Sholmye-Zanvil Rappaport, known as An-sky (1863-1920), the author of the best known play in the Hebrew and Yiddish languages, "The Dybbuk," was a figure of immense versatility and also ambiguity in Russian and Jewish intellectual, literary, and political spheres. He was the rare Russian Jewish intellectual who left a considerable mark on all these spheres and, indeed, more. He was a leading Russian populist; he was the author of the poem adopted as the anthem of the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund; he is credited with being the founder of the field of Jewish ethnography; and he wrote one of the most influential works of Jewish catastrophe literature in modern times, his masterpiece "Hurbm Galitsye," on the travails of East European Jews in the First World War. This volume is the fullest and most complete examination of An-sky ever produced. It draws together leading historians, ethnographers, literary scholars, and others in a far-ranging, multidisciplinary exploration.
It also contains numerous photographs culled from archives in the former Soviet Union, a superb English translation of an early Russian draft - among the very first - of the "The Dybbuk," and a timeline that covers all of An-sky's peripatetic life. Finally, it includes a compact disk combining material drawn from An-sky's own 1912-14 field recordings of Jewish songs, together with contemporary renditions, recorded at Stanford of the Russian and Yiddish music that An-sky wrote, collected, and heard.