By Gabriella Safran
The guy who might turn into S. An-sky—ethnographer, struggle correspondent, writer of the best-known Yiddish play, The Dybbuk—was born Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport in 1863, in Russia’s light of payment. His trip from the streets of Vitebsk to the heart of recent Yiddish and Hebrew theater, in terms of St. Petersburg, Paris, and war-torn Austria-Hungry, used to be either remarkable and in many ways general: Marc Chagall, one other baby of Vitebsk, might make an analogous transit a iteration later. Like Chagall, An-sky used to be dependable to a number of, conflicting Jewish, Russian, and eu identities. and prefer Chagall, An-sky made his actual and cultural transience happen as he drew on Jewish folks tradition to create artwork that confounded nationality. Leaving Vitebsk at seventeen, An-sky cast a couple of it appears contradictory paths. A witness to peasant poverty, pogroms, and battle, he attempted to rescue the vestiges of disappearing groups even whereas scuffling with for reform. A loner hooked on reinventing himself—at instances a Russian laborer, an intensive orator, a Jewish activist, an ethnographer of Hasidism, a wartime aid worker—An-sky observed himself as a savior of the people’s tradition and its artifacts. What united the disparate strands of his lifestyles was once his eagerness to talk to and for as many folks as attainable, despite their language or nationwide starting place. during this first full-length biography in English, Gabriella Safran, utilizing Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and French resources, recreates this missed protean determine who, along with his passions, struggles, and paintings, expected the complex identities of the ecu Jews who may stick to him. (20101004)
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Extra info for Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky
Example text
To start work, but it turned out that he was not needed till the following day. Rather than spending the day at the tavern, he decided to talk his way into the mines themselves. The foreman, skeptical at first, eventually let TO T H E S A LT M I N E S 39 him go down the shaft. Rappoport was amazed by the eerie subterranean world. “For a minute I felt that I was in some legendary underground palace. ”17 The work he had gotten was simple, but exhausting. Rappoport made sure that the milled salt was poured into bags, he moved the bags away, and he weighed them.
Shloyme-Zanvl comforted the culprit, telling him that the punishment for reading forbidden books was itself a heroic act with religious significance: “Calming him, I proved to him that his and his brother’s sufferings were a sort of self-sacrifice for Kiddush ha-Shem [sanctification of the name, or martyrdom as an expression of devotion to Judaism]—on behalf of the Haskalah. 33 Shloyme-Zanvl took his advice and left quickly, but the few months he spent in Liozno became a touchstone for him: in novels, short stories, and a memoir, he would return half a dozen times to the theme of radical Russian tutors going underground in conservative shtetls, always reevaluating the meaning of the events he saw and his own role in them, and distancing himself increasingly from his teenage sense of the tremendous importance of his task.
The hero Sviatogor meets a peasant with a bag over his shoulder, and no matter how fast Sviatogor rides, he cannot catch him. The peasant puts down the bag and Sviatogor tries to lift it, but he can barely move it off the ground, while he sinks in the earth to his knees. ”12 Although it was ideologically satisfying to live in a village near peasants, Rappoport did not keep his tutoring position for long. His employers’ daughter had converted from Judaism to Christianity in order to marry a local man.