The Tale of the Ba‘al Shem and the Dybbuk

Little is known of Sonya (Naimark) the Wise Woman, whose folktales reflect Jewish life in her home Mogilev province (today in Belarus). A respected khakhome (wise woman), Naimark won recognition—and earned a living—as a practiced storyteller. She also taught tales to badkhentes (female wedding jesters), which they used to entertain guests at weddings and other festivities. Naimark was noted for her deft and theatrical use of language, style, and rhyme in her performance of stories and proverbs. Naimark was a contributor to A. Litvin’s pioneering ethnographic compilations of East European Jewish folk culture.

Born Samuel (Shmuel) Hurwitz in Minsk, A. Litvin had a traditional religious education and studied secular works on his own. While working a number of odd jobs, he wrote articles and poems in Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish journals as A[lef] Litvin. Living in New York from 1901 until the 1905, he contributed to socialist and radical Yiddish newspapers. Returning to the Russian Empire, Litvin devoted himself to radical politics, Yiddish literature, and ethnographic research that became the source material for his Yidishe neshomes (6 vols., 1916–1917). As the editor of Lebn un visenshaft (1909–1912), Litvin strove to bring a variety of popular scientific, intellectual, political, and artistic works to Russian Jews with limited access to higher education. He moved permanently to New York in 1914 and frequently contributed to Morgn-zhurnal and Forverts.