The Worlds of S. An-sky

Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport, known as An-sky (1863-1920), the author of the best known play in the Hebrew and Yiddish languages, "The Dybbuk," was a figure of immense versatility and also ambiguity in Russian and Jewish intellectual, literary, and political spheres. He was a leading Russian populist; he was the author of the poem adopted as the anthem of the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund; he is credited with being the founder of the field of Jewish ethnography; and he wrote one of the most influential works of Jewish catastrophe literature in modern times, his masterpiece "Hurbn Galitsye," on the travails of East European Jews in the First World War. This volume is the most complete examination of An-sky ever produced. It draws together leading historians, ethnographers, literary scholars, and others in a far-ranging, multidisciplinary exploration. It also contains numerous photographs culled from archives in the former Soviet Union, a superb English translation of an early Russian draft—among the very first—of "The Dybbuk," and a timeline that covers all of An-sky's peripatetic life. Gabriella Safran is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. She is the author of the prize-winning book Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire (Stanford University Press, 2000). Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History and Director of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford University. He has published widely on modern Jewish history, and he is at work on a cultural history of East European and Russian Jewry from the eighteenth century to the present.