Born in translation. An author’s life in exile and the multilingual history of a Jewish play

The best-known Jewish play, The Dybbuk, famously staged in Hebrew in Moscow in 1922, was written in Russian and in Yiddish. Its complex textual history, besides reflecting the intrinsic multilingualism of Jewish society, is closely related to the life events of its author. Shloyme Zanvl Rapoport, known by his pen name An-ski, was a writer of fiction, non-fiction, and drama, a reporter, an ethnographer, a political activist. Also, he was an exile for most of his life.