Even as the story of early 20th century American Yiddish culture awaits adequate scholarly treatment, Noah Steinberg’s Yung amerike (“Young America”) is an essential work for those seeking entry into this too-frequently forgotten cultural realm. Steinberg offers a mixture of personal reflection and literary critique, focusing on the generation of Yiddish writers known as Di yunge – “the young ones.” Including Dovid Ignatov, Zishe Landoy, Mani Leyb, Moyshe Nadir, H. Leyvik, Joseph Opatoshu, and Moyshe Leyb Halpern, di yunge arrived to America’s shores at the turn of the century right on the cultural, linguistic, and religious thresholds of modernity. These writers found in the new Yiddish literature a means of exploring the individual experience in all of its mundaneness, rather than proclaiming the proletarian, sweatshop ideologies of the masses. Even though di yunge would come under attack from subsequent literati for what Yankev Glatstheyn termed their self-satisfied “thoughtlessness and contentlessness”, di yunge did much to make Yiddish literature and culture cosmopolitan, most notably through their refinement of classical poetic forms and translations of world poetry into Yiddish.

Steinberg sometimes lapses into what one Menorah Journal reviewer called “sycophantic admiration and all the abuses of the newspaper interview at its worst.” But he has also favored us here with some doses of trenchant literary criticism, thus making his study an important companion volume to the handful of anthologies of American Yiddish poetry and prose.

The 1908 Yiddish Language Conference held in Czernowitz looms large in the history of Yiddishism. This gathering of leading Jewish intelligentsia, among them Nathan Birnbaum, Chaim Zhitlowsky, Esther Frumkin, and I. L. Peretz, is widely remembered as an auspicious moment in the development of secular Yiddish culture into a movement that would transcend the bitter polemics of Zionism, Socialism, Bundism and other factions. The “spirit of Czernowitz,” according to Zhitlowsky’s later reflections, marked a critical step that laid the foundation for the triumphs of Yiddish in the next decades: the creation of YIVO in 1925, the flowering of Yiddish literature and scholarship in interwar Poland, and the creation of secular Yiddish schools in America.

While the retrospective value of the Conference is clear - it put Yiddishism on the map, as it were – a look at the Conference itself suggests otherwise. YIVO’s 1931 anthology reveals the proceedings to be beset by the thorny question of whether Yiddish was “a” or “the” national language of the Jewish people (“a” was finally decided upon), with little to no concrete resolution of other items, such as the need for a modern Yiddish translation of the Bible or the prospects for the future of Yiddish orthography. In addition to detailed accounts of the proceedings, this anthology also gathers articles from the press, as well as philologist Matthias Mieses’ stirring lecture in defense of the Yiddish language. Especially as virtually no primary documents from the Conference remain, Di ershte yidishe shprakh konferents is an important resource for anyone interested in demystifying those several days in Czernowitz and understanding why they hold so much romantic appeal in popular histories of Yiddishism as a milestone for the language.

Y.Y. Trunk’s 7-volume Poland: Memories and Images is considered one of the most important memoirs of Jewish life in Poland. Trunk began chronicling his life, and the life of Jews in Poland, two days after his arrival in the United States in March 1941. He knew that Europe’s Jews were facing an unimaginable disaster, and his book has been called a “portable literary gravestone for a destroyed community.”

The volume Kinder-yorn (Childhood Years) exists as a Yiddish-language audiobook produced by the Yiddish Book Center and the Jewish Public Library of Montreal. This fruitful collaboration continues, as two Yiddish Book Center Fellows just returned from Montreal with another 200 Yiddish audiobooks on tape, which will soon be digitized and made available for free online! Poyln has also been translated into English and published by the Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada.  

Der purim-ber is a play for children in three acts by Der Tunkeler, published in Odessa in 1919. The 34-page-long play tells the story of little Yosele, the rabbi’s son, who meets a talking bear in the forest. 

Der Tunkeler (The Dark One) was a pen name used by the well-known Yiddish writer of poetry and humorous prose, Yosef Tunkel (1881–1949). Born in Belarus to a poor family, Tunkel was a sickly child with a gift for drawing. The community sponsored his education at a Vilnius art school, and Tunkel went on to travel to America, where he founded Der kibitzer — later Der groyser kundes— perhaps the most significant Yiddish humor magazine of all time.