Yiddish Book Center
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פֿרישע נײַעס Now
Tsukunft: The Future | Our 50th Anniversary Campaign
On View | Yiddish: A Global Culture
Bronx Bohemians Blog
Book Talk | Anita Norich in conversation with Lisa Newman | Sunday, September 15 @ 2:00 p.m. ET at the Yiddish Book Center & streamed live via Zoom.
The Shmooze: The Book of Izzy
Donor Profile: Helen Pollack
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Focus On Rokhl Korn
It’s striking how many Yiddish writers didn’t start out writing in Yiddish. In some cases they began in Hebrew, inspired by the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment movement. In other instances they began in non-Jewish languages, like Russian or Polish. Sometimes they weren’t Yiddish speakers at all and only learned the language as adults in order to write in it. That was the case with the poet Rokhl Korn, who passed away on September 9, 1982. Born on January 15, 1898, on a farm in Galicia, Korn first wrote in Polish before switching to Yiddish after the First World War. She survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union before making her way to Montreal, Canada, where she lived the rest of her life. In honor of one of the great postwar Yiddish poets, let’s take a look at some of Korn’s work.
אויסגעקליבן Handpicked Brianna Burdetsky
Each month, the Yiddish Book Center asks a member of our staff or a friend to select favorite stories, books, interviews, or articles from our online collections. This month, we’re excited to share with you picks by Brianna Burdetsky, the development assistant at the Yiddish Book Center.
Vegn altyidishn roman un novele: fertsnṭer-zekhtsnter yorhundert, by Max Erik
This work is notable for being one of the few book-length studies of Old Yiddish literature written in Yiddish. Erik begins with a general overview of Yiddish literature in the 14th to 16th centuries before moving on to discuss specific works. It remains a unique gem of Yiddish-language scholarship.
Elye bokher: poeṭishe shafungen in yidish, by Elia Levita
While much of early Yiddish literature was anonymously authored, Elye Bokher stands out as a famous individual personality in Yiddish history at this period. He was a writer of romance, short poetry, and grammars, and this book contains a facsimile of the original 1541 printing of his most famous work, Bovo d’Antona, also known as the Bovo-bukh.
Social History of the Jews in Medieval Europe
Leonard Glick was a cultural anthropologist and professor at Hampshire College. This lecture on Jewish civilization in medieval Europe was delivered as part of the Center’s summer program in 1999. What is more remarkable to me than its content is the lecture’s place in the history of the Center’s education program. Most educational programs for Yiddish students tend to focus on the 19th century onward, though I would personally love to see more emphasis on the early history of the language and its literature.
“Fir lider in altyidishn loshn,” by Abraham Sutzkever
If I had to pick a favorite modern Yiddish writer, it would be Sutzkever. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that his poetry resonates with me—as a young man, he studied the early history of the Yiddish language under Max Weinreich, and this experience was influential on his early creative work. Today, the only remaining piece of Sutzkever’s engagement with Old Yiddish is his “Fir lider in altyidishn loshn,” a cycle of four short poems in which he experimented with the style and vocabulary of Old Yiddish poetry.
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