Publisher's Synopsis

Selected Passages

(Note: The excerpts and page numbers are from the recently published New Yiddish Library edition of The Dybbuk and Other Writings, edited by David Roskies.)

Khonon: We need not wage war against sin, we need only purify it. Just as a goldsmith refines gold in a flame or a farmer threshes the chaff from the wheat, so must we cleanse sin of its dross until nothing but holiness remains.

Henekh: Holiness in sin? Where did you get such an idea!?

Khonon: Everything in God’s creation contains a spark of holiness.

Henekh: God did not create sin; that was the work of Satan!

Khonon: And who created Satan? It was God! Satan is the oppoiste of God, and as one of His aspects, he contains a holy spark.

Henekh: Holiness in Satan! I don’t believe it! I can’t understand it! Let me think. (pp. 13-14)

The Messenger: Let me tell you a parable of the rebbe’s. Once a rich but stingy Hasid visited the rebbe. Taking him by the hand, the rebbe led him to the window and asked him to describe what he saw through the pane. ‘I see people in the street,’ the Hasid said. Then the rebbe took his hand again and led him to a mirror. ‘Now what do you see?’ he asked. ‘I see myself,’ the Hasid answered.‘Do you understand? Both the window and the mirror are made of glass, but as soon as you cover the glass with a small amount of silver, you no longer see others but only yourself.’ (p. 19)

Leah (as Dybbuk, screams): I am not afraid of your curses and threats, and I don’t believe in your assurances. No power in the world can help me! There is no more exalted realm than my present haven, and there is no deeper abyss than the one that awaits me. I will not leave! (p. 36)

Reb Shimshon: Nissen ben Rivke states that with his son’s death he has been cut off from both worlds. Nothing remains of him, neither name nor memory; there is no one to succeed him and no one to recite the kaddish on the anniversary of his death. His light has been extinguished forever, the crown of his head has plunged into an abyss. (p. 42)

Reb Azriel: Gracious and compassionate God! Behold the misery of this homeless and tortured soul who has fallen because of the sins and misdeeds of others. Turn thy gaze from his faults and permit his past good deeds and his deep affliction, together with the merits of his ancestors, to rise up to you like a vapor. Lord of the Universe! Remove every destructive spirit from his path and provide a place of eternal rest for him in your heavenly abode. Amen! (p. 46)

Essay by Shoshana Marchand

The author of The Dybbuk had almost as many names as his play has characters. Born Shloyme Zanvl ben Aaron Hacohen Rappoport, he changed, at different times in his short life, into Solomon Aronovitch, Semyon Akimovich, Solomon Rappoport, S. A. An-ski and, finally, S. Ansky.

One can love his play, The Dybbuk, for its rich associations with Yiddish theater or for its intense romanticism; for its historical value or for its evocation of the rabbinic courts of the old world; or as a meditation on love, as a small window into kabbala or just because it’s spooky and exciting. And, personally, this reader has long loved it for all of the above reasons.

But there’s another reason to read and love this play. The journey in and out of Jewishness, in and out of love with his birth culture, in and out of the old world and the new, the journey taken by the author is the journey of the Jew. And this play beautifully mirrors and illuminates that journey.

So is it a study of the redemptive power of love, or of the curse of love? Is it about the golden idealized Jewish shtetl past, or about old world superstition? What relevance does The Dybbuk have for the contemporary reader? Is it just a crazy old melodrama?

Well, that last one is a facetious question, isn’t it? In fact, I would argue that it is death to literature to read anything, ever, as kitsch. It’s vital to find the ways in which authorial sensibility, or intent, feels modern. We Jews know how to do this not only with Shakespeare, but with the Torah. Of course, really old documents are curiously easier, or safer, to interpret than only-recently-old work like Ansky’s. The author deals with so many of the same issues and internal conflicts as do we, the readers. And yet he treats them so differently than we might. Still The Dybbuk feels, to me, thrillingly contemporary.

Ansky – born in Vitebst, the center of Chabad Lubavitch culture, but born to a family prominent in the talmudic traditions of Lithuanian Yeshiva circles – was, at various times, an ardent socialist, a mineworkers’ organizer, a literary exile to Paris, a bookbinder, an anti-Semite, a Haskalah Jew, a Yiddishist, a political refugee from Lenin’s Soviet Union, a well-loved writer and a complete, penniless, unknown failure. It’s very important to read this play with these identities in mind, for they all echo throughout the manuscript.

On the surface, the play is a simple fairy tale. Two Yeshiva students, beloved friends, promise that their unborn children will wed. One friend dies, and the promise is eventually forgotten by the other. The boy and the girl they each create are besheert, but don’t know it.

Fast forward one generation. The surviving father, Reb Sender, has grown rich. In hopes of making a wealthy marriage for his daughter, Leah, he breaks with the tradition of marrying one’s daughter to the best Torah scholar. He doesn’t choose the learned young student Khonon, formerly his boarder, though Khonon has fallen in love with the daughter. Sender has never inquired into his boarder’s parentage, and instead he chooses the son of a rich man from a neighboring shtetl.

Of course, the penniless, orphaned Khonon, in love with the daughter, was the friend’s son to whom she’d been promised so long ago. He has been studying kabbala and, trancelike, says all kinds of sacrilegious, mystical things before he keels over, dead, at the announcement of the betrothal.

On her wedding day, Leah dances herself into a frenzy with the poor people of the shtetl. Then, when she’s supposed to be visiting her mother’s grave before the wedding, she visits the grave of the dead student. His spirit rises up to possess her.

The remainder of the play is spectacle indeed, a total expressionist hodgepodge, as the young maiden Leah speaks, walks and screams in the spooky persona and voice of Khonon’s dybbuk, alternating with her own bewildered, semi-conscious self. Rabbinic courts try and fail to convince the dybbuk to let her go peacefully, and a rabbi performs an exorcism, that she may yet be a chaste Jewish maiden again, and wed. In the end, before the rabbis can perform the marriage ceremony, Leah dies in order to become spectacularly at one with the dybbuk.

Questions for Discussion

1. Is it truly the fault of the surviving friend, Leah’s father, that there’s nobody to say kaddish for Nissen ben Rivke?

2. Does the author of the play believe in spirit possession, or is he trying to talk about something else? Explain.

3. If a couple can be bashert (betrothed by destiny), and if breaking this betrothal is such a sin, then is the author speaking up for arranged marriage? It seems not; what is he saying here about love or marriage?

4. Would it still be possible to produce this play, and to do it straight? How would a contemporary audience see it differently? In what ways would they share reactions with the audiences of years past?

5. Why has this play, over the years, particularly drawn the attention of the international theater vanguard?

6. What’s different about the script from the film versions of The Dybbuk that many of us have seen?

7. Does the play show any tension within the rabbinical authority of the Miropolyer Chasidic shtetl? To what extent is it or is it not a truthful depiction of the time and place?

8. Is the story rooted in a particular time and place, or is it more symbolist than representational? Can we have it both ways?

9. What are your feelings about the legitimacy of rabbinic authority in the past? What about in modern times? To which of these does The Dybbuk?

10. Do you personally believe in evil spirits or evil inclinations? How literally do you take these kabbalistic ideas? Some of us find great truth in them; others think they’re hogwash. Can you explain what you actually believe about the nature of good and evil?