AN-SKI, S. (pseudonym of Solomon Zainwil Rapaport; 1863–1920), author and folklorist. An-Ski was born in Chashnik, White Russia, where his father was a landowner's agent and his mother an innkeeper. At the age of 16, he joined the Haskalah movement and studied Russian. Attracted by the doctrines of Narodniki, a populist group, he went to live among Russian peasants, and worked as a blacksmith, bookbinder, factory hand, and teacher. On the advice of the Russian writer Gleb Uspensky, he returned from south Russia to St. Petersburg and wrote for the Narodniki's monthly publication. Compelled to leave Russia in 1892, he stayed briefly in Germany and Switzerland before settling in Paris in 1894. There he worked for six years as secretary of the revolutionary and philosopher Piotr Lavrov.

Until 1904 An-Ski wrote chiefly in Russian, and thereafter in Yiddish. Returning to Russia in 1905, he joined the Social-Revolutionary Party, composed the Bund hymn "Di Shvue" ("The Oath"), and wrote folk legends, hasidic tales, and stories about Jewish poverty. An-Ski brought to Yiddish literature a deep appreciation of Jewish folk values. As head of the Jewish ethnographic expedition financed by Baron Horace Guenzburg he traveled through the villages of Volhynia and Podolia from 1911 to 1914, collecting material. His knowledge of folklore inspired his famous play The Dybbuk, (written by An-Ski in both Russian and Yiddish, the latter originally called Tsvishn Tsvey Veltn), was first produced in Yiddish by the Vilna troupe (1920), and then, in the Hebrew translation of Bialik, by the Habimah company in Moscow, Tel Aviv, and New York. Bialik translated The Dybbuk into Hebrew in Ha-Tekufah, vol. 1 (1918). An-Ski subsequently lost the Yiddish original on his way from Russia to Vilna. He therefore translated the play back to Yiddish from Bialik's Hebrew version with his own changes. This latter version was the one performed by the Vilna Theater group. Productions in German, English, Polish, Ukrainian, Swedish, Bulgarian, and French followed. The Italian composer L. Rocca based an opera on the play, musical versions by Renato Simoni and David Temkin appeared in New York, and movie versions in Poland in 1938 and Israel in 1968. During World War I, An-Ski devoted himself to organizing relief committees for Jewish war victims. In 1917 he was elected to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly as a Social-Revolutionary deputy and in 1918 he helped to reorganize the Vilna community. After the war he moved to Warsaw, where his last undertaking (1919) was the foundation of a Jewish ethnographic society. His Yiddish works were published posthumously in 15 volumes (1920–25). They include poems, plays, narratives, memoirs, folklore, and three volumes of his observations on the havoc wrought by World War I among the Jewish communities of Galicia, Bukovina, and Poland.