Yiddish

Beyond the ability to read, literacy can be reckoned as “a continuum of learning” that enables both personal development and participation in community life.¹ The dynamics of Yiddish literacy, in this expanded sense, entail the advent of new print technologies and cultural practices, as well as transformations of educational opportunities for Ashkenazim, their geographic shifts, and their ideological movements. Following the advent of print in Europe, books and other publications in Yiddish became mainstays of Ashkenazic culture, concomitant with the impact of printing on the rise in use and prestige of other European vernaculars. Print both stabilized Yiddish and endowed it with an elasticity unprecedented in diaspora Jewish vernaculars, eventually enabling it to span northern Europe in a form that transcended local dialects and then to become an international language read by millions. The history of Yiddish publishing over more than five centuries reflects changing understandings of literacy among the language’s speakers—that is, notions of who reads Yiddish, what they read, and how and why they do so. Moreover, these developments track the evolving potential of this vernacular to serve as the voice of literate Jews.

Yiddish books and periodicals also evince, if at times obliquely, the shifting constellation of languages engaged by Ashkenazim. Throughout the history of print, they have always had some access to publications in other languages. Translations into and out of Yiddish, as well as multilingual texts that include Yiddish, also figure prominently in Ashkenazic print culture. Issued with few exceptions independent of state support, yet often contending with governmental regulations, Yiddish publications reveal Ashkenazic readers’ shifting interests amid a variety of external constraints and opportunities as well as increasing options in multiple languages.

Unlike canonical works in loshn-koydesh—including editions of the Bible, prayer books, and the Talmud—Yiddish books competed for readers in the marketplace, as promotional notices on the title pages of some of these publications reveal. Lev tov (A good heart), a book of moral instruction first published in Prague in 1620, exhorts customers: “Do not tarry, buy it quickly, while you still find it cheap. It also has good paper and ink; even a blind man can see it.”⁵ The title page of the 1602 edition of the Mayse-bukh (Book of tales)—a compendium of morally edifying parables and legends, many translated from rabbinic sources—adjures customers to purchase it “and not read from the Ku-bukh,” a rival Yiddish publication, or the heroic epics Dietrich von Bern and Meister Hildebrant, “for they are truly nothing but dirt.”⁶

These paratexts also frequently state that Yiddish books were meant for a general Jewish public: adults and children, women and men. Yiddish literacy thus defined a non-elite Jewish readership, distinguished from gentile readers but situated lower in the hierarchy of Jewish learnedness than scholars fluent in loshn-koydesh. Nevertheless, Yiddish books could boast that they provide readers something commensurate with rabbinical erudition, if not authority. The aforementioned introduction to the Mayse-bukh promises that after the reader has mastered its contents, “the whole world will be astonished at him and every man will say: ‘I believe he knows the whole Torah on one foot. As he has such great erudition in the Gemara, I believe he knows the whole Torah. Who has seen his like?’ ”⁷ However, the extent to which Jewish legal texts could be translated into Yiddish was subject to rabbinic scrutiny and occasional condemnation. For example, rabbis perceived a transgression of their authority to adjudicate Jewish legal issues when part of the Shulhan aruch (Set table), an influential compilation of rabbinic law, was translated into Yiddish in a late eighteenth-century book of moral conduct. They banned the publication, and it was reported to have been publicly burned in Vilna.⁸

As a language that has never stood alone, Yiddish often figures in bilingual or multiglossic reading practices. Among its earliest publications are concordances and glossaries that variously parallel Yiddish with German, Hebrew, Italian, or Latin. Yiddish texts were sometimes integrated into devotional books that are primarily in loshn-koydesh, as in the earliest known dated appearance of Yiddish in print: a song inserted into a Passover Haggadah published in Prague in 1526.⁹ Bilingual prayer books that juxtapose canonical liturgy with Yiddish translation and, sometimes, commentaries later became mainstays of Ashkenazic publishing.

Innovations in eastern European Jewish ideology and practice of the late eighteenth century produced new genres of Yiddish publishing and reading practices. Early in the spread of Hasidism, narratives by or about its foundational figures, including Shivhei ha-Besht (In praise of the Baal Shem Tov) and the tales of Nahman of Bratslav, were variously published in Hebrew, Yiddish, or bilingual Hebrew/Yiddish editions.¹⁰ These collections reflect the elevated status of vernacular literacy in this spiritual movement, especially the prominent role that storytelling played in Hasidic practice, as part of efforts to democratize Jews’ engagements with mysticism and promote the authority of tsadikim. Unlike much of earlier Yiddish literature, these Hasidic publications do not translate or adapt biblical and Talmudic narratives or non-Jewish epics but offer original stories, whether accounts of the wondrous actions of the Baal Shem Tov, the movement’s progenitor, and later tsadikim, or, in the case of Nahman of Bratslav’s tales, narratives rich in arcane symbolism. This innovative use of Yiddish storytelling would later be hailed as the beginning of modern Yiddish literature.¹¹ However, the stories and discourses that rebeyim related to their followers in Yiddish were recorded by scribes in Hebrew, reflecting the long-standing complementary relationship in traditional Ashkenazic practice between Yiddish as a primarily oral language and Hebrew as primarily written.¹² Bilingual publications of these early Hasidic works enable readers to engage the orality of the primary act of vernacular storytelling by reading the Yiddish texts aloud, while their rendering in Hebrew imbued these narratives with the imprimatur of sanctity associated with that language. Even though these narratives were first transmitted in Yiddish, bilingual editions of Hasidic tales typically place the Hebrew translation on the top half of the page, above the Yiddish, signifying each language’s respective place within Ashkenazic “gradations of sanctity.”¹³

The first page of the “Tale of the Loss of the Princess” by Nahman of Bratslav. His collected tales, first published in 1815, are seminal works of Hasidic literature. This bilingual edition, published in Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine) in 1902, maintains the practice of printing the Hebrew translation above the Yiddish original. The Yiddish is printed with nekudes, a common practice at the time.

The transformation of Jewish literacy advocated by the Haskalah centered on new reading materials and practices that relegated rather than elevated Yiddish. Yet even as maskilim in German lands repudiated their traditional vernacular, they sometimes employed Yiddish in their writings, notably in satirical works that ridicule its speakers’ worldview and mores. In effect, these maskilim turned Yiddish against itself, as part of a larger practice of auto-critique. Isaac Euchel’s late eighteenth-century drama Reb Henekh exemplifies this deployment of Yiddish. This polyglot text delineates its various characters through different languages and linguistic registers. As Yiddish studies scholar Marion Aptroot notes, non-Jewish characters “speak German, German dialects, or in the case of foreigners, a broken German mixed with elements from their mother tongue.” Jewish characters’ speech reflects their respective ideologies: traditionally observant Jews, “impervious to the new ideas of the enlightenment, speak Yiddish; the enlightened Jews (and falsely enlightened ones), speak High German; and a character who . . . believes herself to be more enlightened than she really is, occasionally lapses into the local low city dialect” of Berlin.¹⁴ Euchel assumed readers of the play (which was unlikely written to be staged but was perhaps read aloud) would recognize this range of languages and registers and grasp their sociolinguistic implications. Even as Reb Henekh ridicules “unenlightened” or superficially enlightened Jews, it requires familiarity with their speech and sensibility. Indeed, their vitality, albeit disparaged, is essential to the drama’s plot and its agenda of reforming Ashkenazim.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, Yiddish publishing in eastern Europe grew in scope and variety, eventually providing a mass readership with a steady supply of books and periodicals. The dynamics of Yiddish literacy reflect larger intellectual, political, economic, and social developments, including shifts in the legality of Jewish publishing. The institution of state censorship in Congress Poland early in the century relied on the judgment of maskilim, who attempted to use this regulation to suppress Hasidic publications and books in Yiddish (referred to in an 1820 edict as “the common spoiled language”).¹⁷ In the Russian Empire, the number of presses that could print books in Hebrew or Yiddish was severely limited from the 1830s until the 1860s, which ushered in a more liberal era of Jewish culture.

A key figure in the expansion of Yiddish literacy at this time was Ayzik Meyer Dik, subsequently hailed as “the first professional Yiddish writer.”¹⁸ Beginning in the 1840s, Dik produced over two hundred books of extraordinary variety, including homilies, romances, satires, parodies, ethnographies, and instructional manuals. Sometimes published anonymously or under a pseudonym, Dik’s books included original works as well as adaptations of a wide range of sources (sometimes unacknowledged), from rabbinic narratives to works of fiction and nonfiction originally published in German, Russian, Polish, French, and English. Among these books is a reworking of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, titled Di shklaferay (Slavery), issued in 1868. Dik expanded on the maskilic use of Yiddish as a vehicle for satire to write fiction that was both entertaining and morally exhortative. He also produced informational works on history, geography, and mathematics, among other topics. The author’s extensive oeuvre introduced Yiddish readers to core principles of the Haskalah: a rationalist approach to piety and the importance of secular knowledge.

Another pioneer of modern Yiddish culture emerged on the heels of Dik’s popularity: Avraham Goldfaden, widely recognized as the founder of modern Yiddish theater. Goldfaden began writing Yiddish plays in the late 1860s and staged his first operettas a decade later, quickly achieving widespread acclaim and establishing theatergoing as a fixture of modern Yiddish culture, a public complement to the private literacy of belles-lettres. Yiddish theater engendered new literacy practices as well, including the publishing of plays (Goldfaden’s libretti were issued in Warsaw in the mid-1880s) and the writing of drama criticism.²⁰

The final decades of the nineteenth century witnessed what Benjamin Harshav has termed the “modern Jewish revolution”—that is, eastern European Jewry’s abrupt encounter with the opportunities and challenges posed by new social, political, and economic developments: accelerated urbanization and industrialization, the onset of mass emigration out of the region, the rise of radical political movements—all of which demanded that these Jews interrogate assumptions about every aspect of their lives, including their reading and writing.²¹ Thus, whereas Dik sought to raise the stature of Yiddish by emulating German, subsequent authors turned to Yiddish because of its distinctive Ashkenazic vernacularity. Most notable among the first to do so are Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, whom readers associated with his literary persona, Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Mendele the Book Seller), and Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Rabinovitsh’s penname, which is the Yiddish equivalent of “Hello!” The unassuming character of their pseudonyms exemplifies the authors’ embrace of Yiddish for its quotidian familiarity. Reflecting on his decision to shift from writing in Hebrew to Yiddish, Sholem Aleichem cited its ability to reach a wide public and suggested that the language offered authors an inherent immediacy: “Even when you write in Hebrew, you think in Yiddish—wouldn’t it be better for you to write the way you think?”²²

However, this turn to Yiddish as a literary language was anything but straightforward. Literature scholar Dan Miron notes that almost all Yiddish writers in eastern Europe during this period began their careers in Hebrew or Russian and, when they turned to Yiddish, felt “a compelling need to explain and vindicate themselves” and to defend the language’s literary possibilities.²³ Some of these authors continued to write, and occasionally even reworked the same text, in two languages. Most notably, Abramovitsh composed versions of some of his major novels in both Yiddish and Hebrew, the author’s movement between the two languages informing his pioneering literary style in each.²⁴ Shifts among languages continued to shape works by subsequent generations of Yiddish writers. Thus, between 1912 and 1917, S. An-ski (né Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport) composed different versions of Der dibek (The dybbuk), arguably the most famous Yiddish drama, in Russian and Hebrew as well as twice in Yiddish.²⁵ Philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel, who also wrote in English, German, and Hebrew, turned to Yiddish at key moments in the beginning, midpoint, and end of his career, spanning the 1930s to the 1970s.²⁶ These authors’ multilingual output did not simply reflect different audiences for their work but juxtaposed different aspects of a polyglot Jewish literacy against one another.

New reading material and practices enabled important developments in the lives of eastern Europe’s Jews. Naomi Seidman observes that reading fiction about romantic love helped transform courtship and marriage practices, providing young Jews with greater agency in their choice of marriage partners and redefining expectations of married life.²⁷ The relationship between literacy and matrimony was reciprocal. Not only did reading romantic literature inform how these Jews approached marriage; they also engaged these intimate experiences through writing, whether in diaries, memoirs, which became an important genre of eastern European Jewish literature during the nineteenth century, or the exchange of courtship letters, which often followed models published in brivnshtelers.

In addition to news, features, and editorials, the Yiddish press published works of literature. During the early decades of the twentieth century, newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic issued weekly literary supplements. Major authors, including Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, published serialized versions of long prose works in the press before they were issued in book form. Yiddish newspapers also conducted surveys and contests and printed letters, opinion pieces, recipes, and other submissions from readers, thereby making this new form of literacy an interactive public practice.³⁰

As Yiddish book publishing proliferated, it catered to different audiences, reflecting diverging notions of the cultural value of Yiddish literacy. Highbrow aspirations are epitomized by literary anthologies, which strove to curate the best of new writing or establish literary canons of historical depth. Thus, Morris Bassin’s anthology of five hundred years of Yiddish poetry, issued in 1917, opens with a shabes-lid (“Sabbath song”) written in Erfurt in 1410 and concludes with a selection of contemporary poems, followed by linguistic and bibliographic annotations by Ber Borochov.³¹

Concurrently, sensational, lowbrow fiction and drama, collectively referred to as shund, proved enormously popular with audiences in eastern Europe and abroad. These works often used lurid plots to address provocative contemporary social issues, such as relations between the sexes, intergenerational conflict, and class struggle.³² Shund became a ready target for writers seeking to establish Yiddish literature as the equal of highbrow European belles-lettres. Sholem Aleichem offered a trenchant critique of shund in his 1888 essay “Shomers mishpet” (Shomer’s trial), which decried the output of Nokhem Meyer Shaykevitch, known to his readers by the pseudonym Shomer.³³ Nevertheless, Shomer’s writings remained popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and his success doubtless inspired other authors to produce new works of shund. As the genre continued to flourish, so did its denunciation—for example, in American Yiddish theater criticism during the first decades of the twentieth century and in the interwar Polish Yiddish press.³⁴

Many readers of shund, especially a largely working-class Jewish public with limited reading skills in other languages, also turned to Yiddish as a vehicle for popular education. Publishers in Europe and the United States produced books for self-study in history, geography, political science, philosophy, mathematics, the natural sciences, and foreign languages. Series of celebrity biographies proved especially popular. In New York at the turn of the twentieth century the Internatsyonale Biblyotek Farlag (International Library Publishing Co.) began issuing books on famous Jewish figures, among other topics, while Warsaw’s Farlag Progres (Progress Press) published titles on popular science as well as “lives of significant people.”³⁵ During the interwar years, the Groshn-biblyotek (Penny Library), based in Warsaw, offered dozens of short books on Jewish and world history, political theory, current events (especially the rise of Nazism in Germany), technology, music, and profiles of famous individuals, ranging from Lucrezia Borgia to Mahatma Gandhi.

This burgeoning of publications engendered new reading practices. As books and newspapers proved too costly for many eastern European Jews to purchase for themselves, much of their reading involved shared print material. Libraries, both public and private, became a widespread presence in the Russian Empire beginning in the 1890s, though the public institutions did not carry Yiddish books (and few titles on Jewish subjects in Russian), due to government restrictions, until after the 1905 Revolution. Jewish communities in the Russian Empire also established libraries at this time. Some were connected to a local school, synagogue, or charity, while others were founded by individuals, and Jewish political organizations also ran clandestine libraries.³⁶ In interwar eastern Europe, professionally run Jewish libraries became fixtures of major cities. Branches of Jewish youth movements in smaller towns often created their own libraries, housed in spaces where members met. In these settings, literacy was a communal activity; young people shared and discussed books as part of their socializing. Periodicals were also frequently shared, whether in cafes and libraries or among neighbors. Literacy became a performative practice, as reading aloud from newspapers was a common social practice on both sides of the Atlantic.³⁷

Alongside popular publications, a modernist Yiddish literature emerged in the first decades of twentieth century, rivaling the achievements of European and American avant-garde writers.³⁸ Even as Yiddish modernists founded their own journals and presses, they often participated in Yiddish mainstream culture as well. Some leading figures of Yiddish literature (for example, Jacob Glatstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer) wrote opinion pieces, features, or sensational fiction for the Yiddish press under pseudonyms. Other major authors wrote extensively for children as well as for adults (Mani-Leib, Kadya Molodowsky, Itzik Kipnis) or translated works of world literature into Yiddish (David Hofstein, Zishe Landau, Leib Naidus, Leon Kobrin). Though some authors may have undertaken these efforts simply to earn a living, others apparently wished to engage the gamut of Yiddish readers, traversing boundaries between elite and popular culture. During the first half of the twentieth century translations of world literature extended the parameters of Yiddish literacy toward the cosmopolitan. For example, the 1925 catalog of titles sold by Farlag B. A. Kletskin, a major publisher of Yiddish books in Poland, included translations of Hans Christian Andersen, Miguel de Cervantes, George Eliot, Maxim Gorky, Heinrich Heine, Jack London, Molière, August Strindberg, Rabindranath Tagore, and Stanisław Wyspiański, among others.³⁹

Publishing in Yiddish during this period reflected the speech community’s diverging ideological range. At their height during the interwar years, progressive Jewish political parties in Europe and secular Yiddish organizations in America issued a comprehensive array of publications in Yiddish. Recognizing their attraction, especially for younger Jews, Orthodox organizations responded in kind. In interwar Poland, Agudath Israel promoted new works of Yiddish literature that combined “Orthodox content with modern literary form,” thereby championing Yiddish literacy as essential to bolstering Jewish piety.⁴⁰ This perceived need to argue for the language is telling; for some traditionally observant Jews in interwar eastern Europe, Yiddish literacy could not be taken for granted. Indeed, despite the burgeoning of publishing at this time, the state of Yiddish literacy was often perceived as unstable, even imperiled. Book publishers competed with periodicals for readers. In Poland, both secular Yiddishists and traditionally observant Jews worried that their youth either preferred reading Yiddish translations of world literature to the work of Yiddish authors or were abandoning Yiddish altogether for Polish. Linguistic assimilation was also a concern for Yiddish writers and publishers in the United States, especially following the end of mass immigration from eastern Europe during the early 1920s.⁴¹

Yiddish publishing did not depend on the vagaries of the marketplace in the Soviet Union. As members of the Soviet Writers Union, Yiddish authors were employed by the state to produce novels, stories, poems, and plays, which were vetted and issued by government presses. The first years of the Soviet Union witnessed a burgeoning of avant-garde publishing in Yiddish, exemplified by the expressionist poetry of Peretz Markish and surreal children’s fiction of Itzik Kipnis. Major artists of the period—including Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky, and Issachar Ryback—designed typography and illustrations for Yiddish publications.⁴²

From the start, Soviet Yiddish publishing reflected the state’s agenda for transforming the Jewish population. In addition to several newspapers (e.g., Der emes [The truth], which appeared from 1920 to 1938), the Soviet Union issued an array of periodicals, including some that promoted Marxist values among the young (such as Zay greyt [Be prepared], 1928–1937) and a journal that assailed religion (Der apikoyres [The heretic], 1931–1935).⁴³ Like other works of Soviet public culture produced in the 1920s and 1930s, Yiddish literature reflected efforts to address shifts in state-approved aesthetics—for example, moving from more formally experimental writing and illustration to social realism.⁴⁴ Tethered to government control, Yiddish publishing in the Soviet Union both rose and fell abruptly. The shuttering of Soviet Yiddish cultural institutions in 1949 and execution of their leading figures in 1952, after being falsely charged and convicted of treason, in effect rendered any public manifestation of Yiddish literacy a crime against the state.⁴⁵

Cover of the August 1932 issue of Der apikoyres (The heretic), an anti-religious propaganda magazine, published in Moscow. The spelling of the magazine’s name exemplifies the Soviet Union’s reform of Yiddish orthography, which renders words from the Semitic component of Yiddish phonetically, rather than the traditional spelling אפּיקורות. Images on the cover, designed by Aron Hefter, protest the oppression of the proletariat and mock traditional Jewish religious practices. (Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, Paris. Photo: Michel Urtado. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource NY.)

The Soviet Union eventually “rehabilitated” Yiddish in 1959, with its first state-sanctioned publications appearing after a decade of absence. Late Soviet Yiddish publishing is exemplified by Sovetish heymland (Soviet homeland), which appeared from 1961 to 1991. Linguist Harald Haarmann characterized this literary journal as a “cultural relic,” noting that it included summaries of its contents in Russian, “to assure access [by] non-Yiddish-speaking Jews.”⁴⁶ During the final years of the Soviet Union, a long-suppressed Russian-Yiddish dictionary was published, as were the first Yiddish textbooks for children to appear since World War II, suggesting that, under perestroika, the language might be afforded greater state support.⁴⁷

The destruction wrought by the Holocaust extended beyond the vast human toll to dismantling the cultural infrastructure of presses, booksellers, libraries, and schools in which Yiddish literacy had flourished in Europe. The Nazis’ extensive looting of Jewish property included the holdings of communal libraries and archives. After the war, some of these items were recovered by Allied Forces in occupied Germany and sent to new institutions, as Holocaust survivors established new cultural centers, especially in the Americas and Israel.⁵⁰

In the wake of the genocide, Yiddish literacy functioned differently and acquired new cultural significance. This transformation is exemplified by the Algemeyne entsiklopedye (General encyclopedia), a project of secular Yiddishists initiated in Europe in 1930 as a general knowledge reference work. During the war the scope of the encyclopedia changed; its final volumes (published between 1939 and 1966) focused exclusively on Jewish history and culture. This shift reflects “changing representational imperatives,” notes Barry Trachtenberg. “No longer was the task of Yiddish scholars to edify and educate their readers in the knowledge of the larger world, but instead to make a record of the Jewish world so recently destroyed.”⁵¹

Scores of individual memoirs of prewar and wartime experience were published in the Americas, Europe, Israel, and Australia. In the early postwar years the Central Association of Polish Jews in Argentina initiated a series of Yiddish books, titled Poylishe yidntum (Polish Jewry), which by the mid-1960s produced more than 160 titles, including histories, novels, poetry, memoirs, biographies, memorial books, and translations.⁵⁴ Another monumental publishing project undertaken in Argentina had a different focus: the one-hundred-volume series of anthologies Musterverk fun der yidisher literatur (Exemplary works of Yiddish literature), issued between 1957 and 1984 by the Instituto Científico Judío. These anthologies cover the range of Yiddish letters from the 1500s to the mid-twentieth century, including major early works (Bovo Dantona, Mayse-bukh), collections devoted to a single author (from maskil Shloyme Etinger, the subject of the first volume, to twentieth-century figures such as Max Weinreich and fiction writer Israel Joshua Singer), anthologies of regional Yiddish writing, especially from Latin America, and thematic volumes (e.g., on childhood, humor, Hasidism, the Holocaust). Whereas Poylishe yidntum focused primarily on the recent past, the Musterverk looked back through the chronology of Yiddish literature as well as forward. On one hand, the series was undertaken to establish “a biblyotek vos felt”—a missing library, which implicitly evokes the Holocaust’s devastation of Europe’s Yiddish book culture. Unlike Poylishe yidntum, the Musterverk canonized existing Yiddish letters, dating back to the Renaissance, rather than publishing new works. On the other hand, the Musterverk was created to serve future generations of Yiddish readers: “those who teach in Jewish secondary schools, in pedagogical seminars, courses on Jewish subjects, readers’ clubs, study centers, and . . . who pursue knowledge on their own.”⁵⁵

The exceptional commitment of Hasidim to Yiddish in their postwar communities has produced their own new literacy practices. Like other fundamentalist groups, Hasidim have embraced the form of certain popular culture genres and imbued them with pious content. Among these are works of what might be termed Hasidic leisure fiction, including historical and adventure novels in Yiddish. These books often open with endorsements from rabbinic authorities and sometimes offer a rationale for this new literature. One introduction explains that reading fiction is a repercussion of modern times that has, regrettably, attracted pious Jews. Rather than leaving them to resort to books in English or secular works in Hebrew and Yiddish, rabbis have encouraged “trustworthy authors” to write engaging works of fiction in Yiddish that are “worthy of being brought into respectable Jewish homes.”⁵⁷

The most consequential transformation of Yiddish literacy to come in the wake of the Holocaust is the salient role of translation. Before World War II, almost all readers of Yiddish were native speakers of the language, and relatively little of Yiddish literature was translated into other languages. But soon after the war, the situation reversed: as the numbers of Yiddish readers declined, the audience for its literature in translation burgeoned. In addition to translations of works by individual authors, anthologies established new canons of Yiddish prose and poetry for this readership. Moreover, these collections redefined what it means to be literate in this corpus, informing readers of the significance of Yiddish literature and the culture that produced it through the selection and organization of works and through paratexts—introductions, glossaries, annotations—some of which are extensive.⁵⁸ Translators of Yiddish literature regularly grapple with the challenge of rendering culturally specific idioms and allusions in other languages. Notably, Isaac Bashevis Singer proclaimed the English translations of his fiction, which were created with his input, to be “second originals.” Meant especially for an audience that did not know Yiddish, they created a new kind of command of Yiddish literature that diverged from the literacy of those who read Yiddish.⁵⁹

Despite this shift, literary translation into Yiddish has continued after World War II, though on a much-diminished scale and toward different ends. In the early postwar period, new renderings of works of world literature into Yiddish for its vernacular readership appeared, sometimes with prefaces noting the symbolic value of these efforts as assertions of the resilience of Yiddish literacy after the Holocaust. Thus, historian Jacob Shatzky writes in his foreword to the 1954 Yiddish translation of the Finnish epic Kalevala that in the wake of the Holocaust each translation from world literature into Yiddish “is a prized item and a cause for celebration.”⁶⁰ Recently, Hebrew writer Etgar Keret’s 2018 short-story collection Takalah bi-ktseh ha-galaksyah (“Disturbance at the edge of the galaxy”; English title: Fly Already) won Israel’s Sapir Prize for Literature, which includes commissioning translations of the work into Arabic plus another language of the author’s choice. Keret requested a translation into Yiddish, the first author to do so in the prize’s history. Keret, who does not speak or read Yiddish, explains his decision as a recognition of “the diaspora Jewishness we Israelis have lost.”⁶¹

A more complex significance has been ascribed to some postwar translations into Yiddish, such as the claim that Joseph Buloff and Luba Kadison’s Yiddish rendering of Arthur Miller’s drama Death of a Salesman, which these actors first performed in Buenos Aires in 1949, constitutes “a disguised original unmasked.”⁶² The Yiddish version of the 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof involves a more complex movement among Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye stories, their translation from Yiddish into English and subsequent adaptation for the American stage, followed by the musical’s translation into Yiddish by Shraga Friedman, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, for performance in Israel in 1966. In these examples, translation into Yiddish is perceived as returning works to their linguistic and cultural foundations, thereby recovering an imagined “lost” literacy.

Recently issued Yiddish renderings of renowned works of children’s literature—including The Cat and the Hat, Le Petit Prince, and Max und Moritz—proffer an especially provocative configuration of Yiddish literacy.⁶³ These translations seem intended less for Yiddish-speaking children who are not literate in English, French, or German than for adults wishing to imagine their childhoods as if they had taken place in Yiddish, including reading beloved works of their youth. Some of these translations Judaize their sources by giving characters Ashkenazic names (thus, Charles Nydorf and Elinor Robinson’s Yiddish rendering of Der Struwwelpeter is retitled Pinye shtroykop) or replacing elements of the text with Yiddish idioms. (For example, in Vini-der-Pu, Leonard Wolf’s translation of Winnie the Pooh, the title character’s refrain of “rum-tum-tidl-um-tum” becomes “haydl-didl, haydl-didl dam.”)⁶⁴ Such playfulness is key to these translations, which require familiarity with the original to appreciate the manipulation of translating as a practice in its own right. In these works, Yiddish literacy is defined in relationship with literacy in another language.⁶⁵

Translation is similarly strategic to the transformed literacy of Yiddish in contemporary performance. Presentations of Yiddish plays and songs now seldom assume that their audiences are fluent in the language. As a result, translations are provided through a variety of strategies, including projected supertitles or simultaneous audio transmission received on individual headsets. Singers often incorporate translating into their performances, whether through commentary that introduces a song or by crafting bilingual lyrics that shift between the original Yiddish and its rendering in the audience’s vernacular.⁶⁶ Translation thereby becomes an integral component of performing Yiddish. As literacy in the language is no longer self-sufficient, its semantic value shifts into other languages, thereby foregrounding the affective qualities of Yiddish apart from its meaning.

Just as the invention of print constituted a threshold in the dynamics of Yiddish literacy some five hundred years ago, the advent of digital media marks a similar watershed. Digitized scans provide greater access to Yiddish publications of the past and preserve rare or fragile archival documents. Thousands of Yiddish titles are available online from a number of sources, including the Yiddish Book Center, while in its Amherst, Massachusetts, headquarters the original volumes have become objects of massed display. The internet enables new writing in Yiddish, whether blogs or online periodicals, to circulate internationally. And translation software promises to enable anyone to become “literate,” to some degree, in Yiddish (or any other written language).