The Dybbuk

Join YIVO and the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene for a staged reading of Sh. An-ski’s legendary folk drama of spiritual possession and predestined love, The Dybbuk. Growing out of An-ski’s ethnographic expeditions to the Pale of Settlement between 1912 and 1914, The Dybbuk includes a wealth of detail pulled from Jewish folklore. During these expeditions, An-ski and a team took photographs, made recordings, and gathered hundreds of folktales, folksongs, and sacred objects to document traditional Eastern European Jewish life. The resulting play, originally written in Russian between 1913 and 1916, was translated into Yiddish by An-ski himself and is considered a canonic work of Yiddish theater, which has inspired countless film, opera, and ballet adaptations. This staged reading is directed by Mikhl Yashinsky.