What happens when a woman in a Hasidic shtetl to the west of Kiev, on the eve of World War I, becomes pregnant? If she sleeps a lot, will she have a girl? If she looks at ugly pictures, will she have an ugly baby? Should she conceal her condition as long as possible? Would she use a Christian midwife, and if so, what would that mean to her? If she asks a neighbor to lend her something and the neighbor refuses, will mice eat up everything the neighbor owns? And why would S. An-ski (Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport, 1863–1920), a Russian Jewish revolutionary who had abandoned traditional Jewish practices and never had children of his own, gather a team of researchers to formulate, ask, collect, write down, and publish these questions and others?

Dos yidishe etnografishe program, ershter teyl: der mentsh (The Jewish Ethnographic Program, Part One: Man), published in St. Petersburg in 1914, contains 2,087 questions or sets of questions about the Jewish lifecycle and beliefs, including those I asked above (from questions 7, 20, 24, 42, and 61). The product of two summers of research in 1912 and 1913 in the provinces of Kiev, Volhynia, and Podolia, the book was assembled with the help of ten students from the St. Petersburg Jewish Academy It was structured to allow research to proceed even in the absence of the ethnographers: willing subjects would go through it, carefully responding to each question (in neat handwriting, using only one side of the page), and would submit their answers for tabulation. War and revolution were among the factors that prevented the survey from ever being carried out—but the questionnaire itself remains, in all its intimate detail.

Nathaniel Deutsch has now given us an English rendition of An-ski's work. His Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement begins with a 100-page essay that sets An-ski's ethnographic opus in the context of his own life, of Jewish efforts to collect and systematize customs and spoken words, and of prerevolutionary Russian ethnography. The 200-page annotated questionnaire follows. The book offers not only questions but also answers—about Jewish practices in Ukraine before the revolution and at other times and places, and about why An-ski and his collaborators wanted to know about them.

As a young man, An-ski yearned to dedicate himself to a life of service to the “folk,” which meant studying the customs and lore of Russian peasants and trying to help them. He could not imagine that the Jews among whom he grew up were also a “folk” or that their customs too needed to be recorded because they were in danger of dying out. In his late thirties, though, he became increasingly interested in Jews, particularly Hasidim, and he moved from collecting Yiddish songs from fellow revolutionaries to collecting magical spells in his native Vitebsk province and ultimately to raising funds for a full-fledged ethnographic expedition. His field methods were effective, though not always ethical from a present-day point of view. Over his two summers of work he grew better at acting the role of a pious Jew so that his informants would trust him.

An-ski's expedition cannot be explained as the product of a single intellectual tradition. He was obviously inspired by the questionnaires produced by Russian imperial ethnographers, such as Count Vladislav Tenishev's Program of Ethnographic Information about the Peasants of Central Russia (1897–1900), with some 2,500 questions. But Deutsch shows that while An-ski's questionnaire was Russian in form, it was Jewish in intention. The inspiration for An-ski's efforts mirrored that of others in Jewish tradition who sought to capture the present for future generations: the preservation in written form of an oral tradition that was perceived as threatened (the Mishnah, in the second century), and the systematization of that tradition by Maimonides (the Mishneh Torah in the twelfth century) and Joseph Caro (the Shulḥan ‘Arukh in the sixteenth). Closer to An-ski's era, Hasidim had, since the eighteenth century, “collected, preserved, and transformed both Jewish and non-Jewish folk traditions, including tales, dances, songs, incantations, clothing, and material objects—in other words, precisely those things that most interested An-sky” (42). When An-ski asked shtetl Jews to tell him whether people eat and drink in heaven (question 2077), his subjects recognized his project as a familiar one. In fact their own tale of the miraculous tefillin of holy men—when people opened them, the letters flew away (in response to question 588)—evinced a similar fascination with writing and disappearance. As Deutsch notes, except for the questions about pregnancy, childbirth, healing, and exorcism, most of An-ski's questions echoed the hasidic books of customs more than they did Tenishev's questionnaire (64).

An-ski's project of publishing descriptions of customs continues today. The ultra-Orthodox, who share his “awareness of the rupture caused by modernity,” publish their own books of customs (90). And Deutsch's translation is itself of a piece with the original, which is also a translation, concerned with capturing the meanings of words before they fly away, as in question 1823: “What is the holy ground [dos heylike ort, literally, ‘the holy place’] called in your community (beys oylem [eternal house], beys almin [Aramaic, same], beys khayim [house of life], feld [the field], Tsien [Zion], and the like?)” (282). In his annotations, Deutsch has tried to answer the questions that An-ski asked, turning first, as he explains, to Jews from the towns An-ski had visited, then to contemporary Brooklyn Hasidim, and finally to scholars. An-ski asked the question, What could be done if a woman was having trouble giving birth? The question was answered when an elderly man who grew up in the shtetl of Ludmir told Deutsch that one should study a section from the Mishnah (question 85) (121). An-ski asked whether a boy's first letters should make a holy word; a Hasid from Williamsburg told Deutsch that a child should be taught the letters alef-mem-tav, which form the word “‘Emes,’ which is the name of Hashem [God]” (question 338) (147). An-ski asked whether matches were still made between young children; Deutsch cites recent historical research showing that the marriage age for Jews in the Russian Empire varied by class and increased over the course of the nineteenth century (question 959) (197).

Of course Deutsch and his sources could not answer all the questions that An-ski had asked, and none of his answers purport to be valid beyond a specific place and time. But the quixotic desire to provide a total picture of Jewish life is what Deutsch's project shares with An-ski's, and the impossibility of achieving this goal does not diminish the worth of either. This book allows us to listen in on compelling conversations—between An-ski and his informants, between Deutsch and his informants, between An-ski and Deutsch. These questions and answers will provoke more questions, and eventually more answers as well. Deutsch's book makes for good reading, and is marvelous as a reference for those interested in the life of Eastern European Jews—not only an elite of men, but women, children, and the poor. He has done a valuable service for anyone interested in Russian or Jewish history and culture.