Yiddish Ethnography and An-ski

Yiddish Civilization Lecture Series See all lectures » Admission: Free Watch the video

Gabriella Safran | Delivered in English.

Sh. An-ski (Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport, 1863-1920) was a writer in Russian and Yiddish, a revolutionary, a wartime relief worker, and an ethnographer who studied the Jews of the Russian Empire. During his 1911-1914 expeditions to shtetls in Ukraine—he would report—he and his co-workers took 1000 photographs, recorded 1000 Yiddish songs and 1500 stories, and purchased 400 objects for a Jewish museum. The expedition also inspired An-ski to write his signature play, The Dybbuk. Although East European Jews used ethnographic tools to study themselves both before and after An-ski’s expeditions, he retains an outsize status in the field of Yiddish ethnography, strongly tied to the success of his play. This talk explores the connections between An-ski’s ethnographic work, his play, and the Russian politics of his era.

About the Speaker

Gabriella Safran, the Eva Chernov Lokey Professor in Jewish Studies at Stanford University, teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She is the author and editor of prize-winning books on how Russian novels describe Jewish assimilation and on the relation between Jewish literature and anthropology; her biography of a pioneering Russian-Jewish writer, ethnographer, and revolutionary, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky, came out with Harvard University Press in 2010. Safran is now finishing a book on listening, transcription, and verbal imitation across class lines in the mid-19th-century Russian Empire, and beginning another book about the international pre-history of the Jewish joke.

Bibliography

An-ski, S. The Enemy at his Pleasure: A Journey through the Jewish Pale of Settlement During World War I. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003.

The Dybbuk and the Jewish Imagination: A Haunted Reader, ed. and trans. Joachim Neugroschel. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000.

An-ski, S. 1915 Diary of S. An-ski: A Russian Jewish Writer at the Eastern Front. Trans. Polly Zavadivker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016.

Ansky, S. The Dybbuk and Other Writings, ed. David G. Roskies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

Deutsch, Nathaniel. The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Pale of Settlement. New York: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Old Jewish Folk Music: The Collections and Writings of Moshe Beregovski. Ed. and trans. Mark Slobin. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.

Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky's Ethnographic Expeditions. Ed. Eugene Avrutin and Harriet Murav. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2009.

Safran, Gabriella. Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky. New York: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Tracing An-sky: Jewish Collections from the State Ethnographic Museum in St Petersburg. Ed. Mariella Beukers and Renée Waale. St. Petersburg: State Ethnographic Museum, 1992.

The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century. Ed. Gabriella Safran and Steven Zipperstein. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.