The Dybbuk is arguably the most famous play in the Yiddish repertoire and plays an intrinsic part in the cultural system that created the Yiddish imagination. Along with this new translation, this text offers a variety of literary works spanning the 17th to the 20th centuries.

he most famous play in the Yiddish repertoire, S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk has been made into two films and three operas and has been staged all over the world. As an extraordinary product of the Yiddish imagination, however, its literary and religious roots have never been thoroughly explored. With a new translation of Ansky’s play that conveys its brilliant supernatural poetry, this anthology comprises thirty highly diverse literary masterpieces dating from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Beginning with the first Yiddish tale about a possession (1602), these works influenced Ansky or formed a cultural and spiritual network that shows us how the era and tradition precipitated the drama. The result is a literary mosaic that shows a vast array of styles, from the earthy simplicity of homespun folk tales to the delicacy and elegance of polished literary expression. Joachim Neugroschel brings together a wide variety of stories, verse narratives, and even modern melodrama—many never before translated into English.

This volume presents The Dybbuk, S. Ansky's well-known drama of mystical passion and demonic possession, along with little-known works of his autobiographical and fantastical prose fiction and an excerpt from his four-volume chronicle of the Eastern Front in the First World War, The Destruction of Galacia.

The first part of the book features Tony Kushner's adaptation of The Dybbuk by S. Ansky from Joachim Neugroschel's translation, with an afterword by Harold Bloom. Considered by many to be the greatest Yiddish drama, The Dybuuk recounts the tale of a wealthy man's daughter who is possessed by the spirit of her dead beloved. Also included in this volume is a selection of stories translated into English for the first time by Joachim Neugroschel, illuminating different aspects of the Jewish mystical world, including possessions, transmigration, fairy tales, parables and miracles.

"Tony Kushner’s adaptation of A Dybbuk, perhaps the greatest classic of Yiddish drama, is passionate and illuminating.” –Clive Barnes, New York Post “Some playwrights want to change the world. Some want to revolutionize theater. Tony Kushner is that rarity of rarities: a writer who has the promise to do both.” -New York Times “As filtered through Kushner, the play has a deep wistfulness about a flawed but rich culture on the precipice of apocalyptic change, about technology poised to tear through ancient truths and the seductions of assimilation ready to devastate whatever culture is left after the slaughters of the twentieth century.” –Linda Winer, Newsday The first part of the book features Tony Kushner’s remarkable, imaginative adaptation of The Dybbuk by S. Ansky (from Joachim Neugroschel’s translation), with an afterword by Harold Bloom. Considered by many to be the greatest Yiddish drama, The Dybbuk recounts the tale of a wealthy man’s daughter who is possessed by the spirit of her dead beloved. Also included in this volume is a selection of stories translated into English for the first time by Joachim Neugroschel, illuminating different aspects of the Jewish mystical world, including possessions, transmigration, fairy tales, parables and miracles.

After a nearly two-thousand-year interlude, and just as Christian Europe was in the throes of the great Witch Hunt and what historians have referred to as "The Age of the Demoniac," accounts of spirit possession began to proliferate in the Jewish world. Concentrated at first in the Near East but spreading rapidly westward, spirit possession, both benevolent and malevolent, emerged as perhaps the most characteristic form of religiosity in early modern Jewish society. Adopting a comparative historical approach, J. H. Chajes uncovers this strain of Jewish belief to which scant attention has been paid. Informed by recent research in historical anthropology, Between Worlds provides fascinating descriptions of the cases of possession as well as analysis of the magical techniques deployed by rabbinic exorcists to expel the ghostly intruders. Seeking to understand the phenomenon of spirit possession in its full complexity, Chajes delves into its ideational framework—chiefly the doctrine of reincarnation—while exploring its relation to contemporary Christian and Islamic analogues. Regarding spirit possession as a form of religious expression open to—and even dominated by—women, Chajes initiates a major reassessment of women in the history of Jewish mysticism. In a concluding section he examines the reception history of the great Hebrew accounts of spirit possession, focusing on the deployment of these "ghost stories" in the battle against incipient skepticism in the turbulent Jewish community of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Exploring a phenomenon that bridged learned and ignorant, rich and poor, men and women, Jews and Gentiles, Between Worlds maps for the first time a prominent feature of the early modern Jewish religious landscape, as quotidian as it was portentous: the nexus of the living and the dead.

The dybbuk, a dead person's soul that possesses a living person, is an ancient and fascinating part of Jewish folklore in Eastern Europe. Drawing on the eerie world of the kaballah and the many mystical legends handed down through generations, the dybbuk illuminates various aspects of the Jewish supernatural world. The centerpiece of this volume is Tony Kushner's remarkable adaptation of A Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds, which tells the story of a wealthy man's daughter who is possessed by the spirit of her dead beloved. The work is adapted from the original play by noted author and folklorist S. Ansky. In the early nineteenth century, Ansky embarked on a trip to the remote regions of the Ukraine to recover the many oral tales and legends of Eastern European Hasidic culture. His play, The Dybbuk, was the retelling in dramatic form of many of the tales he discovered. It received its premiere in Warsaw in 1920, several months after Ansky's death, and it remains as one of the masterworks of Hebrew mystical drama. Also included in this volume is a selection of Yiddish supernatural tales translated by Joachim Neugroschel. The stories, none of which have been translated before, illuminate the different aspects of the Jewish mystical world, including possessions, transmigration, fairy tales, parables and miracles. This volume features original cover art by Maurice Sendak.