Shloyme Ansky

Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport (1863 – November 8, 1920), known by his pseudonym S. Ansky (or An-sky), was a Belarusian Jewish author, playwright, researcher of Jewish folklore, polemicist, and cultural and political activist. He is best known for his play The Dybbuk or Between Two Worlds, written in 1914.

In 1917, after the Russian Revolution, he was elected to the Russian Constituent Assembly as a Social-Revolutionary deputy.

S. Ansky was born in Chashniki, Vitebsk Governorate, Russian Empire, and died in Otwock, Poland on November 8, 1920.

Under the influence of the Russian narodnik movement, Ansky became interested in ethnography, as well as socialism, and became a political activist. Between 1911 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, he headed ethnographic expeditions to various Jewish towns of Volhynia and Podolia, composing a detailed ethnographic questionnaire of more than 2000 questions.

Ansky's ethnographic collections were locked away in Soviet vaults for years, but some material has come to light since the 1990s. The State Ethnographic Museum at St. Petersburg holds a good deal of it. Some of his vast collection of cylinder recordings made on these expeditions have been transferred to CD as well.

His ethnographic report of the deliberate destruction of Jewish communities by the Russian army in the First World War, The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey Through the Jewish Pale of Settlement During World War I, has become a major source in the historiography of the war's impact on civilian populations.

Initially he wrote in Russian, but from 1904 he became known mainly as a Yiddish author.

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