Salvaging Lives, Saving Culture:An- sky's Literary Ethnographyin the First World War
Samuel Spinner
Shloyme Zanvyl Rappoport( 1863-1920), who published under thepseudonym S. An- sky, was one of the foremost Yiddish writers of thelate 19th and early 20th century. But in 1909, in a letter to his friend andfrequent correspondent Chaim Zhitlowsky, he announced that he wasturning his attention away from writing:»... I have decided to devote therest ofmy life to the Jewish task, which I consider colossally importantfor the creation of a Jewish culture. This is the creation of Jewish eth-nography, the collection of objects of Jewish folklore, etc.« ¹. An- sky hadlong harbored an interest in folklore, but early in his career this interesthad been primarily in Russian rather than Jewish subjects- in fact, hehad written extensively in Russian. By the end of the nineteenth century,his interest had come to include Jewish folklore, and he started writingmore in Yiddish, but his 1909 announcement to Zhitlowsky of his turn toJewish ethnography presumably entailed leaving behind his engagementwith Russian folklore as well as his belletristic activities, whether Jewishor Russian in focus. An- sky's decision intimates a triage between litera-ture and ethnography, which, in the eleven years preceding his death, hewould ultimately refuse to implement in his own most important works,his seminal play The Dybbuk and his war memoir Khurbn Galitsiye, thelatter of which forms the subject of this essay. These two works, his twomost significant produced after his turn to Jewish ethnography, illustratein two divergent but complementary ways the possibilities for a non-scholarly, ethnographically informed and engaged literature in Yiddish.
1 An- sky, qtd. in Benjamin Lukin:» An Academy Where Folklore Will be Studied<:An- sky and the Jewish Museum.<< The Worlds of S. An- sky: a Russian Jewish In-tellectual at the Turn of the Century. Ed. Gabriella Safran& Steven J. Zipperstein.Stanford, California 2006, pp. 281-306, p. 287.