S. Ansky

In his youth, he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon, and unlike many critics who write for newspapers and magazines, Beckerman frequently ventures forth into the world to conduct archival research, but also to conduct fieldwork, talk to people, bear witness.

So, for instance, last summer, To research the writer best known by his nom de plume, S. Ansky, author of the play The Dybbuk, Beckerman traveled to the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine on a kind of scavenger hunt for the artifacts and documents generated by an ethnographic project S. Ansky had undertaken in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, Prior to World War I, that project, the Jewish Ethnographic Program, documented the life ways of shtetl Jews that would be obliterated by the Holocaust.

During the course of his fieldwork, S. Ansky had composed a marvelous questionnaire, 2,087 questions long.

In the article about the Jewish ethnographic program he published in The Atlantic last October, Beckerman quotes some of S. Ansky's 2,087 questions.

And so will I.

Question 31.

And it's just getting classic.

I wouldn't call it quite Ansky's famed sociological study of the Jewish people of the early 1900s, where he went around with a thousand questions, asking people all sorts of interesting things.

Very fascinating.

It's not called sociological.

to getting into Hebrew college.

Ansky wrote the play in 1918, but dropped dead before the play was performed.

True story that makes sense if you know the play, at his funeral, the director of the Warsaw Jewish Theater committed to putting on the play at Ansky's death.

So he never saw it.

Just wanna say a word about Ansky, who was a radical.

He wrote the Shvua, which is the oath, which is the Ode for the Bund, the Jewish labor organization, which is well known.

You can go read the poem and hear the music for it.

Ansky's friend, Chaim Zhytlovsky, who's a famous Yiddish author, wrote about Ansky the following.

Then I must find my way along another path.

Our mystery drama, The Demon Spirit, was especially adapted from the classic S. Ansky play, The Dybbuk, for the Mystery Theater by Milt Wissoff and stars Norman Rose and Mason Adams.

Black magic is rooted in the darkest corners of our mind.

and emerges only when we feel the insatiable need for power, money, love, any desire that becomes obsessive when withheld.