European Judaism

Now that this issue focusing on Yiddish is completed it seems obvious, at least in retrospect, that this was a relevant and important topic for a journal devoted to themes affecting Jewish life in Europe. This was not so self-evident when the idea began to emerge. An early impetus was the offering of an article some years ago by Haike Beruriah Wiegand, included here, on the writings of Isaac Bashevis Singer. At the time it seemed too specialised and lacking in a context, so it was held in reserve. Another impetus was hearing a lecture on the unexpected topic of ‘Yiddish Tango in Argentina’ by Lloica Czackis, included in this issue, accompanied by her own excellent performances of the songs. That in turn triggered many memories of performances of Yiddish songs in Germany by excellent singers and musicians as diverse as Daniel Kempin, Shura Lipovsky, Roswitha Dasch and Katharina Muetter, the former two Jewish, the latter not, all of whom have undertaken serious research into Yiddish culture and music, and brought commitment and learning, as well as great artistry, to their work. Suddenly the obviousness of the subject became apparent.

Whereas Yiddish flourished in France in the immediate post-war period, partly due to the influx of survivors from Poland and Lithuania, the failure to ensure transmission of Yiddish to the following generation led to a decline. From the 1970s a number of significant academic institutions and programmes were created and the Bibliotheque Medem became a centre of documentation and acquired the bibliographic collections of libraries that had closed. In 2002 the Maison de la Culture Yiddish-Bibliotheque Medem (MCY) was established with the task not only of preservation but also of creating cultural opportunities through projects including publications, adult and children's education, and through encouraging the use of the spoken language.

Using pre-war Poland as an example, Helen Beer describes the richness of Yiddish cultural life prior to the Holocaust. Upon briefly sketching aspects of the Yiddish-speaking world of our times, she illustrates the modern phenomenon of forging an allegiance to Yiddish without knowledge of the language. Beer argues that Yiddish without Yiddish is not an option and that the only means of sustaining and perpetuating the language and culture is by means of learning and using it.

This article discusses the importance of Yiddish for our understanding of European Jewish histories and highlights some of the particularities of using Yiddish materials in historical research and the problems involved in doing so. There is a wealth of Yiddish materials available for historians yet many sources still need to be catalogued and disclosed. At the same time it is often not easy for historians to acquire the necessary linguistic skills to use Yiddish sources in their research, both because of practical reasons and a lack of awareness of the specific linguistic needs of historians. Opening up the field of Yiddish to historians though is very important to understand the rich and varied histories of Europe's Jews better, particularly before the Holocaust.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Amsterdam functioned as the European printing centre of Yiddish books. Texts in the Ashkenazi vernacular were published in the city for the benefit of the local reading public, and these books were also distributed throughout the Ashkenazi diaspora, in central and eastern Europe. Two basic guidelines directed the work of Yiddish book agents in Amsterdam: printing was considered a service to Ashkenazim and their communities: nevertheless, printing of Yiddish books also needed to be a commercially sustainable project. Therefore, books dealing with religion, tradition and didactical literature comprised the majority of the printed output. These were considered as practical (printed in Yiddish for the benefit of the masses who could not read Hebrew) and thus their production also included a commercial logic. Between circa 1650 and 1800 more than 500 Yiddish books were published, including texts in various genres. The modernization process that encompassed Jewish communities in Western Europe also signalled the downfall of Yiddish book production in Amsterdam, and the end of a period of Yiddish literature composed and published in West Yiddish, a dialect that was pushed aside by the emerging Eastern European, modern, Yiddish.

Until 1940 Amsterdam had a significant and largely lower-class Jewish population. The Yiddish and Portuguese languages of this community melted with Dutch and immigrant influences into a specific Amsterdam Jewish dialect. This idiom had a considerable influence on the Dutch language, especially after the death of its speakers during World War Two.

This article deals with the secular Yiddish textbooks, which have not been a focus of research so far. Yiddish textbooks emerged in the twentieth century together with the Yiddish school system. Based on a comprehensive bibliography of Yiddish textbooks, the article traces the development of the Yiddish textbook, shows the most important phases and centres of the Yiddish textbook production, as well as its development due to historical-political changes. In many countries, those books have been produced independent of any governmental support or control and thus are primarily an image of the respective Yiddish-speaking community. As such, this paper will introduce the most important factors for creating an identity in the context of the textbooks, namely the Yiddish language, the Jewish religion and die alte heym. In the history of the Yiddish textbooks different target groups can be observed, including teachers and students learning Yiddish as a mother tongue, as a parallel or as a foreign language

This article presents an unknown Old-Eastern-Yiddish remedy-book (refue-bukh) with the Hebrew title Seyfer derekh ets ha-khayim, printed in 1613 in Poland. The only known copy was rediscovered in the Austrian National Library in Vienna some 10 years ago. The text is one of the earliest Eastern-Yiddish accounts of the Jewish community in Poland. The printing place of the book is unknown, as is the name of the author, who according to his own words was purposely writing in tajtsh so that everybody could use the remedies to save his health in order to praise and serve God. The anonymous author, however, refers directly to the surrounding Jewish Polish community. Not only does he use numerous Polish-derived plant, animal and disease names but also, surprisingly modern for his time, forms of Eastern-Yiddish syntactic and semantic structures. This old Yiddish book is an invaluable document of early Eastern-Yiddish linguistics, but even more interestingly it gives us insight into the everyday life of the pre-modern Jewish society in Poland. Seyfer derekh ets ha-khayim provides the reader with detailed prescriptions on dietary rules, hygienic and moral behaviour as well as floral and animal remedies for diseases that threatened the people in early modern Poland regardless of nationality or creed.

The 1920s saw the debut of a considerable number of female poets writing in Yiddish in Europe and the United States of America. This article briefly considers the emergence of modern Yiddish women's poetry, and the importance of Ezra Korman's Yidishe dikhterins, an anthology of their work published in Chicago in 1928, before turning to one of the poets represented there, Rokhl H. Korn. The article considers her unusual family background and upbringing on a farm in rural Poland, which fostered the development of her poetic talent. Through analysis of several significant poems, the character of her early work is revealed: a combination of deep empathy with the natural world, free expression of female sexuality, and a sensitive evocation of the lives and emotions of the people of her childhood village, both Poles and Jews. Her later poetry incorporates the Holocaust and the pain of exile, but the more controlled work of her maturity is rooted in the rich and passionate poetry of her youth. One of the leading female Yiddish lyric poets of the 20th century, Korn exemplifies the freedom to express individual creativity and female sensibility which women writers in Yiddish discovered in the inter-war years.

Singing in Yiddish about London: 1880-1940 is the story of six Yiddish songs that tell of mainly East End people and places and experiences; these snippets of history give insights into what was happening in London at the time. They tell of poverty and work, of street life and of love. They tell of characters; an old fiddler, a bagel seller, a prostitute. They tell of places, the Pavilion Theatre, Victoria Park, Morgan Street. They sparkle with life, whether deeply moving or comic. This article explores Jewish history through the songs, as well as exploring the history of the songs themselves. The songs were collected in Denmark, Canada, Germany, Liverpool and London. The article describes some of the people who sung them, who collected them and who wrote them. There is a lot unknown about the songs and why they were written, so there is much to conjecture by London Yiddishists and folk collectors. These answers throw more light onto the politics and issues of the day. Today these songs are being performed by Vivi Lachs and Klezmer Klub, a London-based band who are seeking to revive them and imbue in them a sense of their meaning for today.

The tango was born just before the turn of the twentieth century in Buenos Aires as the resulting blend of the cultures of Italian, Spanish, French and Eastern European Jewish immigrants and Afro-Argentine rhythms. In the 1910s the tango took Western Europe by storm, soon reaching Eastern Europe. Ballrooms and cabarets featured this Latin American import; composers, Jews amongst them, started to write new tangos. Inevitably, during the Holocaust tango became part of the life of ghettos and concentration camps, where it, now in Yiddish, was once again adopted as a vehicle to express the experience of inmates and their hopes for freedom. Not only did the Nazis allow this music, they forced Lagerkapellen, the camp orchestras, to play the Tango of Death to accompany prisoners as they were marched to the gas chambers. In different and happier circumstances, Jewish musicians living in Buenos Aires and New York – many of whom were émigrés – wrote Yiddish tangos for the Yiddish theatre, musicals and Jewish revues. The mixed nature of tango probably explains why it has been continuously embraced and transformed during its extraordinary voyage around the world. Yiddish tangos are only an episode in this chronicle, an example of the Jews' tendency to adapt to the ethos of their adoptive countries and also, more generally, the mutual acceptance and fruitful interaction between peoples.

Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel Di familye Mushkat (The Family Moskat) depicts the lives of three generations of a Polish-Jewish family and their associates from the early 1900s until 1939. Messianism and the unfulfilled hope for redemption constitute an important theme. Bashevis presents both the traditional Jewish belief in the coming of the Messiah and modern secular models of redemption. He leaves his readers with two possible solutions, reflected in the different endings of the Yiddish and the English editions. The English ends with a modern Jewish intellectual's resigned response to the impending catastrophe, seeing messianic redemption only in death. The Yiddish edition, whose final chapter the English omits, exposes all the new secular messiahs as failures and shows the validity of traditional Judaism despite the evil awaiting the Jews in Poland. In this novel, the dominant leitmotif is death. The descriptions of some of the protagonists' dying hours are replete with Kabbalistic images of the higher spheres and of 'sparks of holiness' scattered through the universe. In the face of death, in the last chapter of the Yiddish edition, the main protagonist of the novel discovers the power of the words of the Torah, from whose letters, according to Sefer Yetzirah, the world was created.

This article discusses an ambivalent portrayal of the shtetl presented in the prose works of five Yiddish writers who were creatively active in the communist Poland: Leyb Olitsky, Mendel Tempel, Shlomo Strauss-Marko, Lili Berger and Kalman Segal. The theme of the shtetl is of a particular importance in Yiddish literature of that time since it makes it possible to realize how difficult Yiddish writers' situation was under communism in the post-Holocaust era. The literary image of shtetl in their prose works is conditioned by two contrasting perspectives: ideological critique and a sense of loss. In comparison to the classic texts there is a substantial shift – the continuity of the shtetl life with the cycle of the holy history of the Jewish people is interrupted, and religion is substituted – at least ostensibly – by the ideology of communism. The writers criticize the traditional way of life, known as Yiddishkayt, the mentality associated with it, as well as the crisis of the moral value system. Nonetheless, as if in opposition to communist literary critics, all of them unanimously emphasize the values of the Jewish world that are worth remembering, such as the language, folklore, customs and traditions, and also domestic religious rituals, and even certain aspects of religion.

After a time of silence, Jewish identity often appeared to be reclaimed, or redefined, through connecting to Yiddish (folk-) song. Since Yiddish songs have become a kind of musical historic archive, Jews find in this repertoire different expressions of Jewish identity. They are able to embark on a joyful learning process as opposed to the sadness or silence they have been confronted with before. Meanwhile, the interest of non-Jews for this subject teaches them about a multi-faceted Jewish life, as opposed to only learning about the Shoah or the dramatic political struggles of Israel. This kind of cultural exploration becomes a strong tool for intercultural dialogue and peace. Both Jews and non-Jews participate in an inclusive learning-experience about a European Jewish heritage, which appears to be a discovery for both, on different levels. Depending on the choice of repertoire and a specific pedagogical approach, this particular way of learning appears to contribute to consciousness and universal thinking. The usual chauvinism that might result from reclaiming one's ethnic, cultural or religious identity does not seem to occur in this case. This article details Europe's quest for Yiddish culture after the Second World War and its consequences for Jewish and non-Jewish life today, seen through the eyes of a singer and pedagogue of Yiddish songs.

This article is an excerpt from my novel manuscript 'Lieberman'. Its plot concerns the assistant (Kunzman) to a literary critic (Lieberman) who suffers from the critic's dominance. After the critic's death, the assistant believes that he has been freed, finally, from the critic's influence. However, the critic's widow (Victoria) then asks him to complete an unfinished novel written by her late husband. The excerpt details the complicated literary relationship which existed between Lieberman and Kunzman while Lieberman was alive. Unlike Kunzman, who is more diplomatic, Lieberman pulls no punches in his approach to literary criticism. Often his reviews are punctuated with caustic Yiddish sayings or witticisms. If at first Lieberman seemed to disregard his assistant, Kunzman, the latter gradually achieved recognition on the part of his mentor. Sometimes, faced with Lieberman's response to a sin of commission or omission on his part, Kunzman wondered why he ever became a critic. Perhaps he did so because he fitted George Steiner's definition of a Jew as 'a man who reads a book with a pencil in his hand, covers it with comments and is convinced that he is able to write it better'. Lieberman, of course, would use a pen.

It is with great sadness that we record the death after a long illness, on 3 May 2009, of Mme Colette Kessler, one of the leading figures of liberal Judaism in France. She was above all a teacher and educator, responsible for developing the educational programmes at the Union Libéral Israélite (ULI) and subsequently the Mouvement Juif Libéral de France (MJLF) in Paris. But she was also dedicated to developing Jewish-Christian dialogue, participating in innumerable conferences, encounters, studies and religious services. She addressed the World Union for Progressive Judaism Conference in Paris in 1995 on ‘The Urgency of a Jewish Response in the Inter-religious Dialogue’ anticipating by five years the appearance in the United States of ‘Dabru Emet, A Jewish Statement about Christianity’.

David Roskies, Yiddishlands: A Memoir, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008, 235pp. ISBN: 978-0-8143-3397-6

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