Yiddish Book Center

To watch one brilliant light of Yiddish and Jewish studies, Binyomin Harshav, who has inspired so many students, discuss how the great poet Moyshe Kulbak inspired him as a student in Vilne—it doesn’t get better.

Sh. Ansky, most famous for his play The Dybbuk, wrote two novellas based on his own adolescent experience of becoming a Maskil, an adherent of the Jewish enlightenment, and his early—mostly failed—attempts to bring modern thought and science to the Jewish shtetl. I love imagining the elegant Ansky as this gangly youth, uncomfortable in his short coat.

Melekh Ravitch’s four volume series, My Lexicon, offers “intimate portraits,” in his words, of basically every person Ravitch knew who was involved with Yiddish culture. Published beginning in 1945, the volumes are a very personal and at the same time exhaustive memorial to pre-war Yiddish culture. The portraits of Yiddish writers in Poland contained in the first volume offer the kind of idiosyncratic details so often lost in scholarly biography. For example, my favorite portrait, of Ravitch’s close friend Alter Kacyzne, teases the subject mercilessly for his vegetarianism—even though Ravitch himself was also a vegetarian.

Tabachnik recorded a number of conversations with Yiddish poets and writers in the 1950s, in which they also read a number of their works. The recordings are full of the background noises of the New York neighborhood where the conversations take place, it makes you feel like you’re sitting there with them.