Yiddish Literature

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Eric

Former Member
My last visit to Krak?w was indeed in 1981. So a lot must have changed. I shall come within a year or two.

Is Krzysztofory still a theatre or caf?? How many decent bookshops are there on the Rynek? There are many things I want to know, but coming to see them myself is by far the best way of doing so. To listen to the "hey now!" up on the twins towers of Kosciol Mariacki, and drink coffee in the Sukiennice, if it's still a caf?.

But the press has changed beyond all recognition. From the 1970s I remember the flimsy, four-page newspapers, filled mostly with dreary news (which was good Polish practice for me, nevertheless). To get some news about Solidarnosc and so on, I used to read the English "Dziennik Polski", the one then published in London, when I had returned to England.

But even in the 1970s, the Polish weekly cultural press, with a couple of good literary newspapers, was good. The fine art scene was very Western, modern and excellent. And seeing one of the original performances of "Umarla klasa" (The Dead Class) by Tadeusz Kantor was unforgettable.

So when I come to Krak?w again, it will be as much for Poylish as for Yiddish things.
 
T

the nice marmot

Reader
Glad to see this thread awokened by my generic little comment. Thanks, Eric, I will type those names into the search engines of my university library once my final exams are done. I'm pretty interested in so-called Yinglish as well, please recommend websites on the matter.

I read "The Dybbuk" by S. Ansky last week, a play. The interest was sparked by the little Yiddish spiel at the start of the Coen brothers great new film A Serious Man, in which a Dybbuk, a ghostly creature of hasidic Jewish folklore was mentioned. I liked it quite a lot, though as with quite a lot of world literature, many, many references flew over my head.
 
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ferns_dad

Guest
Well of course IB Singer.What a collection of stories! There's a pretty good dybbuk scene in the new Coen Brothers movie (A Serious Man)

But I think you should also include Jerzy Kosinski (whose "Painted Bird" shows just how primitive and awful life in country Poland was) and, Bruce Jay Freidman for some pretty hilarious stuff ( anyone read "Stern"? )
 
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Eric

Former Member
Never mind the Jews, Ferns Dad, what about the people who wrote or write serious literature in Yiddish? We can all go on about Jewish authors, filmmakers, comedians, etc., but Yiddish authors are so much more exclusive. People should not scrape too many Jewish barrels if they've never heard of I.J. Singer, Esther Kreitman, Mendele the Book Peddler, Sutzkever, Manger, Glatshteyn, Grade, etc.

Those who plumped for Israel as a spiritual home often rather neglected the large Yiddish literature. And most gentiles couldn't care less. So let's raise a glass to Yiddish literature, and hope it gets read.

When the word "hilarious" is used in the context of Yiddish, I reach for my gun. There is nothing worse than the condescending chortlings of Leon Rosten and others. Nobody sniggers at Swedish or Italian literature. So why should the Yiddish-speakers fall victim to snotty derision?
 
E

Eric

Former Member
Thanks, Mirabell.

Let's return to literature written originally in Yiddish. Has anyone read any in translation, and what did they think of it? Quite a lot, but not all, is about small Jewish towns, termed "shtetls", in Poland, Lithuania, Romania, Ukraine, etc., before Hitler wiped out most of the Jewish population there. Some is set in the USA. There is a lot about Jewish habits and customs, but the people described can vary from rich merchants to petty criminals. Poets, like Abraham Sutzkever, who fought in the guerrilla movement around Vilnius against the Nazis have a special take on the Holocaust. Other poets were murdered by Stalin, e.g. on the Night of the Murdered Poets. See:

Night of the Murdered Poets - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Wikipedia article on Yiddish literature in general contains a lot of names for the modern period, but as you can see from the names in red, there are relatively few entries for individual authors:

Yiddish literature - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

One Yiddish poet who lived in Britain for eleven years was Itzik Manger:

Itzik Manger - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And as I mentioned earlier, Esther Kreitman, the sister of Isaac Bashevis Singer lived through the Blitz in London in the early 1940s:

Esther Kreitman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There are lots of interesting, sometimes tragic, lives, even before you get down to reading the actual literature.

A very good novel I read, by Bashevis Singer himself, is "Shadows on the Hudson", (Shotns baym Hodson), which is available in Penguin. This is set in New York and Florida, not in a Polish shtetl.
 
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anchomal

Reader
I picked up a book in the library the other day, Yekl, a short novel written in the late 1800s, by Abraham Cahan. Haven't gotten around to reading it yet but I hope to get to it this weekend. Cahan definitely wrote in Yiddish, but I'm not sure if this particular book was originally written in Yiddish or English.
Also, there must be a lot of books by Sholem Aleichem (he of 'Fiddler On The Roof' fame) in print. Again, we're talking 19th century stuff, though. I don't know how much modern work is written in Yiddish.
 
pesahson

pesahson

Reader
I think Icchok Lejb Perec is also worth mentioning. He is considered a classic after all. And he bears the same name as Georges Perec, whose family has some Polish roots, so I've heard.
 
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Eric

Former Member
Anchomal, I hadn't actually heard of Cahan, but looking at the Wikipedia article, it would seem very likely that someone coming from Lithuania and being the editor for some 40 years of the leading Yiddish daily "Forverts" (nowadays: "The Jewish Daily Forverts" - now a weekly, despite its name), wrote that novel (published 1896) in Yiddish. That's the way it looks from that Wikipedia article:

Abraham Cahan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

He may have been proficient in English, but literature requires more than a passing knowledge of the new language, as can be seen by many authors (despite exceptions like Conrad and Nabokov) who wrote in their new, adopted language.
 
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Eric

Former Member
I just read in the Swiss daily Neue Z?rcher Zeitung (NZZ) that the major Yiddish poet Abraham (Avrom) Sutzkever has died:

Der Lyriker als Zeitzeuge (Kultur, Literatur, NZZ Online)

Abraham Sutzkever: In Memoriam*?*Content*?*Jewish Ideas Daily

Sutzkever, born in 1913, is perhaps the last major Yiddish poet that experienced WWII. He fought as a partisan against the Nazis in WWII (in the woods outside Vilnius). He experienced the horrors of the Vilne ghetto in that same city.

He was a witness at the Nuremberg Trials after WWI, but soon left the Soviet Union for Israel.

A parallel text volume of his poetry Yiddish-English is called "The Fiddle Rose":

Fiddle Rose: Poems 1970 to 1972 - a Bilingual Edition (paperback) by Abraham Sutzkever
 
O

obooki

Reader
Eric said:
Anchomal, I hadn't actually heard of Cahan, but looking at the Wikipedia article, it would seem very likely that someone coming from Lithuania and being the editor for some 40 years of the leading Yiddish daily "Forverts" (nowadays: "The Jewish Daily Forverts" - now a weekly, despite its name), wrote that novel (published 1896) in Yiddish. That's the way it looks from that Wikipedia article:

Abraham Cahan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

He may have been proficient in English, but literature requires more than a passing knowledge of the new language, as can be seen by many authors (despite exceptions like Conrad and Nabokov) who wrote in their new, adopted language.
Click to expand...

Actually, Cahan wrote Yekl - along with almost all his fictional works - in English. The Wikipedia article is very misleading, particularly the line "Cahan is regarded as having been one of America's preeminent Yiddish novelists, a language which was previously regarded as a somewhat uncultured jargon of the common folk", which is just plain untrue: he didn't ever write a novel in Yiddish.
 
E

Eric

Former Member
Well, if Cahan wrote mostly in English, as Obooki suggests, as did Anzia Yezierska, let's examine the ones who wrote in Yiddish and have had the luck to be translated into English. Like Sutzkever, who is very famous in Yiddish circles. It seems unfair somehow, that as soon as a Yiddish author goes over to English, he or she becomes world famous. But if he sticks to his mame-loshn (mother-tongue, to you) he never gets translated.

Continuing on the theme of Sutzkever, here's a short announcement from the Yiddish Book Center website:

Di festung (The Fortress): Sutzkever's collection of poems


On January 20, 2010, the Yiddish world lost a poet and hero. Born in 1913, Avrom Sutzkever spent his early childhood in Siberia and his youth in Vilna, where he belonged to the Yiddish writers' group Yung Vilne. During the Nazi occupation he used his forced labor detail to smuggle arms into the Vilna Ghetto and rare materials out of the YIVO archive, and documented the conditions of the ghetto in verse. After his escape to the partisans in 1943 he was airlifted to Moscow, and later testified at the Nuremberg trials. In 1947 he moved to Tel Aviv and founded the literary quarterly Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain, which he edited until 1995). His presence and his work brought new life to Yiddish in Israel, and he is the only Yiddish poet to have received the Israel Prize (1985). View Di festung and other books by Sutzkever in our digital library.
 
O

obooki

Reader
It seems unfair somehow, that as soon as a Yiddish author goes over to English, he or she becomes world famous. But if he sticks to his mame-loshn (mother-tongue, to you) he never gets translated.
Click to expand...

Except I B Singer, I suppose.

And, if you look through the 1930s - 1950s American best-seller lists according to Publishers' Weekly, you'll see that the name Sholem Asch crops up now and again. His works were written originally in Yiddish, translated into English and bought by millions of Americans.

Asch became far more famous than the man who'd first published him in Yiddish, who was - of course - Abraham Cahan.
 
L

lenz

Reader
Speaking of laughing at Yiddish humour - which can be hilarious, Eric - the basis of comic writing and performing, in North America, at any rate, is the humour of Jewish immigrants and Yiddish joke-making straight out the stetl. The American TV sitcom (not to mention radio before that) would not be in the form it has taken for the past 60 years or so without the direct influence of early vaudeville schtick and New York Yiddish theatre since the 19th c.. And where would we be without sitcoms? Makes you think...
I agree with you about Leo Rosten and that kind of (there must be a yiddish word for it) . . . complacent cuteness. But, if something strikes you as funny, Eric, it's ok to let a low chortle escape your teeth.
 
E

Eric

Former Member
Please, please, no more Yiddish-American humour! Yiddish humour of the Leo Rosten type has smothered a serious appreciation of Yiddish literature and left the world with a lot of funny Yiddish words spelt in a German (as opposed to YIVO) way when transliterated, plus even more nagging mothers who spoil their fat clumsy little boys something terrible. Clich? and stereotypes are funny - but let's move on.

As I have said elsewhere, if you removed all the comedians with a Jewish background from the USA, America would be terribly straitlaced. (I am not well versed in Amish humour, or that of the Mormons or Michigan Swedes, I'm afraid.) But I feel that the time is now ripe, decades after the Holocaust, to look at the whole breadth of Yiddish literature (the serious stuff) as something on a par with Czech, Polish, Lithuanian and other moderately-sized European literatures, in amongst which Yiddish literature lived. (Kafka was a fan of the Yiddish theatre.)

Bashevis Singer may have written some of his later works in English, or have them translated by relatives of friends. Correct me if I'm wrong. I feel it would be nice if the Americans or British started a series of Yiddish modern classics, in the same way that the Vassallucci publishing house did in the Netherlands for Dutch translations in the 1990s.
 
E

Eric

Former Member
This isn't much of a thread, as even those who claim some sympathy with Jewish literature, whether on account of taste or provenance, don't seem to warm to anything written in Yiddish.

The Zionists and Haskalah Jews who favoured the Enlightenment to obscurantism and Hassidism, did, of course gravitate towards Hebrew. But Yiddish, once the language of kitchen maids and errand boys, did actually acquire a literary pedigree.

I found an excellent book in the library that demonstrates this fact and runs through the history of Yiddish literature: A History of Yiddish Literature, (author) Sol Liptzin, Jonathan David Publishers, New York, 1972. This book is straightforward and chronological, covering the history of Yiddish literature, mostly from the 19th century onwards, over some 500 pages. It not only covers Lithuania, Poland and the USA, but also Yiddish literature written in Russia, South Africa, Latin America, Galicia, Romania, and Australia.

We tend to think of Yiddish as something from pre-Holocaust Europe. But I read in this book that there were some 3 million Yiddish speakers living in the USA in 1917.

How much of this all will ever be translated (or is worth translating) into English is anyone's guess. But I reckon that there are still a few nuggets to be found amongst the dross.

I would argue that if we can read endless English novels where the Church of England features large, although nowadays it is almost a spent force and most people in the UK are secular, we can also read and try to understand the Jewish aspirations of that same century, and the early 20th. You don't have to be a Jew to be interested in Yiddish literature, just like you don't have to be Russian to read Dostoevsky, or English to read Jane Austen.
 
pesahson

pesahson

Reader
For anyone who would like to read some Yiddish, here's a link to a magazine, based in France - Der Yiddisher Tam Tam. The magazine is available online for free. Great stuff.
Tam Tam

Edit:

That reminded me that Assimil published self teach book for Yiddish. It's quite uncommon for a publishing house that specialises in modern languages to have that:
Assimil Yiddish
Judging by the way other Assimil books look like, I'm sure it teaches Yiddish as a living, changing language.
 
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