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Sh. An-ski was the pseudonym of Shlomo-Zanvl Rapoport, because his mother's name was Anna (Chana). He was born in Vitebsk in 1883, studied in a cheder and received a traditional Jewish education. His father was a bit of a maskil and, because of his profession, lived for a long time even in Moscow. His mother oversaw his Jewish education; his “non-Jewish” education was overseen by the streets of Vitebsk and its surroundings. In Vitebsk there were already illegal circles of Socialist-Folkist young people. Under the direct of influence of reading radical literature, Shlomo-Zanvl decided to learn a trade. First he adopted blacksmithing, but probably this was beyond his capabilities, so he learned bookbinding. The fact that he chose bookbinding as a profession indicated his conscious urge to be near the world of books, which grew in time to be involved with his own written work. He was not greatly proficient in bookbinding. Rudolf Rocker, who was also a bookbinder and who worked with An-ski for a short time in Paris, discusses this (R. Rocker: “In the Storm,” Buenos Aires, 1952: page 38-42). Rocker totally overlooks An-ski's proletarian “dilettantism,” because he had other virtues that the critical Rocker, in the few months of their working together, noted as “unforgettable.”

In Vitebsk, An-ski became, for the first time, absorbed in Jewish matters. He had begun to write in his early years. Zhitlovsky, the intimate friend of his youth, relates that Shlomo-Zanvl Rapoport wrote when he was very young a drama that depicts the “Gehenna of the cheder.” This piece was even read, in manuscript, by the actor Yakov Adler.

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Together with Zhitlovsky, An-ski tried to put out in Yiddish a leaflet called “The Vitebsk Bell.” This leaflet appeared, according to Zhitlovsky, in two issues.

Having nothing to do in Vitebsk, in 1881 An-ski went to the Chasidic shtetl of Liozna, where he became a teacher and a cultural “missionary.” His cultural mission, however, was denounced. The “heretic” An-ski had to leave the shtetl. For a short time he lived in Dvinsk. Zhitlovsky says that at that time An-ski kept a diary in Russian–a sign that he began to take his calling as a writer seriously. In 1881, An-ski wrote a major story called “A Story of a Family.” This is not the place to print such a story. A Vilna publisher advised him to write following the pattern of Shomer, because that would mean good business. Two years later, this story was translated from Yiddish into Russian by someone else, and it was published with the title “A Story of a Family” in “Voschod” (1884). The author name was given as “Pseudonym.” Years later, An-ski himself revised this story and included it in a volume of Russian stories with the title “Stepchildren” (1905).

An-ski had nothing to do in his Jewish surroundings. As a convinced Folkist, he went to work among the Russian folk. If anyone could interfere with him there, it was the police; while he was in a Jewish environment, as had been the case in Liozna, it was the Jewish leadership who had interfered with him. This had embittered him and estranged him from Jews. He felt good among the peasant masses, who were coal miners in the Donetsk region.

Zhitlovsky relates that in 1892 An-ski was quite distant from Yiddishkeit and strongly opposed to Zhitlovsky's own thoughts. He felt confined by the Jewish world and he felt that one could do no significant work in Yiddish.

An-ski was in Moscow for a short time, where his father, whom he barely knew, was then living. In the winter of 1891-1892, An-ski went to Petersburg. There he drew close to the group of prominent Narodnik writers, led by Gleb Uspensky, and he began to write stories about Russian folk life. High-minded by nature, An-ski began to detect in the souls of the Russian folk, especially among the peasants,

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Sh. An-ski (1863-1920)

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similar idealistic features, while Zhitlovksy held them to be one-sided and full of superstitions. Years later, when An-ski had returned to Jewish creativity, he showed the same exalted approach as when he had written about earlier Jewish life. In the summer of 1892 went abroad for the first time. He settled in Paris and, until he became the private secretary of Piotr Lavrov (1894-1900) he lived by bookbinding and worked together with Rudolf Rocker.

In France, An-ski became interested in French social folklore–a subject that had strongly captivated him in Russia in connection with Russian folklore. His book–Sketches on Folk Literacy–that appeared in Russia in 1894, was a result of his investigation into how the mass of the Russian people were mirrored in Russian literature.

The French method of investigating folklore consisted of this: how the social moments that found redress in a song, a ballad, or a story were used as sources for the psychology of the folk mass. The authenticity of this kind of material did not interest the investigator, nor did the origin of this material. In this tradition had Dragomanov investigated Ukrainian historical thought, not going into such details as they could have written about individuals from higher social classes.

In Paris, An-ski collected much material and intended to make a comparison with similar Russian material in order, in this fashion, to come to certain conclusions regarding the difference in the social psychology of the Russian and French masses. This work should have appeared in German from the publishing house where Chaim Zhitlovsky was partly the head and also the editor. But after Lavrov's death (1900), An-ski left for Switzerland. The book was never written and it is likely that the material was lost.

In Switzerland he became active in the organization of Russian social revolutionaries, and for a time he led the Jewish division. He began, after an interval, to write again, this time in two languages: Russian and Yiddish. These six years (1902-1908) were the most fruitful of his life. He returned in his Russian writing to Jewish themes. In the years 1904-1905 he wrote his novels Pioneers,

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(published in Voskhod) and Mendel the Turk, he worked on his Stepchildren, wrote “In the Current” (Russian, 1907), and many other stories about Jewish life. He was very critical of his earlier maskilik approach. He depicted the transitional period in Russian-Jewish life in the small shtetls with more nostalgic warmth and less hostility.

In the novel Pioneers, the maskil's father, who himself had fought for a road to general culture, says to his maskil children, who go to the gymnasium:

“Don't be in such a hurry to throw off all of your Yiddishkeit; don't be in such a hurry to knock down all the fences” (Russian Collection 3:181).

The Russian narodniks [members of the Russian intelligentsia who favored socialism and supported the lower classes] held that with his emotional conceptions, An-ski's attitude toward the old Jewish way of life was a negative factor. The critic Gornfeld relates that a Russian editor did not want to publish his stories about Jewish life in his journal because “it could hurt the Jews.”

An-ski's stories, therefore, with few exceptions, were published in Voskhod, in a Russian-Jewish organ that no one could suspect of “hurting the Jews.”

At the time of the revolution (1905), An-ski returned home. He, the author of the Bundist “The Vow,” the “Marseillaise” of the Jewish working class, threw himself once again, with great energy, into the general revolutionary enlightenment work. He worked among the village and city proletariat. He assembled material that surely had nothing to do with the ongoing issues of that revolutionary spurt. He went no further than to tell what the everyday person read, if he could read, and what he would have read if he could have read. Some years later (1913), this material was the subject of a new book (Narod I kniga [The Folk and the Book]).

He dealt with Jewish matters en masse in the Russian Calendar Almanac that he edited (1907-1910), where his aim was to “spread accurate information about Jews,” or, in other words, apologetics. This aim itself called forth protests from the Ukrainian and White Russian press, because An-ski was less well-known in the national political awakening of these people in Russia.

At the same time, An-ski held lectures in which he used

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collected Russian materials that he presented as folklore but which were, in essence, literary productions. Such a lecture, for example, was given about “War and its Reflection in Literature” (1910), with the thesis “that the Russian folk-mass regards war as a great misfortune,” as can be seen in Russian folksongs. But in the same talk, An-ski had a second theme that contradicted the first, that “the Russian soldier moves always heroically toward death” (From the Recent Past, 1937, pp. 310-320).

Disappointed in the revolution, An-ski began to return “home.” These were the years 1908-1914, the crowning years of his life, when he interested himself in the folklore not of those who lay in the earth and dug coal but of those who lay in the earth and dug nothing–that is, of the impoverished Jewish folk-masses. His project was a conservative one regarding all forms of Jewish life. This is clear in his anniversary talks, held in 1909 when people celebrated a quarter century of his literary work. At the same time he defended what in 1878 and later he held to be a hellish institution, that is, the cheder.

The years 1908-1914 were his “folkloristic years.” He organized the folklore expedition, which visited 66 places in Volhynia and Podolia and collected much material. The funds for this historic work was in large part provided by the Kiev baron Vladimir Ginzburg. A number of students from the higher classes for the study of Israel in Petersburg took part in the expedition. The great love and dedication of those who took part in the expedition were a factor in the significant results of this first Jewish folklore expedition in our history.

An-ski began to publish works, many in Russian, that would serve as a theoretical foundation for Jewish folklore studies. It is not important here to get involved in the arguments regarding An-ski's theses about folklore. Questions have long been asked. It is enough to read Gaster, Heller, and other competent Jewish folklorists to realize that Jewish folk-creations are no different from non-Jewish ones. If there is no “triumphant physical heroism” in Jewish folk-creations, there is also none in the Old Christian, Old Russian, or Hindu. At the same time, An-ski wrote (Pereshitoe [The Past], 1: 276-314; Collected Works, 15:

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29-95) that current folk-creations are largely similar to the folklore of other people and that Jewish folklore is not different or better than others. “The ideas of justice and purity of spirit” that moved one of the participants in the expedition (M. Chudner, The Moment, 1932, number 157), is basically a feature of many folk-literatures.

Concerning the Jewish folksong, An-ski convinced himself at the time during the First World War when he was in Galicia. He wrote (The Jewish Destruction in Poland, Galicia, and Bukovina, 1914-1917, Vilna, 1923, page 57), that folksongs and folktales in which people cry and wail are not only a Jewish production but a Slavic one.

In the bulk of An-ski's collections there is a great cultural-historical and national value. His romantic theory of Jewish folklore as unique mirrors the emotional spirit of the folklorist, as does his intellectual approach in general.

The First World War arrived. The work of collecting had to stop. An-ski saw for himself a greater duty–to help his victimized brothers and sisters in the sections of Austria that were occupied by Russian troops, first of all Galicia and Bukovina–two Jewish territories with a long- established Jewish way of life. He went there, gathered documents about persecution of Jews and the evil eye of folklore never deserted him. Here and there he recorded a story or a superstition. Over all, however, he offered a variety of explanations of a folkloristic character. For example, during the war, there spread more legends about escapes from death. Legends also spread about the messiah (particularly among Chasidim).

“Folk legends,” An-ski wrote in his book The Destruction of Galicia (1: 39), “are suffused with a deep optimism, with belief, that eventually the truth will show itself.” Whether the legends concern escape from false accusations during the war or the meeting of two Jewish soldiers on the field of slaughter, one prods the other and hears the cry, as he dies, “Shema Yisroel.”

The war of brother against brother also affected Ukrainian folklore, Polish folklore, and even Italian folklore. Clearly this was not a purely Jewish phenomenon.

The difference between story, legend, and tradition is not visible in his theoretical work.

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“One should study a Chasidic story the way one studies a page of Gemara, and perhaps even more deeply,” wrote An-ski (Collected Writings, 1:110). That the Chasidic story was not basically Jewish (more like Slavic), while only the characters were “made up” did not interest An-ski.

Jewish folktales are Jewish according to language and style but international according to their subject matter and substance. Today this is accepted as an axiom by everyone. Certainly some of them have been published in pamphlets and books, but when they go to the people–as Y.L. Cohen as accurately demonstrated–they come back “mother naked” and come in “frank and free,” as they were at first, before the scholar dressed them up in didactic clothing. Because a folk tale is in its depth playful and seldom didactic.

Zhitlovski has already correctly noted that in An-ski's soul in those years of crisis ethics to a significant degree had consumed aesthetics (Memories of my Life, 1935, 1:67).

The aesthetics of Jewish folktales primarily consisted of language, rhythm, style, and plot as a fully thought out composition. However, several traditions in a version of a folktale An-ski had identified because of content rather than form. For example, in the splendid tradition about Nikolas I and Rabbi Moshe Montefiore (Collected Work 11, 1928), inserted in the middle are prosaic passages that totally distort the fantasy of the legend: “And when R. Moshe Montefiore named something, it was, you understand, not difficult to accomplish it.” In another story about the same Nikolas: “A hardboiled enemy not so much of Jews as of Yiddishkeit.” The story is basically superb, but the artistic interpretations have usurped their grace and naivete (as shown even more in Collected Works 1, Pereshitoe 2, Yevreiskaya Starina 13, and elsewhere).

Examples, like old stories reworked by Chasidim, are cited by Zinberg in YIVO Bletter 1:330-336. Many allegedly Jewish legends (for example, about Amram) are Christian, as the great scholar of Jewish folklore Louis Ginzburg has shown.

In a letter of May 7, 1915, addressed to the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Institution in Petrograd, gave an account of his ethnographic expedition. It had cost a total of 23,000 rubles. Ten thousand of those rubles had been donated by Baron Vladimir Ginzburg. Here is the accounting of what he collected:

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2,000 photographs
1,800 folktales, traditions, and legends
1,500 folksongs and games
500 rolls of Jewish folk music
1,000 tunes for songs with and without words

In addition, many proverbs, superstitions, etc. He also collected:

100 historical documents
500 manuscripts
700 antiques, purchased for the price of 6,000 rubles.

These things were all collected to create a Jewish national museum. At the end of 1916, the whole treasure was given to the Historical-Ethnographic Institution (Yevreiskaya Starina 1918, page 319).

A second report published shortly after An-ski's death says that in the archive of the same society can be found 2,327 letters from An-ski's collection.

“I have no wife, no children, and no house,” An-ski wrote in a letter, “not even an apartment, no possessions, and not even an established dwelling place. The only thing that ties me strongly to this dimension is the nation.”

In addition, there remain 1,371 documents about Jews in the First World War, a full collection from a Chasidic wedding with all the melodies and other documents (Yevreiskaya Starina 1924, pages 306-311).

This whole treasure An-ski had to abandon when he fled into exile after the Bolshevik Revolution.

During the war, returning from Galicia, An-ski gave lectures about Jewish folklore (in 1916). A year earlier a large questionnaire went out that he put together with the help of the ten students who took part in his expedition. The book is called The Jewish Ethnographic Program, volume 1, 1915, 238 pages. The program consists of 2,657 questions and is dedicated to Baron Vladimir Ginzburg and edited by the ethnographer L. Shternberg.

In the brief but interesting introduction, An-ski says that folklore is “Oral Torah.” And this was created by “the people themselves,” especially “the multitude”–created from the same “Jewish spirit” as the Written Torah. This indicates a relapse into the old positions of his first theoretical articles.

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Therefore, laments, An-ski, Jewish folklore is declining because “the Jew relates easily and with attention to the greater and richer creation that lives in the people.”

The whole program, you must understand, is nothing more than a skeleton.

“One would need twenty professors,” wrote Y.L. Cohen (“Studies on Jewish Folk-Creations,” YIVO, 1952, p. 133), “to look for answers to the questions of the huge questionnaire.”

In January of 1916, An-ski gave a lecture at the Russian Theater Conference about Yiddish theater. He explained that he had dedicated himself to collecting 100 variations of the “Ahashverosh-Play.” But he gave details about the texts of the “David and Goliath Play,” because he had found there “elements of social protest” (Yevreiskaya Zhizn, 1916).

In 1917 he was chosen to be a deputy in the constituent assembly of the Esserish Party. He experienced the dissolution of the founding assembly, and in September of 1918 he left Russia and settled in Vilna. There, in the Jerusalem of Lithuania, An-ski found himself in a warm Jewish environment, which revived him, but people could already see signs of a terrible illness.

On February 20, 1919, the Jewish Historical Ethnographic Institute was founded. Following his death, it was named after him.

On June 9, 1919, An-ski read in the hall of the Vilna community The Dybbuk, which after his death became the greatest hit of the Yiddish theater. It was a dramatic reworking of some of the ethnographic material he had collected.

From Vilna An-ski went to Warsaw, after giving the Vilna Ethnographic Institute 40 volumes of folklore material. In Warsaw, An-ski set himself to creating an ethnographic institute.

An-ski died on November 8, 1920, a day after the founding gathering of the institute, which ended up never being established in the capital of Poland. After An-ski's death, people at the Ethnographic Institute in Vilna created a special An-ski Room, where they assembled materials about the author of The Dybbuk.

In December of 1920, an An-ski Institute was founded, led by Y.L. Cohen. A variety of plans were made,

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including even a folklore journal, but there was no audience for such a project.

In Warsaw, a committee issued An-ski's works, in accordance with his will., but only 15 volumes appeared, among them many translated from Russian. This edition of his collected works was never completed.

In 1922, the monumental record from the Vilna An-ski Institute was issued (864 pages), with significant folkloristic material. In 1936, the YIVO researcher in Vilna Reuven Lichtshteyn began to work on an An-ski monograph. Only a single chapter (“An-ski's First Outing”) was published in YIVO Bletter 12:443-453. A significant work about An-ski entitled “The Lifestyle of An-ski” was published by Hillel Zeitlin in the Almanac for the Tenth Anniversary of Moment (1921, pages 49-72). There was also Chaim Zhitlovsky's piece in Memories from my Life (volume 1:114-119) and Victor Charnov's in his book, Jewish Activists in the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (1948, pages 52-90).

An-ski's letters were published in various editions–in the journals The Month (Warsaw, 1919), YIVO Bletter, From the Recent Past, The Future, and others.

Memoirs of the expedition were published by the participants: M Chudner (The Moment, 1937), A. Rechtman and Yitzchak Gir-Aryeh (P. Kenger) in Knowledge of the People (Jerusalem, volume 2), a book about An-ski's folklore expedition prepared by A. Rechtman. About a general evaluation of An-ski the writer, activist, and folklorist there is nothing yet.

An-ski was the messenger of Jewish folklore, just like the messenger in his Dybbuk, bringing stories and legends, proverbs and rumors. Even An-ski felt this way (see Yakov Shatzki in Yearbook, 5711, vol. 9, from the Jewish Book Council in America, pages 113-119). As a writer, An-ski had a very unassuming place in the history of Yiddish literature. As a personality, An-ski shone for his idealism and his holy naivete. As a folklorist, An-ski introduced a new force in the work of collecting. His years of working with folklore were the best and happiest years of his life. He truly merged with the people, although this is not actually the function of a folklorist. Romantic in his heart and soul, he also approached folklore as a romantic love.

An-ski was closely tied up with the story of Jewish folklore.

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What he accomplished–perhaps a great deal of it has gone to waste–was truly a major thing. With The Dybbuk, he wove eternity into the history of Yiddish theater. His Russian works about Jewish life will remain sources for a social history of Jews in the second half of the nineteenth century in White Russia, particularly in the area of Vitebsk.

Finally, it is appropriate to indicate one curious point. Jewish folklore in the quarters of Vitebsk was also gathered by non-Jewish folklorists, who published their work in Russian folklorist journals (Vitebskaya Starina, Zhivaya Starina, Ruskaya Etnografia, and others). White Russia had an abundance of Jewish folklore. When Jewish folklore will be assembled according to its places of origin–just as Oscar Kolberg did in his time for Poland–it will cover not only Jewish folklore but also study of the Yiddish language. Unfortunately, there are not enough competent workers. Everything comes more from love than from skill, but the love requires skill.

Shlomo-Zanvl Rapaport (Sh. An-ski) showed the highest loving skill for Jewish folklore.

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