The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey through the Jewish Pale of Settlement during World War I

Sh. An-ski (Shloyme Zaynvl Rapaport) was born in Chashniki, Russia (today in Belarus) and was raised in Vitebsk. After attending heder, he studied Russian literature and criticism, then worked as a tutor and in the salt- and coal-mining industries. An-ski lived in Western Europe until 1905, serving as secretary to the radical philosopher Petr Lavrov and associating with the Bund. An-ski returned to the Russian Empire after the 1905 revolution, and in 1912–1914 he led an ethnographic expedition in Volhynia and Podolia (Ukraine), gathering thousands of photographs, folklore, historical documents, sacred objects, and wax-cylinder recordings of folk music from Jewish communities. Using material from the expedition, An-ski drafted The Dybbuk in Russian in 1913. The play was first performed in Yiddish in 1920 by the Vilner Troupe in Warsaw. He fled to Vilna following the Bolshevik takeover and in 1919 he left for Warsaw.