Weekly Reader: The Zeitlin Family Legacy
Yiddish literature can often seem like a family affair. Literary parents give rise to literary offspring. Writerly siblings vie with one another for prominence. While there are numerous examples to draw on—the most famous of these, the Singers, I’ve written about before—one of my favorite families of Yiddish writers is the Zeitlins. Hillel Zeitlin (1871–1942) was a prominent prewar Yiddish journalist, writer, and editor who made a name for himself popularizing, and in some ways reinventing, Hasidism in the twentieth century. His son Arn—sometimes spelled Aaron—Zeitlin (1898–1973) became a celebrated Yiddish poet, both before and after the Holocaust. And though less famous than his father or brother, Elkhonen Zeitlin (1902–1941) was also an accomplished writer and editor and a mainstay of Warsaw Yiddish journalism. Let’s take a look at this illustrious family.
Zeitlin Père
While readers of Yiddish literature are likely to be familiar with Arn Zeitlin—the most famous member of the family—I am personally more fascinated by his father. Hillel Zeitlin was an idiosyncratic personality and thinker the breadth of whose writings and activities are virtually impossible to summarize. He is best known, however, for his interest in Hasidism and Kabbalah, writing numerous books and essays on those subjects. A collection of Zeitlin’s writings in English translation, Hasidic Spirituality for a New Era, was published in 2012, but you can read all of Zeitlin’s work in the original Yiddish in our Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library.
Like Father, Like Son
Like his father, Arn Zeitlin was a prolific writer whose work spanned multiple genres. Though best known as a poet, he also wrote essays, literary and cultural criticism, drama, and fiction. Arn was also fascinated by the Jewish mystical tradition, and mystical themes infused much of his writing. In this program, recorded in Yiddish in 1968 at Montreal’s Jewish Public Library, the Argentinian Yiddish writer, editor, and activist Shmuel Rozhansky discusses the mystical themes in Arn Zeitlin’s work.
Poet and Pop Star
Of all the Zeitlins, Arn is undoubtedly the most famous and most translated, and his poems appear frequently in collections of Yiddish poetry. In part this is due to the quantity—and quality—of his output. Partly it is due to the fact that unlike his father and brother, both of whom died in the Warsaw Ghetto, Arn survived the Holocaust after immigrating to America in 1939, and contributed greatly to postwar Yiddish culture. And partly it’s due to the fact that he was the only member of his family to become a hit songwriter. I say this somewhat facetiously, but it’s true. Arn’s poem “Dana, Dana”—or “Dona, Dona”—was written for his play Esterke, put to music by Sholom Secunda, and later made famous in English by Joan Baez. While we unfortunately do not have any interviews with Baez, we do have an interview with Shirley Schachter Katz, a child singer and performer of Yiddish vaudeville, who describes working with Arn’s songwriting partner, Sholom Secunda.
Watch an oral history interview with Shirley Schachter Katz
Six Lines
Like many postwar Yiddish writers, Arn Zeitlin struggled with the role of the Yiddish writer after the Holocaust. In his short poem “Six Lines,” he asks, “Who needs a poem anyway—and especially in Yiddish?” In this recorded program, Madeleine Cohen, Sebastian Schulman, and Daniel Kahn offer a reading of Zeitlin’s poem in Yiddish and seven surprisingly different translations into English, including a performance of Kahn’s musical setting and translation.
Watch a program about Arn Zeitlin’s “Six Lines.”
A Literary Household
Elkhonen Zeitlin is less known than his father or brother, in part because he was less prolific and partly because he only lived to age 39, dying in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941. But much of what we know about the Zeitlin family comes from him and from his memoir In a literarisher shtub (In a Literary Household), which was published posthumously in 1946. In this essay, Miranda Cooper describes her discovery of the younger Zeitlin and the lasting value of his extraordinary memoir.
Read an essay about Elkhonen Zeitlin
Read Zeitlin’s memoir in the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library