The Lost World of Russia’s Jews: Ethnography and Folklore in the Pale of Settlement by Abraham Rechtman, Nathaniel Deutch and Noah Barrera (review)

Yidishe etnografye un folklor (Jewish Ethnography and Folklore) was the life work of Abraham Rechtman (1890–1972), a Russian Jewish intellectual who was born in the Pale of Settlement and was self-trained as an anthropologist and author. As a young man, he participated in S. An-sky’s ethnographic expeditions to Jewish villages in the Pale of Settlement in 1912–1914, seeking to document the remnants of Jewish folkways.

A translation of this pivotal document of twentieth-century Russian Jewish folklore studies cannot function only as a work of scholarship and literature. Rechtman’s compendium of Jewish folkways acts on the psyche of the present-day reader, instantiating a connection to a romanticized moment in Jewish cultural history that has been underexplored, despite the iconic status of its subject matter. In their choice of title, The Lost World of Russia’s Jews, the translators/authors Nathaniel Deutsch and Noah Barrera gesture toward the performative and ideological powers of the work they are undertaking. The title invokes fairy tales, a genre that runs through Rechtman’s work as an unmentioned thread of mystification that animates many of the stories he relates. Rechtman’s text falls in a gray area between folkloristics, literature, and autoethnography, and is marked by its keen attention to ghosts, mystical experience, and the uncanny. Deutsch and Barrera meet the challenge in approaching this unusual work by refusing to impose a hierarchy on the multitude of interpretive possibilities that can attach to its fantastical stories and intriguing reportage on the experience of performing ethnography.

Like The Dybbuk, the classic Yiddish play written by S. An-sky (1863–1920), Yidishe etnografye un folklor is a creative project that draws on the experience of studying folklore. An-sky was Rechtman’s mentor and the leader of the research team that produced the ethnographies he reports on. Just as An-sky subsumed his anonymous ethnographic sources into his magnum opus, Rechtman obscures his own role as a creative voice through the supposed objectivity of his scholarly observation. But unlike An-sky’s celebrated work, Rechtman’s book practically disappeared almost immediately upon its publication in 1958. It never received a second edition after its initial printing in Buenos Aires in 1958, nor was it translated. The book was out of print for decades until resurfacing as a digitized file on the Yiddish Book Center website in 2009.¹ For the past sixty years the book has been unknown outside of the world of academic Yiddishists. This first English-language edition embraces the work both as foundational scholarship and as a talisman of Yiddish culture. The Lost World creates a suture across the aura of myth and fantasy in which the fabled An-sky ethnographic expeditions have been suspended.

Falling right before World War I, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust brought an end to rural Eastern European Jewish life, An-sky’s ethnography has garnered a retrospective assessment that imagines his collection as almost mystical in its significance. The An-sky expeditions had minimal public output in terms of publications, leading to a sense that even the relics of the “lost” Jews had disappeared. The contents of Ansky’s prized Jewish Ethnographic Museum were looted and destroyed. The field recordings made on the expedition have been shuttered away in the Vernadsky Archive in Kyiv for a century and have only begun to be digitized and released to the world in the past decade.² Photographing the Jewish Nation, the 2009 book of photographs from the expedition that were only discovered by accident in the 1990s, was hailed as a treasure.³ The expectations and romance surrounding artifacts of the An-sky expedition run high.

As Deutsch ably relates in his Introduction, Rechtman himself struggled under the weight of his feeling of obligation...