Weekly Reader: A Deeper Dive into Yiddish Publishing
Published on July 14, 2024.
When we talk about the Yiddish press, we usually think about the big newspapers—publications like the Forverts or Der tog in the United States and Haynt or Der moment in Europe. But along with the major dailies there were a plethora of smaller outlets—weeklies, monthlies, and some that appeared even less frequently. These were often specialty literary or art publications that corresponded to the English-language “little magazines” associated with modernist movements. Here at the Yiddish Book Center, our bibliography team has been hard at work cataloging our periodical holdings, including such rare and sometimes very obscure treasures. This week, let’s take a look at this often overlooked but essential corner of Yiddish publishing.
Making it New
In the English-speaking world, a “little magazine” usually meant not just a publication that was small in size or distribution but that was dedicated to avant-garde, noncommercial art or literature and was often tied to a particular modernist movement or group. The same was true in Yiddish. Journals like Shriftn, Poezye, and Inzikh in New York, which published Yiddish modernist literature, poetry, and art, were modeled after their English-language counterparts. And as in English, Yiddish literature was rich with a variety of modernist movements, each with its own artistic ideas, manifestos, and publications.
Rich History
Yiddish modernism and “little magazines” were largely a product of the early twentieth century, but they built on the legacy of periodical publication that went back to the mid-nineteenth. In 1862, Alexander Tsederboym introduced Kol mevaser (The Voice of the Messenger) as a supplement to his highbrow Hebrew journal; Sholem Aleichem squandered much of his inheritance on his own Yiddish magazine, for which he wrote much of the content, and I. L. Peretz named each issue of his Yontev bletlekh (Holiday Pages) after a different Jewish holiday, thereby circumventing a tsarist ban on Yiddish serials. These were just the first. Before long, nearly every literary or political group, no matter how small, was publishing a Yiddish periodical of its own.
Publication for the People
While modernist “little magazines” usually had an avant-garde, anti-populist bent, there were plenty of small Yiddish publications aimed at those with literary aspirations but perhaps less sophistication. In Europe, a primary example of this was the Groshn-biblyotek, or Penny Library. Small enough to slip easily into a pocket, the Groshn-biblyotek booklets varied widely in subject matter, but all were cheap and affordable. Aimed at Yiddish-speaking workers in 1930s Poland, this ambitious venture ran for seven years, over that time developing into an influential and popular library of Jewish and general knowledge. You can come and see a selection of titles from the Groshn-biblyotek in our new permanent exhibition, Yiddish: A Global Culture.
From the Vault
While the Yiddish Book Center was founded with the idea of rescuing Yiddish books, it’s no surprise that plenty of other print materials found their way into our collections, including many periodicals. Our bibliography team has recently been working to sort and document these publications and in the process has discovered all sorts of interesting journals, such as Yugntruf (Call to Youth), a journal founded in 1964 as an outlet for a new, younger generation of Yiddishists; Davke, a high-minded Yiddish-language philosophy journal from Buenos Aires; and the Gezunt almanakh (Health Almanac), full of all sorts of intriguing but outdated medical advice.
Read about our efforts to catalog our periodical collections
Doing It Yourself
Unlike their larger, commercial counterparts, “little magazines” were often distinguished by their homespun quality. In that respect, not much has changed. Today, young Yiddishists continue making their mark on a centuries-old Yiddish literary canon with an innovative, ephemeral, and often radical publishing medium: the “zine,” a term that is used to describe self-published booklets of writing and art. Our permanent exhibition, Yiddish: A Global Culture, puts ten zines by young Yiddishists on display. Seeing the wide-eyed reaction to the zine display, the bibliography team initiated a search for new zines to bring into our collection. So far, we have amassed nearly two dozen zines created by Yiddishist artists, students, and activists—and we’re still collecting!