"The Tavern" by S. Ansky -1886

A ultra-realistic story by the author of The Dybbuk

One of the things my blog is about is giving what voice I can to the lost, the forgotten, those with no one to speak for them.  

My post on The Dybbuk - contains background information on S. Ansky

My Posts on Yiddish Literature

S. Ansky (1863 to 1920, Russia) is of great cultural and literary interest.  His life was a fascinating patchwork.  David Roskies does a wonderful job of explaining his great importance and the tumult within his psyche.  I have previously posted on his classic drama, The Dybbuk and one of his short stories, "Go Tell it to a Goy".  His work is now a subject of heavy scholarly interest as perhaps our best window into Jewish life in late Czarist Russia.   

"The Tavern" gives us a hyper-realistic darker than Zola look at a day in the life in a tavern in a small town in late Czarist Russia. This is not your Fiddler on the Roof type place.   The tavern, run by two Jewish women, it was considered not fit work for a man, caters to the everyday people of the mixed Gentile and Jewish community.  It is a place where people come to drink very cheap vodka until they are totally drunk, make business deals, get some food, socialize, and act like a big deal in front of everyone else.  The owners quickly size up all the patrons.  A man drinking alone is probably a wife beater, an old begger woman selling some linen is probably a fence and a woman alone in the tavern is seen as either a prostitute or as waiting for her husband to come in so she can castigate him as a drunken bum.  The patrons abuse the owners verbally, drink and eat on credit and use the bar as a second home.  When a petty Czarist inspector comes in the owners suck up to him and when he leaves they curse him.  We see a son and mother at a secluded table, the son trying to console his mother for the beating his father last gave her.  Political meetings sometimes go on in the back room.  

I know this sounds grim but it really made me feel I was there and it was just a lot of fun to read this superbly done story.  There is drama and it was fun to see the patrons come and go.  

Ansky spent a lot of time in Paris and I can see, or maybe imagine, the influence of Balzac on him.  

There are several more short stories in The Dybbuk and other Writings and I look forward to reading them.

I was kindly given the full Yale Yiddish Library by the publisher.

Reading these books has opened up a new reading world for me.  Many of the original readers,and their descendants,of these works, along with the books,  were burned by the Nazis.  

Mel u

The Dybbuk by S Ansky (1914). A Drama in Four Acts - The Yale Yiddish Literature Project

A very important work in the canon of Yiddish literature. 

This project was made possible by a generous gift from The Yale University Press.

S. Ansky (1863 to 1920, Ukraine) is one of the most famous of Yiddish language dramatist.  

In Jewish mythology, a dybbuk (Yiddish: דיבוק, from Hebrew adhere or cling) is a malicious possessing spirit believed to be the dislocated soul of deceased person.  S. Ansky dramatized just such a possession in his famous play, The Dybbuk.  (The play is considered the immediate cultural source for movies like The Exorcist.)  Normally a dybbuk will enter the soul of a living person because it is dissatisfied with the course of events after its (their) death and are seeking to bend the will of the living as the price for releasing the possessed individual.   This is exactly what happens in the play.  The Dybbuk deals with deep matters of the teachings in writings of the tradition of the Kabbalah.  There are speeches by learned Rabbis that go into great details concerning spirit possession and its remedies.  

A young Talmudic scholar has fallen madly in love with the daughter of a wealthy man who has another son of a rich man picked out for his daughter. There wedding had been promised long ago.    The man in love dies from shock.  The woman goes to the cemetery to invite her deceased mother to the wedding ceremony, set for that morning.  She stops by the grave of the man who died from love for her and somehow she leaves "changed".  At the wedding ceremony she shouts out when she sees the man she is to marry, "you are not my bridegroom" and refuses to marry him.   She returns the cemetery, where she had stopped at the grave of a murdered couple the night before, and is followed by many from the wedding party.  In a male voice she announces that that her true love has returned to claim her as his bride. The Rabbi says she has been possessed by a dybbuk.  The rest of the play deals with the various attempts to exorcise this malicious spirit from the woman.   

The Dybbuk was to me of greatest value for its incorporation of Yiddish lore and customs into the play. 

It will only take you at most two hours to read it and I am defiantly glad I did.  I would enjoy seeing it preformed but there is not a big demand for Yiddish drama where I live so I guess I probably won't.

There was a Polish Yiddish language movie based on the play released in 1939.  

There is some background information on Ansky and Yiddish literature in my post on his short story "Go Talk to a Goy".  I will, I hope, post on additional short stories in the beautifully done Yale Collection  of his works. 

Mel u