Wandering Soul The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky

Gabriella Safran, "Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky"
English | 2010 | ISBN: 0674055705 | PDF | pages: 392 | 1.2 mb
The man who would become S. An-sky―ethnographer, war correspondent, author of the best-known Yiddish play, The Dybbuk―was born Shloyme-Zanvl Rapoport 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.