S. Ansky

S. Ansky's famous play, The Dybbuk--a haunting tale about ill-fated love, possession, and exorcism in a small Jewish town in Eastern Europe--was originally called "Between Two Worlds," which is also an apt description of the life of this unusual writer. Solomon Rappoport-Ansky (1863-1920) began his career among radical Russian populists and Socialist-Revolutionaries, and later returned to the world of Yiddish-speaking Jews through a study of its folklore. This volume. Provides an incomparable portrait of an assimilated Jewish artist who finds his way home through the folk culture of the Jewish people. This anthology, the third volume in Schocken's Library of Yiddish Classics, presents a broad selection of Ansky's work, including a new translation of The Dybbuk (which was made into the last great Yiddish film produced in Poland in 1937), short stories, and autobiographical sketches. Just prior to World War I, Ansky envisioned and led. The Jewish Ethnographic Expedition to Poland and the Ukraine to study the folklore he later used as themes in his modernist fiction and drama. During the war itself, he returned to Poland as a relief worker delivering donated funds to besieged Jewish communities in the occupied war zone. "The Destruction of Galicia," included in this volume, contains portions from his diaries in which he recorded his piercing observations of traditional Jewish life in Eastern Europe on. The eve of its dissolution.

"In late 1914, S. Ansky, the influential Jewish-Russian journalist, playwright, and politician, received a commission: to organize desperately needed relief for Jews on the borderlands, caught between the warring armies of Russia, Germany, and the Austrian Empire. Thus began an extraordinary four-year journey through the Pale of Settlement, the border region to which Russian czars had long restricted Jewish residency and the site of much of the fighting on the Eastern Front. This journey was meticulously documented by Ansky, a peerless witness of his time.". "In daily accounts, Ansky details his struggles: to raise funds; to lobby and bribe at the czar's court; and to procure and transport food, medicine, and money to the ravaged Jewish towns, which, in the course of the war, were conquered and reconquered by Cossacks, Germans, Polish mercenaries, and Russian revolutionaries. Ansky depicts scenes of devastation - convoys of refugees, towns looted and burned to the ground, villagers taken hostage and raped, prey to all comers. Speaking to maids and ministers, farmers and recruits, doctors and profiteers, Ansky hears and sees it all, as the czar's army disintegrates and the winds of revolution sweep across the land."--BOOK JACKET.