April 2021: Handpicked

Lisa Newman is the Yiddish Book Center’s director of publishing and public programs, co-editor of Pakn Treger, and host of The Shmooze. As a non-Yiddish speaker, she's constantly scouring our website for English-language recordings, lectures, articles, oral histories, and other materials that open up the culture and provide background for her work. She chose to theme her selections for this month around our Decade of Discovery theme for 2021, Yiddish and Social Justice. "I began searching our collections for content and was surprised by what I found," she tells us. "I’m continuing to mine the collections—and learning that there’s so much to discover and consider."

After delving into her selections, scroll down to read a short interview with Lisa about her choices.

Reading Yiddish Literature in a Time of National Reckoning, A Panel Discussion Moderated by Rachel Rubinstein

This discussion reveals how Yiddish writers grappled with racial injustice in America—taking on slavery, lynching, segregation, and everyday casual racism as literary subjects.

Gerechtigkeit—Fifty Years of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union Membership Newspaper

This collection of the weekly journal Justice was published by the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), which was founded in 1900 and was one of the largest labor unions in the US and one of the first with a primarily female membership. I'm eager for scholars and translators to access this trove—for those of us who can't read Justice in the original Yiddish.

Yiddish Rebelliousness, Pleasure, Corporeality of the Past

I recently watched our Great Jewish Books Lecture on Yiddish women poets by Dr. Zohar Weiman-Kelman, and following the lecture I sought out their oral history interview to learn more about their work.

Di yunge—A Group of American-Jewish Literary Rebels

I'm always curious to learn more about the 'rebels' of Yiddish literature so I was excited to find this talk in English by Ruth Wisse in our Frances Brandt Online Yiddish Audio Library. The talk is full of rich detail about the writers and their world, and how it informed their work—and one gets a sense of how they wrestled with and debated about their writing.

Pogrom Literature and Collective Memory

Former Yiddish Book Center fellow Sarah Quiat's article about Rokhl Faygnberg's "A pinkes fun a toyter shtot (khurbn
dubove) / Chronicle of a Dead City: The Destruction of Dubove" recalls a devastating 1919 pogrom in Dubove community. Sarah's article touches on so many aspects of history, memoir, and, as she notes, collective memory.

Q&A

Lisa Newman talks to the Yiddish Book Center's communications editor, Faune Albert, about her Handpicked choices:

Faune Albert: The panel discussion on race and Yiddish literature was such an insightful and thought-provoking conversation. What were some of your biggest takeaways from that program or questions it left you with?

Lisa Newman: I was reminded that Yiddish literature found an audience of readers around the globe and, as is the case for literature and journalism, work was often written in response to contemporary issues. I was fascinated by Alyssa Quint's presentation about Polish Yiddish writer Leyb Malakh's play Mississippi—not only the subject of the play but also the staging notes for the play that Alyssa brought to light. She described an acclaimed 1935 Warsaw production in which "actors representing white characters stood on higher platforms than actors representing black characters, to emphasize their fatal inequality in American society." And while all the works that were discussed were challenging to listen to in translation, they bore out the fact that Yiddish writers wrote and grappled with the same issues of injustice that writers in other languages tackled.

FA: You mention that you really get a sense from Ruth Wisse's talk on Di yunge how these writers, these literary rebels, debated about and wrestled with their writing. I'm wondering if you can say more on that? What were some of the major issues they debated about or wrestled with?

LN: I guess I was struck by the ways in which these young writers identified with and wrote in response to the various literary movements of their times. They debated modernism vs romanticism, worked collectively to evolve their writing within new constructs, and created work in response to the new world in which they found themselves—a place with new challenges and new opportunities that informed and populated their work.

FA: Sarah Quiat's piece on Rokhl Faygnberg is really powerful, and thinking about it in the context of your selections as connected to the Yiddish and Social Justice Decade of Discovery theme is also interesting. Can we understand the work of preserving history that might otherwise be lost as a kind of social justice work?

LN: Interesting question. I'm not sure I'd suggest that the work was a kind of social justice, rather that it was written as a way to document or process events that impacted the writer. And through the writing the reader becomes aware of that 'history,' those events that shaped and impacted the time. And by chronicling those events, yes, the writer is preserving that history, but I'm not sure that's at the core of why the work was written. Reading backwards as it were is always so different because you can see the history from reverse.

FA: I love this clip that you've selected from Zohar Weiman-Kelman and the way they talk about recognizing the corporeality of the past and taking pleasure in the past (whether that be an erotic or an aesthetic kind of pleasure). It's a different way of relating to history than many people are used to, I think. Are there particular elements of Yiddish culture for you that bring you pleasure, in an aesthetic kind of sense?

LN: Agree, it was a really interesting way to frame the idea. It made me think differently—and for me that's always a welcome opportunity. The illustrations and artwork in Yiddish books and Yiddish culture more broadly always grab my attention; I'm amazed at the collaborations between the writers and the artists and the resulting works. 

FA: The Yiddish newspapers! Eddy Portnoy also recommended those in his selections a few months ago. So, an imaginative exercise: if you were editor of that weekly journal for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and could choose one selection from the Center's various collections to include, what would it be and why?

LN: Well, let's start with the fact that I'm not a Yiddish speaker so I can't read the papers . . . but I recognize their importance and continue to hope that someday I can read these in translation. Hmmm, so with that said—I imagine I'd opt to include a song of protest from one of our pieces of sheet music. Something that speaks to the collective voice of protest and the long history of Yiddish songs related to social justice and protest—many of which I'm looking forward to hearing at this year's virtual Yidstock, which is tied to this year's Decade of Discovery theme, Yiddish and Social Justice.