The only thing more exciting than collecting boxes of Yiddish books was opening them. What treasures lay within! The more we unpacked, the more we began to appreciate the remarkable scope of modern Yiddish literature.
What are Yiddish books? Who wrote them? When? Where? And for whom?
Despite their dust, their tattered bindings and yellowed pages, the books we recovered were not ancient. Most weren’t even old. That’s because Yiddish literature as we know it didn’t really begin until the second half of the nineteenth century. Before that, when the traditional Jewish world was still intact, educated men spent their days studying in Hebrew and Aramaic. Although they spoke Yiddish, they considered it beneath them to read or write it.
What little literature did exist in Yiddish was intended for women— and perhaps uneducated men—who couldn’t read Hebrew. Women used a folksy Yiddish prayer book called a tkhine and a loosely translated Yiddish bible called the Tsene u’rene. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, secular Yiddish works—fables, fairy tales, and fanciful stories drawn from European folklore—started to appear in Germany and Northern Italy. One of the most popular was the Bove bukh (1541), a Jewish adaptation of medieval tales of chivalry and knights in shining armor. Although the book is now largely forgotten, it seems to have given rise to a familiar Yiddish expression: “a bobe mayse”—an improbable tale. Although most people assume that bobe mayse comes from the Yiddish word bobe, “grandmother,” some scholars believe it to be a corruption of bove, referring to a story so outlandish that it sounds like something straight out of the Bove bukh.
It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century, when modern capitalism and Western Enlightenment finally made their way to eastern Europe, that the traditional Jewish world finally began to open up to other forms of literary expression.
At first the maskilim (Jewish proponents of Enlightenment) turned to Hebrew, a language so classical it was used for commencement addresses during the early years of Harvard University. There was only one problem: Like Latin, Hebrew hadn’t actually been spoken for several thousand years, and nonscholars—presumably those who most needed enlightening—couldn’t read Hebrew well enough to understand most of what the maskilim were trying to communicate. In 1857 the year’s best-selling Hebrew novel sold 1,200 copies; the same year, a minor Yiddish novel by Isaac Meir Dik sold 120,000.
And so, slowly, with little enthusiasm, some of the braver Hebrew writers decided to try their hand at writing in Yiddish. The most important of these was an accomplished Hebrew stylist—he’s often called the Father of Modern Hebrew Literature—named Sholem Abramovitsh, who made his Yiddish debut in 1864 under the pseudonym Mendele Moykher Seforim, Mendele the Book Peddler. Abramovitsh made no pretense: He regarded Yiddish as ugly and unwashed, and adopted it only as a “necessary evil,” a utilitarian means of spreading enlightenment among the masses. But as I discovered in graduate school, he was enough of an artist to know a good thing when he saw it: The more he imitated the Yiddish vernacular—ostensibly to ridicule it—the more he came to appreciate its artistic possibilities. Although Mendele never ceased to poke fun at the foibles of the Jewish masses, it wasn’t long before he was using his pen to defend them, as well. His works include a play about a tax revolt by the Jewish poor, an allegorical novel in which a talking horse demands bread before knowledge, a parody of Don Quixote, and Yiddish translations of the Hebrew psalms and classics of world literature. Fascinated by the literary possibilities of “a bird’s-eye view,” he translated Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days from French to Yiddish. (Ironically, his own grandson became a test pilot and was killed in a plane crash in 1913.)
Mendele was followed by two other “classical” Yiddish writers: Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz. They in turn were followed by hundreds more, and it wasn’t long before the dynamism, wisdom, humor, and tragedy that had been cultivated in spoken Yiddish for a thousand years burst forth on the page. Between 1864, when Mendele published his first Yiddish story, and 1939, when the Nazis invaded Poland, nearly thirty thousand separate Yiddish titles appeared, constituting one of the most concentrated periods of literary creativity in all of Jewish history. Yiddish writers experimented with virtually every form of modern literary expression, from impressionism, romanticism, and naturalism to socialist realism, eroticism, and surrealism.
The new literature found astounding resonance. In Eastern Europe, and even more so in the countries where Jews took refuge, millions turned to Yiddish books for comfort and guidance in a confusing new world. They read widely and voraciously. They scrimped and saved to buy books. They devoured poetry, short stories, novels, drama, history, ethnography, sociology, folklore, linguistics, natural science, religion, and politics. They read about the world, about the Old Country, and about themselves.
In America, Yiddish books and newspapers played a central role in helping newly arrived Jewish immigrants adapt to life in a strange new land. Even religious Jews, who would never have seen a Yiddish book in Europe, bought them in America. Grine, greenhorns, studied etiquette books; schoolboys memorized ready-made bar mitzvah speeches; and aspiring Americans pored over Yiddish pamphlets—published by the D.A.R., no less—to prepare for citizenship exams. Another guidebook helped new parents choose a suitably American name for their child. A Bintl Brief (A Bundle of Letters), the Jewish Daily Forward’s advice column, was a cross between Dear Abby and Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed—an invaluable introduction to American mores and manners.
Of course, Jewish housewives of the immigrant generation cooked the way their mothers did, with a bisl of this and a smitshik of that. Yiddish cookbooks tried to standardize recipes, adapting them to American ingredients, conventions, and tastes. When Jewish immigrants first arrived in America they assumed that coffee beans, like other beans, were not kosher for Passover—until an enterprising Maxwell House advertising agent came along. First he found a rabbi who publicly declared that coffee beans are really berries and therefore acceptable Passover fare. Then, to reinforce the point, he began distributing free Haggadahs (books used at the Passover seder) emblazoned with the Maxwell House logo. To this day, “Maxwell House Haggadahs” can be found on seder tables across the country.
Popular-science books in Yiddish taught everything from geology and astronomy to chemistry and physics. A Yiddish guidebook to human sexuality was censored under the federal government’s puritanical Comstock laws; though hardly racy by modern standards, entire sections had to be blacked out before the book could be sent through the United States mail.
A surprising number of the books we collected were translations of world literature into Yiddish. We found Yiddish versions of “Bambi,” The Bhagavad Gita, Chinese legends, and Finnish folktales. Favorite writers included Jack London (The Call of the Wild—Di shtime fun blut), Mark Twain (The Prince and the Pauper—Der prints un der betler), Knut Hamsun, Rabindranath Tagore, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Emile Zola, Leo Tolstoy, Feodor Dostoyevsky, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oscar Wilde, and last but not least, Guy de Maupassant, whose ubiquitous thirteen-volume Collected Works was distributed free as a subscription premium for a popular Yiddish newspaper. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (Der tsoyberbarg) and Eric Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (Afn mayrev front keyn nayes) were translated into Yiddish by the young Isaac Bashevis Singer, presaging the pessimism and disillusionment that later found expression in his own writing. Shakespeare was almost as popular in Yiddish as he was in English; a favorite title was Kenig Lir (King Lear), which dealt with a subject much on the minds of Jewish immigrants: tsores mit kinder—trouble with children. The Yiddish title page of one Shakespeare translation read “Fartaytsht un farbesert—Translated and Improved.” Jews approached these works with great seriousness and respect; they were a window out of the tenement (or the shtetl), often giving Yiddish readers their first glimpse of the broader artistic and intellectual life beyond.
Meanwhile, by the early twentieth century, serious Yiddish literature was enjoying a golden age in the goldene medine, the golden land. Bohemian literary groups such as Di Yunge, The Young Ones, renounced social protest in favor of more personal artistic expression, largely through poetry. Their experimental language, exotic forms, and art-for-art’s-sake philosophy made writers such as Mani Leib, Reuben Iceland, Moyshe Leib Halpern, Joseph Opatoshu, and David Ignatoff the “Beat Generation” of Yiddish letters. The Inzikhistn, or Introspectivist, movement brought Yiddish poetry into the jazz age through the work of Jacob Glatstein, Aaron Glanz-Leyeles, N. B. Minkoff, and others.
As we opened the boxes, we were intrigued to see how many works were written by women. Rachel Luria and Fradel Stock wrote vivid, gritty stories of daily life. Kadya Molodowsky was active in Yiddish literary circles in Kiev and Warsaw before coming to America in 1935. Here she continued her work as a poet, novelist, and editor, expressing her concern for the oppressed, exposing the depredations of war, and later responding to the tragedy of the Holocaust. After the founding of Israel her odes to the Jewish homeland were sung in the streets of the new state.
As oppression and violence escalated in Europe, other established Yiddish prose writers—including Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, Lamed Shapiro, and I. J. Singer—fled to America, adding new momentum to an already teeming Yiddish literary life. They were joined after the war by Chaim Grade, Itzik Manger, Rokhl Korn, and dozens more.
For the most part, though, the accomplishments of American Yiddish literature lay more in poetry than in prose; when American Yiddish writers did write novels or stories, they usually set them in the Old Country. “The better Yiddish prose writers avoid writing about American Jewish life,” observed Isaac Bashevis Singer, who arrived in the country in 1935. “Yiddish words that each day smell more and more of the past and of otherworldliness cannot convey a lifestyle which hurtles forth with such extraordinary speed that even the rich and ever resilient English language can scarcely keep pace.”
Although Yiddish literature found its largest audience in America, until the outbreak of World War II its creative epicenter remained in Europe. In 1908 an international conference was convened in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now in western Ukraine), to discuss the role of Yiddish in modern Jewish life. Among the seventy delegates were many of the greatest Yiddish writers and intellectuals of the day, including Nathan Birnbaum, Chaim Zhitlowsky, Jacob Gordin, David Pinski, Avrom Reisen, Sholem Asch, Hirsh Dovid Nomberg, and I. L. Peretz. Debate was spirited. “Yiddishists” wanted to recognize Yiddish as “ the national language of the Jewish people,” whereas Hebraists and Zionists argued that Yiddish should be discarded. In the end cooler heads prevailed, and Yiddish was declared “a national language.” Although the Zionist leader Ahad Ha’am later characterized the conference as a “Purim shpil” (a farcical spectacle like those performed on the Jewish carnival day of Purim), others credited it with granting legitimacy to Yiddish, fostering new scholarship and literary creativity.
The peace treaty that ended the First World War granted special rights and protections to the ethnic minorities of Eastern Europe; for Yiddish-speaking Jews it seemed a godsend. Jewish political and intellectual life flourished, and hundreds of new Yiddish writers emerged. Even as anti-Semitism intensified, poverty deepened, and storm clouds gathered over Europe, a brilliant literary and cultural renaissance took place in the Jewish communities of Warsaw, Vilna, and other cities. Many of their titles featured imaginative design and typography, and when we opened boxes, we could usually count on finding at least some of these distinctive volumes inside.
It was the Holocaust, in the end, that sounded the death knell of Yiddish literature in Europe—and paradoxically gave rise to its most powerful expression. In the late 1930s, before the German invasion of Poland, the Yiddish poet Mordecai Gebirtig wrote with blood-chilling prescience:
Es brent, briderlekh, es brent!
Oy, undzer orem shtetl, nebekh, brent! S’hobn shoyn di fayer-tsungen,
Dos gantse shtetl ayngeshlungen—
Un di beyze vintn hudzhen,
S’gantse shtetl brent.
On fire, brothers, it’s on fire!
Oh, our poor little village is on fire!
Tongues of flame are wildly leaping,
Through our town the flames are sweeping—
And the cruel winds keep it burning,
The whole town’s on fire.
Gebirtig went on to write powerful poems about the Holocaust until he, his wife, and two daughters were murdered by the Nazis in 1942. Of course, the consuming fire he foretold could not be extinguished, and as the horror unfolded, reportage and literary imagination, as much as armed struggle, became weapons of resistance.
In the Nazi-imposed ghettos of Lodz and Warsaw, the Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum handpicked a clandestine group of scholars, poets, playwrights, novelists, and journalists to chronicle daily life. Operating under the Hebrew code name Oyneg Shabes (The Joy of the Sabbath), they started out as social scientists, reporting in meticulous detail on everything from mail delivery to food and sanitation. But as conditions worsened, as starvation and disease ran rampant, as horrifying accounts came back from the death camps—and as it became clear that most of the ghetto’s inhabitants would not survive—many of the Oyneg Shabes chroniclers turned to literature, in both Yiddish and Hebrew, to better convey the unspeakable human tragedy taking place before their eyes. Before the ghetto was liquidated, they buried three separate caches of documents. Part of the first cache, packed into ten tin boxes, was recovered shortly after the war; and the second, sealed inside two aluminum milk cans, was found by Polish construction workers in December 1950. The location of the third cache remains unknown.
In the Vilna ghetto young Jewish writers, including the Hebrew poet Abba Kovner and the Yiddish writer Avrom Sutzkever, played a central role in organizing a movement of armed resistance. Later they fled to the forests, where they fought on as partisans. In one poem, Sutzkever imagines the partisans melting the lead printing plates of the Talmud to forge their bullets. In another, one of my own favorites, he describes a young woman named Mira who continues to teach Yiddish literature to her students as the ghetto falls around them.
Immediately after the war, Jews in the displaced persons camps of Europe published firsthand Yiddish accounts. When they couldn’t find Hebrew type, as was often the case, they settled for what was at hand, transliterating their Yiddish memoirs and setting them in German or Polish fonts. Although the survivors eventually rebuilt their shattered lives, Yiddish writers continued for years to wrestle with the political and existential implications of the Nazis’ crimes. Among the most moving volumes we found were yizkor bikher (memorial books), massive compendia in which émigrés and survivors reconstructed their vanished hometowns through prose, photos, personal recollections, hand-drawn maps, and endless lists of names of those who died.
Of course, even without the depredations of the Holocaust it’s not clear that Yiddish would have prevailed as the spoken language of the majority of Jews. In interwar Poland, Yiddish was already losing ground against Polish as younger Jews acculturated. In Palestine and later in the State of Israel, Zionist ideology predicated itself on “negation of the galut,” rejection of the diaspora, leaving little room for Yiddish, a language redolent of Jewish marginality. In America, a land of unprecedented freedom and opportunity, Jews found tolerance for religious differences but not for differences of language or culture. Although a handful of writers continue even today to publish in Yiddish, for the most part they are very old, and their remaining readers are few and far between. With one or two exceptions, there has never been a significant Yiddish writer born in America. Like it or not, Yiddish literature is finite, bound to a specific time and place.
But precisely because Yiddish literature is finite, it is enormously important, a link between one epoch of Jewish history and the next. Its world’s having been ferociously attacked and almost destroyed only serves to underscore its significance. The books we collect are the immediate intellectual antecedent of most contemporary Jews, able to tell us who we are and where we came from. Especially now, after the unspeakable horrors of the twentieth century, Yiddish literature endures as our last, best bridge across the abyss.