S. Ansky The Dybbuk

The article looks at some productions of the Dybbuk and other plays by Jewish amateur theatre companies in Dublin 1902-1928. A comparison of Synge's Playboy of the Western World with The Dybbuk by An-sky (Shlomo Rappoport) is used to ask questions about the similarities and inter-dependence of cultural nationalisms.

Master of Arts, 2004
Thesis directed by: Professor Miriam Isaacs
Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies

Both Sh. An-sky’s “Der Dybuk” and Zora Neale Hurston’s Polk County epitomize the concept of “marginal modernism.”  Marginal literature is literature written by a member of a community that is in some way disenfranchised from the dominant, mainstream society in which the community resides—and in a language other than that which is used by the dominant, mainstream society.  It often articulates the needs, desires, values, and nuances of the community.  Marginality, in certain ways, is the ultimate indicator of modernism, in that the margin challenges the conventions established by the center, just as modernist literature challenges literary conventions.  An-sky’s and Hurston’s styles, techniques, and goals match those of the modernist movements of their times and locations: An-sky’s the Russian revolutions of the early 1900s and Hurston’s the African American arts movement of the Harlem Renaissance.

Volkonsky's Lessons in Habima and their Impact on the Hebrew Theater' Speech Tradition. [Prince Volkonsky and Habima: a Russian Accent on the Hebrew Stage]
The Russian theatre culture had considerable impact on the Jewish theatre in general, and on the theatre in Hebrew in particular. The first professional Hebrew theatre, Habima, set out on its artistic road in Moscow in 1917. The first Habima actors were trained by the greatest Russian theatre figures of the period.
The article is devoted to specific aspect of the Russian culture influence on the Hebrew Theatre: the influence of the Russian Prince Sergey Volkonsky on the speaking style of Habima.
The speech lessons taught to the Habima first actors and their impact upon them are analyzed, beginning with a description of Volkonsky's theatrical approach, and followed by a recap of his lessons and an examination of how deep his students were able to absorb them.
The influence of Volkonsky's lessons on the formation of Habima's acting style was three-fold: 1) He instilled into his students an awareness of the great importance of the means of outward expression in the theatre and the absolute necessity of developing and practicing the actor's physical tools. For many years the conscious attitude to the scenic form, attention to word and gesture, pitch of voice and excellence of diction became the trademarks of Habima; 2) Volkonsky's lessons, combined with Stanislavsky's doctrines, prepared the ground for the unprecedented success of the Vakhtangov performance, The Dybbuk. The whole spoken, "audible", aspect of the performance was built upon the superior vocal technique developed in Volkonsky's courses; and 3) Volkonsky's influence was also noticeable in the characteristic accent of the first generation of Habima. The fact that the actors, whose mother tongue was largely Yiddish and whose stage language was Hebrew, learned “correct” speech on the basis of Russian, had a great impact on their manner of speaking.
Although the stage language of Habima had nothing in common with the contemporary spoken Hebrew, in the Russian period it completely suited the general style of the theatre and as well as the spirit of the times. Later, after settling in the Land of Israel in 1931, the actors of Habima sought to preserve their pronounce and speaking style, in spite of the fact that their pronunciation was perceived by the native Jews of the Land of Israel as a heavy Russian accent  and their speaking style – as a "Russian musicality".
Because of their dogmatic and fossilized understanding of the lessons, which they had learned in Russia, those very peculiarities that had previously been an advantage, became a drawback when their time had passed.

The book includes articles, documentation and a catalog of the Ethnographic Department of the Museum of the Contemporary. It is the fruit of a long-term project carried out at the Mamuta Art and Research Center and curated by the Sala-Manca Group. It contains articles by Yoram Bilu, Rachel Elior, Freddie Rokem and Diego Rotman on the Dybbuk; by Galit Hasan-Rokem and Daphna Ben-Shaul on Sukkot, and on the Eternal Sukkah project; by Shalom Sabar on electric Shabbat candles, and by Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman on different art projects. The book also includes documentation of artworks and a project by Itamar Mendes-Flohr, Yeshaiahu Rabinowtz, Ktura Manor, Hannan Abu Huseein, Reuven Zehavi, Sala-Manca, Samuel Rotman, Shira Borer, Nir Yahalom, Chen Cohen, Pessi Komar, Adi Kaplan, and Shahar Carmel, among others.

Dybbuk, in the folklore of Hassidic Jews in Eastern Europe, is a spirit of a dead man who takes possession of the body of the person to whom he was attached in his lifetime. Michal Waszynski’s The Dybbuk, released in Poland in 1937, set on stage this figure, based on the play by Sholem Anski, a Russian ethnographer, and on the expressionist aesthetics. Waszynski’s film is a witness fiction that contains traces of the existence of Yiddish culture and the magical beliefs of Eastern European Jews before the Second World War, from which the legend of Dybbuk is originated. This paper aims to question the images of magic and mysticism present in Waszynski’s film in order to understand the self-representation of a disappeared world.

Sh. An-ski's "The Dybbuk" (Yiddish version). Introduction, new edition of the Yiddish original text, and a new Italian translation (176 pages).

דער דיבוק פֿון ש. אנ-סקי. הקדמה, נײַע אויסגאַבע פֿונעם ייִדישן טעקסט און נײַע איטאַליענישע איבערזעצונג (176 זײַטן).־

הדיבוק של ש' אנ-סקי. הגרסה היידית. הקדמה, הטקסט היידי המקורי במהדורה חדשה ותרגום איטלקי חדש (176 עמודים).־""

More info: http://www.raffaeleesposito.com/books.php?lang=it&title=Dibbuk%20yiddish

Buy: http://www.arborsapientiae.com/libro/17604/adse-iii-3-dibbuk-yiddish-introduzione-traduzione-e-nuova-edizione-del-testo-originale-archivio-di-studi-ebraici-iiii-3-raffaele-esposito.html

This article focuses on the three-year period of work on the "Dybbuk" by Evgeny Vakhtangov in Habima (1919-1922) and on the processes occurring during this period in the history and in the private lives of the director and the actors. The article analyzes elements that impacted the style of the performance, and it also attempts to demonstrate that without one or several of these elements, maintaining the high quality of the performance would have been impossible.
Статья посвящена трехлетнему периоду работы над спектаклем Библейской студии Габима "Га-Диббук", поставленным Евгением Вахтанговым  по пьесе С. Ан-ского в 1922 г., и тем процессам которые происходили в эти годы в истории и в личной жизни режиссера и актеров. В статье анализируются составляющие, повлиявшие на стиль  спектакля "Дибук", и делается попытка показать, что без одной или нескольких из этих составляющих, полноценное существование спектакля было невозможным.

Ghosts, apparitions of various cultural shape and form pose a challenge to narrative continuity in depiction of local memory. Using semiotic models of J. Lotman, P. Nora and J. Assmann the work studies and analyses the figure of the Yiddish Dybbuk, its purpose in the formation of communal memory and its presence in post-Holocaust Polish film 'Demon' (2015).

This article offers a Žižekian approach to a highly important and influential play by the Russian Jewish ethnographer S. An-sky. Set in a deeply Hasidic world of mystery and mysticism, The Dybbuk stages one of the most memorable encounters with the fantastic in all of drama. Its protagonist, a young yeshiva student named Khonen, succeeds in transubstantiating himself into a spirit or “dybbuk” in order to possess the body of his beloved. Drawing upon Žižek’s Lacan-inspired analyses of sublimation, desire, hysteria, and “symbolic death,” I attempt to “look awry” upon this play’s fantastical protagonist and the sublimity of its culminating Liebestod. I argue that a close reading of this play through the lens of Žižek encourages us both to re-conceive its “subversive” aspects and to significantly complicate existing “feminist” readings of it. The article also demonstrates how key Žižekian insights and emphases might be applied in the context of a live theatrical production.