“This dybbuk was also haunting Ashkenazim”: cross-cultural solidarity through the lenses of performance and animation in Almog Behar’s “Ana Min Al-Yahud”

Abstract

The trope of the dybbuk is ubiquitous in modern Jewish storytelling, and its secular renditions offer myriad of possibilities: from feminist resistance to the male gaze to a place where belonging and estrangement are negotiated in the context of immigration and exile. This article discusses the uses of the dybbuk in Almog Behar’s short story “Ana Min Al-Yahud” through the lenses of animation as a trope of analysis, as theorized by Teri Silvio, in performance studies. It argues that the trope of the dybbuk is not only an intradiegetic element that helps the characters to make sense of the phenomenon they are experiencing, but also an extradiegetic force that inserts Behar’s story in a much wider tradition, drawing a continuum in the history of Jewish storytelling and opening, with the text, a path for solidarity among readers. Furthermore, the work of translation through which “Ana Min Al-Yahud” went, in several contexts and to so many languages, expands the trope of the dybbuk also to non-Jewish audiences.