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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Welcome, everyone, to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Virtually. My name is Alex Weiser. I'm a public programs director of yivo, and we're so thrilled to have you here with us for our Yiddish Civilization lecture series, which is a lecture series in Yiddish and English. Today's lecture is in English, in which we delve into topics of Yiddish history, Yiddish culture, for our summer program students that are with us studying Yiddish this summer. And we make it open to the wider public. So it's a great way for this program to open up and to connect with our wider audience. So we're so pleased to have you here with us today. Today's talk is called Yiddish Ethnography and An Ski, and we're really pleased to have Gabriella Sovran with us. Before I hand it over to Gabriela, just a brief word about yivo. YIVO is a very special place for the celebration and contemplation of Jewish history and Jewish culture. We have a library and archive with over 23 million documents and over 400,000 books which researchers from around the world use. In addition to this collection, we do a variety of classes, like our Yiddish program that I was just mentioning, and events and exhibitions to bring the world of this culture alive. So thank you again for joining us, and without further ado, I'm going to hand it over to Gabriella Safran.
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Okay, thank you so much. So this is a talk about Yiddish ethnography and S omsky, who was a Russian and Yiddish writer who lived in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I'm really happy to have been asked to speak about S an sky today, and I'm especially happy to be asked to address the YIVO Summer Program students. I was a student in the YIVO Summer Program in 1999. I studied with the legendary Yiddish linguist Mordcha Schechter, who at that point was in the process of writing his Yiddish dictionaries for late 20th century life. So he would come in every day to our class with these lists of new words, new Yiddish words that he had heard or maybe invented for things that didn't used to exist in Yiddish, like cell phones and disposable diapers. And he would ask us in his class what we thought of them. We always liked them, and we liked him. I enrolled in the YIVA Summer Program when I was just starting my job at Stanford, and I was also just starting to do research on S on sky, the Russian and Yiddish writer and ethnographer and so that's what I'm going to talk about today. I'll talk about An Ski in the context, Yiddish ethnography. My talk will be in four parts. So first I'll tell you some things about ethnography in principle, ethnography, folklore, literature and Yiddish ethnography in specific then, or Jewish ethnography. Then I'll say a few things about S on Ski and his ethnographic work. Third, I'll talk a little bit about a trial that An Ski attended, the Bayless trial. And fourth, I'll talk about An Ski's famous play, the Dybbuk, and how it's connected to his ethnographic work. So what is ethnography? Ethnography is the study of people, right? The ethnos. Ethnography in a way develops in two sort of separate schools and two poles during the 19th century. So there's one kind of ethnography that has to do with the. Of people who live far away from you. Other people, colonized people. This is a kind of ethnography that leads to maybe what we would think of today as anthropology. Then there's the study of one's own people, local people. And this leads to what we might think of today as folkloristics or folklore. And that's the kind of ethnography that I'm going to talk about today. It's closer to folkloristics, the collection of folklore. What is folklore, you might ask? It's an 18th century idea. It develops in England, in other places in Western Europe, where people who are part of literate society start to notice that they have distinctive entertainment forms. And they notice that other people who are not literate have other entertainment forms. And they start to call those other entertainment forms of those other people who folklore. And to think of them as something that they, the literate people, should collect and write down. So this happens around Europe in the late 18th, early 19th century. And you get these very sort of significant figures in folklore studies, like Johann Gottfried von Herder, who publishes folk songs and says national art should be based on folk songs. So folklore should inspire national literature. And you get this same impulse elsewhere where all around Europe people are collecting folklore, they're creating vernacular dictionaries, so they're collecting folk language and they are creating new art based on these things. In German speaking territories. You have Jakob and Wilhelm and Grimm collecting their folk songs, folk tales, sorry, and creating a dictionary. You have Achim von Arnim and Clemence Brentano compiling folk songs in the British Isles. You get these Peasant poets, Stephen duck, John Clare, Scots1, Robert Burns. In Finland you get Elias Lunroth compiling the Kalevala, a very long epic out of short heroic songs that he had gathered. So these are all people who want to document spoken language and folklore and use those things to create or curate or invent what they understand as national art. All right, so much for the non Jews. What do the Jews do? As usual, the Jews do the same things as non Jews do in a given time and place. So. So in the 19th century, the Jews collect their folklore. So first you have these German Jews or German speaking Jews expressing the desire to collect and curate folklore. Max Grunewald creating the Museum of Jewish Folk Art or Folklore in 1896 in the Russian Empire, where you have the largest population of Jews. In the 19th century, you get, in the early 20th century you get a lot of Jews who become interested in Jewish folklore, Jewish history from a kind of secular perspective. So 1901, Saul Ginsburg and Pesach Marek publish a volume called Jewish Folk Songs. I mean, it's called that in Russian and Yiddish, but I put it in English for you kindly. And you get a lot of writers, Yiddish writers who use folklore in various ways ways. You have Yiddish writers who use folklore from a kind of maskilic perspective, kind of criticizing the traditional culture that folklore is part of. And that's what you see Mendelen Mour Svoram and Sholem Aleichem doing. And then you get other writers who are more kind of inspired by folklore and in a kind of neo Hasidic way produce literature that is based on folklore, that gestures toward folklore. So Yudlamid Parrots, S on Sky, Isaac Bashevis Singer are part of that sort of tendency. Between the world wars, Jewish folklore study flourishes in Poland, in Lithuania, at Yivo, when Yivo was in Vilna. There's also a lot of folklore collection happening across the border in the Soviet Union, especially Minsk. If you want to learn more about this, I urge you to go to the Yivo Encyclopedia online and read the article about folklore might be called folklore and ethnography or something. And you'll see that it's a commonplace in Jewish ethnography, Jewish folklore as non Jewish folklore, that people see folklore as inspiring contemporary art folklore. Jewish folklore collection can be associated with all sorts of different ideologies. Zionist ideology, Diaspora, nationalist, Soviet, Marxist, assimilationist folklore inspires lots of people. And of course the collection of Jewish folklore continues in Yiddish and other Jewish languages in the post war, in the US and very much so. In Israel. Okay, now I want to turn from sort of folklore and ethnography in general to the area that I have done research about and can talk about more, which is S an sky. The figure of S an Sky. Semyon Akimovich, an sky whose real name was Shloime Zonval Rapoport. And I put his dates up here. He is an important Yiddish Jewish folklorist and ethnographer and he's attracted quite a lot of scholarly attention in the last few decades. So, you know, 25 years ago when I got interested in him, there was hardly anything written on him in English. And now there's lots and lots of books, which I sent a bibliography of them to the people in the class this summer. I've written a little bit about him. My biography of him, Wandering Soul, is something that you can get from Harvard Press if you want. I also co edited with Stephen Zipperstein a collection of. Of essays and source materials about An Ski. And recently my biography of an Ski came out in Russian, which with what I think is a pretty cover. So I put it here too. And An Ski is, you know, he's known as a folklorist, but he's really best known as the author of the play the Dybbuk. He was fascinated by some figures from Jewish folklore, including dybbuks, which you're going to hear more about, and golems, about whom I will also talk more in this talk. So I was kind of. If only I could actually see you physically. I would ask you to raise your hand if you've read the play the Dybbuk or seen the movie or the play. But since, unfortunately I can't see you, I'll just have to imagine that a bunch of you are raising your hands in all these different locations around the globe where I know you are. Okay, let me move on to part three. So let me talk now a little bit about an Ski. And I'm going to begin. In September 1909, an ski is living in a boarding house, a rooming house in the Finnish part of the Russian Empire. And. And this tragedy happens. There's a fire and the house that he's living in burns down and everything that he owns is lost. And after that he writes a letter to his friend Chaim Zhadlovsky, and he says, you know, this tragedy has inspired me to dedicate myself to collecting Jewish folklore. I've realized that's what I now need to do with my life. He writes, jewishness lies in a 4,000 year old psychology. And a 4,000 year old culture. If we can succeed in adapting our culture to life, we will live. If not, we will suffer and run out of air until we suffocate. But no surgeon can sew someone else's head and heart onto us. This last misfortune, the fire practically cut off half my life with a knife. I'm going to have to struggle like a fish against the ice because of money, but I'm not losing my good spirits. I want to work and I believe in the future of the Jews. So he comes out of this personal tragedy making plans to convince the Jewish Ethnographic Society of St. Petersburg to send him to gather folklore, Jewish folklore, around the Russian Empire. And he thinks that this project is going to cost 8,000 to 10,000 rubles. He writes, if this works out, I'll willingly dedicate what remains of my life to it. It's worth it. Folklore, for An Ski was a way to understand the most traditional, poorest Jews. He was full of passion to try to understand them and also to do the fundraising to get the resources to do his work. By 1911, he wanted to raise 30,000 rubles and produce a kind of full fledged modern ethnographic expedition, like the expeditions the people were undertaking at the time, to study the peoples of Siberia with at least two people on each team and modern technology like a camera and a phonograph. An Ski believed that folk art would inspire modern Jewish artists to produce work that would speak to Jews and Christians alike, art that would itself defend and renew Jewish culture. He got support from a wealthy Kiev businessman, Baron Vladimir Ginsburg, who gave him 10,000 rubles of seed money and helped him with future fundraising. An Ski described this plan as the only possible path to Jewish cultural renewal. He wrote, gathering folklore is not only a scholarly task, but a national and a topical one. To educate our children in a national Jewish spirit, we must give them folk tales, folk songs, in short, the basis of children's education for other peoples. An Ski finally set out on his expedition at the beginning of July 1912, and he wrote to Ginsburg, his funder, that he was worried that his high expectations were unrealistic. He wrote, I am powerfully agitated, as before, something large and unknown. How will it go? Will I manage to attain the trust of these poor, primitive people from whom I myself emerged, but from whom I have traveled so far in the last years? At times I become terrified, but at the same time I have a great joyful feeling in my soul and that the most cherished dream of my entire life is beginning. To be realized. An ski feared that his subjects might not trust him or his two co workers. Whereas an ski's Yiddish was fluent and his beard made him look like a traditional Jew, his co workers were clean shaven grad students. One, the musicologist Yuli Engel, barely spoke Yiddish. These fears seemed to be coming true on the first day of the expedition, July 1, 1912, at the train station in the town of Ruzhin, where the team hired a wagon driver named Hennech. When they spoke with Henig in Yiddish, he immediately identified them as big city Jews and frustrated them by answering in a mix of Ukrainian and Russian, which is typical of the Kyiv region still today. Soon, though, Hennech warmed up to the visitors and spoke in Yiddish about himself. He spoke about his passions, his enthusiasm, his ecstasy over the phonograph. The ethnographers found in this wagon driver just what they hoped Hasidism and traditional Jewish life would provide a more powerful joy, more powerful emotions than modern life offered. Yuli Engel wrote in prayer. He wrote about Hasidism, and in prayer you must reach ecstasy. You must break away from the consciousness of an independent existence and feel united with God. One of the things that can help produce this condition is singing. An Ski, too, just defined hasidism as a striving for the mysterious and the miraculous. And now maybe I'll show you my images play. Okay, so here we see an ski and some of the people that he met on the expedition. So an ski is the one in the hat with the brim sort of at the edge of the table. And he's interviewing all these shtetl people and, and they're paying attention to him, and he looks very serious. And then on the other side, in the other picture, you see a photograph of a synagogue that an ski saw on his expedition. And he's very excited. You can tell by the ark with its very complex carvings. And you can see that he's using his umbrella to pull aside the chandelier so that the ark will be visible. We know that's an ski's umbrella. You kind of see his hand. Another thing that happened on the expedition was that an ski and his crew had this phonograph and they would use it to record songs and rhymes. So you just hear it a little bit. But, but what you're hearing was the recording of children's rhymes that, that an ski and people on his expedition made in 1912. And you're actually, what you were hearing was from a CD that I co produced with Michael Albert, who is here in the audience today and may be willing to answer questions about it in the chat once we're done with the talk. So we have this wonderful data from the expert expedition. But the expedition was not always easy. An Ski wrote in his diary about how there was tension, often between his ethnographic team and the people of the shtetl. Informants were uncooperative. Chaya Gitte, he wrote, a typical old lady knows spells but won't recite them. Another woman starts to recite a spell that he wants to collect, then becomes frightened when on skin asks to hear a word again, refuses to go on, and tells him to go to a drugstore if he needs a cure. By the next summer, 1913, though an ski knew what techniques would work in each new shtetl. He established contact by joining the community in prayer. Each time they got to a shtetl, they would go to the shoal and pray. Naturally, after the service, the locals would invite the ethnographers. They would start talking to them, they'd invite them. Or the ethnographers would invite the locals to come to their hotel room for some whiskey. The ethnographers would ask questions, hear detailed answers, take notes, and they would hear certain legends in many different places. In 12 towns, an ski and his team were shown a fenced off place near the synagogue where a bride and groom in killed during their wedding by the Haidamaks. These 18th century Cossack rebels were buried. And they would often hear about how children playing on wasteland had started to dig and uncovered an entire synagogue underground. An Ski's team gathered stories about movement between the world of the living and the true world of the dead and back. The team was fascinated by stories about dybbuks, dead souls that possess the bodies of the living. In one story that An Ski collected, an old cantor, jealous of his successor, dies, possesses the young man and forces him to sing the Yom Kippur service in his voice with the old cantor's melodies. The healer's charms and the rabbi's exorcisms functioned in a world in which the word was, whether written or spoken, possessed magic power. The ethnographers knew that. Schneer Zalman of Lidi had said, songs possess that kind of power too. Songs sung with true kavana intention are a vehicle for messages from the world of the living to the true world, the world of the dead. So what would happen to that power if the charms and melodies were collected, tabulated, studied, or displayed as An Ski hoped to do? The question arose concerning the Phonograph. The shtetl Jews had heard of phonographs, which they called Edisons, but few had actually seen one. So the team would set the phonograph up in the study house after prayers for a demonstration. One of the team would sing a song, deliberately laughing in the middle, and then they would play the cylinder on which it had been recorded. The amazed audience would realize that the performance they had just heard had really been recorded, and this would produce an enthusiastic response. In one town, Karastishev, though, the team heard of a different response. An elderly synagogue official, Reb Avram Bloch, told the ethnographers a story about Reb Motele, the current Rebbe's father. A couple of decades earlier, presumably when gramophones first became commercially available in the 1890s, men had come to Karastishev with the marvelous new invention. Rab Motola had inserted the hearing tube in his ear and listened, and then suddenly pulled it out and stood up as though bitten by a snake. He turned to Bloch and said, avram, try to sing into this machine a melody or a prayer. Sing with feeling, with an outpouring of your soul, with higher holiness. The terrified Bloch refused, and Rabb Motala shook his head and said, gewalt, where can one find a great man? Later, Reb Motala explained his words by telling another story. One day, the Besht, the BAAL Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, went into a prayer house and cried out, gevalt, Jews. The prayer house is full of prayers. It's choking. Pure. Prayers, the Besht explained, went straight to heaven. But prayers with blemishes couldn't rise and were stuck on earth. In the study house, Rav Motala explained that this is the secret of the Edison. The machine captures only simple words and blemished songs. Reb Motele's anxiety that the phonograph could never preserve Jewish song with its true power did not seem to trouble the shtetl Jews, whom the ethnographers recorded. For the most part, men would happily come to the hotel room and be recorded singing songs. An Ski persuaded one elderly woman in Kremenets to sing in a room with other women, while the men listened from another room and, without her permission, recorded her. Not very ethical. The process of collecting, whether it was difficult or easy, gave An Ski tremendous happiness. After An Ski had succeeded in persuading a family to sell him a valuable old manuscript, his delight, says one of the expedition members, was boundless. An Ski himself described his Expedition. In mystical terms, he wrote, the expedition is becoming a study of all the Jews, if not something bigger. It's impossible to write to you about the expedition. So many impressions, it can't be described. It's as though I am climbing up a tall mountain from which I see a greater and greater area. I'm starting to see the folk, the nation, with flesh and blood eyes. An Ski saw this as a kind of miracle. He had gained access to something not quite of this world. He moved from revelation to statistics. He wrote, the team has gathered a thousand tales, 1500 songs. It has taken a thousand photographs. It has bought 400 objects for the museum, including 20 manuscripts. He wrote, the happiness I feel from this work is limited. It is limitless. The ecstasy that drew An Ski to the Ukrainian Chassids was finally his as well. An Ski repeatedly measured his distance from his subjects. In his research methods and in his choice of objects to collect. He was willing to deceive his subjects, such as the traditional healers to whom he represented himself as a formerly rich man, now nearly blind and fallen on hard times, who needed to, quote, borrow a charm for his own use and have his cousin write it down. Jewish law mandates that all parts of a corpse be buried, and it forbids the living prolonged contact with the bodies of the dead. But An Ski collected just the kind of human remains that were typically exhibited in ethnographic museums at the time. In Praskurov, the teen met an old man whose finger had been chopped off when he was a child in order to save him from recruitment into the Imperial Army. Families who performed this operation on their sons would save the finger so that it could eventually be buried along with its former owner. But An Ski convinced an old man to sell him his finger for the Jewish Ethnographic Museum. An Ski wrote proudly to Ginzburg. When he acquired some even older body parts, he wrote, in one shtetl, I managed to get from an old cemetery two skulls, one of which had visibly been broken by a weapon. I myself dug up this skull from the depth of one archim and pulled it out with my hands. So the break is undoubtedly old. Had the Shtetl Jews realized that the ethnographers did not scruple to dig up a Jewish corpse and carry part of it away for exhibit in a St. Petersburg museum, many of them would have been appalled. But the act was consistent with the team's behavior in other circumstances. They collected many stories about graves and tombstones, especially those of Hasidic leaders. They were interested in the Kvitlach the notes of supplication that were often left at the graves of famous rebbes. The writers believed that the power of the written word was such that their pleas might reach the dead sage in the world to come, and he might intercede for them in the world of the living. The ethnographers collected many Kvitlach for their museum. With no qualms about disrupting their magic. An Ski was fascinated by the magic of the shtetl folk and the ways that they believed they could penetrate the border between the worlds of the living and the dead. But An Ski did not share their beliefs. Instead of using exorcisms or to influence the dead to intercede in the world of the living, he had another audience in mind by displaying what he had found in his museum. Rabbinic textbooks, sorry, rabbinic books, photographs, Kvitlach and skulls. He believed that he might work a different kind of magic by inspiring assimilated Jews to create secular Jewish art. In spite of his ecstasy at collecting, the folklore he amassed was a means to an end. Not an end in itself. As he wrote in 1914 in a letter praising a young artist who could have been Chagall, he wrote, we would exchange the grave of the best for a good Jewish Leonardo da Vinci. True, the lore and the objects that the Jews had lived by was not ultimately the point. The creation of a secular Jewish culture mattered much more to him. Okay, that was the end of part two. Now parts three and four are shorter. So part three. While An Ski and his colleagues were immersed in ethnographic work, the Russian public was also discussing Jewish customs from a different perspective. This period saw the revival of the blood libel, the legend that Jews are religiously obligated to use Christian blood in the matzos they make at Passover on March 12, 1911, when a 13 year old Christian boy, Andrei Yushinsky, disappeared on his way to school in Kiev. His body was found later with multiple stab wounds. On July 21, Mendel Bayliss, a Jewish superintendent at the Zaitsev brick factory, was arrested in connection with the murder. For two years, the Kiev Police Department prepared a case against Bayless, accusing him of murdering Yushinsky in order to use his blood for ritual purposes. Simultaneously, Jewish and Russian liberals prepared the case for the defense. As An Ski prepared and carried out the first two seasons of the ethnographic expedition. The Bayless affair distracted him and his colleagues constantly. An Ski wrote about the Jewish folklore, folktales that had arisen in response to blood libel accusations. He wrote that folktales about that these kinds of folktales exemplify what he called the optimism of folklore, which testifies to the deep faith of the folk in the victory of truth and justice, and requires that the libel be uncovered, the innocent freed, and the guilty punished as they deserve. An Ski especially was interested in the stories of Judah Loeb ben Bezalel of Prague, a 16th century rabbi known as the Maharal, and his invention, the Golem. This was an enormous servant made of clay, who performed superhuman feats in order to save Jews from the blood libel. He prevented Christians from depositing corpses in Jewish homes, exposed those who did so, or pointed out the grave in the cemetery from which a fresh corpse had been dug up in order to sneak it into the home of an innocent Jew. As an sky explained, these tales were a natural response to the blood libel. He wrote, Folklore depicts remarkable circumstances where the truth is revealed in an especially triumphant and indisputable form. Once the trial was finally set, set for September 1913, an ski left the ethnographic expedition and secured a journalist's ticket to the trial. He sat in the courtroom from 10 in the morning. He wrote until midnight in hell. He wrote about how the day that the jury was chosen, Kiev felt haunted. He felt that he could see the ghosts from the time of the ghetto in Kiev. He felt that throughout Kiev, Jews, wrapped in prayer shawls, as in the Middle Ages, were chanting prayers for forgiveness and hoping for a miraculous salvation. An Ski looked at Kiev in September 1913, and he saw Prague in the 16th century, the Jews knowing that the blood libel accusation threatened all of them, and joining in a communal prayer for miraculous salvation. An Ski went on to write a lot of Yiddish newspaper articles about the Bayless blood libel trial. And he was constantly returning to this idea that there would be some kind of miraculous salvation at the end. In fact, the trial ended ambiguously. The jury decided that although Bayless was innocent, ritual murder had occurred, meaning that some Jews somewhere were guilty of killing Yushinsky and consuming his blood. An Ski reacted to the verdict with despair. He felt that he had believed, and Jewish folklore had believed in some kind of miraculous salvation, something like the creation of a golem. And instead there was just this ambiguous result. He felt that the medieval pattern where a Jewish community suffers, looks inward and is rewarded with a miracle that that pattern had been broken. So let me move on to the Dybbuk, the. The play that An Ski then writes. In the midst of his despair over the blood libel trial in Kiev, An Ski drafted a play that drew on all his experiences of the previous few years. His efforts would bear fruit only after his death, when the Dybbuk would become the best known and most often staged work of the Hebrew and Yiddish. The theaters. So some of you know, but maybe some of you don't, that this famous play, the Dybbuk, tells of a young couple, Chonan and Leah, whose fathers are Chassids, who follow Rebbe Azrael of Meeropol, who's promised them to each other in marriage before they were born. Chonin's father, Nissen, has died young, and Leah's father, Sennder, has grown rich and forgotten his promise. Honen has become a yeshiva student who takes meals at the house of Leah and her father. The souls of the two young people are connected by mystic bonds, and they yearn for each other in the first act. In the shtetl of Brenitz, Sender seeks a rich groom for his daughter, and Honen experiments with practical Kabbalah, Jewish magic, in order to win Leia's hand. He's tempted by the vision of gold. He calls on the devil, and he dies. In the second act, Leia is about to marry someone else, but she goes to the cemetery, and she invites her dead mother and the dead Honen to attend the wedding. As she's led under the marriage canopy, she calls out to the groom in Honen's voice, you are not my bridegroom. And the crowd realizes that she's been possessed by a dybbuk, the soul of Haman. The third act is in Rebbe Azrael's court. Sender asks the Rebbe to exorcise the dybbuk, but the Rebbe discovers that Honen's father, the dead Nissen, wants to summon Cender to a trial, so he postpones the exorcism. The fourth act begins with the trial between the living and the dead, and Nissen accuses Cender of breaking his promise, causing Honen's death and ending Nissen's line and his memory. The rabbinic court, while exonerating Cender in part, determines that he has to donate half his wealth to the poor and say prayers in memory of Nissen and Chonen. Then the Rebbe exercises the dybbuk, but before Leah can be married, she chooses to join Honen in death, and she dies. It's a great play. If you haven't seen it, you should. The first draft of the play has not been preserved, but we do have a draft from 1915 which bears the imprint of an Ski's time as an ethnographer like each of the team's visits to a shtetl, the first three acts of the 1915 version open with old men telling stories in a synagogue or a study room, hoping for a bite to eat and a drink. The 1915 version has a prologue in which a prodigal daughter, now back with her father after having run away with a man, asks for forgiveness and the father offers a Dybbuktail. Throughout the play, characters ask each other to explain customs or landmarks, to perform songs, dances, rituals. And unlike the uncooperative informal about whom An Ski complained in his diary, these people are delighted to oblige. The real plot of the play is perhaps the plot of the ethnographic expedition itself. Over and over it dramatizes the encounter of a loquacious storyteller and an eager listener, as the members of the ethnographic team yearn to do. The heroes of the play have ecstatic experiences when Leia is possessed by the Dybbuk and when Honen appeals to supernatural powers. These people are experimenting with the forms of altered consciousness that were available to Eastern European Jews at the time. Honen is experimenting with non possession trance, and Lay is experimenting with possession trance. This is a sort of gendered thing. But in any case, when Lay is specific, speaks with Honen's voice, and when Honen, at the moment of his death, says, I see the revelation, now they're transgressing the boundaries of their usual selves. An Ski had rejoiced that the expedition gave him this kind of limitless happiness, a mystical view of Jewish life. And the heroes of the Dybbuk also have this urge for the kind of experience you can't have in ordinary life. When Leah rejects her body and joins Honen in death at the end, he she seems to have achieved this. The Hebrew poet Avraham Schlansky was very scornful about An Ski's play. He called it, quote, an ethnographic museum strewn with bits of folk tales, religious rituals, et cetera, all of it devoid of literary or dramatic necessity. As he edited, An Ski had actually pared down the ethnographic material. But really the play did remain an ethnographic museum, a textual counterpart in to the actual museum that An Ski had created in Petersburg, as though she herself were a museum visitor. Leia asks during the play to see the embroidered curtain on the ark where the Torah scrolls are kept, and her aunt Frada tells her two of the stories that the ethnographers heard repeated in many shtetls. The stories about the Synagogue discovered hole underground and about the mound where the bride and groom, killed on their wedding day, are buried. The play's central theme of the Dybbuk is obviously borrowed from the many Dybbuk legends that the team collected, maybe especially from the story of the cantor who possesses the body of his successor, which is a case of a specific a Dybbuk possessing a specific person for a specific reason. Like the museum that An Ski imagined, the play, especially in its earlier drafts, stressed display over narrative, education over catharsis, genuine artifacts over interpretation. Like the museum, the play was meant to appeal not to the Jews of the shtetl themselves, but to the assimilated Jews and non Jews of the capitals. An Ski even complained that non Jews always understood his play better than Jews did. More than any of his other works, the Dybbuk succeeded in doing what An Ski had identified as the goal of the Jewish to create new secular art based on tradition, to create a new culture that would be as compelling as the old religious culture that he believed Jews were leaving behind. Ansti wanted modern Jewish culture to provide the same joy that he had found among the Hasidim. He wrote, A nation lives not in suffering, but in the ecstasy of the realization of its I, in joyful creation, in pride, in its culture, in the poetry of its daily life. Without that, the Jewish nation would have vanished long ago. With the Dybbuk, An Ski was trying to provoke that kind of ecstasy. And as when he fantasized about exchanging the grave of the Bescht for a Jewish Leonardo Da Vinci, An Ski suspected that the cause of modern Jewish culture would involve dealings with the dead. Okay, I. Actually, there's this whole other thing that I. That I've written about, but I can talk about it if you want, which is the ways that the play reveals it kind of weaves together the experiences of the ethnographic expedition and the experiences at the Bayless trial with An Ski's experiences as a revolutionary, which is something I didn't talk about very much today, but which I can answer questions about. He was a socialist revolutionary who was part of a very important party of revolutionaries that were not the Bolsheviks. It was like the other side, and they really believed in terror. They believed in acts of violence to further revolution. And I think in some ways an sky drew on that too, in his. In his production of the Dybbuk, and that Khanan has something in common with the terrorists that An Ski interacted with as part of the socialist revolutionaries. But that's not the subject of Today's talk, it's just something I kind of want you to know. What I think is most important, sort of from the perspective of An Ski and ethnography, is that he ended up producing a play that lacks the optimism that he thought folklore should have. Right. He says folklore, like the story of the Golem, is optimistic. It testifies to the deep faith of the folk and the victory of truth and justice. But the Dybbuk is a pessimistic play that ends in death. It does not end in any kind of triumph. And that's a kind of very striking thing. The pessimism of synthesis. Conclusion. Now, the pessimism of the Dybbuk may have made reflected An Ski's experiences at the Bayless trial in Kiev. He had hoped that the fervent prayers of the Jewish community or the passionate speeches of the lawyers would produce maybe a modern day Golem, or at least kind of remarkable circumstances where the truth would be revealed in an especially triumphant and indisputable form. But instead, there was an ambiguous. An ambiguous verdict that caused An Ski to mourn and then to write a play about a supernatural hero who's kind of the opposite of the Golem. The Golem emerges out of communal grief and saves the community, but the Dybbuk emerges from individual crisis. And in the play the result is the destruction of Leah and with her, as Rabbi Azrael says, a living branch on the fruitful tree of the people of Israel. Whereas in Kiev an sky had hoped that communal longing and despair would produce a miracle, the play he wrote soon after meditated on individual longing and despair and the havoc that they can wreak. The most memorable voice in the play is that of Leia herself, who cries out in Honan's male tones at the end of the second act, the center of the text. You are not my bridegroom. Her possession could be interpreted in different ways. We could see it as a way. We could see this kind of displaying being possessed as a way for women who are rendered silent, or more silent by tradition, to claim a voice. And certainly, if the play is about a girl wanting to choose her own groom, her own husband, An Ski would have been on the side of Leia, on the side of someone like her. It may be that the play was actually inspired by An Ski seeing a teenage girl in Podolia devastated by her father's decision to marry her to a rich neighbor instead of the young yeshiva student that she loved. But audiences, as an sky knew, tended to see the play as more mystical than Realist. When the theater director Konstantin Stanislavski read the Dybbuk, the Moscow art theater, he praised precisely its mysticism as, quote, more original than the mysticism of Maeterlink. Within the mystical worldview of the play, Leia is not a rebel but a victim. Conan's miraculous ability to live on after death comes at the expense of Leia living a traditional life and ultimately living it all. It may be that An Ski was so fascinated with Dybbuk stories, and in which the voice lives on transgressively after the death of its owner, partly because they recalled his own work with the gramophone. The fantasy of conquering death was prominent in the early history of sound recording, and An Ski recorded the people of the shtetl, sometimes willingly and sometimes against their will, preserving their voice so they could be heard long after their death. Motola and Kodastyschev had spoken for a part of the Jewish tradition that did not entirely welcome such recording. He spoke for the suspicion that the gramophone could reproduce and preserve only flawed songs and prayers, not the true spirit of the word. To judge from his letters and notes, An Ski didn't care about Motola's concerns or any of the ways that his collection of voices, body parts, transgressed the norms and even the rights of his subjects. But it may be that some awareness of the moral uncertainty of his ethnographic work emerges in the Dybbuk. When Lea speaks in Honen's voice, she and he are like the gramophone and the singer whom it records. But the process of making his voice live on after death proves fatal to both of them. If the play which drew so evidently on An Ski's ethnographic work reveals ambivalence about the expedition and its methods, it may also emerge from uncertainty and about the awe that An Ski had felt toward folklore itself in the wake of the Bayless trial. The Blood Libel is, after all, a bit of folklore that has traveled widely, orally and in print, proving remarkably durable. No legal case can put it to rest. The Blood Libel forces scholars to realize that folklore can unleash hatred and destruction in the Russian empire. One part of the periodical press disseminated the Blood Libel legend, while another part attacked it. But after the bailiff's trial, an sky found himself angry not only at the anti Semitic newspapers, but also at the Yiddish press, who refrained from criticizing the Jews for their own misdeeds. He ended his time in Kiev feeling bitter about many things, some of which had been dear to him, such as the possibility of Jewish renewal through a return to folklore. Thus, the Dybbuk dramatizes folklore that does not cause communal redemption, but questions the viability of community. Thank you.
- [49:06]
B
Thank you so much. That was wonderful. So we've got a bunch of questions and if anyone else has questions, please make sure to type them in the Q and A and we'll try to get to them. We've got a few minutes here. So, rewinding back to the very beginning of the talk, you spoke briefly about the masculic critique of folk culture. And one of our viewers was wondering if you could just elaborate. What does that mean a little bit?
- [49:33]
A
Oh, that's such a good question. I should have explained that more. Yeah, the Haskalah is. Haskalah, which means enlightenment in Hebrew, is a movement that arises in the 18th century among Jews, first in Berlin and then it kind of moves east into the Russian Empire. And it's the idea that Jews need to reform and kind of integrate more with, with the, the life of educated non Jews and they need to learn non Jewish languages, read secular sciences. And that that movement involves kind of critiquing a lot of aspects of Jewish life that the Maskilim, the adherents of the Haskalah, see as kind of old fashioned, backwards as holding the Jews back.
- [50:22]
B
Thank you. And then there are also a few questions about moving from this topic of the Haskalah or the Enlightenment. One viewer asks, was the study of folklore only because of the Enlightenment? And another viewer asks a similar question. If the Enlightenment was such an influence on Jewish ethnography, what motivated non Jewish ethnography?
- [50:46]
A
I mean, I think Enlightenment thinking in the sort of 17th and 18th century probably motivates folklore, motivates ethnography, the desire to learn about other nations, other ethnosis, other ethnic groups and one's own ethnic group. So I think it's really very similar impulses for different kinds of ethnography. And yeah, you know, there's one place to learn if you want to learn more about the sort of roots of ethnography. There's a pretty good book on it by Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs that I think would be really helpful for sort of answering that question, probably in more detail than I should give today.
- [51:34]
B
Great. I think we'll all have to check that book out. One viewer asks, this is a different kind of question. What attracted you to an ski in your studies? And maybe a follow up to that in terms of your own trajectory as a scholar. What are you working on now and what are you working on in what Are you planning to work on.
- [51:57]
A
You know, I'm a scholar of Russian literature. So I studied, started out being interested in learning about Russian literature. Then I wrote a dissertation about the Jewish assimilation in Russian literature. How Russian writers depict assimilating Jews. And then I started to learn Yiddish. I discovered An Ski. I read some stuff by him and I thought, wow, I could learn Yiddish and I could write about him. He's so interesting. Hardly anyone's written anything. And so then I learned Yiddish and then I discovered, you know, the archives, Ansky's archives were just getting open at that time. It became possible to travel to Kiev and Moscow and St. Petersburg and use those archives. So part of it was just my fascination with reading the Dybbuk and part of it was that sort of being in the right place at the right time where not that much had been written about him. But I could see that he was really fascinating and the resources were becoming available. I'm now finishing up a book about listening. So I became really fascinated by how An Ski was depicted in memoirists writings. An Ski is. People would always write about how he was such a good listener to the folk. It was amazing how he would listen to the folk. Like it was this performance. I was like wow, where does that come from? So now I've written this whole Book about mid 19th century Russian writers and how they, they see it as a kind of performance, the way that they listen to the folk and they kind of evaluate each other doing that in a pretty self conscious way. So I'm almost finished with that book and I'm starting another book which is about the idea of Jewish speech style as funny. So when do Jews start to seem funny? When does Jewish speech start to seem funny? Deliberately or not deliberately? And I think it probably happens first. First you see evidence of this in German speaking populations, in German sources and then in Russian sources and then in English sources. So the English language is sort of a latecomer to the concept of Jewish speech as funny.
- [54:05]
B
Wonderful. Please keep us posted with these projects And a quick note for audience members. You actually gave a talk on a similar topic of listening and Jewish speech in our 1917 Russian Revolution Conference. I think it was a few years ago. So that's on our YouTube channel if anyone's curious to, you know, for a little bit of a sneak peek on the upcoming work. Which very curious to. To read when, when you're done. Another viewer asks about the choice of showing the folklore through a theater piece, through a play. Why? Why was that this a choice of Course, An Ski kind of showed his work in a variety of ways, the fruits of his ethnographic labor. But why do you think you chose to kind of show it within a play?
- [54:53]
A
He was a popularizer. He was someone who wanted to reach a broad audience, and he loved theater. So he wrote a lot of things about folklore. He wrote lots of sort of articles, books about folklore, or different kinds of ethnographic work. But he always wanted to reach more people. And I think he thought a play would be a way to reach more people. But also, I think he just, you know, he was an enthusiastic writer in many, many genres. Prose, poetry, he had written other plays. I think the material spoke to him as dramatic. The drama of the material was something that he sensed.
- [55:33]
B
Another viewer asks, could you speak a little bit more about the use of technology and how that facilitated the study and what kind of role it played, not just the recording, but also photography.
- [55:46]
A
Yeah, I mean, this is this period of a kind of boom in technologically sophisticated ethnography. So An Ski was friends with some people who had organized these ethnographic expeditions to these Siberian. To study these Siberian peoples. And for him, and those people used gramophones and cameras. And so I think for An Ski, it was a. It was kind of. It made it modern. Like, he was. He was excited about the technology itself and what it allowed. And he was always kind of an early adopter. Right. Whenever I say this here in Silicon Valley, this is sort of especially meaningful. Right. Like, he would have. If he could have. He would have had, you know, the latest iPhone, and he would know how to use all the parts of it, which I don't. And he'd be like, look, look, now I'm going to video you. Now I'm going to post it to this or that. You know, he just really liked technology, but I think it was also a prestige thing. He felt like the Jews are important, and therefore there should be an ethnographic expedition to the Jews that's modern and has a gramophone.
- [57:00]
B
Wonderful. And there's so many great questions here. Unfortunately, we're running out of time. We're not gonna be able to get to all of them. But here is a very hopefully quick question, just about the pen name and how it came about. What does it mean?
- [57:16]
A
Oh, you know, probably it seems that it was. He was urged to produce it, or maybe it was actually invented by his kind of mentor, the Russian writer Gleb Uspiansky. And an sky later would say that it has to do with his mother's name, which was Chana, but usually in Russian, a Jewish woman named Channa would be called Anna. So An Ski like Anna, maybe. I theorize, I write in my book, that it seems to me that it's more likely that it comes from anonymous anonym. Right. That he kind of wanted to be anonymous at the point when he started to write. And that was sort of the conceit of being anonymous was something that was typical of writers of his kind of ideological persuasion. I see a lot of the questions, and some of them I think I could answer very quickly. Should I do that?
- [58:14]
B
Sure, by all means, yeah.
- [58:17]
A
Okay. So let me. Let me just. The report is available in English translation. Sorry, not the report. So he never wrote a report about his expedition, but he did write a very detailed questionnaire which kind of anticipates what the report would be. And that questionnaire is available, translated and edited by Nathaniel Deutschland. An Ski died because he had heart problems. He actually died a natural death, which is kind of amazing given that he was a revolutionary and he had a really hard life. The expedition traveled to Volhynia and Podolia and the Kyiv region. So it stayed in Ukraine. Ansky's group did succeed in recording other women singing. They would sit there, gramophone up in, like, a schoolhouse or a public place, and young women would often be willing to come and be recorded, not so much older women. The questions in his questionnaire were written with great specificity because that was the way in which ethnographers at the time worked. That was the norm. So it was part of him being modern, like having the gramophone and the camera. His backers were at least somewhat aware of his revolutionary activities, but he was not as involved, he was not as intensely involved in revolutionary work at the time of the expedition. There was just less revolutionary stuff happening in 1911, 1912, compared to pre1905. So wait, that's the questions that are in the chat. And then to look at some of the questions in the Q and A. Certainly the nationalistic tendencies of the 19th century emerge from the idea of folklore. And that's really apparent. If you want to read the work of Herder, you'll see the sort of connection between sort of the idea of folklore and nationalism. An Ski began writing the Dybbuk. It appears at the end of 1913, and he went on writing it through about 1918. So it took him about five years to write the first version of it. He may even have been tinkering with it later in view of his underlying paternalistic attitude, or was he reinforcing class differences between Jews. I think. I think that he was, you know, he. He was a socialist. He was a very serious socialist. So in terms of class differences, I think he always saw himself as a vehicle for and in conversation with poorer Jews. And he saw himself as. As not so much engaging with wealthier Jews. Is that the truth? I don't know, but I think that's sort of how he saw things. Did losing the boarding house, the home and the boarding house, did that make wandering around to collect inviting? Yeah, I think that's totally possible. But he was a wanderer. An Ski was a wanderer. Really, his whole life are there. Could I elaborate on the connection between his endorsing revolutionary terrorism and his interest in the mystical? Yeah. So An Ski was the movement that he was part of, the socialist revolutionaries. They were into terror, as I said, in the period after the sort of the Revolution of 1905, that prompted a kind of reevaluation among socialist revolutionaries of the tactic of terror. So you saw that produced. It prompted a lot of people who had been allied with the socialist revolutionaries to write these kind of questioning, uncertain pieces of fiction or drama or whatever, where they're sort of using this, like, mystical language to think about what does it mean to be willing to die, to kill other people and die for our country? Cause there it's. So in producing literature on this topic that's kind of mystical and revolutionary and also kind of hesitating about violence, An Ski was doing something that was really of a piece with other people from his revolutionary movement at this time. And I think the most interesting. If you want to read more of this stuff, you can read the work of Boris Savinkov, who is a wonderful and very strange and disturbing writer. Also, you could read Andre Bieli's Petersburg, and that will give you a really marvelous vision into that complicated world. I think I've actually answered all the questions. How much of the original expedition journal is preserved? Almost none. A few pages that are at yivo. So we have all different kinds of things from the expedition, but what we don't have is lots of journals by An Ski.
- [63:48]
B
Okay. Gabriela, thank you so much. This has been a wonderful talk. It's always a pleasure to have you on our stage, whether virtual or in person. And we look forward to seeing you again soon. Thank you.
- [64:00]
A
Thank you. Oh, you know, I love presenting this material. I'm always happy to talk about it. If anyone wants to buy my book or any of the many books in English that are now out about An Ski there's just so much, and it's all, I think, incredibly fascinating. He didn't just write the dybbuk. He wrote lots and lots of things. And a huge amount of what he wrote is now available in translation.
- [64:26]
B
Thank you so much.
- [64:27]
A
Thank. You, sa.