CHAPTER 29

Struggles over the Saturday Edition of the Folkstsaytung

In 1922 the editorial staff of our daily newspaper, the Folkstsaytung, decided to publish on the Jewish Sabbath, on Saturday.

No other Jewish daily newspaper published on Saturday. Since there were not many buyers in the Jewish neighborhoods for Polish newspapers, no newspaper peddlers in the Jewish neighborhoods kept their kiosks open on Saturday. We were forced, therefore, to send out our own hawkers to distribute the Saturday edition of the Folkstsaytung. For the most part these were our Tsukunfistn, our young Bundists, who, with their usual enthusiasm, went zealously to work.

On the Jewish streets something new happened. Every Saturday morning, when most Jews, who didn’t go to work or to their places of business, were still sleeping, one could now hear in the courtyards the singing out of young voices, announcing they had the Folkstsaytung for sale. Their cries echoed through the empty, sleepy streets. Many of these young people displayed their “creative talents”: they invented their own rhymes or amusing little jingles to get people to buy and read the Saturday Folkstsaytung.

But the religious Jews—the Sabbath observers—had a very different view of things. They raised a hue and a cry against the Folkstsaytung and began attacking our youthful distributors of the Saturday edition on the street. Most of the time this happened when the pious emerged after prayers from the synagogues and the small Hasidic houses of prayer. They threw themselves on the youthful hawkers of our newspaper, tore the bundles of newspaper out their hands, and ripped them to pieces on the spot (apparently it was all right to tear paper on the Sabbath!), at the same time beating up our young people.

This continued for some time, and our young comrades would show up more and more frequently at the administrative offices of the newspaper, beaten, with torn fragments of the newspaper, to complain about the Hasidic terror. We had to mount a resistance, so we sent out our Bund militiamen to defend our young comrades. This battle reached its highest point when the Warsaw Rabbinate issued a writ of excommunication (!) against the newspaper, its staff, and its hawkers. The religious zealots now attacked our distributors with even more zeal, but the attempt to intimidate us with a writ of excommunication evoked a storm of protest throughout the country. Now it was no longer just about a Saturday edition, but about free speech. After some time, when the attackers saw they could not intimidate us, they grew quiet and stopped attacking our young hawkers.

Figure 49. “Worker, Your Newspaper Is the Folkstsaytung.” Warsaw, 1936. From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

After a few years, the Folkstsaytung stopped the publication of its Saturday edition—not because of the attacks of the pious zealots, but to lower the deficit it accrued after each edition, including the Saturday one.

In 1931 the First of May fell on a Friday. All over the country, our First of May demonstrations were being held jointly with the PPS. This cooperation had enormous political significance. The party, therefore, didn’t want to wait two days to publish reports of these joint demonstrations, so on May 2, 1931, a Saturday, a special edition of the Folkstsaytung was published, dedicated to the reporting of these joint First of May demonstrations throughout Poland. This edition sold out very quickly. The financial situation of the newspaper improved. It was decided to publish the Saturday edition permanently.

From that time on the Folkstsaytung was published regularly every Saturday, up to and until our great Catastrophe. The Saturday edition sold well. Throughout the Warsaw courtyards on Saturday mornings, the ringing singsong of our SKIFISTs and Tsukunftists was once again to be heard: “A new edition of the Folkstsaytung!”