May 2023: Handpicked

Joseph (Khayim) Reisberg is the 2022–2023 Applebaum Family Fellow in the Yiddish Book Center’s Bibliography and Translation departments. Next fall he will be a PhD student in Jewish Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. His poems and translations appear or are forthcoming in Jewish Fiction.net, The Adroit Journal, The Loch Raven Review, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly.  

Freydl’s lider (Freydl’s Poems), by Freydl Sosonkin Charney, New York, 1943 

After the writer Ida Maze saw the notice of Freydl Charney’s death from tuberculosis, she undertook the “holy labor” of compiling a book from the underappreciated poet’s handwritten manuscripts, alongside a committee of writers, activists, and Freydl’s family. Long separated from her relatives in New York due to strict immigration laws, Charney had been living with her husband in the French Riviera, trying to recuperate from her illness and writing poems to pass the time. And what astonishing poems! These concise but captivating lyrics circle around memory and eternity and are stylistically reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s work. 

Di idishe landsmanshaftn fun Nyu York (The Jewish Landsmanshaftn of New York), New York, 1938 

At the time this anthology was compiled, over three thousand landsmanshaft associations existed in New York City, with an official membership of around half a million people. Although other ethnic groups had similar mutual-aid and fraternal networks, the Jewish landsmanshaftn were distinguished by their continuity with Old World customs of tsedoke (charity) and their organization around a particular city, town, or region. Most exciting about this book—which was sponsored by the Federal Writers’ Project and the Yiddish Writers Union—is a comprehensive index of associations, with their gathering locations (mainly on the Lower East Side), percentage of American-born members, and the language in which their meetings were held.  

Iber amerike (Across America), by Sh. Almazov, published by Morgn-Frayhayt, New York, 1930 

Sh. Almazov’s narrative about his journalistic trips across the United States often calls to mind an older genre of Eastern European folkloristic gathering, but this book is written in an unfussy, often sarcastic style, focusing on exploited communities that the communist press wanted its New York readership to know about. Much ground is covered—from a Holy Rollers revival in Buffalo, to the Chicago stockyards, to the Winnebago Reservation in Nebraska, and even to Reno, Nevada—“the shame-house of America.”  

“Red Dew,” by Pessie Pomerantz-Honigbaum (translated by Jessica Kirzane) and “Red Dew, Again,” by Jessica Kirzane 

We often talk about what contemporary Yiddishist cultural production can look like, and Jessica Kirzane’s poem, inspired by Pomerantz-Honigbaum, feels like a brilliant example to learn from. Pomerantz-Honigbaum’s poem, written in America at the brink of the Holocaust and also written in a Chicago autumn, is a haunting and powerful presage of Kirzane’s voice. I was struck by Kirzane’s creative process, stopping in the middle of a jog to dictate her poem aloud, a kind of benevolent 21st-century dybbuk possession. 

“Modern in Autumn: The Belated Discovery of Blume Lempel,” by Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub 

I came to Blume Lempel’s strange, psychologically rich stories through an unusual source—her typewriter, which can be found in the Yiddish Book Center vault. Seeing her typewriter, with its fastidiously cared for carrying case, gave me a deeper appreciation of the freedom Lempel found through her writing. As Chaim Grade notes in this 2018 Pakn Treger article, Lempel debuted too late to find a mass audience, but her work lives on through Cassedy and Taub’s translations and compilations of her correspondence.  

“Baltimore Pripetshik: A Yiddish Playgroup for Children,” with Anne Eakin Moss 

Besides my interest as a Baltimore resident (and having gone to school with some of the families mentioned in this video), I think this 2013 clip of professor Anne Eakin Moss from the Wexler Oral History Project is a heartwarming and inspirational look into raising secular Yiddishist families outside of New York City. I love how the Baltimore Pripetshik adapts traditions started by the Bainbridgivke families but also creates its own materials and excursions to keep Yiddish an active and fun part of its member families’ lives.  

Q&A

Tell us about your selections and what they say about your relationship with Yiddish language and culture. 

I’ve noticed the books I’m most drawn to are mainly published in the United States in the ’30s and ’40s, when my grandparents were born, which to me seems like a pivotal turning point in American Jewish history, as the first U.S.-born Jewish generation figures out their relationship to Yiddish and communal life. For the landsmanshaftn book, it was about immigrants remaking the leadership structure and mutual-aid customs of their hometowns within the overcrowded landscape of the Lower East Side. And the landsmanshaft became a place for debate over which values and traditions Yiddish speakers wanted to pass on to their children—for example, leftist landslayt only agreeing to sponsor a communal Talmud Torah back in the old country if they could also fund a secular library at the same time. In Sh. Almazov’s book, we see Yiddish speakers understanding their diverse new country through the lens of an Eastern European culture. In this way, tamales made by street vendors in San Antonio are called “corn latkes,” and Black residents sitting on their front stoops in Jacksonville, Florida, are said to be taking a rest on prizbes, a type of vernacular architecture most commonly found in Belarus.  

Besides communal identity, I’m also interested in literary communities, having come to Yiddish out of a writerly desire to work with a non-English canon. So I chose Freydl Charney’s book mainly because I’m hoping someone will translate it! (Some individual poems have been translated, but a book-length work seems overdue, and the precise, graceful rhymes are too intimidating for me to attempt.) Similarly, I appreciate the care that Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub put into tracing Blume Lempel’s social spheres and correspondences, as well as the intergenerational literary connection Jessica Kirzane built with Pessie Pomerantz-Honigbaum.  

As anyone who knows me can attest, I have a deep love for Baltimore and all its many neighborhoods, so it’s a rare treat to find Yiddish texts from Baltimore besides clippings from the Forverts and stories of immigration through Locust Point. Anne Eakin Moss’s oral history reminds me to forge Yiddish community wherever I go, and that the Yiddish I speak with my friends and co-workers is a humble link in a goldene keyt—a golden chain—of tradition. 

What are you working on next? 

I’ll always be babbling to myself in Yiddish and scribbling my little poems in mame-loshn, but in terms of more scholarly work I’d like to continue researching Yiddish communal life and what it was like growing up in the first American-born generation in majority immigrant neighborhoods (such as the stories I hear from my grandfather about being raised on the Greater Vest Side of Chicago). I’m extremely grateful to say that I will be a PhD student in the Department of Jewish Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University starting this fall, and I can’t wait to research urban Yiddishist life and literature and study with the community of faculty and students there. Also, I have recently begun translating the work of Mina Smoler, a Communist-aligned short-story writer who features characters at the margins of society and Yiddish literature—agricultural workers on strike in California, residents of a women’s prison, a Jewish immigrant who finds himself trapped on a Georgia chain gang, and more.