The Dybbuk, Ghost of the Vanished World

A ghost haunts Europe, it is the ghost of the dybbuk! This wandering soul, even to possess living beings and to express oneself through them, has conquered the world thanks to the Russian writer Sh. An-ski, who collected the stories during his expeditions to Podolia and Volhynia in the 1910s. They inspired the writing of the Dybbuk. A resounding success from 1920, immediately translated, the play was performed from Warsaw to Buenos Aires, via Moscow, Paris and New York. Work emblematic of Yiddish theater and early Hebrew theater, it inspires directors and artists of the Jewish avant-garde. Adapted for the cinema in 1937, It will produce the most ambitious Yiddish film and one of the last to be shot before the invasion of Poland. After the Shoah, the Dybbuk still operates as an emblematic work of the fertility of Yiddishland and as a metaphor for the vanished world. It is found in on stage, on screen, in literature, as well as in the works of artists contemporaries. A major object of Jewish culture, the dybbuk is a key to understanding a identity haunted by its past.