Wandering soul : the Dybbuk's creator, S. An-Sky / Gabriella Safran.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Safran, Gabriella, 1967-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

An-Ski, S., 1863-1920.

An-Ski, S.

Authors, Russian--Biography.

Authors, Russian.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (353 p., [26] p. of plates ) ill., facsims., map, ports.

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

Dybbuk's creator, S. An-Sky

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In 'The Dybbuk', the mystical play at the center of modern Yiddish and Hebrew theater, the hero experiments with Kabbalah, dies, then rises from the dead to possess the woman he loves. The play's author was just as restless and rebellious. Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport, known by his pen name, S. An-sky. The man who would become S. An-sky -ethnographer, war correspondent, author of the best-known Yiddish play, The Dybbuk -was born Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport in 1863, in Russia's Pale of Settlement. His journey from the streets of Vitebsk to the center of modern Yiddish and Hebrew theater, by way of St. Petersburg, Paris, and war-torn Austria-Hungry, was both extraordinary and in some ways typical: Marc Chagall, another child of Vitebsk, would make a similar transit a generation later. Like Chagall, An-sky was loyal to multiple, conflicting Jewish, Russian, and European identities. And like Chagall, An-sky made his physical and cultural transience manifest as he drew on Jewish folk culture to create art that defied nationality. Leaving Vitebsk at seventeen, An-sky forged a number of apparently contradictory paths. A witness to peasant poverty, pogroms, and war, he tried to rescue the vestiges of disappearing communities even while fighting for reform. A loner addicted to reinventing himself-at times a Russian laborer, a radical orator, a Jewish activist, an ethnographer of Hasidism, a wartime relief worker-An-sky saw himself as a savior of the people's culture and its artifacts. What united the disparate strands of his life was his eagerness to speak to and for as many people as possible, regardless of their language or national origin. In this first full-length biography in English, Gabriella Safran, using Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and French sources, recreates this neglected protean figure who, with his passions, struggles, and art, anticipated the complicated identities of the European Jews who would follow him.

Contents:

Prologue

A bad influence

To the salt mines

A revolutionary has no name

A propagandist's education

We swear to fight!

The hero of deeds and the hero of words

No common language

The Dybbuk and the Golem

A passion for bloodshed

All flesh is grass

Archives and abbreviations

Notes.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674058583

0674058585

OCLC:

709591744