October 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 Randi Silnutzer.
Randi Silnutzer studied anthropology and ethnomusicology at Hampshire College, where she conducted fieldwork on traditional music in Appalachia. After working for several arts organizations and completing an M.Ed. from the University of Massachusetts, she returned to campus in 2000 to take a position as Membership Director at the Yiddish Book Center. Twenty-four years later, she is still here as Director of Operations, where she oversees the membership program as well as other aspects of the Center.
Adrienne Cooper: Song-teaching in the Former Soviet Union
In this excerpt from the Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, legendary Yiddish singer Adrienne Cooper z”l talks about the experience of teaching Yiddish music and culture in the former Soviet Union. She speaks about how the participants had just a “fine thread” that connected them to their history, describes how thirsty they were for learning more, and notes that “had our families not emigrated, we would have been these people.”
Collecting Yiddish Zines
The Center’s new permanent exhibition, Yiddish: A Global Culture, not only looks at the geographic range of Yiddish but also at its expression across time periods and genres. The curators were very intentional in including a collection of Yiddish “zines”—contemporary, often self-published booklets of literature and art. In this article, former Yiddish Book Center fellow Maya Gonzalez explores the variety of themes in Yiddish zines. It’s a perfect example—with striking visuals—of Yiddish creative expression continuing to adapt and thrive in the present day.
Make America Your Country as Well as Your Home
I’ve always loved this 1924 pamphlet, “How to Take Out Your First Papers,” which we reprinted for a members’ premium a couple of years ago. Originally produced as an instruction manual for immigrants, it’s a piece of history complete with citizenship forms, lists of presidents, reading suggestions, and the national anthem. All are rendered in a mix of Yiddish and English, so it’s fun to compare the bits of bilingual content. This “From the Vault” article by former fellow Elissa Sperling provides context and examples from the pamphlet, as well as a link to the original.
Six Lines in Seven Translations: The Craft of Translating Yiddish Poetry
In April 2020, when we had just shut down due to the pandemic, the Center began a series of virtual public programs that continues to this day. This selection, one of our earliest virtual programs, brought a handful of translators together to read and discuss their own English translations of a short Yiddish poem by Aaron Zeitlin called “Six Lines.” The results were incredibly varied and nuanced, a firsthand view of how choices made by a translator can have a powerful impact on the feel and meaning.
Socalled Demo (Yidstock video)
I happened to be in attendance at this workshop in 2008, where Josh Dolgin (aka Socalled) talked about his early interest in hip-hop music and how he began to discover and incorporate old recordings of Yiddish theater and klezmer music. Right there on the stage, he showed us how he took samples from different recordings and looped them in with a hip-hop beat and his own singing to create something that was both wildly new and historically resonant.
Reading the Readers
In the Center’s membership department, we regularly receive calls from long-time supporters who want to make sure we know they’ve been “a member since the very beginning.” Many of them have also donated their own Yiddish books or the contents of their parents’ or grandparents’ libraries. This “From the Vault” article takes a look at the stories behind the books in our collection and provides a visceral feel for how deeply personal they truly are.
Q&A
Tell us about your selections and what they say about your relationship with Yiddish language and culture.
As a musician and as someone always interested in the role of the arts in community, it has been inspiring to work at the Yiddish Book Center, where I’ve had the opportunity to come back home to my own cultural heritage and to learn more about the history, literature, and culture that is so integral to understanding Jewish life in America today. My selections show a fascination with the process of cultural change—how traditional ideas are reinterpreted and made new over and over again—and my appreciation for and admiration of this organization that has played such an important role in that story.
What are you working on next?
I’m always working on ways to engage with the Center’s members and to try in various ways to support this longstanding, continuous community that has made the Center what it is today, from the earliest book collections onward. Much of my work involves behind-the-scenes aspects of keeping things running smoothly and keeping our technology up to date, so that members’ and visitors’ interactions with the Center are as friendly and fulfilling as possible. One upcoming project is a planned upgrade to our store and visitor center applications. And, of course, we’re gearing up for the year-end membership renewal season.