Plants! and other Science Texts

The Book Center's collection has many science texts and manuals in Yiddish. Here are several from our collection:

Plants: Textbook for the Yiddish Schools
Collection Manager Aaron Rubinstein has this to say about Abraham Golomb's Plants: Textbook for the Yiddish Schools / Geviksn: lernbukh far Yidishe shuln: "Plants is one of my favorite books even though I can't keep a houseplant alive for more than a couple of weeks! For Golomb, Yiddish was a language of everything. There's a perfectly good Yiddish word for even the most minute aspects of plant anatomy." Published in Warsaw and Mexico from 1922 through 1947, this illustrated text contains a Yiddish-Russian-Polish glossary in the back, and is proof of the vitality of Yiddish before and after the Second World War.

Yashunki's Nature and Culture
“Engineer Joseph Yashunski loved to know.” This is the opening sentence of a short biography of the scientist, editor, and journalist written by Yiddish poet Melekh Ravitch. Yashunski’s widely read columns in the interwar European Yiddish press covered every aspect of modern life. His legacy, however, is Natur un kultur / Nature and Culture, a series of books on popular science translated into Yiddish. The 18-volume set covers a range of topics, including Aeroplan / Aeroplane (pictured at left), published in Warsaw, 1929.

How Things Work: Popular Books in Natural Science
Aaron David Bernstein's series, Popular Books on Natural Science, was wildly successful in Germany in the 1800s. When a 21-volume Yiddish edition was published (London, 1909-1914), it became one of the most popular Yiddish books ever printed in England. According to the introduction, "In these times... we are starting to look around ourselves and wonder how things work."