August 2024: Handpicked
Each month we ask a member of our staff or a special friend to select favorite stories, books, interviews, or articles from our online collections. This month’s picks are by Grisha Leyfer.
Grisha Leyfer is the 2023–24 digital collections fellow at the Yiddish Book Center. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a BA in linguistics and a BS in sustainable community development. He has studied Yiddish with YIVO, the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages, the Workers’ Circle, and the Steiner Summer Yiddish Program.
An Oral History Interview with Sergo Bengelsdorf
In this clip, Sergo Bengelsdorf recalls his childhood home in Birobidzhan, the capital of the USSR’s Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR). Before the Stalinist purges swept up practically the entirety of the JAR’s creative class—including Sergo’s mother, the Yiddish poet Lyuba Vasserman, who spent seven years in a gulag—Sergo’s home was a literary hub renowned just as much for Lyuba’s gefilte fish as for the creativity that flourished there. I’ve always been really taken by the idea of a literary salon. It lends the grounded gravity of the private domestic space to the constellation of creative talent that surrounds it and makes the art of hosting just as indispensable to an artistic movement as the less ephemeral works it produces.
As for Sergo himself, he went on to become an accomplished pianist, which is foreshadowed in this clip. This clip also opens the Wexler Oral History Project’s Birobidzhan entry in the Jewish Neighborhoods series, which features five more clips about life and culture in the Autonomous Region.
Whistling Concerts by Jack Cohen
Jack Cohen was a successful plastic surgeon by day, dedicating his evenings to his secondary career as a professional whistler. One can imagine how much breath control was required for an hour-long whistling concert—in fact, you can hear Jack taking deep breaths on the recordings. Jack performs both classical pieces, many originally written for flute, and a number of Yiddish songs, including a rendition of “Dos fertsnte yor iz ongekumen”—appropriately enough for the 75th anniversary of the library’s opening in 1914—that’s quite different from any rendition I’ve heard. These concerts offer not only a tantalizing glimpse into the world of professional whistling—in which Dr. Cohen, apparently, has recently successfully competed in an annual “whistle-off”—but also into the world of Yiddish Montreal in the late 20th century. As on many recordings, you can hear the audience chatting and milling about in the first few seconds. This, to me, gives this collection of tapes a charm akin to the unique sensory pleasure of an old book.
Listen to a 1987 whistling concert by Jack Cohen
Listen to a 1989 whistling concert by Jack Cohen
Allen Moore: Architect
On the fellows’ first week on the job, Ollie Schmith, the Yiddish Book Center’s facilities manager, told us that in all his years of working here, he’s never fallen out of love with the building. Every day when he arrives, he greets it: “Good morning, beautiful.” Is it difficult to understand why? The ten-acre apple orchard it’s located on is framed by mountains that burn up with the famous New England foliage in the fall and can make even frozen-over sleet look beautiful. When I first visited the Yiddish Book Center and walked through the small writers’ garden outside, I was especially moved that the poet Morris Rosenfeld, whose famous poem “My Resting Place” anticipates a resting place among the unfeeling machines of a sweatshop rather than among trees, birds, and fountains, is memorialized in a place that has all three. The building itself was designed by Allen Moore, whose subsequent work included the Rwinkwavu Community Library and Learning Center in Rwanda. This profile of him in Pakn Treger reveals how thoughtfully he approached the project. From the rooftop inspired by shtetl architecture to the large skylights that literally and metaphorically shed light on the books, the building engages deeply with the past, present, and future of Yiddish. My favorite tidbit from this article is that Moore designed the building to be larger inside than you’d expect looking from outside—something I find is also true about Yiddish.
Will You Speak English?, by Joseph Slonimsky
All right, one silly one. Before there was Duolingo, there was Joseph Slonimsky’s Will You Speak English?, a phrasebook teaching potential English learners such useful phrases as “Every man must die,” “Let us admire the mild azure of the sky,” and “You speak well Englis” (sic). Slonimsky, who never lived in an English-speaking country, displays a frankly insufficient mastery of the language to be writing textbooks of it—much less ones subtitled “The Best Method for Self-Instruction in the English Language.” Historians of language pedagogy might find this a useful document, and everyone else can have fun skimming the endlessly entertaining phrases and imagining the strange mild-azured world Slonimsky implies awaits immigrants at the end of their journey.
“Tell the True Story about You and Yiddish”
I’d like to conclude with my favorite excerpt from the entire Wexler Oral History Project. Inevitably, language learners will encounter moments of frustration—when it’s going slower than you’d like, when you don’t have the vocabulary to express what it is you want to say, when you can’t get rid of your accent, when you forget something you already knew. In this clip, Psoy Korolenko, a brilliant multilingual musician, encourages us to not shy away from the process and in fact draw from it. I’ll let the words speak for themselves:
“Tell the true story about you and Yiddish. Don’t pretend to speak it better than you do. Don’t emphasize alienation either. Share the experience of being in love with Yiddish. Tell the true story about you and Yiddish.”
Q&A
Tell us about your selections and what they say about your relationship with Yiddish language and culture.
Looking back at my selections, they all center around what it’s like to experience the Yiddish world. I love when a work of art encourages or even forces you to focus on the medium or makes a process visible. When I started learning Yiddish, I was thinking a lot about how unfortunate it was that I hadn’t learned it as a child; but now, I’m actually glad I’ve gotten to approach Yiddish in this way. The process of learning has been hugely generative for me. I haven’t just been learning the language, I’ve been learning how to be a Yiddish learner—something that comes with a whole new set of lenses through which to look at the broader world. I dislike the all-too-frequent characterizations of Yiddish as uniquely funny, sad, beautiful, creative, mysterious, or magical—you’d think nothing boring or just kind of bad has ever been written in Yiddish!—but the process of learning Yiddish can be all of those things. Because you have to work for it in a way you don’t have to with your native language, some of the humor, tragedy, beauty, creativity, mystery, or magic that we might take for granted in our daily lives can become suddenly visible in Yiddish. If you’ll permit me a moment to be schmaltzily earnest, I’m looking forward to what I hope will be a life-long love affair with Yiddish—and I hope I can help fill this seeming void of mediocre Yiddish work.
What are you working on next?
The digital collections team has been working on improving the Yiddish Book Center’s optical character recognition program. Stay tuned for the updated version, which has only a 1.5 percent error rate! I’m also working on improving the searchability and usability of the digital collections, especially cleaning up the personal name metadata on our website.