUEST:

They sent a messenger for it to the city,

50

miles away.

It appears you fear your landowner. Is he really that terrible?

Like all landowners. With a single word he can bestow his favor upon you or have you rot in a pit.

ALTER:

cooK (significantly): GUEST

Or even worse ...

(pricking up his ears):

Like what?

cooK: Nothing, nothing ... There are some things that shouldn't be talked about ... You've certainly heard the story of our landowner's grandfather, the old count.

MEYER:

GUEST:

No, I haven't. I'm from distant parts.

(surprised): You've heard nothing about the old count? He was famous throughout the region. What he did is really no laughing matter. It's even frightening to talk about it. At night he would turn into a black cat and smother Jewish boys on the eve of their circumcision. And there was no protection against him until the Besht himself stepped forward and defeated him.

FIRST OLD MAN

(to the Second Old Man): Reb Mikhoel, you know the story. Why don't you tell it, and let a Jew from other parts hear the tale.

MEYER

(sighs and takes a seat. The others sit as well) except for Once upon a time, the holy Besht, ofblessed memory,

SECOND OLD MAN

Meyer):

4-01

+02

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

ordered his coachman Aleksa to harness the horse. When he'd done so, the Besht and his pupils set out for a drive. Of course, you know how the Besht usually rode. He'd sit in the carriage and converse with his students. Aleksa would sit on the box and snooze with his back to the horses. The horse knew the way and would trot easily along by itself, barely shuffling its legs, and in a half hour it would cover a thousand or two thousand miles-because beneath the horse, the ground was rushing in the opposite direction. Suddenly the horse stops at an inn. Because the horse had come to a halt, it was meant to. Besht and his disciples alighted from the carriage and entered the inn. They saw that the inn was festive, many candles lit, but the innkeeper sat in the corner utterly despondent. He didn't even raise his head when they entered. The Besht went up to the innkeeper and asked why he was so depressed. The innkeeper made no response at first, but the Besht was persistent, and finally the innkeeper told him of his sorrow. "My wife gave birth seven times to completely healthy boys, but at midnight on the eve of the circumcision each one died. Now my wife has born an eighth son, and the circumcision is supposed to take place tomorrow. But I know the child will die at midnight." The Besht listened to his story and replied, "Your child will live. Now, please go to sleep." The innkeeper obeyed. The Besht placed two of his disciples next to the cradle, gave them an empty sack, and ordered them to stay awake and stand guard. "Hold this sack open," he said, "right next to the cradle. If something appears and throws itself at the cradle, capture whatever it is in the sack, tie it securely, and call me. The Besht then went into the next room and devoted himself to divine thought. The disciples did everything the Besht ordered. When midnight arrived, they began extinguishing the candles, and an enormous cat ran into the room and hurled itself at the cradle. The disciples captured it in the sack, tied it, and called the Besht, who ordered them to beat the sack mercilessly with sticks and then throw the cat outside. In the morning, the child was alive and well. The circumcision took place, and everyone feasted and rejoiced. Mter the feast, the innkeeper, according to the custom, took the landowner a congratulatory meal. This landowner was the old count, the grandfather of our landowner. Do you understand?

MEYER:

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

(continues): When the innkeeper brought the celebratory meal to the count, he was told the count was ailing. But when the landowner heard the innkeeper had arrived, he had him summoned. The innkeeper found the landowner in bed, covered with bandages and dressings. The landowner inquired, "Who was the Jew who came to see you yesterday evening?" The innkeeper answered, "I don't know his name, but he's certainly a holy man. He shielded my child from death," and the innkeeper proceeded to relate to the landowner everything that had happened. Then the landowner said, "Tell this Jew to come see me." The innkeeper returned home saddened, for he feared that the landowner would harm the Besht. The Besht laughed, "Don't worry," and he went to see the landowner. Upon his arrival, the landowner said to him, "This is no trifle. You captured me unawares and beat me mercilessly. If you'd like to engage me in battle, let's go out to an open field, and then you '11 see which of us is the stronger." The Besht replied, "I did not intend to do battle with you. I was only saving the life of a child. But if you'd like to challenge me to battle, I will not decline. You gather your students, and I will gather mine. In a month we will meet in a clearing." Exactly one month later they met in an open field, as they had agreed. The Besht made two circles around himself and one around his students, whom he ordered to stare intently at his face. If they noticed any change in his features, they were to strengthen their gaze with holy thoughts. The landowner also made circles around himself and his students and began to send out terrible wild animals from his circle, which would hurl themselves, howling terribly, at the Besht. But as soon as they entered the first circle they disappeared. This continued an entire day. Finally, the landmvner sent wild boars against the Besht, snorting fire from their nostrils. The boars flung themselves at the Besht and broke through the first circle. The Besht's face underwent a change, whereupon his students strengthened their holy gaze, and the wild boars vanished at the second circle. Three times the landowner sent forth wild boars, and each of them vanished. Then he left the circle and said to the Besht, "I have no more strength to do battle with you. You are victorious and may kill me if you wish." The Besht replied, "Ifi'd wanted to kill you, I would have done so long ago. I only wanted to demonstrate to you the great majesty of our God. Look at the sky." The landowner

SECOND OLD MAN

403

+O+

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

raised his eyes skyward. Two ravens flew down and pecked his eyes out. The blind landowner could no longer .-,ow evil, for all his magical power was in his eyes. Thus may all your enemies perish, oh Lord. (Pause. All are amazed by the tale.) cooK: The old men still recall how the old blind count shuffled around the town, led by two servants. GUEST: And is the present landowner also involved in such doings? cooK: Last year children were dying like flies ... And last year before Passover three women died in childbirth ... This summer a young bride drowned in broad daylight. It can't be mere coincidence ... AI,TER: And they suspect ... they fear ... (Sender enters dressed in holiday attire accompanied by several servants.) SENDER (to Alter):

Has everything been done as I've ordered?

ALTER: Yes, everything, Reb Sender, everything. You can rely on me. (Hands the servants the platters.) Carry them very carefully. (Sender, accompanied by his servants carrying platters, heads toward the square and turns to the right. Everyone makes way for him and watches the procession, whispering to one another: «Reb Sender is taking a celebratory meal to the landowner.'' Alter tidies up the table and takes it along with the remnants of wine and cakes into the house. One after another, the cooks leave. The First and Second Old Men and Meyer return to the synagogue. The Wedding Guest standing on the porch goes into the house. Leah appears in the courtyard behind the table, wearing a wedding gown, and dancing with the poor, one by one. More and more ofthe poor are drawn to her from all sides.) POOR WOMAN WITH ONE ARM: LAME woMAN:

I danced with the bride!

So did I! I grabbed her and spun around. He-he!!!

HUNCHBACK: Why does this bride dance only with women? I wouldn't mind a swing with her, too, he-he! THE POOR: He-he-he! (Prada, Gitel, and Basia come out onto the porch.)

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

Woe is me! Leah is still dancing with the poor. She's certain to get dizzy. Children, go bring her here. (Prada sits down by the porch. Gitel and Basia go up to Leah and stop her.)

FRADA:

GITEL: LEAH

Enough dancing, Leah. Let's go.

(looks at her distractedly, then closes her eyes):

A little more ...

You're going to get dizzy. (Basia and Gitel take her by the hand and begin leading her away. Poor men and women encircle Leah, grab hold of her, and shout in pleading, whining voices):

BASIA:

-

She still hasn't danced with me! What, I'm not as good as the others? I've been waiting an hour already. Let me go, it's my turn. She danced with Lame Yana for a long time, and she doesn't want to dance with me. I don't have any luck. Let her spin around with me at least once. Just once!

(enters, stands on a bench, and shouts loudly in a sing-song voice): Everyone hurry to the awning; each of you will receive ten groschen. (Leaves.) (The poor rush to the courtyard shoving and shouting excitedly, ((Ten groschen apiece! Ten ~ffroschen apiece!'' Leah, Gitel, Basia, and the Old Woman remain omtage.) BADKHEN

woMAN (grabs Leah): Just one dance. I don't need any groschen. I haven't danced in 40 years ... Oh, how I could dance when I was young. (Leah grabs her and begins dancing. The old woman won't let go and shouts.) More, more! (They dance some more, and the old woman is gasping for breath. She shouts.) More, more! (Basia and Gitel stop the old woman. Basia leads her to the courtyard and returns. Gitelleads Leah to the bench and sits her down. Servants are clearing the tables and closing the gates.)

OLD

FRADA:

You look awful, Leah! Are you tired?

(closes her eyes, lzfts her head, speaking as if in a trance): They grasped me firmly, pressing their bodies against mine, pressing their

LEAH

405

406

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

icy fingers into my skin ... My head began to spin, and the ground vanished from beneath my feet. Some unearthly force seized me and spirited me far, far away ... Your dress is all soiled and wrinkled! What are you going to do now?

BASIA:

(as before): If you leave the bride alone on the day of the wedding, the spirits come and whisk her away, and she herself becomes a spirit ... Why did you bring me back?

LEAH

(frightened): What terrible words you say, Leah. Don't even mention the spirits. They're exceedingly cunning, lying in wait in every nook and cranny, listening and watching everything, just waiting till someone unwittingly mentions them, and then they hurl themselves upon him. Tfu! Tfu! Tfu!!!

FRADA

(opens her eyes): I know the spirits and do not tear them. They are not frightening ...

LEAH

And you must not praise them. If you praise an evil spirit, it becomes bold.

FRADA:

(with extreme conviction): Granny, it's not evil spirits that surround us, but the souls of people who lived on earth before us, or with us, and then died. It is they who watch and listen to everything we do and say. They dwell among us.

LEAH

What are you talking about, Leah! The souls of the dead fly up to the sky and find repose in Paradise. And the sinful souls ...

FRADA:

(interrupting her): No, Granny, no. They live among us ... (In a different tone.) Granny, a person is born to live out an entire life! And if he dies before his time, what happens to his unlived life? What happens to his joys, his sorrows, the thoughts he was supposed to have, the deeds he was supposed to accomplish, the children he was supposed to have? ... (In a different tone.) Once there lived a young man with a lofty soul and profound thoughts. He had his whole life before him. Suddenly, it was cut short. Strangers came and took him to be buried in soil he did not know. And what happened to his unlived life, his unspoken words, his

LEAH

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

unfinished prayers? Granny, if a candle goes out before it finishes burning, it doesn't disappear. You can light it again, and it will burn to the end. How, then, can a human life disappear if it is extinguished before its time? (shaking her head): You cannot think of such things, Leah. God knows what he's doing. We are blind and know nothing.

FRADA

(softly): But I know, Granny. The life of a human does not disappear. The souls of the departed return to earth, and spirits without bodies live out their lives, complete their business, experience the joys they never had, say the prayers they didn't finish. You yourself used to tell me how the dead would gather in the synagogue at night to pray. My mother died young and didn't experience all the joys of motherhood. Today I am going to go to her in the cemetery and invite her to my wedding. And she will come. And she and my father will lead me to the wedding canopy and then dance with me ... And all the other souls also live among us, in joy and in sorrow. But we neither see them nor understand them. (Whispering.) Granny, if you really want to, you can see them, hear their voices, and live with them as with the living. I know ... (Pause. Points at the grave.) That is a holy grave. (She rises and slowly walks toward the grave. Prada, Gitel, and Basia follow her.) I remember this grave from my earliest childhood, I know the bride and groom, I've seen them many times in my dreams and while awake. They are as dear to me as my own family. They were young and happy as they were approaching the canopy and had a long life before them. Suddenly there were shouts and confusion. Cruel and bloodthirsty marauders attacked, an axe flashed, and the bride and groom fell dead. They were buried in a single graveinseparable for all eternity. Their souls joined as one; they can see and hear each other. And every time a couple marries, the guests and bride and groom dance around their grave, and the souls emerge from the grave and share with the newlyweds a portion of their joy and bliss and celebrate their own wedding. (To the grave.) Eternal bride and groom! I invite you to appear at my wedding! Come and stand beside me beneath the canopy. (A flourish of music. Leah screams and almost falls. Gitel and Basia hold her up.)

LEAH

407

408

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

What frightened you? The groom has just arrived, and they're greeting him with music on the outskirts of town.

GITEL:

(excited):

BASIA

GITEL: LEAH

I'll go have a look at him!

Me too. Then I'll come and tell you what he's like. All right?

(softly):

There's no need ...

She's ashamed. Don't be bashful, silly. We won't tell anyone. (Exeunt Cite! and Basia hasti£v. Leah and Prada return to their previous places.) BASIA:

The bride always asks her friends to go have a look and tell her what the groom looks like, whether he's dark or fair. (Sender approaches.)

FRADA:

SENDER:

Why are you sitting here, my daughter?

She was entertaining the poor, dancing with them, and now her head is spinning. She's resting.

FRADA:

Ah, entertaining the poor. That's good ... I was at the count's. He was satisfied with the congratulatory meal and promised to send you an expensive gift. (Looks at the sky.) It's getting late. The groom and family have arrived. Are you ready?

SENDER:

PRADA:

We still have to go to the cemetery ...

Go, go, my daughter, to see your mother. Invite her to the wedding and weep over her grave ... Tell her that I also would like her to come, that I would very much like her by my side to lead our only daughter beneath the canopy. (With emotion.) Tell her I've done everything she asked me to on her deathbed: I devoted all my attention to you, I raised you and instilled in you a fear of God. And now I am marrying you to a worthy, learned young man from a good family ... (Sobs, wipes his tears, and walks into the house with bowed head. Pause.)

SENDER:

Granny, can I invite any of the other deceased besides Mother to the wedding?

LEAH:

Only the closest relatives. Invite your grandfather Ephraim and your aunt Mirele ...

FRADA:

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant LEAH

(softly):

I'd like to invite someone ... who's not family.

No, my dear! If you invite a stranger, you will insult the other deceased, whom you did not invite, and that will bring harm upon us ...

FRADA:

But he's not a stranger ... He was in our house, like one of the family.

LEAH:

FRADA LEAH

(whispers):

Who?

(barely audible):

Khonen.

(frightened): Oh no, my dear-they say his end was inauspicious. (Leah lowers her head and silently weeps.) Don't cry! Don't cry! All right, invite him! I'll take the sin upon myself! (Suddenly remembers.) But I don't know where his grave is, and it wouldn't be proper to ask.

FRADA

I know where it is ...

LEAH: FRADA:

How do you know?

I saw it in a dream! (Closes her eyes, as if speaking to herself) I saw him myself ... He spoke with me and told me what had happened to him in this world and asked me to invite him to my wedding. (Gitel and Basia run in.)

LEAH:

GITELAND BASrA LEAH

(in unison):

(recoiling, cries out):

We saw him! We saw him!

Who? Who did you see?

GITEL:

The groom! He's dark, very dark!

BASIA:

No he's not! He's blond! (Pause.)

LEAH

(stands):

Granny, let's go to the cemetery.

Wait, Leah! First you have to deliver to the midwife Khana the shirt you sewed for her.

FRADA:

And she'll dance and sing in it at the market and entertain the merchants.

BASIA:

4-09

4-IO

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant

Yes! It's an old custom and must be observed. (To Gitel and Basia.) Go into the house, girls, and bring the shirt and refreshments. (Gitel and Basia go into the house and return with two trays-one bearing the shirt and the other mead and cakes. They give the tray with the shirt to Leah. Leah leads the way with Gitel behind her carrying the other tray. They head for the house at the far left edge of the stage. Children come running in.)

FRADA:

(hopping about): They're bringing Granny Khana the shirt! They're bringing Granny Khana the shirt! (They run after the procession. Leah and the others walk up to the house of Khana.)

CHILDREN

(knocking at the door): Khana, open up! Your granddaughter has brought you a present. (Khana, an old woman, comes out.)

LEAH

KHANA:

You remembered your old midwife.

(presenting her the tray with the shirt): Granny, I sewed this shirt for you and embroidered it myself. (Hands her the other tray.) And I baked these cakes for you, as well. Please receive these gifts from me on the day of my wedding in the way you received me the day I was born. May you live to be a hundredand-twenty.

LEAH

It will not be long to 120, he-he! (Takes the second tray.) My dear child, just as you have blessed me with a shirt, may the Good Lord bless you with 12 sons who shall sit before the Torah and bring praise to your name throughout the land. (Kisses her. Places a hand upon her head.) May the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob bless you! (Takes the shirt and examines it.) Oh, what a lovely shirt. It will be my burial shroud. Now, I must go get dressed for the wedding. (Khana goes into the house. Leah throws a black shawl over her shoulders and heads down the side alley with Prada.)

KHANA:

(to Basia): Leah and Prada went to the cemetery. (Khana comes out wearing the shirt girdled by a white belt.)

GITEL

The Dybbuk: Censored Variant (picks up the tray and dances through the market toward the shops. Sings):

KHANA

Midwife Khana bravely bore A bunch of little children, On the wedding day, therefore, Received a shirt of linen. Ivish Writers and Journalists, Vilna, 320 autobiography: in An-sky's fiction, 12-13, 16, 19; Jewish folklore vs., 94; Sholem Aleichem, 43. See also memoirs avant-garde: artists, 27-28, 307-19; theater, 261, 264. See also modernism Aynhorn, Arn, 244-45 Azarkhi, Beila, xv, xxix Azef, Evno, 99 Babel, Isaac, 19, 134; Red Cavalry/ Konarmiia, 95 Bagritsky, Eduard, 19, 134 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 228 Bakst, Lev, 212, 309, 312, 314 Bakunin, Mikhail, 105 Balaban, Meyer, 310 Balfour Declaration, 29, 345 ballet: Ballets Russes, 177, 314; The Dybbuk, 264 Bastomski, Shloymc, 327 Batiushkov, Fedor Dmitrievich, 363-64

515

516

Index Baty, Gaston, 264 Beilis, Mcnahcm-Mendcl, xxv, 97 Beilis murder trial, xxv, 17,97-98,290 Bejart, Maurice, 264 Belinsky, Vissarion, xx Bely, Andrey, 176, 178 Ben-Ari, 258 Ben-Khaim, 258 Berdiacv, Nikolai, 115 Beregovsky, Moisei, 208, 209, 225-26 Bergelson, David, 121, 133 Bcrlewi, Henryk, 235, 238-39 Berlin: An-sky, xix, xxiii, 67-68; An-sky ethnographic collection, 317; Jewish artists, 31 0; Shtif, 329; theater, 171, 176,264 Berlin, Moses, 267-68; Survey of the Ethnography of the jewish Population in Russia, 267 Bern, xix, 4, 68, 148-49 Bernstein, Abraham Moyshe, 324, 332 Bernstein's collection, 285 Besht, Baal Shem Tov, 14, 97, 101, 206 between two worldsjtsvishn tsvey veltn, 187, 227-28, 240-41; An-sky personally, xxv, 14, 19, 40,44-52, 118, 13235, 227-28; The Dybbuk original title, 56,13,41,167,182,227-28,252-53, 361-72; Kulmrkampf, 22, 34, 35, 166, 168; play, 202; trivial sense, 45. See also Russian persona; yidishkayt Bezalel School, Jcmsalcm, 182 Bialc, David, Cultures of the Jews, 10 Bialik, Hayim Nachman, 6, 9; perception of The Dybbuk, 10, 46, 179, 254; The Dybbttk translation, xXYiii, 21, 169, 175, 190, 192, 209, 220,253, 371; and ethnographic expedition, 209, 291, 298; "In the City of Slaughter," 162; Sefer HaAggada compilation (with Ravnitsky), 285-86 Bialystok, pogrom (1906), xxiii, 146 Bible, 48-51, 105, 130-31; biblical Jew, 114-15; biblical theater, 25,254,26365, 371; core ofJewish culture (with Hasidism), 14, 18, 96; The Dybbuk and, 25,

179, 198, 265; and girls, 278; maskilim mocking, 131; Sholem Aleichem and, 43; Song of Songs, 184, 194,210,222,240. See also Torah Bikel, Theodore, 220-21 birth records, girls/boys, 266 birzhejboursejexchange, 141-42 Blavatsky, Mme, 177 Blok, Alexandr, 178 Boas, Franz, 346-48, 350 Bobrinsky, Aleksei, 312 Bogrov, Grigorii, 94 Bolsheviks: vs. An-sky/An-sky vs., xxvii, XXYiii, I, 9, 12, 102, ll8, 169,253,306, 345; Bolshevik/October Revolution (1917), xxvii, 102, 118, 131, 169; Constituent Assembly dissolved by, xXYii, 6, 118; vs. Hebrew language, 24, 25; St. Petersburg JHES closed by, 324 Bolshoi Opera House, 170 books. See literah!re; reading Bowlt, John E., 27-28, 307-19 Braudo, Alexander, 17-18, 108 Braz, Osip, 309 Brenner, YosefHayim, xxiii, 156 Briusov, Valery Yakovlevich, 176 Brodsky, Isaak, 309 Brodsky, Lazar, 92, 289 Brody, relief work, 5 Buber, Martin, 98 Bukovina: relief work, xXYi, 117, 134; Der yidisher khurbn fun Poyln, Galitsye un Bukovino,fun tog-bukh 1914-1917/The Jewish Destmction in Poland, Galicia, and Bukovina, from a 1914-1917 Diary (An-sky), xxviii, 5, 42, 218, 271 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 176 Bulgakov, Sergei, 115 Bund. See Labor Bund, Jewish socialist Bunin, Ivan, 212 burial, An-sky's, xxviii, 32, 238-39 byliny, epic, 116 Cahan, Abraham, 32 cantonists, llO, 2ll

Index capitalism, 127; The Dybbuk and, 188; populists vs., 55, 65, 123; traditions and, 307 censorship, 61, 138; 1be Dybbuk, xxvi, 361, 367-72; "Sheep," xviii-xix, 64-65 census, all- Russian ( 1897), 266 Chagall, Marc: Cemetery Gate (1917), 319; and The Dybbuk, 23, 201, 202, 254, 255; and ethnographic expedition, 27, 309, 310, 314, 318-19; musical, 205; My Life, 254; Praying jew ( 1914), 319; Pregnant Woman (1913), 313; School of E. Zvantseva, 212; School ofYehuda Pen, 181; theater sets and costumes, 254, 255, 309; Vinaver sponsoring, 313 Chaikin, Joseph, 264 Chaikov, Iosif, 309, 316 Chaikovsky, Nikolai, xxviii Chashnik, Il'ia, 310 Chebotarevskaia, Anastasiia, xxv, 367 Chekhov, Anton, 165, 182, 364; The Cherry Orchard, 85; Moscow Art Theater, 170, 176, 264; "Seagull," 264 Chekhov, Mikhail, 252 Chernov, Viktor, xx, 4, 9, 59-64, 72, 78 Chernowitz language conference, 110 Chernyi Peredd/Biack Repartition movement, xvii Chernyshcvsky, Nikolay, 33, 36 Chertkov, V. G., xxvii children: folksongs, 118, 288-89; girls, 278; literature, 5, 288-89,291-92. See also education Christians, xvii; Beilis affair, 97; Jewish literary images, xxv, 12 7; Judaism contrasted with Christianity, 77; love, 185; military associated with, 104; psychotechnical ecstasy, 260. See also Russian Orthodoxy class politics, 106, 108, 125; Bund, 145, 150-51, 163; The Dybbuk, 179; Jewish socialist parties, 162; and nationalism, 163. Sec also working class Clifford, James, 358-59 Clowes, Edith, 172 comedy, Sholem A.lcichcm, 39,43 commedia dell'arte, 178, 193

Commission on Jewish Ethnography, 92, 296,331 communism: An-sky's pluralism and, 345; fall of, 15; and Jewish ritual, 131; of murdered Jew, 29. See also Bolsheviks; Marxism community: obschina, 173, 177, 180; pochvennost', 168, 179, 180, 181. See also pinkasimjcommunal records; shtetls Conrad, Joseph, 85 conservative politics, Russia, xxv, 97-98, 106, 119-20 Constituent Assembly, xxvii, 6, 118 Constitutional Democratic/Kadet party, 93,107 Copland, Aaron, "Vitebsk (Study on a Jewish Themc)/Vitebsk Trio," 23, 223-27 creativity: Jewish, 114-15,214-15, 285; "popular," 51. See also art criticism: e, xx, 78; Istoriia odnogo semeistva/The History of a Family/"Shtitkinder'/The Stepchildren/ Pasynki (1881), xvi, xvii, 37, 55-56, 59; "Mendel the Turk" (1892), xix, 42, 7475, 79-80, Ill; Pioneers (1904 and 1905), uii, 35, 37, 111, 135; V novom rusle/On a New Course/In shtrom, xxiii, xxiv, 13,20-21, 112, 137-63 Novoe slovo/New Word, St. Petersburg, xx Novoe vremiajNew Times, xxv, 63 Novyi put>/New Path, 313 Novyi voskhod/New Dawn, 313 Obrazovanie/Education, xix obschina/community, 173, 177, 180 occultism, The Dybbuk, 22, 173, 177, 182, 189, 191, 195 October Manifesto (1905), xxiii, 106, 155, 158-59, 161

October pogroms (1905), 31, 106, 139, 141, 162 October Revolution/Bolshevik takeover (1917), xxvii, 102, ll8, 131, 169 Odessa: Jabotinsky from, 136; police attention to An-sky, xxvii opera: Bolshoi Opera House, 170; Czech, 171; The Dybbuk, 222, 223, 250-51, 264; Gesamtkunstwerk, 176, 177; Metropolitan Opera, 223; Rimsky-Korsakov, 181; Wagnerian, 176-77, 181, 183, 185; Yiddish, 212 Orleska, Miriam, 239 Ortega y Gasset, Jose, 84 Orthodoxy, Russian, 168, 173, 181, 311, 313,320 Orwell, George, 10 Ostrovsky, Alexander Nikolaevich, 167, 182 Ostrzega, Abraham, 238-39 Otechestvennye zapiski/Fatherland Notes, 62 the Other, anthropology/folklore and, 348 Other World/Eternal World, 49-50 Oyneg shabes/Shabbat Celebration, u pacifism, xxv painters, 205, 309; of An-sky, 3, 165; avant-gardc, 307-19; Jewish Museums and, 325; Pasternak, xxvi, 1, 3, 165, 309, 317; ofUspensky, 62. See also Al'tman, Natan; Chagall, Marc; Fal'k, Robert; Lissitzky, El/Lazar' Lisitsky; visual culture Pale of Settlement, xvii, 58, 69, 72; The Dybbuk, 186; Jewish intelligentsia and, 91, 95; lectures, xxiv, 18, 132-33, 288; music, 205; revolution in, 141, 151, I 53; Vilna JHES collections from, 342; women, 266, 268; World War I, 323. See also Jewish Ethnographic Expedition in the name of Baron Horace Gucnzburg; shtetls Palestine, 117; Habima Theater, 24; Jewish History Museum, 304-5; Jewish Legion,

Index xxvii; Maiden ofLudmir, 272; mock trial of The Dybbuk (1926), 247-48, 247; museum exhibits fi·om, 296. See also Israel; Jerusalem Paris: Al'tman, 317; An-sky in, xix-xx, 4, 12, 68, 87; Ballets Russes, 314; The Dybbuk performances, 264; World Exhibition, Trocadero Palace, 281, 304 Pasternak, Leonid, xxvi, 1, 3, 165, 309, 317 patriarchy, Sholem Aleichem and, 34, 39, 184-85 patriotism, Russian ( 191 Os ), 307 pen names, 59-63; Mendele, 81; Sholem Aleichem, 33, 81. See also An-sky, Semyon Akimovich/Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoportpen names PeredvizhnikijWanderers art movement, 181 Peretz, I. L., 10, 47,171, 211; burial with An-sky, xxviii, 32, 238-39; Collected lMwks, xxii; death (1915), 238; ethical superiority of the Jews, 40; ethnographic expedition and, 90, 298; and tolklore, 238, 284; Digoldene keyt/The Golden Chain, 32, 41, 171, 238; and Hasidism, 14, 95, 173, 238; identity of characters, 133; influence on An-sky, xxii, 14, 18, 38-41,95, 132, 173, 237-38; "Monish," xxii, 40; Night on the Old Marketplace/Bay nakht afn altn mark, 171; Oyneg shabesjShabbat Celebration, xx; St. Petersburg reception, xxv, 238; Sholem Aleichem and, 38, 39, 40; Vilna JHES and YIVO collections, 28, 325, 331, 339; wite Helena, 331; and Yiddish theater, 237, 238, 249; Yiddish writing style, xxii, 132, 237-38; Dos yidishe lebn loyt di yidishe folks-lider /Jewish Life According to Yiddish Folksongs, 238 Peretz Museum, YIVO, 331 Perezhitoe/Experience, xxiv, 108-ll, 313 performances: Jewish art, 220; Sholem Asch play, 171. See also The Dybbuk (An-sky)performances; theater

performative history: The Dybbuk, 168, 202, 252; Hebrew and Yiddish traditions, 202 Pedis, Vivian, 224, 226-27 Pcrsits, M. M., 318 Petersburg. See St. Petersburg Petrograd: Duma, xxvii; ethnographic expedition exhibitions, 315-16; Jewish Literary Society, xxiv, xxv, ll 0, 135; Je\vish Museum, 296-302, 300, 309, 316; Jewish Society for the Encouragement of the Arts (JSEA), 313, 316; Museum ofthe Je\vish Institute of the Ethnographical Society, 28; Society for Jewish Folk Music, 211-12. See also Leningrad; St. Petersburg Petrovsky-Shtcrn, Yohanan, 15, 16-17, 83-102 phonograph, 204, 207-8, 210 physical strength/weakness, 105, 107-8, 117. See also military; power Piatnitsky, K., 135 pinkasim/communal records, 97, 325, 339; M~tzikalisher pinkes/Musical Record Book, 332; Pinkas Ludmir, 270-73; Pinkes far der geshikhtc fun vilne in di yorn fun milkhome un okupatsye/Record Book of the History ofVilna in th