The third August Chills story is a Jewish ghostly love story. The origin is a stage play by S. Ansky “Ha-Dybbuk, or Between Two Wolds”. It tells of the forbidden love between Khanan, a poor yashiva student and Leah, the daughter of a wealthy merchant.

Listen to their story :

In case you were wondering, ‘dybbuk’ means ‘possession’ in Hebrew (and Yiddish), and is usually used for the possessing spirit. Jewish tradition doesn’t have many ghost stories, this is one of the few I know and definitely the most complex. I had to shorten it quite a bit to fit the length of the video, from a full length play to approx. 15 minutes, so there’s a lot more to the original story. I focused on Khanan and Leah’s love story, it was important to me to make it clear that Khanan’s possession of Leah wasn’t a result of a one-sided obsession, Leah loved him, wanted him, and though it wasn’t mutually planned (or planned at all, really…), she readily accepted it. I kept the same focus with the art, playing with layers to show Khanan through Leah. It was rather tricky to balance their separate identities with their united face/body…

I’ve always loved the play, it has a wonderful air of mystery, and creates an interesting combination of forbidden love and lovers’ suicide themes. As far as I know, Ansky didn’t base his play on any specific story, he was an ethnographer and during his travels, collecting samples of traditional Jewish music he also encountered many local stories and out of those grew the story of Khanan and Leah. In the play, the two are clearly intended by fate: their fathers were friends in their youth and agreed to marry their children if one had a boy and another a girl, but they lost touch and Leah’s father didn’t know that Khanan was the son of his friend. The play includes a wonderful trial scene, with the spirit of Khanan’s father accusing Sender for not keeping his word. The tragedy is that if he knew, Sender would have happily married them.

I worked on this piece until the very last moment, I wanted to use a lot of semi-transparent layers, it works great with ghost themes in general, but in this story it seems almost necessary. The main image is the two lovers with Khanan looking at us through Leah. I have to say, my eyes still get a bit confused when I look at it, even though I made this! The strong shading was inspired by the makeup used in the original staging of the play, which used German\Russian Expressionism aesthetics (yum). Because their image is so strong, I felt that the background should have a lot of detail to balance it. I combined Hebrew text (a Hasidik song used in the play and a line from the Song of Songs) with Kabbala symbols. I added some torn paper pieces to match the fabric veil\shrouds. I don’t really have a good reasoning for the purplish-blue coloring, it just fit in my head. I wanted a surreal unnatural color for Khanan’s eye, that would make them look luminous, and the background matched that.

This project definitely occupied my time this week, I hope you enjoy the results! I’d love to hear what you think, and of course - the giveaway is still ongoing! Check the details below. We have one more story coming next week - can’t believe it’s almost over!

Giveaway!

don’t forget to visit my social media accounts for your chance to win a limited edition copy of this work (or one of the other three August Chills works - your choice which!):