An-sky (Shloyme Zanvil Rapoport)

Semyon (Shimon) An-sky was a Jewish author, playwright, researcher of Jewish folklore, revolutionary, and political activist. He was also an aid worker during World War I. He was born Shloyme Zanvil Rapoport in Chasniki, Belarus (near Vitebsk) on 27 October 1863, and died on 8 November 8 1920 in Otwock, Poland. He was born into a relatively poor family; his father was notably absent, while his mother owned and ran a small inn. An-sky grew up in contact with the local peasantry, drinkers, and brawlers—the unfortunates of the Northwest Territories in the Russian Empire (now Belarus). Although he attended a religious primary school (heder), at an early age he rejected a life of traditional Jewish observance and the authority of rabbinic law. In Vitebsk, he became friendly with Chaim Zhitlowski, the future leader of the Jewish Autonomy movement, and the two studied revolutionary literature in Yiddish and Russian. At age sixteen, An-sky left his home to become a tutor of Russian among Jewish families; he used his position to convince his charges to leave the “straight and narrow” life of Judaism. By the age of eighteen he had organized a half-way house for runaways among young Jews. Soon after he left Belorussia and traveled to the coal mines in the Don Basin in Ukraine, where he began collecting folklore among the miners. It was there that he wrote his first works on the peasant reader and his first stories about Jewish life in the Northwest Territories. He soon moved to St. Petersburg and served on the editorial board of the popular journal Russkoe Bogatstvo. In 1892, out of fear of the police, he left Russia and moved ultimately to Paris, where he found employment as the secretary to the famed Russian populist Pyotr Lavrov. After Lavrov’s death in 1900, An-sky became a leader in the Socialist Revolutionary Party. He continued to write stories about Jewish life, including the novel Pioneers (1903–1905). He returned to Russia in January 1906 as a result of the Tsar’s amnesty. He began publishing widely on Jewish folklore. In 1912 he organized the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition; together with a group of specialists, he traveled through parts of the Pale of Settlement and collected artifacts, songs, and folktales. In 1915, billeted with Russian forces, he volunteered to bring money to Jewish communities affected by war, predominantly in Galicia (Ukraine), Podolia, and Bukovina. His work resulted in a memoir about the destruction of Jewish life during World War I. At the end of the war, An-sky became a devotee of Zionism and the ideas of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky. He returned to St. Petersburg after the February Revolution, and to his collection of materials, which constituted Russia’s first Jewish Ethnographic Museum. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly on behalf of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, but the Bolsheviks never permitted the Assembly to operate and put out an arrest warrant for An-sky, who escaped to Poland. Living in a sanatorium near Vilna, with his health deteriorating, An-sky organized a new Jewish ethnographic project, an institute that would become the original YIVO. In 1920 he was moved to another sanatorium outside of Warsaw, where he continued his studies of Jewish folklore until his death.