September 2021: Handpicked
Each month, the Yiddish Book Center asks a member of our staff or a special friend to select favorite stories, books, interviews, or articles from our online collections. This month, we’re excited to share with you picks by Jennifer Young.
Jennifer served as the Director of Education at the YIVO Institute, where she also worked as Digital Learning Curator to produce YIVO's first online class, "Discovering Ashkenaz." She has also worked at the Tenement Museum, the Lower East Side Jewish Conservancy, and the New-York Historical Society. Jennifer received a B.A. in Anthropology and Jewish Studies from McGill University, and an M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Illinois. After completing doctoral studies in Jewish history at NYU, she received an M.Ed in Museum Curriculum and Pedagogy from the University of British Columbia. She also serves as part of a scholars' working group dedicated to research and scholarship of the Yiddish Left, sponsored by Cornell University.
After delving into her selections, scroll down to read a short interview with Jennifer about her choices.
I’m very interested in the connections between radical politics, mutual aid, and public health. Liber was born in Romania, the son of a Yiddish dramatist, and studied medicine in Vienna. He wrote for anarchist and Communist publications, and translated a French play about syphilis. This book, published in numerous editions, includes very straightforward information on sex, biology, and health.
Nokh alemen, by Dovid Bergelson, Farlag Emes, Moscow, 1935
This is the first novel I read in Yiddish, and it floored me. The main character, Mirl Hurwitz, is a modern woman, caught between modernity and tradition, and she ultimately chooses alienation and isolation rather than being caught up in either flawed social system.
Chava Rosenfarb, My Life as a Yiddish Writer
I read Rosenfarb’s short story “Edgia’s Revenge” as a college student at McGill University, and it changed the way I thought about Yiddish literature. Post-holocaust Yiddish literature, written by a woman, and in the same city where I was living, opened up new ways for me to think about what Yiddish literature is, and who it is for. This audio recording provides a window in the work and life of the writer.
I first met Adrienne, z’’l, at KlezKanada, where I spent a number of very happy summers immersed in Yiddish cultural arts. This is where I made some of my most enduring friendships, and began to see myself as more than a student of Yiddish, but as an active participant in the Yiddish future. I hope that I get to take my daughter there soon. Adrienne was a scholar-activist, and a master teacher, as well as an artist who was always evolving and perfecting her craft. She also ran the Max Weinreich Center at YIVO, as I did myself, when I served as the Director of Education in charge of the summer and winter programs there.
Who doesn’t love a collection of children’s stories about a Yiddish dog? The Labzik stories, now translated by Miriam Udel and the subject of a wonderful puppet film by Jake Krakovksy, are about a Depression-era dog who comes to live with a working-class family in the Bronx, and helps them face the issues of their time, (and ours) such as political protest, racism, and economic insecurity. The Labzik stories were originally published by the International Workers Order, founded in 1930 as an immigrant fraternal order that provided high-quality, low-cost health and burial insurance and other benefits for members. It also ran a birth control clinic led by a pioneering female physician, Dr. Cheri Appel, out of its office at 80 Fifth Avenue. I’m part of a scholarly working group sponsored by Cornell University that is working to preserve this history. So we’re coming back full circle to the connections between radical politics, mutual aid, and public health.
Q&A
Jennifer Young speaks with the Yiddish Book Center’s director of publishing and public programs, Lisa Newman, about her Handpicked choices:
Lisa Newman: Dos geshlekhts lebn—This is such an interesting book. I’m curious to know if there are other books about sex, biology, and health and if you have thoughts about who the audience for such books would have been.
Jennifer Young: We might not think of medical textbooks being an important part of Yiddish culture, but they tell a fascinating story about Yiddish-speaking immigrants and their children, who helped make the political and social changes that gave rise to the birth control movement and to modern feminism.
Margaret Sanger’s What Every Girl Should Know was translated into Yiddish in 1916, but Liber’s book goes into even more detail. As the publisher of Unzer gezunt, Liber believed that it was his role as an intellectual and a medical professional to create freely accessible materials related to sex, sexual diseases, and birth control. People could change their own lives for the better, he believed, only if they had easily accessible knowledge to help them do so.
Thanks to a 1918 New York Court of Appeals ruling in People v. Sanger, licensed physicians could legally provide information on contraception, as long as it was used primarily for the “cure or prevention of disease.” Liber’s book was briefly banned, which, he successfully argued, was because it was “too revolutionary in explaining the social causes of diseases.” By “social causes” Liber meant poverty, lack of education, and scarce public health and medical resources in marginalized communities.
Liber’s “sex manual” may have been the most popular Yiddish book about sex, from a medical perspective, but it was followed in the 1930s by birth control pioneer Dr. Hannah Meyer Stone’s A Marriage Manual: A Practical Guide-Book to Sex and Marriage.Stone ran Sanger’s first legal birth control clinic and educated thousands of women on how their own bodies worked and on the proper use of diaphragms. As Melissa Klapper argued, Jewish women in America were very active in the birth control movement; they adopted birth control methods relatively quickly, and many, like Hannah Meyer Stone, were among the first doctors on the front lines at the first birth control clinics. Women like Stone initially embraced the work because they simply wanted to help people, but they became politicized—even radicalized—because they saw how their work was banned. They were arrested, even after the procedures had been legalized.
I’m drawn to people like Liber and Stone, whose radicalism isn’t often discussed today, because they understood how essential it was to give women tools to achieve agency over their own bodies and their own families, and to give them a measure of economic stability.
LN: How did Bergelson write such a strong female character?
JY: Nokh alemen has been called “the Yiddish Madame Bovary.” Flaubert wanted to write an introspective, modern novel of a woman’s life, and so did Bergelson. Flaubert was concerned with writing a realist novel about the manners and banality of provincial life; the modern Yiddish novel, in contrast, balanced on a knife’s edge, with characters negotiating anti-Jewish violence, political upheaval, and failed emancipation, among other issues.
This novel was translated by Joseph Sherman and first published in 1913 as The End of Everything.It is about a beautiful, headstrong young woman who chafes against the expectations of shtetl gentility and reluctantly marries the suitor her father picked out for her—under the stipulation that she won’t actually have to have sex with him. When she does eventually become pregnant, she immediately has an abortion. At the end of the novel she leaves her husband in the city and her friends in the shtetl, and she disappears to parts unknown. The reader is bereft—we know from Bergelson’s treatment of personal isolation and alienation that happiness will never really be possible for this character, and we can only imagine her fate.
LN:I read this story in a collection of Rosenfarb’s work translated by her daughter Goldie Morgenthaler. It was an early Great Jewish Books Book Club selection that prompted intense conversation. For me it was a remarkably layered piece of writing that laid open the characters for the reader in a challenging and remarkable way. I found that the reactions to the story varied. Your thoughts?
JY: Like Yenta Mash, another female Yiddish writer who created intricate, finely wrought portraits of survival during the Holocaust, Rosenfarb lived through many of the events she later fictionalized. Her characters are individuals—flawed and unique, not metaphors for good and evil. Their survival was mostly due to arbitrary and capricious fate, and so their reactions to being survivors is also unpredictable. Edgia’s Revenge is narrated by Rella, a woman who survived the war as a kapo, a Jewish concentration camp guard who received her position in return for sexual favors to a Nazi guard. Rella used her very minimal positional privilege to abuse her fellow inmates. But one day, perhaps inexplicably, she saves Edgia’s life by hiding her under a bed. In Montreal, years later, the two women encounter each other. Although they are outwardly functional and even successful in their new North American lives, there is a great deal of fear and ambivalence because they can’t ever really leave their European lives behind. Goldie Morgentalar, Rosenfarb’s daughter and translator, calls this “the unfinished business of the European past.” There is no clear and final resolution, no “end of history.” As we have learned in the last several years, there is no safe place to live. There is no government that can’t be overthrown. Nazis have not disappeared into history; their movements are becoming more visible and powerful. These contexts have all changed dramatically since the first time I read this story, and I think the story will continue to become more powerful, and relevant, over time. I am looking forward to discussing it with new readers.
LN: Do you think that much of Yiddish children’s literature works on two levels—written for both the child and the parent? You can read these books as mere stories, but it also seems—from what I’ve read in translation—that there’s much more to be read into many of these stories.
JY: As Miriam Udel says in Honey on the Page, a lot of Yiddish literature is about children and childhood rather than specifically for children. When Yiddish writers began writing for children, they often did so as part of a larger political movement or to make a political point. In other words, it is often didactic. Yiddish authors and educators “discovered” children because they wanted to find ways to create modern political movements, to promote secular culture, and to resist anti-Semitism and fascism by helping Jewish children become well-adjusted, resilient, and full of self-knowledge. There is a lot going on in the creation of any Yiddish kids’ book: there are always multiple levels of meaning, for both kids and adults.
In the case of Labzik (or, as Udel calls him, “Leftist Lassie”) the story is so appealing because it really does succeed as a story for children. We all want to know the ongoing adventures of this cute little dog and the children who love him. The stories work on their own, even if kids don’t know the larger context that an adult would glean from reading—that the stories are set in a working-class family in Depression-era New York, and that the stories are clearly written from a leftist political perspective, dealing with racism, labor activism, and fighting the bosses and the police. I’m excited that these stories have been translated by Miriam Udel, via a YBC translation fellowship, and that they’ve also been adapted into a new artistic format by Jake Krakovsky, who created a short film based on the stories using paper puppets. I love that these stories can take on a new life, and new audiences, and can still be such a rich source of Yiddish cultural creativity.