Asakiyume mita

A happy kaleidoscoping of events brought me and osprey_archer to the Yiddish Book Center last Tuesday. I'd wandered its grounds before (its buildings are designed to like an Old World shtetl) but never been inside: on Tuesday we took a tour, and I got to see an exhibit the healing angel's signifcant other (... they need a name here... let's call them "the musician") had told me about: "Every Protection: Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Jewish Pale of Settlement". These are works of art by the artist Debra Olin, inspired by questions the ethnographer and playwright S. An-sky asked people in the Pale of Settlement about their beliefs on those topics.

(You would think, following the people that I follow here on Dreamwidth, that the name and history of S. An-sky would have struck bells, but it didn't, so I stood fascinated by an ancillary, preliminary exhibition of his photographs from his research. But then I moved on to the main attraction.)

The questions: there were 2087 of them! They were divided into five sections, for the stages of life. Maybe it's all questions about belief, tradition, and practice, or maybe it's the way he phrased his (granting that I'm reading them in translation...), but they are so poetic. I found myself wanting to read *all* of them.¹

Here is a sample of some of them (click through to see any of these photos larger):



And here's an example of one of Debra Olin's pieces in its entirety:



Here are details from that one and from some of the others. You can see how she weaves together the questions and repeating images and materials of daily life:





This detail incorporates a question about games...



... and this detail, from the same piece, shows a game: cat's cradle.



The concept and execution were beautiful, and our overall visit to the Yiddish Book Center was wonderful. The tour guide was knowledgeable and friendly--so capable! Prepared for people with absolutely no knowledge of anything related to Jewish history or Yiddish-language history, but also able to talk at a higher level if his audience knew some things. And I'm sure for visitors who were more informed than osprey_archer and me, he would have been able to scale up even more. He can speak Yiddish, for instance, so if someone came in and had a hankering for the tour in that tongue, I bet he could accommodate. I encourage anyone who happens to be passing through Amherst, MA, to give the Yiddish Book Center a visit. This particular exhibition will be here for several months.

¹ And fortunately I can! A footnote to a 7 January 2020 post by Irena Klepfisz, "The 2087th Question or When Silence Is the Only Answer," in the blog of the journal In geveb gives me this information: "Dos yidishe etnografishe program was published in Russia in 1914 (question 1, p.19; question 2087, p. 237). The English translation of the entire questionnaire with extensive notes appears in Nathaniel Deutsch’s The Jewish Dark Continent: The Life and Death of the Russian Pale of Settlement (2011) (question 1, p. 107; question 2087, p. 313). Deutsch also provides a 100+ page introduction about An-Sky’s life and intellectual evolution."