The man who would become S. An-sky--ethnographer, war correspondent, author of the best-known Yiddish play, The Dybbuk--was born Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport in 1863, in Russia's Pale of Settlement. His journey from the streets of Vitebsk to the center of modern Yiddish and Hebrew theater, by way of St. Petersburg, Paris, and war-torn Austria-Hungry, was both extraordinary and in some ways typical: Marc Chagall, another child of Vitebsk,...