Dear Colleagues and Friends of The Posen Library,
Last month, just as the world was beginning to undergo an unprecedented crisis, Crisis and Creativity between World Wars, 1918-1939, Volume 8 of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization edited by Todd M. Endelman and Zvi Gitelman, arrived at my doorstep. Todd and Zvi have amassed a rich collection of hitherto inaccessible texts that beckon.
These wonderful resources entice time travel to another era to enter an extraordinarily contentious Jewish world. They are a perfect escape from sheltering in place.
One of my current favorites takes me back to August 1935 through a verbatim account of two sessions of a conference in Vilna (then Poland, now Lithuania), on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of YIVO (acronym for Yidisher Visenshaftlicher Institut or Yiddish Scientific Institute, now called YIVO Institute for Jewish Research). The in-person discussions range widely across varied topics—from assessments of the meaning of Jewish emancipation to arguments about language.
While you might consider language debates over Yiddish versus Hebrew versus Polish esoteric, these are anything but. Vera Szabo’s superb translation conveys the speakers’ pungent Yiddish.
Here is Y. Shargel from Haifa: “I ask that my words not be interpreted as hatred of the country where I come from.” After that auspicious beginning, he continues: “I have come on a pilgrimage from Jerusalem to the Jerusalem of Lithuania in order to be rejuvenated, to gain strength, to absorb the atmosphere of this illustrious gathering of Yiddish scholars, writers, and cultural activists about which I have been dreaming for so long.”
I would add an exclamation point there. What a window on diaspora-land of Israel relations! He goes on (remember his initial declaimer):
I come from a land where one can be beaten bloody just for speaking Yiddish in public. I come from a land where the bosom buddies of our American friends . . . the Histadrut [the General Organization of Workers in Israel], passed a law saying that two years after their arrival to the country workers are forbidden to utter a single word in Yiddish, not even if they come to ask for a day of work. I come from a land where one of the most important workers’ leaders, Y[Itzhak] Ben-Zvi, justified a pogrom carried out at a movie theater just because some Yiddish songs had been sung there.
What a trip! But there’s more.
Shargel was not the only one wielding rhetoric that day. Y. Shapiro from Vilna observed: “The demands made on YIVO remind me of the demands made by out-of-town in-laws at a wedding where they did not receive the appropriate honor.”
 | Henryk Berlewi’s cover for an issue of Albatros, a multilingual modernist journal, presents a visual accompaniment to YIVO’s debates. Albatros integrated "poetic, publicist, graphic and typographic values" as quoted in Literary Passports by Shachar Pinsker. Image courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. |
Check out the rest of the proceedings on the Posen Digital Library to spend more time in the vibrant, feisty world of Yiddish scholars. It is a welcome break from COVID-19 and offers insight into how Jews responded to an earlier era of crisis. We have made the text of both sessions available for anyone to read. You don’t even have to register to read it. But of course when you do register you will be able to browse thousands of selections just as intriguing —and all for free.
Zei gezunt,
Deborah Dash Moore
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