Gabriella Safran, Steven J. Zipperstein, eds.. The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. xxxii + 542 pp. $27.95, paper, ISBN 978-0-8047-5344-9.

Reviewed by Michael C. Hickey

Published on H-Russia (October, 2007)

Shlomyme-Zanvl Rappoport (b. 1863, Vitebsk writing belles-letters, traveled extensively Province, d. 1920, ), better known by his through the Pale and the Empire's interior, pen name Semyon Akimovich An-sky, has of late worked at various manual labor jobs, and became spawned a healthy scholarly industry. Although an eager disciple of Russian Populism. By age he produced a sizable corpus of fction, poetry twenty-nine, he had become a protégé of the Pop‐ and songs, non-fction works, and theatrical ulist writer Gleb Uspensky; assumed the nom de works (including the famous play : Be‐ plume An-sky; published non-fction essays on the tween Two Worlds [1914]), scholarly interest in lives of Russian and Ukrainian workers in Russkie An-sky is propelled less by his literary talent than vedomosti and Russkoe bogastvo; and gone into by the complex twists of his life and public identi‐ exile in . He spent the years from ty.[1] Scholars often describe An-sky as the per‐ 1891 to 1905 in Western Europe, writing essays on sonifcation of the multiple political and intellec‐ Populist-infected Russian topics for Russian liber‐ tual paths followed by in the Russian Em‐ al and populist journals and newspapers, and pire. working as private secretary to one of the giants Some scholars see An-sky in his frst three of Russian Populism, Peter Lavrov. decades as an archetype of the fully acculturated Many scholars have described An-sky in his Russian who had "lost himself" in the Populist last three decades as the archetype of the Jew movement. An-sky was born to a poor family in who, faced with the limits of assimilation, sought the Pale of Settlement (Vitebsk) and provided with a "return" to Jewishness (yidishkayt). In the late a traditional Jewish education, but as a teen he 1890s, An-sky came under the spell of I. L. Peretz, (and his lifelong friend, the famous socialist a seminal fgure in . In 1896, he Chaim Zhitlowsky) gravitated towards Russian lit‐ began drafting works of semi-autobiographical erature and the Jewish Enlightenment (). fction in Yiddish. Like many Jewish intellectuals In his early twenties, An-sky tried his hand at throughout Europe, he responded to 's H-Net Reviews

Dreyfus Afair by devoting himself more energeti‐ organize a Jewish Historic-Ethnographic Society cally to Jewish political and literary life. By the and completed a mammoth Yiddish study docu‐ outbreak of Russia's 1905 Revolution he had be‐ menting the suferings of Jews caught in the war gun to envision a new secular tri-lingual (Yiddish, zone. An-sky died in Warsaw in 1920 and is Hebrew, and Russian) . For An-sky, buried next to I. Peretz. In the years after this ever the Populist, Hassidic folk-life would provide death, productions of the The Dybbuk, would se‐ the building materials for this project. In 1900-05 cure An-sky's legacy in Jewish literary history. he continued to write in Russian on Russian top‐ The Dybbuk and the 1912-14 ethnographic ex‐ ics, but he also penned Yiddish stories, poems, pedition are the main topics of the volume under and songs, including "The Oath" ("Di Shuve"), review, which both documents An-sky's life and which the Bund (the General League of Jewish career, and presents a range of analysis by an im‐ Workers of Russia, Poland, and ) adopt‐ pressive roster of scholars. The book itself is the ed as its anthem. In late 1905, An-sky returned to outgrowth of an An-sky conference held at Stan‐ Russia and joined the fray of revolutionary poli‐ ford in 2001. At its core are sixteen scholarly es‐ tics. While he remained a member of the Socialist says, many of which make extensive use of newly Revolutionary (SR) party, An-sky's politics proved available materials from archives in Moscow, St. as catholic as his cultural vision, and he associat‐ Petersburg, Kiev, and New York. Preceding the es‐ ed freely with Bundists, Zionists, and Liberals. says are an editors' preface, which explains the After the 1905 Revolution's collapse, An-sky volume's genesis; a ffteen-page timeline of An- devoted himself almost entirely to the study of sky's life prepared by Gabriella Safran; two pages Jewish folklore. In 1912, he launched the two- of bibliography listing the most common archival year-long Baron Horace Guenzburg Jewish Ethno‐ and published sources cited in the book; and a graphic Expedition. In travels though the Pale of thirty-page introductory essay by Stephen Zipper‐ Settlement (in particular in Ukraine, Volhynia, stein. The essays, which fll over three hundred and Podolia), An'sky's team collected thousands of pages, are followed by an English-language trans‐ folk tales, songs, manuscripts, and artifacts. These lation of the previously un-published Russian-lan‐ materials probably informed his most famous guage censored variant text of The Dybbuk, intro‐ work of literature, the play Between Two Worlds, duced with an essay by that text's editor and a better known as The Dybbuk, which he wrote be‐ translator's note. fore the outbreak of . During the war, But there is more. The package also includes a An-sky helped organize Jewish refugee relief CD with performances of twenty-fve Yiddish and work and toured Galicia, where he chronicled the Russian songs written by, collected by, or closely injustices meted out by the Russian Army to the associated with An-sky. A few of these are remark‐ region's Jews. Although he remained a member of able transfers from wax disks made during An- the PSR and was close to many Bundists, An-sky sky's 1912-14 ethnographic expedition to Ukraine. also began making public statements in support The rest were recorded specifcally for this CD by of Vladimir Jabotinsky's Zionist program. During musicians and singers in the and in the 1917 Revolution, he divided his energy be‐ Russia, using arrangements by musician Michael tween PSR politics (he was elected as an SR to the Alpert. With the CD is a very informative booklet Petrograd City Duma and the Constituent Assem‐ with an essay on An-sky's "musical world" by bly) and eforts to display artifacts from his ethno‐ Gabriella Safran and musician Michael Alpert, graphic expedition at the Petrograd Jewish Muse‐ and an abridged translation of an unpublished um. In 1918, he fed Bolshevik repression and 1915 lecture by Jewish musicologist Iuly Engel, ended up in Vilna, where he subsequently helped

2 H-Net Reviews who helped An-sky collect Jewish folksongs dur‐ two writers and describes him as a hero of mod‐ ing the 1912 expedition season. The booklet also ern Jewish culture. Sylvia Anne Goldberg's brief provides a paragraph-long introduction to each essay takes issue with Roskies. Goldberg argues selection, as well as lyrics in Yiddish (in the He‐ that An-sky did not "return" to yidishkayt because brew alphabet and also transliterated), Russian he never really left Jewish culture. Rather, his en‐ (again, in Cyrillic alphabet and transliterated), tire life was a search for a new kind of Jewishness and in English. appropriate to a rapidly changing world. Gabriel‐ In his graceful, incisive essay, Stephen Zipper‐ la Safran's deeply researched essay locates An-sky stein highlights the complexity of An-sky's career, in a diferent paradigm: the "St. Petersburg tradi‐ about which we know a great deal, and his per‐ tion." Taking as her subjects An-sky's 1892 stay in sonal life, about which we know comparatively Petersburg (as an illegal Jew without residence little. He shows the peripatetic and perpetually papers), his relationship with Gleb Uspensky, and homeless An-sky to have been a rather nice fellow his adoption of his pseudonym, Safran argues that and a romantic who was tragically unlucky at An-sky created himself as a work of fction, that love. Zipperstein carefully lays out what has been his identity was under constant revision, but al‐ perhaps the most infuential recent interpretation ways within the constraints of Petersburg-based of An-sky's life, David Roskies's argument that An- Russian literary genres. In an elegantly written sky epitomized the "paradigm of return": the Jew‐ and impressively documented essay, Yohanan ish intellectual who has become assimilated and Petrovsky-Shtern asks if An-sky was really able to turned his back on his Jewishness, is traumatized "return." He examines An-sky's attempt to con‐ by confrontation with anti-Semitism in the gentile struct his own Jewish identity through a "tradi‐ world (e.g., pogroms or blood libel trials), publicly tional" Jewish marriage, the creation of a new confesses errors, seeks the restoration of Jewish Russian Jewish intellectual movement, and an at‐ identity by "returning" to the Jewish people and tachment to Hassidism (for An-sky, the last rem‐ past, and uses the tools of Russian populism to nant of "pure" Jewish culture). Petrovsky-Shtern construct a new vision of Jewish secular culture argues that each of these projects proved a tragic based upon Hassidic folk culture. In his cogent failure; An-sky simply could not "return." summaries of the book's sixteen essays, Zipper‐ Brian Horowitz frees us from the debate over stein essentially frames the volume as a disputa‐ Roskies and instead addresses the relationship be‐ tion over Roskies's argument. tween An-sky's politics and his "literary imagina‐ David Roskies himself begins the volume tion." He sets An-sky into two closely related intel‐ proper with an essay comparing An-sky and lectual contexts: that of Russian Populism and (Solomon Naumovich Rabi‐ that of Russian and Russian-Jewish intellectuals novich), whom he sees as two very diferent ex‐ who, in the wake of the 1905 Revolution, made emplars of the "master narrative of Russian Jew‐ spiritual values the center of their pursuit of lib‐ ry," the return to Jewishness. Roskies contrasts the eration. According to Horowitz, An-sky believed comic, masculine, Hassid-free world of Aleichem's that spirituality and idealization of physical weak‐ fction (such as his tales of Tevye the Milkman) to ness were the essence of Jewish culture, which led the tragic world of An-sky's stories and plays, with him towards the study of Hassidic folklore mani‐ their strong female characters and their fascina‐ fest in The Dybbuk. Mikhail Krutikov also focuses tion with Hassidic spirituality. Roskies, for whom attention on An-sky's Populist political commit‐ Hassidim seems to represent "real" Jewish cul‐ ments. Krutikov argues that An-sky did not "re‐ ture, clearly considers An-sky the greater of the turn" to Jewish identity, nor was he caught "be‐ tween two worlds." Rather, An-sky created an

3 H-Net Reviews identity that was at once Russian and Jewish. Kru‐ greatest artistic achievement, romantic love tri‐ tikov sees this as a heroic achievement that might umphs over and dissolves traditional communal inform contemporary eforts to construct a Rus‐ authority. Izaly Zemtsovsky sees musicality as a sian-Jewish identity. central aspect of An-sky's creative and scholarly In his monumental study Prophecy and Poli‐ work, from his storytelling voice to his ethno‐ tics: Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews, graphic attention to music to his use of songs in 1862-1917 (1981), Jonathan Frankel was one of the The Dybbuk. Michael C. Steinlauf examines what frst scholars to root An-sky's conception of Jewish The Dybbuk meant to audiences in 1920 in War‐ culture to his Populist faith. In the volume under saw, where it was frst produced for the stage by review, Frankel provides an essay that elegantly the Vilna Troupe. For the actors, the production's compares and contrasts An-sky's 1907 work In "New Jewish Style" was a means to "return" to Shtrom (With the Flow) with four other Yiddish Jewishness, while Jewish audiences instantly and Hebrew novels about Jews during the 1905 greeted the play as an expression of anxiety at a Revolution, works he describes as "instant fction‐ world in chaotic change. The Dybbuk, though, did alization of politics." With exceptional clarity, not initiate a fowering of Polish-Jewish art the‐ Frankel lays out the major themes of each novel ater, nor did its later performance in Polish usher and explains what made In Shtrom distinctive. in an era of Polish/Jewish cultural rapproche‐ Each author, he shows, captured the rush of Jew‐ ment. Vladislav Ivanov describes the 1922 staging ish revolutionary enthusiasm in the spring and in Hebrew of The Dybbuk by the Habima Theater summer of 1905 and highlighted the importance (a Hebrew-language company associated with the of Jewish youth and women to that year's political Moscow Art Theater and founded in 1917), a pro‐ tumult. In other regards, though, An-sky's novel duction that brought world-wide fame to Habima departed from similar works by Mordkhe Spek‐ and to director Evgeny Vakhtangov. For Ivanov, tor, Yitsakh Mayer Weisenberg, Sholem Aleichem, this production, with its emphasis on pathos and and Aharon Avraham Kabak. Unlike the others, ecstasy, gave birth to twentieth-century theater. Ansky did not draw attention to Jewish genera‐ The remaining essays examine aspects and tional conficts. He portrayed Jewish socialists and legacies of An-sky's eforts at ethnography. Zionists as engaged in a common struggle and Nathaniel Deutsch looks at An-sky's attempt to downplayed class tensions within the Jewish com‐ document the quickly disappearing traditional munity. Instead, he emphasized the common in‐ world of Eastern European Jewish women during terest of "the Jewish people," as individual human his 1912-14 ethnographic expeditions. An-sky, beings, in liberation--an interest that An-sky the who became fascinated with the tale of the Maid‐ (the Socialist Revolutionary) believed Jews shared en of Ludmer (which Deutsch suggests informed with the Russian masses. The Dybbuk), was one of the frst intellectuals to The four essays that follow Frankel's concen‐ recognize the centrality of women's experience to trate on disparate aspects of An-sky's aesthetic Jewish culture. Benyamin Lukin traces An-sky's and the staging of The Dybbuk. In the book's long‐ eforts to display artifacts collected during the est essay, Seth Wolitz argues that An-sky is best ethnographic expeditions and his project for a understood within the "paradigm of the Empire network of Jewish museums. Lukin argues that Jew," whose cultural creativity drew on Jewish An-sky conceived of Jewish museums as tools for and Russian experience in the greater context of the development of Jewish self-knowledge, the the Wagnerian-infected Russian Silver Age. formulation of a new secular Jewish culture, and Wolitz observes that in The Dybbuk, An-sky's the nurturing of a new generation of Jewish artists. John E. Bowlt, on the other hand, in a mar‐

4 H-Net Reviews velously contrary and erudite essay, demonstrates edited the play's Russian text) examines the gene‐ that An-sky's collection had little impact on Rus‐ sis of play (written frst in Russian, then translat‐ sian-Jewish artists. Rather, An-sky was important ed by into Hebrew by Hayyim Bialik, then trans‐ in that, like other collectors who "secularized" ob‐ lated to Yiddish by An-sky), as well its author's jects by removing them from their life context, he struggle with Tsarist censors. I will refrain from helped pave the way for abstraction. Few artists, summarizing the play itself, which here is ren‐ though, had access to his collection, and those dered gracefully into English by Craig Cravens. In who did view it at Petrograd's short-lived Jewish this text, words and phrases struck by the Tsarist Museum in 1917 paid relatively little notice. The censor are indicated in brackets, while those in‐ new generation had already begun to formulate serted by An-sky at the censor's insistence are un‐ their own aesthetic, which owed more to Cubism derlined. These demonstrate the seemingly minor and Futurism than to Jewish folk art, and they re‐ matters of language that could capture a censor's jected An-sky's notions of a "Jewish style." attention. Here, for instance, is a change typical of In the book's penultimate essay, Cecile E. those required by the censor, Baron Drizen, be‐ Kuznitz uncovers the complex, destructive compe‐ fore he agreed in October 1915 to approve the tition for materials, volunteers, and funding be‐ play for public performance: a line early in Act tween the YIVO Institute and the Historic-Ethno‐ Two, referring to the Prophet Elijah, was to be graphic Society that An-sky helped found in 1919. changed from "he always appears dressed as a Both called Vilna home and both (in the spirit of pauper or a peasant" to "the hidden righteous An-sky) sought to build a new Jewish culture on ones always appear dressed as paupers or peas‐ the basis of history and folklore. Kuznitz con‐ ants" (p. 400). As for the music CD, I was most cludes, though, that the Society had the more in‐ compelled by the haunting strains of klezmer cap‐ clusive, catholic conception of Jewish culture and tured on wax discs by An-sky's team in 1912-14. the more impartial approach to politics, perhaps Also impressive, though, are Michael Alpert's new the greatest of the legacies bequeath it by An-sky. arrangements of songs associated with An-sky, in‐ In the fnal essay, Jack Kugelmass meditates on cluding Russian miners' songs, Bundist songs, Yid‐ An-sky's legacy to Jewish anthropology and dish children's rhymes, and Russian-Jewish sol‐ ethnography. An-sky's concern for "return" in the diers' songs. These manage an air of authenticity context of a broad cultural crisis had little reso‐ without feigning to be replications of the original nance among post-World War Two anthropolo‐ folk performances, which is no mean achieve‐ gists, who, in any case, paid very little attention to ment. The modern musicians and singers deliver Jews as subjects. Kugelmass refects, though, that excellent performances. his own work may have been infuenced by one of Safran and Zipperstein have done a fne job An-sky's methods as an ethnographer, namely his of assembling and grouping these essays. One use of deception to lure information out of infor‐ might wish that they had pushed a few of the au‐ mants. He also compares An-sky's ethnographic thors to sharpen their arguments and had pres‐ agenda to that manifest in Barbara Myerhof's sured others to correct errors of fact. I hope that I well-known book on modern American Jewry, do not seem overly persnickety by pointing out Number Our Days (1978). that, contrary to the statement on page 118, Lenin Of equal importance to the scholarly essays did permit the Constituent Assembly to convene are the translated text of the censored variant of in January 1918 (but only for one day!). But these The Dybbuk and the CD of music associated with are minor blemishes on a volume of great value. An-sky. In an appendix, Vladislav Ivanov (who Readers approaching the book knowing nothing of An-sky will fnd much to hold their attention

5 H-Net Reviews and will leave it well informed. Readers well- versed in An-sky's work and familiar with the rel‐ evant scholarship will fnd a great deal to chew on as well. Also, the addition of the translated text of The Dybbuk and the music CD makes the more af‐ fordable paperback edition a valuable teaching tool. Note [1]. An-sky completed an unpublished Rus‐ sian text of The Dybbuk in 1914, but the frst pub‐ lished variant of the play was the Hebrew transla‐ tion by Hayim Nacham Bialik, which appeared in Moscow in the journal Ha-tekufah ( The Era) in 1918. An-sky's own translation into Yiddish ap‐ peared in 1919 in Vilna.

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Citation: Michael C. Hickey. Review of Safran, Gabriella; Zipperstein, Steven J., eds. The Worlds of S. An- sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century. H-Russia, H-Net Reviews. October, 2007.

URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13713

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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