Outwitting History (10 page)

Meanwhile, by the early twentieth century, serious Yiddish literature was enjoying a golden age in the
goldene medine,
the golden land. Bohemian literary groups such as Di Yunge, The Young Ones, renounced social protest in favor of more personal artistic expression, largely through poetry. Their experimental language, exotic forms, and art-for-art’s-sake philosophy made writers such as Mani Leib, Reuben Iceland, Moyshe Leib Halpern, Joseph Opatoshu, and David Ignatoff the “Beat Generation” of Yiddish letters. The
Inzikhistn,
or Introspectivist, movement
brought Yiddish poetry into the jazz age through the work of Jacob Glatstein, Aaron Glanz-Leyeles, N. B. Minkoff, and others.

As we opened the boxes, we were intrigued to see how many works were written by women. Rachel Luria and Fradel Stock wrote vivid, gritty stories of daily life. Kadya Molodowsky was active in Yiddish literary circles in Kiev and Warsaw before coming to America in 1935. Here she continued her work as a poet, novelist, and editor, expressing her concern for the oppressed, exposing the depredations of war, and later responding to the tragedy of the Holocaust. After the founding of Israel her odes to the Jewish homeland were sung in the streets of the new state.

As oppression and violence escalated in Europe, other established Yiddish prose writers—including Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, Lamed Shapiro, and I. J. Singer—fled to America, adding new momentum to an already teeming Yiddish literary life. They were joined after the war by Chaim Grade, Itzik Manger, Rokhl Korn, and dozens more.

For the most part, though, the accomplishments of American Yiddish literature lay more in poetry than in prose; when American Yiddish writers did write novels or stories, they usually set them in the Old Country. “The better Yiddish prose writers avoid writing about American Jewish life,” observed Isaac Bashevis Singer, who arrived in the country in 1935. “Yiddish words that each day smell more and more of the past and of otherworldliness cannot convey a lifestyle which hurtles forth with such extraordinary speed that even the rich and ever resilient English language can scarcely keep pace.”

Although Yiddish literature found its largest audience in America, until the outbreak of World War II its creative epicenter remained in Europe. In 1908 an international conference was convened in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now in western Ukraine), to discuss the role of
Yiddish in modern Jewish life. Among the seventy delegates were many of the greatest Yiddish writers and intellectuals of the day, including Nathan Birnbaum, Chaim Zhitlowsky, Jacob Gordin, David Pinski, Avrom Reisen, Sholem Asch, Hirsh Dovid Nomberg, and I. L. Peretz. Debate was spirited. “Yiddishists” wanted to recognize Yiddish as “
the
national language of the Jewish people,” whereas Hebraists and Zionists argued that Yiddish should be discarded. In the end cooler heads prevailed, and Yiddish was declared “
a
national language.” Although the Zionist leader Ahad Ha’am later characterized the conference as a “Purim
shpil
” (a farcical spectacle like those performed on the Jewish carnival day of Purim), others credited it with granting legitimacy to Yiddish, fostering new scholarship and literary creativity.

The peace treaty that ended the First World War granted special rights and protections to the ethnic minorities of Eastern Europe; for Yiddish-speaking Jews it seemed a godsend. Jewish political and intellectual life flourished, and hundreds of new Yiddish writers emerged. Even as anti-Semitism intensified, poverty deepened, and storm clouds gathered over Europe, a brilliant literary and cultural renaissance took place in the Jewish communities of Warsaw, Vilna, and other cities. Many of their titles featured imaginative design and typography, and when we opened boxes, we could usually count on finding at least some of these distinctive volumes inside.

It was the Holocaust, in the end, that sounded the death knell of Yiddish literature in Europe—and paradoxically gave rise to its most powerful expression. In the late 1930s, before the German invasion of Poland, the Yiddish poet Mordecai Gebirtig wrote with blood-chilling prescience:

Es brent, briderlekh, es brent!
Oy, undzer orem shtetl, nebekh, brent!
S’hobn shoyn di fayer-tsungen,
Dos gantse shtetl ayngeshlungen—
Un di beyze vintn hudzhen,
S’gantse shtetl brent.

On fire, brothers, it’s on fire!
Oh, our poor little village is on fire!
Tongues of flame are wildly leaping,
Through our town the flames are sweeping—
And the cruel winds keep it burning,
The whole town’s on fire.

Gebirtig went on to write powerful poems about the Holocaust until he, his wife, and two daughters were murdered by the Nazis in 1942. Of course, the consuming fire he foretold could not be extinguished, and as the horror unfolded, reportage and literary imagination, as much as armed struggle, became weapons of resistance.

In the Nazi-imposed ghettos of Lodz and Warsaw, the Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum handpicked a clandestine group of scholars, poets, playwrights, novelists, and journalists to chronicle daily life. Operating under the Hebrew code name
Oyneg Shabes
(The Joy of the Sabbath), they started out as social scientists, reporting in meticulous detail on everything from mail delivery to food and sanitation. But as conditions worsened, as starvation and disease ran rampant, as horrifying accounts came back from the death camps—and as it became clear that most of the ghetto’s inhabitants would not survive—many of the
Oyneg Shabes
chroniclers turned to literature, in both Yiddish and Hebrew, to better convey the unspeakable human tragedy taking place before their eyes. Before the ghetto was liquidated, they buried three separate caches of documents. Part of the first cache, packed into ten tin boxes, was recovered shortly after the war; and the second, sealed inside two aluminum milk cans, was found by Polish construction
workers in December 1950. The location of the third cache remains unknown.

In the Vilna ghetto young Jewish writers, including the Hebrew poet Abba Kovner and the Yiddish writer Avrom Sutzkever, played a central role in organizing a movement of armed resistance. Later they fled to the forests, where they fought on as partisans. In one poem, Sutzkever imagines the partisans melting the lead printing plates of the Talmud to forge their bullets. In another, one of my own favorites, he describes a young woman named Mira who continues to teach Yiddish literature to her students as the ghetto falls around them.

Immediately after the war, Jews in the displaced persons camps of Europe published firsthand Yiddish accounts. When they couldn’t find Hebrew type, as was often the case, they settled for what was at hand, transliterating their Yiddish memoirs and setting them in German or Polish fonts. Although the survivors eventually rebuilt their shattered lives, Yiddish writers continued for years to wrestle with the political and existential implications of the Nazis’ crimes. Among the most moving volumes we found were
yizkor bikher
(memorial books), massive compendia in which émigrés and survivors reconstructed their vanished hometowns through prose, photos, personal recollections, hand-drawn maps, and endless lists of names of those who died.

Of course, even without the depredations of the Holocaust it’s not clear that Yiddish would have prevailed as the spoken language of the majority of Jews. In interwar Poland, Yiddish was already losing ground against Polish as younger Jews acculturated. In Palestine and later in the State of Israel, Zionist ideology predicated itself on “negation of the
galut,
” rejection of the diaspora, leaving little room for Yiddish, a language redolent of Jewish marginality. In America, a land of unprecedented freedom and opportunity, Jews found tolerance for religious differences but not for differences of language or culture. Although a handful of writers continue even today to publish in Yiddish,
for the most part they are very old, and their remaining readers are few and far between. With one or two exceptions, there has never been a significant Yiddish writer born in America. Like it or not, Yiddish literature is finite, bound to a specific time and place.

But precisely because Yiddish literature
is
finite, it is enormously important, a link between one epoch of Jewish history and the next. Its world’s having been ferociously attacked and almost destroyed only serves to underscore its significance. The books we collect are the immediate intellectual antecedent of most contemporary Jews, able to tell us who we are and where we came from. Especially now, after the unspeakable horrors of the twentieth century, Yiddish literature endures as our last, best bridge across the abyss.

There was a Sisyphean dynamic to our work: The more books we collected, the more the word spread, and the more the word spread, the more books there were to collect. By midwinter of that first year on the road it was clear that immigrant Jews had been more avid readers than anyone imagined. Yiddish books were scattered in virtually every city in North America, and there was no way that we, a handful of young people with extremely limited resources, could collect them all on our own. We needed help! So I decided to organize a network of zamlers, volunteer book collectors, who would gather books in their own communities and ship them to our Massachusetts headquarters.

The idea was not without precedent. In the late nineteenth century the great Jewish historian Simon Dubnow issued an appeal for zamlers to round up communal records and other historical documents in the remote
shtetlekh
of the Russian Pale. These documents served as primary sources for Dubnow’s many books, including the
History of Jews in Russia and Poland
and
The World History of the Jewish People
. When the YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, was founded in Vilna in 1925, hundreds more zamlers answered the call, shipping bundles of documents to its archive. This ingathering continued until the Nazis invaded
Poland and seized the YIVO headquarters, hoping to use its extensive resources for their own racist research. Although many of YIVO’s scholars were forced to work for the Nazis, they did so with quiet courage, often risking their lives to smuggle documents out of the archives, to be reclaimed after the war. Were it not for those early zamlers—and the heroism of librarians and scholars, many of whom were killed—the documentary record of almost a thousand years of Jewish life in Eastern Europe would have been lost.

It was this
yikhes,
this model, that I had in mind when I drew up plans for a “second wave” of zamlers—this time to save Yiddish books. I spent several days with a typewriter, a T square, and a bottle of rubber cement, putting together a prototype Zamler’s Packet, a do-it-yourself kit containing posters, fill-in-the-blank press releases, shipping labels, and step-by-step instructions—in short, everything a volunteer would need to run a successful local Yiddish book drive. I borrowed money to have the packets printed, and then sent out letters and press releases in the hope of recruiting a small group of volunteers. The response was enthusiastic. People signed on all across North America. Some were elderly, others were young people who didn’t speak a word of Yiddish; but they were all grateful for the chance to
act,
to do something practical to reclaim a culture that was disappearing before their eyes.

In New York City, so many volunteered that I decided to call a meeting to coordinate their efforts. Stuart Schear, a recent graduate of Oberlin College who had been fielding calls for us as an assistant in the education department at the Workmen’s Circle, graciously agreed to serve as host. The Workmen’s Circle—or Arbeter Ring, as it’s known in Yiddish—is a fraternal organization deeply committed to Yiddish culture, and the use of their conference room lent a
hekhsher,
an imprimatur, a sense of historical connection, to the proceedings. The meeting took place at 7:30 on a Tuesday evening in early February of 1981.
The weather was windy and bitter cold, but that didn’t stop a dozen people from showing up. Several were in their early twenties: Stuart; Roger Mummert; Danny Soyer, another Oberlin graduate, who was now doing research on the Jewish labor movement; and one or two others. The rest were in their seventies and eighties. There was no one in between.

We started out with coffee and cookies, and then I called the meeting to order. “Since many of you will be working together here in New York, I’d like to go around the room and ask each of you to introduce yourselves.”

That was a mistake. Not for nothing are Jews called “a nation of priests.” Everyone had something to say. I was looking for names, and instead ended up with life stories. The most memorable was Mr. Berger, a dapper octogenarian who, in defiance of the howling weather outside, sported a dazzling suntan (as though he had just spent the day playing pinochle on Miami Beach), carried a pearl-handled walking stick, and wore a cream-colored linen suit, a silk shirt open at the neck, a straw cap, and shiny white loafers. Alas, for a man who positively radiated good health, he was utterly preoccupied with death.

“I’m here tonight,” he began when it was his turn to speak, “because my friends, the ones who really care about Yiddish, couldn’t make it. Do you know where my friends are tonight? They’re
toyt, geshtorbn, nayn eylen in drerd
(dead, deceased, nine cubits under the ground)! I’m here tonight to do the work they can no longer do themselves.”

It was an hour and a half before all twelve people at the table had had their chance to
davenen baym omed,
to take the floor and speak. I then stood up, told a bit about the Yiddish Book Center, outlined my plans for a network of volunteers in New York, and passed around Zamler’s Packets with freshly printed instructions, posters, and press releases.

“Now just one minute!” interrupted Mr. Berger. “I can see from these packets that you know all about marketing. If I ever need a good
public relations man I’ll be sure to call you. But let’s face facts, PR isn’t going to help us collect Yiddish books. The people with Yiddish books don’t read PR. In fact, they don’t read anything anymore! Do you know where the people with Yiddish books are now?”