Abstract
Reviewed by: Mayhill Fowler, Stetson University, Florida, USA
Polly Zavadivker has translated two excerpts from the diary of Shloyme Zanvil Rappaport, more widely known by his pseudonym An-sky. The two excerpts, the only remaining from the original diary, are translated here from the Russian for the first time and offer a window into An-sky’s experience during five months in the year 1915. One might wonder what five months of one year would offer the reader.
Plenty, it turns out. With Zavadivker’s concise and thoughtful introduction, the diary excerpts offer a fresh perspective on anti-Jewish violence, the Russian imperial collapse, the Eastern Front during World War I, Jewish nationalism, as well as the theatre. Zavadivker contextualizes the diary fragments not only in An-sky’s literary biography, but also in Russian, Jewish and Eastern European historiography. Brief discussions of wartime aid organizations, multi-ethnic relations in Russian-occupied Galicia, late imperial Petrograd, and the concept of the war diary all highlight the importance of this text.
As Zavadivker notes, An-sky is best known today for two other pieces of writing, both in Yiddish: first, a memoir based on his diary, and second, the play The Dybbuk. One can now see the ways the diary – that is, the actual witnessing of wartime violence – shaped both. An-sky had to leave his diary in 1918 Moscow as he fled the Bolsheviks, but drew on his experiences chronicled there to produce the three-volume The Jewish Destruction of Poland, Galicia and Bukovina from a Diary, 1914–1917, known as Khurbyn Galitsye (The Destruction of Galicia). This was a detailed account in Yiddish of anti-Jewish violence aiming ‘to present a moral and artistic vision of the war’ (9). The Dybbuk, whose complicated path to production is one of the themes of these diary excerpts, was originally written in Russian, but translated into Yiddish and Hebrew became one of the most significant plays in Moscow, Warsaw, Tel Aviv and beyond.
The diary itself has two sections. First, the section from January to March of 1915 finds An-sky largely in the Pale of Settlement, as he and his colleagues wait for train cars to transport goods to Tarnów in the west. An-sky talks to the locals and relays his observations of Jewish life under Russian occupation. He writes tersely of rape, of synagogues and Torah scrolls destroyed, and of social disorder. The diary also reveals the contingency of wartime: endless waiting, frequent miscommunication, and the absurd fluidity of life and death.
In section 2, from September to October 1915, An-sky is back in Petrograd, the Russian capital. He notes rising bread prices, rumours of abdication and striking, and wartime cultural life. As he was waiting for train cars in Kyiv, so was he waiting for legal permission to stay in St Petersburg; as Zavadivker notes, the Empire abolished the Pale of Settlement in August 1915, but Jews still required official permits for residence in the capital.
Although reflecting only four months, these two excerpts reveal unexpected and important insights into wartime life. First, they show the link between the frontlines and the capital. The violence of the frontlines, the stuck train cars leaving populations waiting for help, and the lack of communication all caused unrest in Petrograd. It is chilling to note a rumour of abdication as early as September 1915, which cannot but be connected with the instability An-sky had observed a few months earlier on the front.
Second, the diary details how culture, government and society were deeply intertwined. In addition to helping the Jewish population, An-sky was also attempting to produce his play, The Dybbuk. Resulting from his earlier ethnographic expeditions, the play reflects the world of the Eastern European Jewish shtetl vanishing precisely at this period. In fact, the diary fragments open and close at the theatre: a ‘senseless operetta’ (39) in Rivne in January, and a reading by Fedor Sologub in Petrograd in October. An-sky notes his frustration with the censor, not a nameless structure, but one Baron Drizen, who informed An-sky that his play would never work. Moreover, An-sky was on the sidelines of the Silver Age, and his diary connects this literary world with war, violence and social transformation.
Third, and finally, the 1915 diary offers a penetrating gaze on the violence against the Jewish population in Eastern Europe during World War I. The soldiers in the Imperial army perpetrating this violence would, of course, fill the ranks of the armies in the Civil War on all sides and would continue the anti-Jewish violence until relative stabilization in 1922. This witnessing raises the question of how Poland and Soviet Ukraine would emerge from this experience, and, of course, details of violence and destruction from small towns in Galicia cannot help but foreshadow the Holocaust. As Zavadivker argues in the introduction, this volume shows the intertwined nature of Russian history, Eastern European history and Jewish history. As such, this volume will be welcomed by scholars in all relevant disciplines, and could be used effectively in courses in history, literature and culture.