איך רעד יידסיש

איך בין גוט אָבער איצט איך בין קראנק
מיר האָבן א סך הײמארבעט אבער איך לערן א סך

די מענטסן אין דער פּראָגראם זײַנען זײער קלוג און די פּראָפֿעסאָרס זײַנען זײער אינטערעסאָנט

כ'וועל שרײַבן נאָך באלד

מיט ליבשאפֿט
לאה–נחלה

Just in case you wanted some actual proof that I am, in fact, learning this language. Here's a translation:

I am well, but now I am sick.
We have a lot of homework, but I am learning a lot.
The people in the program are really smart and the professors are very interesting.
I will write more soon.

With affection,
Leah

To expand a little from my 6-year old's Yiddish, I got slammed with a stupid cold this week. The timing is actually okay: my body held out until after New York travel, and this is a light week in terms of assigned reading. I'm going through my typical virus trajectory. The sore throat phase is over and now I am losing my voice.

My research in New York was... well, kind of unsuccessful, unfortunately. That's the nature of archival research. The truth is, I was really unpleasantly surprised when I arrived at the Tamiment Labor Archives. I was expecting to be working with original materials, but the particular items I was examining (correspondence) was only available on microfilm. After sifting through microfilm for nearly three tedious hours, I was unable to locate what I set out to find. If I had more time there, I may have discovered the handful of things that I wanted at NYU. I shake my fist at microfilm! Fie!

Squandered hours aside, it is actually for the better in this case. The week after our trip, we were lucky enough to have Naomi Seidman from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. We unfortunately did not have nearly enough time (2 or 3 weeks would have been much better) with her to delve into the material as deeply as I would have liked. Luckily, though, her focus was largely on the female voice in Yiddish literature, which is in large part what I set out to really explore in my project in the first place.

When we got to the Yiddish Modernist poets and authors in our readings, I was really, really into the discussion. Some of the better known writers, like Kadya Molodowsky and Cynthia Ozick, I had read a little on my own. But Naomi (no disrespect intended, by the way; everyone has been on a first-name basis this summer) also gave us some poetry by Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin, two Russian-American avant-garde poets. I found Anna Margolin's poetry especially interesting for a Yiddish writer. In many ways, her poetry reflects a certain female tradition in Eastern European Jewish culture. Yet she also deals with many non-Jewish themes, uses Christian imagery, and seeks to redefine what (Jewish) womanhood means in a modern world.

The individuality Margolin asserts in some of her poetry we read reminded me of the way in which Emma Goldman articulated her stance on womanhood. Many find her outspokenness against women's suffrage to be incongruous with her otherwise "feminist" views. From reading Living My Life, one of her two massive autobiographies (she had a very full life), it is clear to me that Goldman relates deeply to her femininity and cherishes the role that women play in the world. However, her justification for her stance women's suffrage is quite nuanced and certainly fits in with her radical denouncement of all hierarchy.

Goldman believed that a political right like suffrage would do no good for the majority of women who (at the time) were tied to the patriarchal yoke of incessant childbearing and child rearing, and other worldly responsibilities. It was no coincidence to her that the most outspoken suffragists were also the most pious and the most burdened by the responsibilities of home. There would be no true political, economic, or social solutions for women until they learned to denounce the set of values that limited them to the domestic sphere. The key to the liberation of women, Goldman said, is to view the self as an individual worthy of men in any sphere.

To establish one's self as an individual and as a woman in the Modern world, whether politically or aesthetically, was no easy task, of course. The idea of the woman as an individual, free of any social constraints, was certainly quite radical. It is this idea that I am most interested in exploring in Margolin's poetry. She was not political, but was nevertheless a radical and innovative poet.

All in all, I am satisfied, and I hope that I will not reach another dead end with this project. Wish me luck!

By the way, the last day of the program is July 30th. I'll be back in Miami sometime in August with many stories to tell.