The CANVAS Compendium: Dispatches from the New Jewish Renaissance
Too often our understanding of the Ashkenaz lingua franca (née mamaloshen) is clouded by borscht-colored glasses—kitschified, reduced to a few cutesy words that belie its important role in Jewish history and culture. For the CANVAS Compendium, we looked at two exhibitions—at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass, and at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City—that explore this protean language and provide a few lessons for the Jewish arts and culture of our day. —Ed.
The Yiddish Book Center’s Yiddish: A Global Culture
Book covers as banners and a Yiddish linotype press at the Yiddish Book Center. Photo: Ben Barnhart
By Lou Cove
One Sunday this past October, after months of being closed for renovations and installations, the Yiddish Book Center reopened to celebrate its new permanent exhibition, Yiddish: A Global Culture.
Although I live just a few miles from the Book Center, this was still something of a homecoming for me. The first time I walked into the Yiddish Book Center it was 1998, and I was visiting because I thought this curiously located repository would be of interest to my in-laws who were in town for the weekend.
But it was I who was changed by the discovery there of a modern Jewish renaissance—one that had flourished right up until I was born, but which no one had ever told me about. The visit exploded my thinking about Jewish creativity and set me on a course that continues to this day.
Improbably—at least for anyone who knew me then—I left my 10-year career in journalism to become Vice President of the Book Center in 2001. I spoke no Yiddish, I was suspicious of the pace and effectiveness of nonprofit workplaces, and I had never raised a dime. But I was alive with a passion for this Big Bang of Jewish creativity I had “discovered.” So I spent the next seven years working with a kinetic, multigenerational team to help rescue, preserve, digitize, translate, and celebrate modern Jewish culture. They were some of the most satisfying and productive years of my career.
Returning now, 15 years later, I found the new exhibition rekindled feelings of wonder and pride, and yet again reminded me how much we have to learn about where we have come from.
A new array of 16 gorgeously constructed sections invites visitors to explore every facet of Yiddishland. The exhibition draws deeply from the Book Center’s unparalleled collection: from “Bestsellers” to 500 years of “Women’s Voices”; “Soviet Yiddish” to “Press and Politics”; from “Modernism” to “Music.” It is a stunning tribute to the cultural outpouring of Jews, articulated in Yiddish—the language three quarters of the world’s Jews spoke before WWII (see Gordon’s piece, below, for more on this).
The newly constructed Peretz Salon is dedicated to the great writer widely credited with launching modern Yiddish literature. Above his portrait, the title of the display makes plain his significance: THE EPICENTER OF MODERN JEWISH CULTURE.
And just below, a reminder: Peretz also played a unique role as a mentor and guide. From 1891 until his death in 1915, he opened his Warsaw apartment on Shabbos afternoons to aspiring writers. Not just a literary gathering place but a laboratory of national renaissance, Peretz’s salon produced an explosion of creative energy that galvanized Yiddish culture for generations and continues to inspire contemporary writers and artists.
For Peretz, Yiddish was essential to that renaissance. It was also essential to more recent luminaries—the new theater display, erected within the Center’s Applebaum-Driker Theater, allows the visitor to access a number of oral histories. One features the legendary literary critic Harold Bloom. In it, he recalls the first Shakespeare play he ever saw, which was performed in Yiddish at the Second Avenue Theater.
“I will never forget my experience,” Bloom says. “This is about 1938 and I’m eight years old. The magnificent Maurice Schwartz is Shylock. But this has all been marvelously rewritten, in Yiddish—as they said, farbesert—‘improved.’”
I will never forget my first experience walking into the Book Center sixty years after Bloom saw The Merchant of Venice on Second Avenue. On that day, my Jewish identity was rekindled. It is hard to imagine improving on that experience, but that is precisely what the reimagining of Yiddish: A Global Culture achieves, and it makes me so hopeful and excited for future visitors who will discover, as I once did, a diasporic kaleidoscope of creativity that brings the past vividly back to life. The new exhibition captures the power of Jewish creativity to remind us who we are, where we’ve come from, and where we are headed.
It’s all been rewritten in English, but as they say in Yiddish, farbesert.
YIVO’s Palestinian Yiddish
Wounded Yiddishists after an attack by Hebrew language fanatics, Tel Aviv, 1928. Ilustrirte vokh, Warsaw, November 30, 1928. Credit: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
By Gordon Haber
We tend to associate Yiddish with Eastern Europe or Jewish enclaves of North American cities—even though back in the day you could find Yiddish anywhere you could find Ashkenazi Jews. One example is the Yishuv, or the Jewish community in Palestine before Israel was founded as a state. Our historical memory overwhelmingly associates the place with Hebrew; but Palestinian Yiddish, an exhibit at YIVO in New York City, reintroduces the visitor to this fascinating, ill-remembered chapter in the long history of Yiddish.
Palestinian Yiddish is a modest exhibit by design—it only takes up one room on the second floor of YIVO—but it’s bursting with history. The earliest document we have so far of Yiddish from the region is in five letters that ended up in the Cairo genizah. In the 1560s, one Rokhl Zusman wrote to her son Moyshe in Venice who, apparently, was not an enthusiastic correspondent. “God forgive you that you make me so sad,” Rokhl writes. “I hope to punish you before I die.”
From there the exhibit documents the vibrancy of Yiddish in the Yishuv as well as the many—and ultimately successful—attempts to suppress it in Israel. Despite its flexibility and usefulness, many Zionists equated the language with a kind of Diasporic weakness, with Hebrew the only proper tongue for the emancipated, self-actualized Jew. In terms of the former, the visitor can see rare treats from the YIVO archives—agricultural journals, literary anthologies, guides to the Holy Land and political tracts. As for the Hebrew advocates, there are also publications from the Gdud meginey hasafa, the Battalion of Language Defenders, an often violent group founded in 1922 to stop professors at Haifa Technion from teaching the sciences in German, and then to stop anybody from speaking and writing in any other language but Hebrew. As the exhibition explains, Gdud members “threw stinkbombs in theaters that showed Yiddish language performances, burned newsstands selling Yiddish publications, and attacked the meetings of Yiddish writers and journalists.”
I was curious about the title of the exhibit, which could seem confusing or inflammatory. The curator, Eddy Portnoy, told me it is borrowed from Mordecai Kosover’s 1966 book Palestinian Yiddish, a study of how Arabic influenced the Yiddish of the Yishuv, which grew out Kosover’s research in the 1920s and 30s.
“Before the state of Israel,” Portnoy reminded me, “both Jews and Arabs living under the British mandate referred to themselves as ‘Palestinians.’ Under that allegedly neutral third party, everyone who lived there was called ‘Palestinian.’”
The exhibit is a welcome window on Yiddish history. I wouldn’t say it was a simpler time, but it is a reminder of how fractiousness in the Holy Land preceded 1948. And it raises the question of how the culture of Israel might have been even richer—more farbesert—had it embraced Hebrew and Yiddish.
Featured image: The Yiddish Book Center’s recreation of I.L. Peretz’s Warsaw salon. Photo: Ben Barnhart.
For more on Jewish history and culture, see also From Assimilation to Reclamation: A Forward Writer on a Century of Jewish Arts and Culture.
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