Is He Or Is He Not Rappoport?
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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 Yiddish belles-letters, traveled extensively Province, d. 1920, Warsaw), 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-fiction works, and theatrical ulist writer Gleb Uspensky; assumed the nom de works (including the famous play The Dybbuk: Be‐ plume An-sky; published non-fiction 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 Western Europe. He spent the years from ty.[1] Scholars often describe An-sky as the per‐ 1891 to 1905 in Western Europe, writing essays on sonification of the multiple political and intellec‐ Populist-inflected Russian topics for Russian liber‐ tual paths followed by Jews 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 Jew 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 Yiddish literature. In 1896, he Chaim Zhitlowsky) gravitated towards Russian lit‐ began drafting works of semi-autobiographical erature and the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah). fiction in Yiddish. Like many Jewish intellectuals In his early twenties, An-sky tried his hand at throughout Europe, he responded to France's H-Net Reviews Dreyfus Affair 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 sufferings 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) Jewish culture. 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 Lithuania) 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 World War I. During the war, But there is more. The package also includes a An-sky helped organize Jewish refugee relief CD with performances of twenty-five 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 specifically for this CD by of Vladimir Jabotinsky's Zionist program. During musicians and singers in the United States 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 efforts 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 different 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 influential 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.