Weekly Reader: Exophonic Yiddish Writers

Playwright Jacob Gordin was a foundational figure in Yiddish theater and is often credited with introducing higher quality work to the repertoire. Before immigrating to New York, however, Gordin had only written in Russian and had little contact with the Yiddish-speaking cultural world. In New York too he started out writing for the Russian press but soon realized that the audience for Yiddish was far larger than it was for Russian and switched to the Yiddish press and Yiddish theater, improving his own language skills on the fly. The decision evidently paid off, as he soon became one of the most accomplished contributors to the Yiddish stage, and his works are performed to this day.

Listen to a podcast episode about the life and legacy of Jacob Gordin 

You would think that the daughter of one of the most famous Yiddish writers in history would have a strong Yiddish background, but surprisingly that wasn’t the case. Lyalya Kaufman, the daughter of Sholem Aleichem, grew up speaking primarily Russian, and her first publications in the Forverts newspaper had to be translated from that language. She soon switched to Yiddish, however, and contributed hundreds of short fictional sketches over a period of decades. 

Watch an oral history interview with Lyalya Kaufman’s daughter, novelist Bel Kaufman 

For one of the preeminent prewar Yiddish modernists, and one of the greatest champions of postwar Yiddish literature, this one is genuinely a surprise. But Melech Ravitch—the pen name of Zekharye-Khone Bergner—was born and raised in eastern Galicia where, by the early twentieth century, the Jewish population was as likely to speak Polish or German as it was to speak Yiddish. Ravitch himself was raised in a Polish- and German-speaking household, and his early education was secular rather than the traditional religious schooling that many of his peers received. It was only after the Czernowitz conference in 1908 that he was drawn to Yiddish and began writing poetry in that language.

Listen to an event in Montreal celebrating Ravitch’s eightieth birthday

While some writers chose Yiddish for practical reasons, or to better connect with their Jewish roots, for others the choice was political. Until the Second World War the majority of Jews in Europe spoke Yiddish, as did their immigrant diasporas in North America and elsewhere. If you wanted to communicate with that population, and to convince them of your political ideas, you had to do so in Yiddish. This led some figures, including non-Jews, to learn the language expressly for that purpose. One of the most famous of these was Rudolf Rocker, a German-born anarchist writer and activist who became one of the preeminent figures in the Yiddish-speaking anarchist movement. 

Read Rudolf Rocker’s Yiddish books in the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library 

Ber Borokhov was famous both for his contributions to the Labor Zionist movement, helping to found the Po’ale Tsiyon political party, and for trying to fuse Yiddishism and Zionism—a combination that many of his Zionist peers rejected. Yet Borokhov himself wrote that he didn’t learn the language until age 26, before going on to champion Yiddish and lay the groundwork for its academic study. It all goes to show that it’s never too late to start. 

Listen to a lecture on Ber Borokhov as a pioneer in the study of Yiddish language and literature