User:Artem.G/sandbox2: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 20:57, 7 July 2024

S. An-sky was born and raised in the Pale, in the territory of modern Belarus; his native tongue was Yiddish. He had a kheder education, but he left Vitebsk in 17, learned Russian and joined narodniki, and became known as a Russian author. He was, and considered himself, an assimilated Jew. He moved to the Donbas region in the spirit of the Going to the People movement, popular among narodniki, and changed his Jewish name, Shlomo Rappoport, to more Russian "Semen An-sky". To him, and to other members of Jewish intelligentsia, Jews of the Pale of Settlement were not interesting, some did not considered them a people or a nation, some thought that Yiddish was "a hybrid unnatural tongue" and Hebrew a dead language.^[1]

An-sky left the Russian Empire in 1892 for France and Switzerland, and returned back only after the Revolution of 1905. He did some ethnographic work before, mainly among Russian workers and peasants. He now realized, through the works of Jewish authors like I. L. Peretz and Sholem Aleichem, that Jews were "a people and, just as importantly, that they were his people", and in 1907 he decide to "go to the Jewish people".^[2]

In 1891 historian Simon Dubnow, also an assimilated Jew born and raised in the Pale, directly compared the Pale of Settlement with the "dark continent" of Africa, and called for ethnographic studies of the region and its people. Dubnow founded the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society in 1908 to promote such studies.^[2]

Expedition and members[edit]

Before the expedition took place, An-sky gathered a conference in Saint Petersburg on March 24– 25, 1912 with prominent participants to discuss it.^[3]^[4] Among the attendees were historian Simon Dubnov, anthropologist Samuel Weissenberg [de], ethnographers Vladimir Jochelson and Lev Shternberg, historian Shaul Ginzburg, musicologist Yoel Engel, attorney Mikhail Kulisher [ru],^[4] Maksim Vinaver, David Maggid, and others.^[3] It was decided that a questionnaore should be created, that should have been sent to communities not visited by the expedition.^[4] Despite An-sky's idea to gather folklore, Shternberg argued that statistics and physiological measurements are more important.^[3]^[4] Engel insisted that a phonograph need to be included to the expedition to record local songs and melodies.^[3]

Baron Vladimir Gintsburg, son of Jewish philanthropist Horace Günzburg (Naftali Hertz), donated 10,000 rubles for the expedition to the Pale of Settlement. With this donation, An-sky gathered more than 20,000 rubles, and the expedition was officially called "The Jewish Ethnographic Expedition in Honor of Baron Naftali Hertz Gintsburg".^[5]

An-sky was quite nervous before the expedition, and wrote about in a letter to Vladimir Gintsburg, on June 30, 1912:^[6]

Between 1912 and 1913, An-sky traveled through Podolia and Volhynia. In the first season, from July to October 1912, they visited 15 shtetls, and in the second season, June–November 1913, another 60. His team included artist and photographer Solomon Yudovin (An-sky's nephew), musicologists Yoel Engel (for the first season) and Susman Kiselgof (for the second season), and ten students of The Higher Courses in Eastern Studies, founded by Baron David Gintsburg.^[7] Three students, Avrom Rekhtman, Yitskhok Fikangur, Shmuel Schreier [he], took part in the second season of the expedition.^[7]^[8] Others are Sh. Vaynshtayn, Avrom Yuditsky, Sh. Lakshin, Y. Luria, Y. Neusikhin, Y. Kimelman, Yekhiel Ravrebbe. Five students were from Hasidic shtetls, and two (Ravrebbe and Shrayer) "received rabbinic ordination". Levi Yitzhak Vaynshteyn was the secretary of the expedition.^[7]

The expedition began on July 1, 1912, when An-sky, Yudovin, and Engel departed on a train from Kiev to a station near Ruzhin.^[9] Engel visited only four shtetls and made 44 records, before he cut his journey in July because of the family matters. In the next season, Susman Kiselgof became responsible for the recordings. In total, thay made more than 500 phonograph records.^[10]

An-sky's team tried to pay for the stories and songs in some shtetls, and sometimes local children invented such songs to get money.^[11]^[12] Gathering of women's traditional songs was usually difficult, because it wasn't customary to Jewish women to sing in the presence of men, and considered immodest. In some shtetls women completely refused to sing, in some they refused to be recorded.^[11]^[12] When the expedition reached a shtetl, they showed phonograph to locals, usually singing something with a intentional mistake and then playing it back to the people; usually everyone except for rabbis were very impressed. Though all members of the expedition were Jews, they all were assimilated.^[11] They spoke only Yiddish in shtetls,^[11]^[13] even though some members, f.e. Yoel Engel, had only very basic knowledge of it.^[13] An-sky also insisted his tem to "act Jewish": everyone was required to observe Shabbat while in shtetl; it meant, for example, no smoking, because it is forbidden to lit fire on Shabbat. An-sky especially wanted to get pinkasim (record books), and often persuaded people to get them. Some members of the expedition were arrested by local police as spies.^[11] Some locals though that they were actors, or even that An-sky was a cantor accompanied by his choirmaster.^[9]

An-sky concealed his Socialist revolutionary and writer fame, and was called by his Jewish name in shtetl, or even simply “Reb Shlomo”. He had a beard, wore a black coat and a hat, and was sometimes welcomed "with the kind of respect they [Hasidim] typically accorded to a holy man", and sometimes even treated as a zaddik, "because his public persona during the expedition tapped into pre-existing models of Hasidic holiness. An-sky owned almost nothing and, according to those who knew him, everything he did own (i.e., some books and papers) fit into a few valises that he carried around with him as he moved from place to place, frequently sleeping on people’s sofas.". According to Shrayer, An-sky forgot everything from his Jewish childhood, and remembered only one prayer, Psalm 104 ‘Borchi nafshi’ [‘Bless the Lord, my soul’], that he used instead of all other prayers when he visited synagogues. However, Engel's writing doesn't support this account.^[14]

An-sky was eager to gather as much material as possible, often employing what Deutsch calls "ethnographic performances". Rekhtman describes their approach later in his memoir, written in ...:^[15]

An-sky considered Jewish folk traditions he wanted to gather as an "Oral Torah".^[16] An-sky was especially interested in Hasidim, especially in their oral tales; in the instructions to the questionare he implicitly said that the fieldworker need to ask whether the story is oral, if the respondent read it somewhere, there were no need to record it.^[17] Hasidim themselves were interested in gathering their own folk songs, tales, and religious artifacts, but were surprised to see a group of assimilated Jews from St. Petersburg interested in it. Shrayer invented a story that was approved by locals, but was mostly fake (An-sky was poor, though he indeed was childless):^[18]

Collection[edit]

An-sky was interested in all kinds of artifacts. Shrayer and Avrom Rekhtman recalled gathering kvitlekh, notes that Hasidim brought to the zaddiks' graves, that were usually burned. Shrayer wrote about this as "[we] robbed the graves of the zaddikim". Other unusual artifacts that were gathered include "the broken skull from Chmielnitsky's time that An-sky dug up himself or the petrified finger that An-sky purchased from an old man in Proskurov, who had amputated it in order to avoid conscription into the tsar’s army (normally, severed limbs would be saved and buried along-side the individual so that the entire body would be intact for the Resurrection of the Dead)".^[19]

According to An-ski’s reports published in 1915–1917, the group investigated about 70 towns in the Pale, recording more than 2,000 folktales, legends, and traditions; more than 1,500 folk songs; as many as 1,000 instrumental and synagogue melodies and drinking songs, as well as customs, ceremonies, superstitions, incantations, proverbs, and parables. Besides oral and musical recordings, material objects occupied a prominent place among expeditionary finds: more than 700 items that could be shown in museum exhibits, several hundred documents and letters, and approximately 100 manuscripts, collections of popular graphic art, mizrokhim (ornamental plaques indicating the eastern direction for prayers), marriage contracts, and other items. They also photographed hundreds of synagogues and their interiors, tombstones, ritual objects, artisans, and stereotypical figures.^[8]

Questionnaire[edit]

Composition[edit]

As early as 1910, An-sky decided to write a book on Jewish ethnography. Later, he wanted to write a more extended study in five volumes, and in 1916 he aimed for 40 volumes. None was written.^[23]

An-sky Program was not the first, Russian and French ethnographers already used similar questionnaires. Notable examples include 1848 Nikolai Nadezhdin's program focused in Russian peasants, and 1896 Viacheslav Tenishev [ru]'s Program of Ethnographic Information about the Peasants of Central Russia, that consisted of around 2,500 questions.^[a] Another example is Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaiai [ru]'s ethnographic study that also used a questionnare, made during four years in a several local villages around her family's estate. The results of the study was publsihed in 1914, after Semyonova death, titled The Life of “Ivan”: Sketches of Peasant Life from One of the Black Earth Provinces.^[25]

Initially, An-sky wanted to create a program of 10,000 questions, but soon decided that it was "impractical", and decided to divide it into two parts. Only the first one was finished. An-sky wrote the program in 1914, after the expedition, with the help of ethnographer Lev Shternberg, though his involvement is questionable. The program was written in Yiddish and titled "Dos Yidishe Etnografishe Program" ("The Jewish Ethnographic Program"). The first volume, titled "Der Mentsch" ("The Person") and devoted to the traditional Jewish life cycle, was published in St. Petersburgh in 1914, but wasn't distributed because of the war. The second volume, "Shabbes un Yontif" ("The Sabbath and Holidays") was not finished.^[26] The first volume has 2,087 questions, divided into five parts: the Child, from the Kheyder to the Wedding, the Wedding, Family Life, and Death.^[27]

An-sky used modern ethnographic methods for his expedition. Avrom Yuditsky, one of the students, was asked to create a special questionnare, titled "Hasidim". It wasn't used though, and now can be found in Vernadsky Library in Kiev.^[29]

"An-sky never received any responses to the two-hundred-page questionnaire after it was published in 1914."^[28] "Though only the answers to the queries about death still exist".^[8]

Selected questions from S. An-sky's questionnaire.^[30][edit]

Translation and modern reception[edit]

David Roskies wrote that An-sky "turned the fieldworker’s questionnaire into a modern epic".^[28] Nathaniel Deutsch, who translated and annotated the questionnare to English, calls it "one of the most illuminating, idiosyncratic, and, until now, unplumbed portraits of this complex reality that anyone has ever created".^[28] He notes that Jewish life in the Pale is mostly unimagibable to modern Americans:

Similar expeditions[edit]

Moisei Berlin published first ethnographic study of the Jews of the Pale in 1860s.^[32] In 1901, Peysakh Marek and Shaul Ginzburg published Jewish Folk Songs in Russia, that contained "hundreds of songs sent to them by Jewish zamlers (collectors) throughout the Pale of Settlement following a widely publicized call for submissions".^[33] Brothers Boris and Yuri Sokolov recorded songs using phonograph in the "isolated villages of the Belozersk region of Novgorod province" in 1908-1909. ^[34]

Hamburg rabbi Max Grunwald [de]『founded the first Jewish ethnographic museum, the first journal of Jewish folklore (Mitteilungen zur jüdischen Volkskunde), and the first society for Jewish folklore (Gesellschaft für jüdische Volkskunde)』in 1890s.^[35]

Closer to home, in 1890, the writer I. L. Peretz was commissioned by Jan Bloch, a prominent Polish financier and convert from Judaism to Christianity, to conduct an informal ethnographic expedition of Jewish communities in the Tomaszow region of Poland in order to combat anti- Semitic charges of economic parasitism,^[36]

During the same period, Regina Lilientalowa (1877– 1924), a native of Zawichost, fashioned herself into a prolifi c and widely respected ethnographer and folklorist of the Jews of Poland, a trajectory that also led her to become the fi rst translator of I. L. Peretz’s Yiddish stories into Polish.34^[36]

References[edit]

Sources[edit]

Contents