And now we must create something firm in our hearts

My prose poem "On Two Streets, with Three Languages" has been accepted by Interfictions. It was written for S. An-sky, also known as Semyon Akimovich Ansky, born Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport. He is most famous for his play The Dybbuk or Between Two Worlds, staged for the first time in 1920 the month after its author's death; it was composed in Russian and premiered in Yiddish, both versions An-sky's. The title is taken from a statement he made about himself at a banquet in his honor in 1910: "A writer has a difficult fate, but a Jewish writer has an especially difficult fate. His soul is torn; he lives on two streets, with three languages." The third language is the one that interested me. In his life as in his work, An-sky is a weird, restless, liminal figure, and it's only relatively recently that I've been able to find as much biographical material about him as I would like. I can recommend Gabrielle Safran's Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky (2010) and Nathaniel Deutsch's The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement (2011).

Not in any way related except by ghosts: Roman skulls discovered on the banks of one of London's lost rivers. Yay, history.