Early in 1985 I was invited to speak at the Yablon Center, a formerly communist (they now called themselves linke, leftist) Jewish culture club that met in a modest storefront directly across the street from the gleaming-white colossus of NBC’s “Television City” in Los Angeles. Seventy-five people were waiting for me, seated on folding metal chairs. There was only one other young person in the room: a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, who was writing a story about the Yiddish Book Center and the “Yiddish revival.”
I began my talk with a quick overview in which I mentioned, more or less in passing, that Yiddish had not died a natural death, that one out of every two Yiddish-speaking Jews was murdered in the Holocaust, and that increasing persecution in the Soviet Union had culminated on August 12, 1952, when Stalin ordered all of his country’s leading Yiddish writers shot on a single night. No sooner was this last statement out of my mouth than an old man in the back of the room jumped to his feet, waved his fist in the air, and shouted at me in a heavy Yiddish accent, “You’re a liar!”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“I said you’re a liar!” repeated the old man, more vehemently than before.
I glanced at the reporter. “Um, I’ll be happy to take questions after the lecture.”
“It’s not a question, it’s a fect!” thundered the old man. “It never happened what you said, Stalin never killed those writers.”
The audience was growing restless.
“Sha!”
“Sit down, better!”
“We came to listen to the yungerman, not to you!”
The old man faced off against the crowd. “Ikh vel nisht zayn keyn Bontsha Shvayg! (I won’t be a Bontsha the Silent!)” he screamed, invoking the name of the long-suffering title character of a story by I. L. Peretz. “The yungerman is a liar. It never heppened, it’s all propaganda, Stalin never did it.”
A woman in the front row turned around to face him. “Okay,” she demanded, “if it never happened, then where are all the Soviet Yiddish writers today?”
“Where are they? They’re all hiding, to embarrass Stalin!”
Pandemonium ensued. Only the reporter was still in his seat; the others were on their feet—some were actually standing on their chairs— and everyone was yelling at once. Arguments, accusations, and epithets flew through the air. The old man gave as good as he got, holding his ground for ten minutes or more until, his face red and his body trembling with rage, he invoked several unprintable Yiddish curses on his erstwhile comrades and stormed out of the building, slamming the door behind him.
I tried my best to restore order and resume my lecture. I was concerned, naturally, lest the incident color the Times’s coverage, but I needn’t have worried: Much of the uproar had been in Yiddish, a language the young reporter didn’t understand. And even if he had understood, he wasn’t the least bit interested: He was there, he told me afterward, to write an “upbeat” article about the joys of Yiddish, and bitter political debate was simply not part of the story.
Except, of course, that it was part of the story, and a central part at that. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II of Russia in 1881, reactionary decrees forced large numbers of Jews out of the countryside and into the cities, where they found work in factories: sewing clothes, tanning leather, or rolling cigarettes. They were not exactly the sort of proletariat Marx had dreamed of. A typical Jewish factory might consist of two workers and an owner, all three working side by side, bent over their machines sixteen hours a day. Class conflict in the Pale, according to one observer, meant the struggle of kaptsn kegn dalfn, the pauper versus the destitute. Still, in a country as overwhelmingly agrarian as Russia, Jews comprised a significant percentage of the urban population in the Pale and were pretty much the only urban proletariat there was. By the early 1890s young Marxist revolutionaries seeking to organize the workers (as opposed to the peasantry) had no choice but to turn to these poor Jews as the vanguard of the revolution.
At first their organizing efforts were comical. The early revolutionaries were mostly intellectuals from wealthy, highly assimilated Jewish families, and their idea of agitation was to teach the workers gramota, Russian grammar. The few workers who, after a long day at work, managed to stay awake quickly put their newfound knowledge to good use, leaving the factories altogether. Eventually the revolutionaries realized—just as Hebrew writers had realized a few decades before— that the only way to reach the Jewish masses was to speak to them in Yiddish, the only language they understood.
Since many of the revolutionaries didn’t speak Yiddish themselves, they mobilized a homegrown cadre of what they called halb-inteligentn, “half-intellectuals,” who in turn organized Zhargon Komitetn, Jargon Committees, making use of the nascent Yiddish literature to spread revolutionary consciousness among their fellow workers. The Jewish poor, schooled in the tradition of social justice espoused by the Hebrew prophets, oppressed both as workers and as Jews, rallied to the cry. The Jewish Workers’ Bund of Russia and Poland, founded in 1897, quickly became one of the most powerful forces in East European Jewish life. It played a key role in launching the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party in 1898, in precipitating the split between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in 1903, and in fighting the Revolution of 1905. After that revolution failed, the tsarist authorities sought to redirect popular discontent by unleashing a wave of anti-Jewish violence. The Bund responded with armed resistance, and then, as reaction and disillusionment took hold, by turning inward, transforming what until then had been a utilitarian expedient—the use of Yiddish to reach the Jewish masses—into a far-reaching cultural program rooted in Yiddish language and literature.
And the Bund was not alone. Ber Borochov, a professional Yiddish linguist, synthesized Marxism and Zionism, giving rise to an influential Labor Zionist movement. Territorialists championed Yiddish-speaking Jewish settlements outside of Palestine. Jewish Communists threw in their lot with the new Soviet Union, while other Jews allied themselves with Polish socialist movements. Together, these groups challenged the political status quo, reshaped Jewish culture—and expended considerable energy fighting among themselves.
When all was said and done, however, the most powerful social movement of all was emigration. Between 1881 and 1924, when the United States effectively closed its doors, some 2 million East European Jews packed up their meager possessions and made the long journey across the sea to di goldene medine, the Golden Land, seeking economic opportunity and an escape from violence and oppression. Like Mrs. Ostroff, many of those immigrants were, at least at first, bitterly disappointed. Population density on the Lower East Side of New York exceeded that of the worst slums of Bombay. Living conditions in the dark, airless tenements almost defied description, and working conditions in the sweatshops were even worse. In 1911 fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, at the edge of Washington Square. “In the eighteen minutes it took to bring the fire under control, one hundred and forty-six workers, most of them Jewish and Italian girls, were burned to death,” Irving Howe recounts in World of Our Fathers. The factory owners had locked the doors to keep out union organizers, and the only way the girls could escape the flames was to jump nine floors to the street below. The Lower East Side was plunged into mourning—a mood captured in a Yiddish poem by Morris Rosenfeld that appeared on the front page of the Forward:
Over whom shall we weep first?
Over the burned ones?
Over those beyond recognition?
Over those who have been crippled?
Or driven senseless?
Or smashed?
I weep for them all.
Now let us light the holy candles
And mark the sorrow
Of Jewish masses in darkness and poverty.
This is our funeral,
These our graves,
Our children, . . .
For many Jews, there was nothing left to do but organize. They joined unions, such as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. They struck for better wages and shorter hours, they walked the picket lines and stood up to the thugs, they suffered setbacks, went hungry, and through victories large and small, they changed the face of the American labor movement forever. In 1914 the Lower East Side elected Meyer London, a Yiddish-speaking socialist and trade union lawyer, to the United States Congress.
If in Europe many Jews still clung to tradition, in America the flood of change was unstoppable. When my sixteen-year-old grandmother arrived in America, she took a job sewing muffs in a sweatshop. “We worked fourteen hours a day, Saturday included,” she remembered. “The first time I had to work on Shabbos I cried so hard I soaked every muff I sewed.”
Torn from their traditional moorings, Jews turned to new, secular Jewish institutions. Landsmanshaftn were mutual aid societies for immigrants from the same city or town. The Workmen’s Circle provided everything from health insurance to burial plots. The old political movements staked out new ground on American soil—socialists, communists, anarchists, Zionists—each with its own Yiddish newspapers, radio stations, publishing houses, libraries, lecture halls, musical groups, schools, and summer camps. They skirmished constantly with one another, and held only two things in common: Yiddish and the dream of a besere un shenere velt—a better and more beautiful world for their children.
It is impossible, today, to understand how important these old Yiddish organizations once were. They attracted hundreds of thousands of members, shaped American Jewish culture, and exercised enormous political influence. Yet they were not to last. For all their proletarian solidarity, Jewish workers couldn’t wait to escape the sweatshops and move their families away from the stifling streets of the Lower East Side. They scrimped, they saved, they took in boarders, they did whatever they had to until they had enough money to move uptown, to Harlem or the Bronx. Many went into business. If they did remain factory workers, it was almost certain that their children would not. And why should they? After all, they were Americans, they spoke English without an accent, they were educated, they became professionals, they moved to the suburbs. What need did they have for unions or radical Yiddish organizations?
There was one other factor. In Eastern Europe many Jews were swept up in the spirit of nationalism, seeking to create a new, modern Jewish culture rooted in Yiddish (or modern Hebrew) instead of religion. In America it was different: Rather than Minority Treaties we had a melting pot. Religious differences were okay; cultural and linguistic differences were not. Upwardly mobile Jews were quick to redefine their identity: not as nationalism, not as culture, but as religion—exactly as assimilating Jews had done in Germany several generations before. It didn’t take long before membership in America’s Reform and Conservative synagogues outnumbered the membership of all Yiddish cultural and political organizations combined. Even those who remained in the Yiddish organizations tacitly acknowledged that America was different. They created many Yiddish afternoon schools in this country but, unlike in Eastern Europe, unlike in Canada, Mexico, and Argentina, not a single Yiddish day school. No matter how rich and varied the Yiddish cultural life they built for themselves, deep in their hearts they must surely have known that their own children wouldn’t or couldn’t follow. To quote Michael Chabon, Yiddish in America became “a tin can with no tin can at the other end of the string.”
Arriving as I did very late in the game, I felt for these once proud Yiddish organizations. For five decades or more they had watched as their members died and were not replaced. They saw the spotlight of history grow dim, they saw themselves marginalized and then forgotten, until, inevitably, their idealism gave way to disappointment, their disappointment to resentment, their resentment to bitterness. They were mad at their children, mad at America, and—because no one else was listening—they were mad at one another. By the time I came along, anarchists wouldn’t speak to socialists, socialists to communists, communists to Zionists. I marveled that Yiddish still existed at all, since it seemed everyone I met who spoke the language refused to speak with everyone else.
For my generation the personal was political; for many of the older Yiddishists, the political was intensely, even frighteningly, personal. I once received a call from the widow of a distinguished Yiddish writer. Many years before, her husband had had a political falling out with Sholem Asch, the most widely translated Yiddish writer of his day. Asch had now been dead forty years, her husband nearly ten years, and still the widow couldn’t give it up. “Mr. Lahnsky,” she said on the phone, “I have the most wonderful news. I just read a memoir which I obtained from the Yiddish Book Center, and I want you to hear what the writer had to say. I quote: ‘I used to get up early in the morning to have more hours in the day to hate Sholem Asch.’ I ask you, have you ever heard a more beautiful passage?”
Wherever I went in the Yiddish world, otherwise rational people continued to fight old battles with a tenacity that left me speechless. One night Roger, Fran, Noah, and I arrived at a high-rise building in Chelsea to pick up books from Diana Sandler, the widow of Philip Sandler, a prominent Yiddish journalist. While Roger and Noah removed hundreds of her late husband’s books from the living room shelves, Fran and I sat with Mrs. Sandler at her kitchen table and talked. She was leaving New York to be near her daughter in Michigan. Given her age she felt too lonely and isolated to remain.
“Don’t you have any friends in this building?” Fran asked.
“No,” she said sadly. “Once, many Jewish people lived here, educated people, Yiddish writers and scholars. My husband and I had many good friends. But over the years they either died or moved away.” She sighed and stared into her coffee for a long time. When she looked up again, she shook her head and added softly, “Actually, there is one other person in the building that I know—very well, in fact—but him, him I don’t talk to.”
The other person was Paul Novik, then more than ninety years old and still the editor-in-chief of the Morning Freiheit, the communist Yiddish newspaper. For many years, Diana Sandler explained, her husband had worked under Novik as the Freiheit’s city editor. Their families were close friends, so close that they took apartments in the same building. Then came 1956, when Khrushchev made his speech to the Party Congress confirming the magnitude of Stalin’s crimes. Deeply shaken, Sandler quit his job and moved to the noncommunist Tog; Novik remained at the Freiheit, and although they continued to live in the same building, the two men and their wives never spoke to one another again.
Except once, Mrs. Sandler explained. Five years earlier, in the middle of an unexpected blizzard, she went downstairs to get her mail and saw Novik pacing back and forth in the lobby. Usually, she said, Novik was a vigorous man, but that night he looked small and frail, and she knew something was wrong.
“There were already big drifts outside. I looked at the snow, I looked at Novik—I could see he was worried. I felt terrible, I knew I shouldn’t speak to him, but what could I do, I’m also a mother. ‘Mr. Novik,’ I said, ‘is something the matter?’ It was the first time I had spoken to him in maybe twenty years. ‘Yes,’ he said in a daze, ‘my wife, she went out shopping, she should have been back an hour ago—’ I didn’t let him finish. I said, ‘Mr. Novik, it’s all right, it’s snowing, the buses are running late, she’ll come home soon.’ And then I took him by the hand and we sat down together on a bench in the lobby. We talked quietly for a long time until the door finally opened and his wife, poor thing, came in half frozen, covered with snow. I waited to make sure she was all right. Then Mr. Novik, he turned to me and he said, ‘Thank you.’ Just that, ‘Thank you.’ Me, I didn’t answer him, I went into the elevator and back up to my apartment. That was five years ago. We still see each other from time to time, in the elevator, in the lobby, but we haven’t spoken a word to each other since.”
The battles still aren’t over. As recently as December of 2002 I received a phone call from a Yiddish editor in New York, asking if the Yiddish Book Center could help underwrite the cost of Der yidisher kemfer (The Jewish Fighter), the hundred-year-old magazine of the Labor Zionist movement. To be honest, I didn’t even know the magazine was still alive. But I wasn’t completely surprised by the call. Three months earlier, I was approached by the ninety-seven-year-old editor of another Yiddish journal, who needed help to keep his faltering publication alive, and I knew of at least two other New York Yiddish journals that were on equally shaky ground. “You all seem to be in the same boat,” I pointed out to the Kemfer editor when he called. “There are four separate Yiddish magazines, all without enough writers or readers or money to survive. Why don’t you just join forces and create one single, viable Yiddish periodical?”
The editor laughed. “Ummeglekh! (Impossible!)” he said, explaining why the ideologies and personalities of the various publications couldn’t mix. His vivid characterization of the respective editors—all insisting on autonomy, all at odds with one another—was entertaining, but it was also tragic. Even at this very late date, they’d rather die alone than work together. I was reminded of a Yiddish expression: Yeder makht shabes far zikh, Everyone is making Shabbos for himself. Itche Goldberg, the erudite head of the erstwhile communist Yiddish cultural world and himself no stranger to bitter internecine Yiddish polemics, once characterized the present state of Yiddish culture as a conflagration: “The entire edifice of Yiddish culture is on fire,” he told me, “it’s burning out of control. Every once in a while a lone individual or organization comes along with a little bucket of water to throw on the flames. But before he can get close, he has to pass by a committee of representatives of all the other organizations, who check to make sure that his tsitses (the fringes of his ritual garment) are kosher. Never mind that the members of the committee do nothing to extinguish the flames themselves, they still want to make sure that no one with the wrong political credentials should have a chance.”
I so wanted it to be different. I wanted these old radicals to be feisty and funny, like the geriatric rabble-rousers in John Sayles’s “At the Anarchists’ Convention.” But there was a danger in romanticizing them. My coworker, Sharon Kleinbaum, who was enamored of anarchist theory, once made a pilgrimage to the elderly editor of a Yiddish anarchist newspaper. She went expecting to talk about Kropotkin, Bakunin, and Emma Goldman; instead, the editor pinched her on the tukhes and chased her around the living room.
At least he still had the oomph to chase her; many of the people we met were just plain bitter—characters not from John Sayles but from Cynthia Ozick’s masterful 1969 story “Envy; or, Yiddish in America.” Envious they were—of each other, and even more so of us. They envied us our youth, our optimism, our success. Why should the newspapers publish pictures of us instead of them, who spoke Yiddish so much better and had been championing Yiddish culture since before we were born? Once, when an article about the Center appeared in the New York Times, the board of a major Yiddish organization filed into its public reading room (a friend of mine was sitting at an adjoining table) and convened an emergency meeting, the subject of which was “What to do about Lahnsky.”
It wasn’t only envy. When all was said and done, they regarded our work in rescuing Yiddish books not as a triumph but as a sign of their own defeat: If they had been doing their jobs, if they had succeeded in conveying Yiddish culture to their children, then Yiddish books wouldn’t need to be rescued. Of course, the historical depredations and upheavals that unseated Yiddish were hardly their fault. But they couldn’t see that, and their myopia only compounded the tragedy. I’d be lying if I said that their barbs didn’t sting. But in the end we, unlike them, could grasp a deeper irony: No matter how harshly they maligned us or how stubbornly they refused to speak with one another, sooner or later they would have to call us to pick up their books, and when they did, we would make no distinctions: Their books and those of their antagonists would end up in the same truck and on the same shelves—side by side, together at last.
BECAUSE IT’S MY nature, and because I had studied enough history to impart a certain rakhmones for those who suffered the slings and arrows of Yiddish fortune, I tried my best to make peace with the old Yiddish organizations while they were still here. I didn’t take sides (though I was often sorely tempted), and I made a point of speaking to everyone—though I learned soon enough whom not to mention to whom. I visited different organizations and appeared before their eksekutives, their executive committees. I attended and spoke at their banketn, the interminable banquets where their members got together in the gilded ballroom of one or another of New York’s faded grand hotels to congratulate one another, celebrate the past, and mourn the future. The more radical the organization, it seemed, the more bourgeois its events. Whatever the ideology, though, the speeches were always the same: “Vu iz undzer yugnt? (Where are our young people?)” their orators would demand as they pounded the hotel podium. And I’d sit there at the head table, looking at my uneaten chicken swimming in grease (I was a vegetarian), looking at my parve ice cream (it never melted, no matter how long the program lasted), and I’d think, With food and entertainment like this, was it any wonder that their yugnt stayed home?
Fortunately, not everyone was bitter. Sometimes I connected personally with members of that older generation—and occasionally I even managed to turn them around. Take S. L. Shneiderman, for example. Barely a year after we began collecting books, he wrote a blistering article in the Forward, attacking the Yiddish Book Center for being out of touch with the real (meaning older) institutions of Yiddish culture. Why, he wrote, hadn’t we contacted the Forverts, why had we ignored the Old Yiddish World, and most of all, why had we never taken the trouble to phone him, Mr. Shneiderman, and let him know what we were up to? The best he could conclude from such gross derelictions was that we were not really interested in saving Yiddish culture, but rather in hoarding books so as “tsu mumifirn di yidishe shprakh, to ‘mummify’ the Yiddish language.”
Since I had never met Mr. Shneiderman, since he had never visited the Center or interviewed me or any other member of our staff before writing his article, I didn’t think his attack was quite fair, and I phoned him at home to tell him so.
“Shneiderman!” he bellowed by way of greeting, in what I took to be a preemptive strike.
I introduced myself and explained where I thought his article had gone astray. To my amazement, he listened, and after an hour and a half—marked by frequent interruptions and pontifications—he was genuinely repentant. “I’ll tell you the truth,” he said, “I had no idea. When you started collecting books without getting in touch with me, I naturally assumed you weren’t really interested in der yidisher kultur (the Yiddish culture). Meyle (no matter), it’s never too late. When can I get a train to Am Hoyrst to see for myself?”
A week later Mr. and Mrs. Shneiderman arrived at the local Amtrak station. He looked like a Jewish Winston Churchill: short but powerful, with broad shoulders and a deep, resonant voice. His wife was considerably quieter and more refined, with a face that revealed both humor and intelligence. In keeping with what I had come to recognize as Yiddish custom, she referred to her husband by his last name alone, as in “Shneiderman was so looking forward to coming here today,” or, “Shneiderman, zay shtil! Keep quiet!”
I loaded the Shneidermans into the back of a borrowed car and took them to the Center. They were impressed. In fact, the relentlessly voluble Mr. Shneiderman was actually nonplussed for a good twenty seconds. Then he wiped a tear from his eye and boomed out his verdict: “A nes min hashomayim! (A miracle from Heaven!) Such young people, to do so much! What’s happening here is the future of Yiddish culture! Ershtns (first of all), I’m going to donate to you all my own books after I’m gone. And tsveytns (second), I’m going to write a three-part series for the Forverts. The whole world should know what goes on here and not listen to the yentes back in New York who only know to criticize and complain.”
He was as good as his word. The Forward ran three successive, full-page articles by S. L. Shneiderman, one of which bore the headline AMHOYRST—NAYER PUNKT AF DER MAPE FUN YIDISH (Amherst, the Newest Point on the Yiddish Map). My grandmother couldn’t stop kvelling: It’s one thing, after all, to see your grandson in the Times and quite another in the Forverts! Before long I was receiving handwritten Yiddish letters from scores of older Yiddish organizations, some with checks and others offering to help us collect books in their communities. I responded in kind, accepting invitations to speak at their meetings, attend their banquets, accept their awards, and sometimes even write for their papers. In fact, I’m still waiting for the $25 honorarium I was promised for an article I wrote for the Forverts in 1983.
I met many people whom I genuinely liked—decent people, activists, visionaries, idealists—and I spent long hours sipping tea at their kitchen tables while they regaled me with recollections of great writers or eyewitness accounts of movements and events I had only read about in books. But even after hundreds of hours together, I think we both knew that on some level we would remain strangers to one another. Born in the shtetl, versed in Talmud, steeped in Marxism, tested on the streets (and sometimes in jail), well read in Hebrew, Yiddish, and the major languages of Europe, they possessed a depth of learning, experience, and Jewish erudition that I could barely apprehend, let alone aspire to. And I, for them, was also a cipher: relatively ignorant of Jewish knowledge, true, but an American through and through, unbent by the past and heir to a new world—sexually, politically, intellectually—that could never be theirs no matter how long they lived in America, no matter how much they read or how earnestly they tried to understand. We were time travelers, inhabitants of different epochs stopping long enough to compare notes before returning whence we came. No matter how respectful I was, no matter how intently I listened, it was never enough. They always wanted me to stay longer, return sooner, understand better or appreciate them more. And why shouldn’t they? They’d been famous long ago, they’d lived front and center on the stage of history, they wrote books, they led, they learned, they taught, they organized, and now, in their old age, all they lacked was a yarshn—someone to whom they could bequeath not only their libraries but the sum total of their lives. God only knows they deserved it. And God only knows I tried. But in the end, what history had stolen from them, no one—not I, not anyone—could restore.