September 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 Brianna Burdetsky.
Brianna Burdetsky is the development assistant at the Yiddish Book Center. She holds a B.A. in English from George Mason University and an M.A. in Medieval and Renaissance Studies from Columbia University. Her academic background is in linguistics and comparative literature, with a focus on Middle High German and Old Yiddish.
Vegn altyidishn roman un novele: fertsnṭer-zekhtsnter yorhundert, by Max Erik
This work is notable for being one of the few book-length studies of Old Yiddish literature written in Yiddish. Erik begins with a general overview of Yiddish literature in the 14th to 16th centuries before moving on to discuss specific works. The main body of the book consists of four sections, each further broken down into scholarly commentary followed by excerpts from the works themselves. The works Erik selects for discussion demonstrate the wide range of cultural contacts and influences that Yiddish already had in the medieval and early modern periods: Elye Bohker’s chivalric epic known as the Bovo-bukh, the Arthurian romance Vidvilt, selected stories from the collection known as the Mayse-bukh, and Yiddish translations of a few fables ultimately derived from Persian and Sanskrit, which Erik refers to as “Indian tales.” Though some of Erik’s commentary is now outdated—the book was published in 1926, and the field of Old Yiddish scholarship has come a long way since then—it remains a unique gem of Yiddish-language scholarship.
Social History of the Jews in Medieval Europe, with Leonard Glick
Leonard Glick, who passed away earlier this year, was a cultural anthropologist and professor at Hampshire College. This lecture on Jewish civilization in medieval Europe was delivered as part of the Center’s summer program in 1999, the same year in which Glick published a book on this material entitled Abraham’s Heirs: Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe. The content of the lecture is not unique, treading the familiar ground of how economic forces and antisemitism shaped Jewish life in the Middle Ages, followed up in the last section of the lecture with the story of how the Enlightenment of the 19th century led to the so-called emancipation of the Jews. What is more remarkable to me than its content is the lecture’s place in the history of the Center’s education program. Most educational programs for Yiddish students tend to focus on the 19th century onward, though I would personally love to see more emphasis on the early history of the language and its literature.
Elye bokher: poeṭishe shafungen in yidish, by Elia Levita
While much of early Yiddish literature was anonymously authored, Elye Bokher stands out as a famous individual personality in Yiddish history at this period. He was a writer of romance, short poetry, and grammars, a master of both Hebrew and Yiddish, and a teacher to many wealthy Italian Christians of his day, at a time when it was becoming fashionable for Christians to learn Hebrew. This book contains a facsimile of the original 1541 printing of his most famous work, Bovo d’Antona, also known as the Bovo-bukh. Based on the chivalric romances that were popular throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, it tells of the adventures of a knight named Bovo as he tries to win back his kingdom after being disinherited by his mother and stepfather. (Incidentally, it is also where the Yiddish term bobe-mayse, meaning an incredible tale, originates.) In addition to the text itself, editor Judah A. Joffee provides context on the life and work of Elye Bokher in both Yiddish and English.
Mayse-bukh: 84 dertseylungen
The term mayse-bukh (literally “story book”) in Yiddish usually refers to a specific collection of over 250 stories first published in Basel in 1602 by a Jewish printer named Jacob Pollak. The stories included short fables derived from such diverse sources as the Talmud, midrash, and the medieval folk tradition. However, the Basel edition was neither the first nor only story collection of its kind. There are several compilations of Hebrew and Yiddish tales dating from the medieval period, and after 1602, numerous editions based on the Basel edition—though not always identical to it—were printed. Therefore, some scholars think of the term mayse-bukh as referring not just to one book but to an entire genre. This edition of the Mayse-bukh, printed in 1969, contains a selection of eighty-four tales taken from the Basel edition, continuing a centuries-long tradition of reprinting, rearranging, and reinterpreting the Yiddish mayse tradition.
“Fir lider in altyidishn loshn,” by Abraham Sutzkever
If I had to pick a favorite modern Yiddish writer, it would be Sutzkever. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that his poetry resonates with me—as a young man, he studied the early history of the Yiddish language under Max Weinreich, and this experience was influential on his early creative work. It is said that he worked on a number of Old Yiddish writing projects in his youth, including an unfinished modern Yiddish translation of the Bovo-bukh, but most of these were lost during the war. Today, the only remaining piece of Sutzkever’s engagement with Old Yiddish is his “Fir lider in altyidishn loshn,” a cycle of four short poems in which he experimented with the style and vocabulary of Old Yiddish poetry. The names of the four poems, translated into English, are “Prayer,” “Drinking Song,” “Wedding Song,” and “Lullaby,” reflecting some of the medieval themes and structures that resonated with him. The poems are followed by a brief glossary of Old Yiddish terms translated into modern Yiddish.
Read (in Yiddish, beginning on page 109)
Jean Baumgarten’s Oral History
Jean Baumgarten is perhaps one of the most well-known scholars of Old Yiddish alive today. His groundbreaking book Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, which was translated into English by Jerold C. Frakes, provided a survey of Old Yiddish literature that was accessible to readers outside the hitherto highly specialized field. In this interview he gave for the Wexler Oral History Project in 2010, Baumgarten discusses the beginning of his interest in Old Yiddish as a student at Oxford. He also describes his first foray into translating Old Yiddish into modern French with the Tsene-rene, the so-called Women’s Bible that was popular in the medieval and early modern period. This book distilled the core teachings of the Bible into an easy-to-read Yiddish book expressly for a female readership, which often had no education in Hebrew. As Baumgarten describes, the work remained popular for centuries and was reprinted in many different editions across Europe.
Q&A
Tell us about your selections and what they say about your relationship with Yiddish language and culture.
I’m a medievalist by academic training, and as a graduate student at Columbia, my research focused on Old Yiddish literature and book history. It was during the research for my master’s thesis on Vidvilt that I first discovered the Yiddish Book Center’s copy of the Max Erik book I discuss above. It immediately stood out to me, as most scholarship on Old Yiddish is in German or English. I began searching for more works on Old Yiddish within the Center’s digital library, and when I was asked to share my book recommendations, I knew that I wanted to highlight this under-discussed aspect of our collection. When I told a few colleagues what I was preparing, some asked me if we even had enough works to make up an entire list. In fact, we have so many that I couldn’t include them all here!
The fact that people are surprised by that isn’t surprising. The Center is not a rare book and manuscript library; we obviously don’t have manuscripts and early printed material here. But we do have a surprising amount of 20th-century scholarship on Old Yiddish; it was a more popular topic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially with Max Weinreich and the original YIVO’s efforts to promote the history of the language. The course of Yiddish scholarship shifted after the Holocaust with the need to preserve the modern language, and while research into Old Yiddish never stopped, it was slowed. Now I think we’re seeing another shift in which more people are becoming interested in Old Yiddish again, so it’s important that we understand the history of the field. I crafted this list around my two favorite selections, the Erik book and the Sutzkever poems, to try to show how modern Yiddishists have engaged with Old Yiddish both academically and creatively.
What are you working on next?
One of the most exciting aspects of my work is event planning. I get to plan talks and programs all over the country that keep us connected to our donors and showcase some of the exciting things we’ve been working on here at the Center. Over the next few months, we’ll be hosting several book talks to highlight recent releases from White Goat Press, our publishing imprint, including Samuel Kassow’s translation of Rokhl Auerbach’s Warsaw Testament and Deborah Green’s translation of S. L. Shneiderman’s Journey Through the Spanish Civil War. Beyond my work at the Center, I am always trying to continue my work as a scholar of Old Yiddish and medieval Jewish studies. I am currently preparing a couple articles for publication, including one on J.R.R. Tolkien and Jewish history that is forthcoming in print next year.