S. An-sky

Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport (; October 27, 1863 – November 8, 1920), also known by his pen name S. An-sky, was a Jewish author, playwright, researcher of Jewish folklore, polemicist, and cultural and political activist. He is best known for his play The Dybbuk or Between Two Worlds, written in 1914, and for Di Shvue, the anthem of the Jewish socialist Bund. In 1912-1914, he led the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition to the Pale of Settlement.

In 1917, after the Russian Revolution, he was elected to the Russian Constituent Assembly as a Social-Revolutionary deputy.

Biography Odessa writers. From left to right: Y. Ravnitzki, An-sky, Mendele Mocher Sforim, H. N. Bialik, S. Frug. Published in Simon Dubnow's newspaper in 1916 Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport was born to Aharon and Khana Rappoport in Chashniki, Vitebsk Governorate, Russian Empire (now Belarus), but spent his childhood in Vitebsk. He was from a poor religious family, and he had only a heder education. His mother ran a tavern; his father worked as a courier for Polyakov's Moscow Land Bank, and was often absent. His father eventually deserted the family, after which his mother moved them to Vitebsk. He left his home and moved to Liozno in his late-teens, and worked as a tutor; he was ostracised by his community for "disseminating radical ideas". He wrote his first novel, "History of a Family", in Yiddish, it was translated and published in Russian in 1884. popular among populists, he moved to Ekaterinoslav region, where he worked as a tutor and in the "salt- and coal-mining industry". He believed in the importance of the education of Russia's peasants and participated in activities such as collecting workers' songs and giving public readings, which led to his arrest in 1888. In 1892, he was introduced to the literary circles of St. Petersburg, where he started writing under the pen name S. An-sky. He moved to Paris in 1892 and lived in Europe until 1905. He mainly wrote in Russian, but eventually started to write in Yiddish too. He also worked as a secretary for Russian philosopher Petr Lavrov in Paris. He had a short marriage to a "French-Russian woman". After Lavrov's death, An-sky moved to Switzerland, where, together with Viktor Chernov, he founded a populist Agrarian Socialist League. In 1904-1905, he was an editor of the Yiddish socialist journal Kampf un kempfer (The Fight and the Fighters). Some of his vast collection of cylinder recordings made on these expeditions were digitized by the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, which holds the collection. Deutsch compares the An-sky's expedition materials to genizah, particularly to the Cairo genizah.

His ethnographic report of the deliberate destruction of Jewish communities by the Russian army in the First World War, Khurbn Galitsiye (The Destruction of Galicia), has become a major source in the historiography of the war's impact on civilian populations.

Literary career

Initially he wrote in Russian, but from 1904 he became known mainly as a Yiddish author.

He is best known for his play The Dybbuk or Between Two Worlds, written in 1914. The play was first staged in the Elyseum Theatre in Warsaw, on December 9, 1920, one month (at the end of the 30-day mourning period) after the author's death. It was subsequently translated into a dozen or more languages and performed thousands of times all over the world. It is still being produced, along with numerous adaptations, as well as operas, ballets, and symphonic suites. (For example, in 2011 there were seven different productions.) It is considered the jewel of the Jewish theatre. In the early years The Dybbuk was considered so significant that parodies of it were written and produced.

Although The Dybbuk is An-sky’s best-known work, he published many works of literature, politics and ethnography. His Collected Works, which do not include all his writings, comprise fifteen volumes. An-sky wrote a number of other plays, four of which are included in this collection, long out of print. One (Day and Night) is, like The Dybbuk, a Hasidic Gothic story. The other three plays have revolutionary themes, and were originally written in Russian: Father and Son, In a Conspiratorial Apartment, and The Grandfather. All four have recently been republished in a bilingual Yiddish-English edition.

An-sky was also the author of the song Di Shvue (The Oath), which became the anthem of the Jewish Socialist Bund party. He was the author of the poem (later made into a song) "In Zaltsikn Yam" (In the Salty Sea), which was also dedicated to the Bund.

Selected publications Sketches on Folk Literacy, 1892/1894 Hungry, 1892 Mendel the Turk, 1892 Pioneers, 1904–1905 On a New Course, 1907 Jewish Folk Art, 1908 The Folk and the Book, 1913 The Dybbuk, 1914 The Destruction of Galicia, 1920 Album of the Jewish Artistic Heritage (published posthumously)