Salomon An-ski

Salomon An-ski, 1910

Salomon An-ski or Salomon Anski (actually Shlomo Sanwel Rappoport or Salomon Seinwil Rapoport; born October 27, 1863 in Tschaschniki, Vitebsk Governorate , Russian Empire ; died November 8, 1920 in Otwock near Warsaw ) was a Russian-Jewish writer, Journalist and ethnographer . He is best known as the author of the play Der Dibbuk , which premiered in 1920 and is considered a classic of Yiddish literature .

Life

Ravnitzki, An-ski, Mendele , Bialik , Frug , before 1916 (from left to right)

An-ski received a traditional Jewish education. He learned the Russian language as an autodidact. An-ski learned bookbinding as a craft, then a locksmith or tailor (here the biographers' statements differ). As a member of the Russian Narodniki , he soon came into conflict with the police, who monitored him and finally expelled him in 1891.

In 1894 he reached Paris , where he first worked as a bookbinder. Later he was secretary to the Russian Social Revolutionary Pyotr Lavrov and secretary of the Russian Social Revolutionary Party in Paris. He wrote two well-known hymns for the Jewish socialist movement “Der Bund” : Di schwue (“The Oath”) and In salzikn jam fun Menschleche trern (“In the salty sea of human tears”).

After the St. Petersburg Bloody Sunday in 1905, An-ski returned to Russia. In 1908 he founded the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society in St. Petersburg . Financed by the Paris entrepreneur Vladimir de Gunzburg (1873–1932), An-ski undertook several ethnographic expeditions in the Jewish Paleon between 1912 and 1914 . During the First World War he was a representative of a Jewish aid organization in Galicia .

In 1919 he traveled to the cities of Vilnius and Warsaw, which had been liberated by Polish troops , where he worked for the Yiddish newspaper Der Moment .

The collected works in Yiddish appeared as a total of fufzn bender from 1920 to 1925 (15 volumes). A reprint appeared in the National Yiddish Book Center, Amherst (Mass.) From 1999; it is also available in some European libraries.

He wrote his most famous piece, The Dibbuk, in Russian. Konstantin Stanislawski wanted to stage it in this version at the Moscow Art Theater. An-Ski himself translated his piece into Yiddish to make it look even more authentic. The first performance of the play took place on December 9, 1920, one month after An-Ski's death, by the Vilna troupe in Warsaw.

In 1938 his play The Dybbuk was filmed in Yiddish by director Michał Waszyński in Poland. This film shows the world of the Jews in Eastern Europe shortly before their destruction by the Shoah . Animated by this film, Rachel Michali created her opera The Dybbuk from An-ski's work in 2005 .

Editions of works (selection)

The Dybuk: Dramatic Legend in Four Acts. Translated by Arno Nadel , 1921 ( online ).
The dibbuk. Dramatic legend in 4 acts. Newly translated by Horst Bienek and Salcia Landmann, Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-458-32901-3 .
The Dybbuk and other writings. Edited by David G. Roskies, Schocken Books, New York 1992, ISBN 0-8052-4111-6 .
The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey through the Jewish Pale of Settlement during World War I. New York 2002, ISBN 080505944X .

literature

Gabrielle Safran (Ed.): The worlds of S. An-sky. A Russian intellectual at the turn of the century. Stanford University Press, Stanford (Cal.) 2006, ISBN 0-8047-5344-X ( digitized ).
Life in the Russian shtetl. In the footsteps of An-Ski. Jewish collections of the State Ethnographic Museum in Saint Petersburg. Catalog for an exhibition in collaboration with the Joods Historisch Museum Amsterdam. Cologne 1993, ISBN 3-923158-24-6 .
Salman Reisen : Leksikon fun der Yiddischer Literatur un Presse, Warsaw 1914.
Salomon Wininger : Large Jewish National Biography, Bd. I. Druckerei Orient, Chernivtsi 1925.
Georg Herlitz, Bruno Kirschner (ed.): Jüdisches Lexikon , Volume 1.Jüdischer Verlag, Berlin 1927.

Web links

Commons : S. An-sky - collection of images, videos and audio files

Literature by and about Salomon An-ski in the catalog of the German National Library
S. An-sky - folklorist, playwright, social activist , film by Boris Sandler in the Day by Day section of the Jewish Daily Forward , November 8, 2014 (in Yiddish, with English subtitles)

personal data
SURNAME	An-ski, Salomon
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Rappaport, Shlomo Sanwel (maiden name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Jewish-Russian author and playwright
DATE OF BIRTH	October 27, 1863
PLACE OF BIRTH	Tschaschniki , Vitebsk Governorate , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH	November 8, 1920
Place of death	Otwock near Warsaw