skygiants

the story of the 19th-century Maiden of Ludmir, who claimed to have the soul of a male tzaddik and took on the role of a Hasidic rebbe

I can recommend Nathaniel Deutsch's The Maiden of Ludmir: A Jewish Holy Woman and Her World (2003) if you are interested further in that direction. Deutsch is also responsible for The Jewish Dark Continent
Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement (2011), which is mostly, invaluably, the full translation of the questions of An-sky's Jewish Ethnographic Program 1912–14. I found both, obviously, via dybbuks.

(I loved A Rainbow Thread so much.)