But men like these returned to a penitent identification with their Jewishness after a life of European cosmopolitanism. Of course, there were well-known secular ba’alei teshuvah (returnees) before Ansky: Jews like Moses Hess and, more tragically, Heinrich Heine and, more spectacularly, Ansky’s contemporary Theodor Herzl. A few years later he joined the first wave of Soviet immigration to Israel. And then one day war broke out in the Middle East, and much to his surprise he desperately wanted the Jews to win, while his government backed the Arabs, and the people in their simple goodness backed the government. He tried teaching them about ecology and the need to protect their world from the depredations of big-city bureaucrats and managers. Of his people! He began to dress like them, to talk like them. He loved the chaste, immense countryside, the simple goodness of its people. For the first time he found himself living in rural Russia, away from big cities and Jews and intellectuals. In the early 60’s, having grown up in a family that preserved a strong sense of Jewishness despite the Stalin years, he had gotten his degree in petroleum engineering from an institution in Moscow and gone to work in an oil field in Siberia. It wasn’t exactly, but the parallel was there. The Russian had stopped walking somewhere back in Alabama and was leaning against a Quonset hut. Two years later the Six-Day War broke out, and three years after that I was living in Israel.

I spoke of the excitement of it of how I, a twenty-five-year-old Jewish boy from New York whose previous encounters with the “real” America had been limited to summer vacations, proudly felt I had penetrated its mysteries of how I believed as never before that its people was mine of how my Jewish home had never seemed so unimportant to me, so marginal to the struggle I was part of of how, nevertheless, the consciousness of that Jewish home would not leave me but even became exacerbated in the course of a year which went from freedom songs and Selma to Watts and the first stirrings of anti-Semitism among black activists. As we trudged back and forth along a perimeter fence, I found myself recalling a year spent in the mid-60’s in the American South, where I taught at a small-town black college and was active in the civil-rights movement.

A Russian immigrant and I had pulled a long guard shift on army reserve duty and had begun to talk about our lives to pass the time. Edited and with an Introduction by David G.

The dybbuk ansky