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Black History and Yiddish Literatureשוואַרץ ווי איך
Given Yiddish literature's long connection with movements for social justice and civil rights, it should come as no surprise that our collection at the Book Center is replete with works devoted to Black America and the struggle for equality and human dignity. In honor of Black History Month, we'll look at four treasures from our book repository in which Yiddish writers explore their relation to African American culture. In 1934, the International Workers Order (IWO) published די נעגער אין אַמעריקע [Negroes in America], the final work of its active member and writer, Dovid Sigel. The IWO was a communist organization that split off from the אַרבעטער־רינג [Workmen's Circle] in 1930. Like Workmen's Circle, the IWO provided low-cost insurance to its membership and ran a wide range of cultural activities including a secular Yiddish school system. Before its steady decling after its 1947 appearance on the attorney general's list of subversive organizations, the IWO had roughly 200,000 members. The Book Center has collected nearly 50 titles published by the IWO. These include children's books, literary criticism, poetry, and works devoted to the historical and social dimensions of the working classes in the United States and throughout the world. Dovid Sigel's 128-page monograph is a sweeping radical history of Black America, beginning in the first chapter with the horrors of the middle passage, "ווי אַזוי די נעגער זײַנען געקומען קיין אַמעריקע [How Negroes Came to America]," and ending with a discussion of the situation of the Black diaspora in the mid-1930s, an analysis of "אַפֿריקע – דער קאָנטינענט פֿון אימפּעריאַליסטישן רויב [Africa: Continent of Imperialist Plunder]."
Among the many pamphlets Novick published through Morgn Frayhayt's press is one written in reaction to the August 1965 Watts Riots in Los Angeles, די ראָל פֿון ייִדן אין די נעגער־קאַמפֿן [The Role of Jews in Negro Struggles]. The pamphlet compares the economic and physical oppression of African Americans in the United States to the oppression of Jews in Europe, with emphasis on the institutionalized violence and brutality displayed by both the L.A.P.D. and Russian pogromists. The International Workers Order was more radical than the Workmen's Circle, but both organizations took as a central tenet the struggle for "Negro Rights." In 1939, the children's publishing branch of the Workmen's Circle brought out Yankev Krepliak's book שוואַרץ און ווײַס [Black and White], an illustration from the book is on the top left of this page. This puzzling little book for small children takes on the story of Jimmy (African American) and Davy (white and Jewish), two New York kids brought together by an act of violence. Instead of the two boys being united by their shared status as oppressed minorities, the two boys are joined by Davy's attack on the much younger Jimmy. The book ends as Davy is forced to confront whether his assault on the smaller child was an act of racism. One rare volume in the Book Center's collection is דאָס געזאַנג פֿון נעגער־פֿאָלק [The Song of the Negro People], published by Zishe Bagish in 1936. Bagish was a Łódź-born poet and translator who settled in Bucharest during the 1930s. Only 500 copies of The Song of the Negro People were ever published. In 1939, Bagish moved to Białystok, where he was eventually interned in the ghetto; in 1944 he was murdered at Birkenau. Bagish's 48-page volume is half a collection of what the author calls "poetic re-workings" of Langston Hughes's poetry and half a compilation of Yiddish translations of "Negro spirituals." Bagish's renditions of Hughes's poetry are especially striking because they are beautifully written, taking on a new resonance in Yiddish. This is especially true in Bagish's translation of Hughes's "Dream Variations," in which the transformation of the famous verse "Black like me" into the Yiddish "shvarts vi ikh," simultaneously universalizes the poem and specifically links it to the Jewish experience.
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| The National Yiddish Book Center Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Building • 1021 West Street • Amherst MA 01002 • Phone 413-256-4900 • Fax 413-256-4700 • Contact |
Although the IWO had ceased operating by 1956, the communist newpaper, Morgn Frayhayt continued to publish its daily edition and run a publishing house until 1988. Paul Novick, Morgn Frayhayt's editor from 1939 on, was a tireless activist of the Jewish Left. One of the founders of the IWO, Novick also was on the editorial board of nearly all the major communist newspapers and journals in New York. He was a pedagogue for the IWO schools, a member of the Proletpen radical Jewish writers group and the organization’s cultural attaché to the Soviet Union.