The Yiddish Press

A new, not-so-shiny-but-no-less-fascinating object suddenly appeared in the Book Center the other day. A Yiddish printing press (**edit: According to my dad, who is an engineer and general machine-ophile far more attuned to these things than I am, it is a linotype machine. According to him, these machines were so well built that it could very well still work)! I am not sure of the exact year that this one was manufactured, but the patent plate on the side of the press says that the model received a patent in 1911.

The significance of the printing press cannot be understated in the development of a Modern Yiddish literary and political culture. This printing press is where it all really happened. Literary journals that published avant-garde poetry and fiction; political newspapers of the Anarchists, Socialists, Communists, Zionists, rival factions within each movement; and many other publications geared toward a Yiddish-speaking audience throughout Eastern Europe and the United States flourished in the early 20th century.

One of the ironic things I learned in my Yiddish Culture class--no slight against the Book Center intended--is that the Yiddish press was actually far more influential than books were in developing Yiddish as a literary language. Much of the Yiddish literature we see in book form at the National Yiddish Book Center today was originally serialized in newspapers.Newspapers were cheap, easy to circulate, and numerous in ideology and audience. Because of these practical reasons, culture, literature, and politics were largely a community experience. Unlike the more intimate experience of novel, the newspaper would be read by multiple people in a household and would be the subject of heated debate in cafes. That kind of populist literary consumption does not exist in the same way now.



I'm not sure if you can tell from the size of this photo, but those are characters of the Yiddish Alef-Beys, which comprises the Hebrew alphabet with some added combinations of letters and some added diacritical marks.


Pretty crazy looking, huh?

First Lecture

Last Friday was our introduction to the Yiddish culture unit of the internship. Aaron Lansky, the founder of the National Yiddish Book Center and the author of Outwitting History (a book that interweaves the history of Yiddishkeit with the story of how the Book Center came to be) delivered a lecture on two Yiddish short stories. The first is "Bontshe Shvayg" by an author well-known among Yiddish-speakers, Y.L. Peretz. The other, much longer story, is called "Gimpel the Fool" by Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer. Lansky's choice of these two stories as an introduction to the major themes in Modern Yiddish literature was deliberate. On the surface, the stories mirror one another. When he put each author into context, however, the stories reveal the great tensions plaguing Jews in the modern world.

In "Bontshe Shvayg," Peretz introduces the main character at the moment when he has just died and crossed the threshold into the "other world." Bontshe Shvayg is a meek man whose only outstanding characteristic during his life on earth is his perpetual silence, even in the face of the most painful circumstances: a botched circumcision, a wife who cheats on him, children who throw him out of his own house. You name the terrible circumstance, and this guy has probably endured it without a complaint.

When he arrives at the great gates of Heaven, complete with winged cherubs and gold everything, Bontshe meets a Heavenly Tribunal. In typically Jewish fashion, though, the tribunal is more like a courtroom trial. His defense paints a picture of a martyr who bore the great burdens of the world with no complaint. When the defense rests its case and the Heavenly Tribunal is ready to admit Bontshe Shvayg they, of course, decide in his favor: "The Heavenly Tribunal can pass no judgment on you. It is not for us to determine your portion of paradise. Take what you want! It is yours, all yours!" The humorous twist is that Bontshe is not a martyr or a saint. He isn't otherworldly. To the great amusement of the prosecution, his only request is "a warm roll with fresh butter every morning." In his overly literal conception of Heaven, Bontshe Shvayg mocks the preoccupation of many religious Jews with deliverance in the "other world" while ignoring life on earth

Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Gimpel the Fool" presents a similar main character with a far different philosophical implication. Unlike "Bontshe Shvayg," which is in the third person, "Gimpel" is a first person account of Gimpel's foibles and unfortunate circumstances. Gimpel is quite the gullible fellow, seemingly incapable of learning to be skeptical when others tell him outrageous things. He is tricked into marrying an unfaithful woman. Luckily, Gimpel has some redeeming factors in his life: he runs a successful business, he has children who love him, and he has an unshakable faith in God. Hell, he doesn't even want to divorce the woman that he catches cheating on him. Bashevis Singer also strays far away from the message Peretz delivers at the end of "Bontse Shvayg." At the end of "Gimpel, the imagery is mystical, the tone transcendent:

"No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world. At the door of the hovel where I lie, there stands the plank on which the dead are taken away. the gravedigger Jew has his spade ready. The grave waits and the worms are hungry; the shrouds are prepared--I carry them in my beggar's sack. Another shnorrer is waiting to inherit my bed of straw. When the time comes I will go joyfully. Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception. God be praised: there even Gimpel cannot be fooled."

While faith and tradition may be imperfect--Gimpel is a "fool" after all (though on a side note, we were told that "fool" isn't necessarily a perfect translation of the word in Yiddish)--it's all the Jews have to unite them as a people. It's a cynical transcendence, at best.

The distinction between these two Yiddish stories would be unremarkable without putting them into historical context. Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote "Gimpel the Fool" in the years that immediately proceeded a grizzly time for Jews. Between the pogroms in Eastern Europe, the Holocaust, and the mass persecution of Jews in the Stalin regime, it is safe to say that Bashevis Singer saw the brutal consequences of Jewish "assimilation" in the modern world. Like gullible Gimpel, who takes blow after blow from others, Jews must hold onto their traditions, turn into their communities, and try to pick up the broken pieces of themselves for the true world beyond the earth.

While it is understandable, Bashevis Singer generated a great deal of controversy amongst the Yiddish literary world. Those who had helped to create and consume the culture of Yiddishkeit in the late 19th and early 20th centuries believed Yiddish represented cosmopolitan humanist values. Jewish isolation is exactly the worldview they worked so hard to shed. As a non-territorial language of a certain people,Yiddish promised to unite Jews everywhere while while allowing Jews to integrate into their own societies. Nevertheless, Isaac Bashevis Singer, not Y.L. Peretz, won a Nobel Prize. With the rise of nationalism, Jews eventually abandoned the promise of Yiddish and adopted Modern Hebrew and the nation-state of Israel. The drawbacks and benefits of that move have been debated for decades in numerous books, articles, and dissertations, so I will leave Israel out of the equation for now.

This debate is one of the conflicts that really draws me into the politics of Yiddish literature. I think it is a compelling question, especially for my generation: is it possible to reconcile one's identity with a particular community and one's identity in a larger society? My own answer to this question has always been complicated. I am an American, but I have always felt like an outsider as a Jew. At the same time, I am not educated so much in the religious aspects of Judaism, which makes identifying as a Jew in the United States a very difficult label. American society tends to reduce "religion" to a check box, to siphon off one's "faith" into a category entirely separate from the culture in which one lives day-to-day life. What I see in Yiddish and in the time when it was a flourishing literary language was an identification with a Jewish peoplehood that did not reduce one's identity in such terms. It represents humanism with a self-aware outlook.

Obviously, though, this is not without its problems. What does it mean to be Jewish without religion? More generally, what does it mean to identify as "American" and something else, or to be a global citizen? If history proves anything, lines, labels, and borders on a map (whether mental or geographical) are difficult to negotiate. Peretz lived in a world where Jews appeared to be flourishing as individual citizens and as a transnational group. The Old World ways were impediments to assimilation. Isaac Bashevis Singer witnessed the consequences of Jewish assimilation. No matter what Jews believed of themselves, they continued to be perceived as unquestionably different. Without religious traditions, Jews would continue to endanger themselves as a people. This post-Holocaust skepticism still exists in many communities, and even among more secular Jews. Integrate with the greater society, sure, but always walk with a mirror in hand, watching for the goy persecutor.

Luckily, I think much of my generation sees the problems and have become disillusioned with this outlook. Whether the extremists like it or not, the world's borders are becoming less and less relevant. While I don't see a Yiddish revivalist movement growing like wildfire, I think we do have many things to learn from the Yiddishkeit.

Obligatory First Post: What am I doing here?

Hello, everyone!

Chances are if you have reached this blog, it is because I sent you here or you stumbled upon the link in my Facebook profile. Although I am documenting this for my own reasons, I look forward to sharing my experiences with everyone. Feel free to leave comments!

For those of you who do not know, I am one of 18 students from across the country, ranging from 2nd-year undergraduates to masters students completing a summer internship in Yiddish Language and Culture at the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. It is a 7-week program that includes Yiddish language instruction, a class in Yiddish culture led by various scholars in Yiddish literature and culture, and, of course, some obligatory grunt work at the Book Center when necessary. Interns also have the opportunity to work closely with the faculty on an independent project that involves translation of Yiddish text and/or research on a particular topic in Yiddish culture. At the end of the summer, we will all present our work and, perhaps, contribute to some kind of future exhibition here at the Book Center. We will also get docent training if we want it, the opportunity for further involvement with the Book Center's upcoming projects, 6 credits of coursework through the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and a small stipend for our work. All of the credits, the books, our housing, and various other goodies (which includes a familiar childhood toy renamed Yiddish-style as an "Oy-Oy") are fully paid for by the center. Yes, they actually PAY us to do something so cool.

Some of you may be baffled by this. Why learn Yiddish? What kind of 22 year old wants to speak like an old bube? Jewish assimilation in America came at the expense of an amazingly rich culture that I managed to stumble upon only recently. The Holocaust killed off about half of the world's Yiddish speakers. The post-World War II generation of Ashkenazi Jews that followed learned almost nothing of their parents' or grandparents' native tongue, typically abandoning it for English or Hebrew. What Yiddish my mother heard growing up only shows up in select words she has always used to describe certain things--shabbes, shmate, goyim, etc. Occasionally she will use a Yiddish word I never heard her say before. Ever since I can remember, I have always been fascinated at the power in those Yiddish words. There is something in the word shpilkes--used colloquially to mean a feeling of restlessness, but literally translated as "pins" or "needles"--that captures something that English cannot, at least to me.

Of course, it is only in retrospect that I see how Yiddish has always played a subtle role in my life. My trajectory into this program really began last summer when I was an honors summer research assistant with a professor of mine at the University of Miami. Much of what I was reading was about nationalism and the movements that have arisen as an answer to it. One day, as I was milling about the internet, I discovered Emma Goldman, the notorious anarchist of the early 20th century. When I read more about her, I also learned about her affiliation with the major Yiddish anarchist movements, both here and internationally.

Wait, what? Yiddish... Jewish... anarchists? I had certainly never heard about political radicals in Hebrew school. My Hebrew school--mostly attended by the irritating offspring of the reformed, observant-two-times-a-year type of Jews--was more of a bar mitzvah mill that taught us to read Hebrew and not much else. On top of it, we learned Sephardic (Middle Eastern) pronunciation of Hebrew when the vast majority of us were of Eastern European descent. We probably did talk about some Jewish traditions and certainly learned about the Holocaust. Yet somehow this entire Jewish secular cultural life that flourished before the Holocaust failed to make it into the curriculum. Since my Jewish grandparents passed away long before I was born, there was very little of that world left in my family. I had to discover this world on my own.

I first became interested in radical political thought and leftist literature at some point after my experience living in New Orleans from 2004 to 2006, both before and after Hurricane Katrina. In a former life, before I came to the University of Miami, I was a student at Tulane University. It was the beginning of my sophomore year when Katrina devastated New Orleans. Being even a small part of one of America's worst human rights crises provided me a deep perspective into the way poverty, race, and government neglect function in this country. Maybe it is another case of liberal white guilt, I am not sure. I certainly did not suffer financially or physically from my experience. But to this day, I empathize deeply with those whose entire lives were wrecked and who still are suffering in the aftermath of Katrina.

When I started reading about the Jews coming to America at the turn of the century, something clicked for me. Of course I knew a great deal about the Holocaust. For the first time, though, I read extensively about the pogroms in Russia and about the struggle Jews faced upon arrival in the United States. Along with the Italians, the Poles, the Irish, and many other immigrant groups, most Jews were poor and, accordingly, were treated like the absolute scum of the universe. My parents are both highly educated, but I wanted to know what it was like for my great-grandparents who came to this country from Eastern Europe, who learned a new language, and who had to make their way from scratch in a very antagonistic environment. My teeny, miniature diaspora during Hurricane Katrina made me empathize with how immigrants were feeling when they had to pick up and leave everything they had known for centuries.

That, in a nutshell, is how I ended up here. My senior thesis (to graduate with Latin honors) is exploring the writings of radical Jewish women in America at the turn of the century. I am interested in examining how these young women adjusted to America--to a new language, a new culture, oppressive working conditions, to Christian moralizing--and figuring out why it is that Jews ultimately abandoned Yiddish culture and many of the ethical values and political ideals that came along with it. With some encouragement from my thesis adviser to look into Yiddish immersion programs, I found this place, applied at the absolute last possible minute, prostrated myself at the feet of my letter of recommendation writers and, well, here I am. At the Yiddish Book Center, I will be continuing my research and I hope to learn through their writing (fiction and memoirs) about the way Ashkenazi Jewish women were acclimating to the New World. Learning Yiddish will help me to eventually use primary sources rather than relying on translations or on the select few females publishing in English at that time.

The other students here are incredibly smart and interesting people who have extremely varied interests and perspectives. It has been only 3 days here in Amherst and I know that I am going to learn so much just from the other interns in this program. Their topics range far and wide in Yiddish culture: comparative studies of Yiddish foods, Jacob Adler's Yiddish portrayal of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Yiddish Linguistics, Klezmer and folk music, Czechoslovakian Jewish History, the perception of Jews in contemporary Poland, Indian-Jewish intermarriage, and so many more interesting and novel ideas. It is actually pretty intimidating. I am sure that I will have to pay tribute to the people I meet through this program in numerous individual blog entries at a later point.

This week was short, but hectic. It felt like freshman year of college all over again, in a way: I probably had to introduce myself about 30 times, at least. Now that we are all moved in and settled, the real work will begin. Next week we start our 2-week course in Yiddish cultural history with Professor David Shneer, who teaches History at the University of Denver. If you are interested in some of what we will be reading in this course, check out http://portfolio.du.edu/dshneer. Needless to say, I am very excited about this portion of the curriculum.

Now, though, it is the weekend. My suite mates and I are going to take some time out of this hectic week to explore "downtown" Amherst. Keep checking back for updates!

Leah

P.S. In case you are wondering, the word in the address of this blog, "zitsfleish" is a Yiddish word I learned somewhat recently. It means "perseverance," which is what I believe learning this language is going to take.