Two Yiddish Books -- From my other blog

Photo of the Yiddish Book Center (https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/) in Amherst, Massachusetts. (2003).
The architecture echoes the look of Eastern European shtetls of a century or more in the past.

A few days ago, the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, sent me two recently published books as a bonus for a recent contribution to their efforts. Publications of newly translated books are part of the center's mission to make available lost or ignored but worthy representatives of Yiddish literature. The smaller work, Radiant Jargon, contains a small selection of poems about Yiddish and translation: some of these poems are by classic Yiddish authors from the early 20th century, and others, and also translations, by modern poets, some of whom have been interns at the center.

The more substantial book, Seeds in the Desert by Mendel Mann (1916-1975), contains a selection of short stories and sketches about the early days of Israel, the lives of Jews in Eastern Europe during World War II, and other vignettes about Jewish life in the mid-20th century. The introduction also provides an interesting summary of the life of the author, whose name and work were entirely unfamiliar to me up until now.

Many of the stories offer just a very small episode from life in Israel or elsewhere; however most of them inform the reader of how these new Israelis had survived and escaped their past. Some stories are set far from Israel, for example, the story "Laughter from the Skies" (p. 96-103) takes place in the Australian outback about a Jew who takes revenge on a former Nazi who had murdered  his family. Another story, "Cain Laments at Night" (p. 114-119), set during World War II, is about a Jewish boy named Emmanuel. He was hiding in a shtetl from which he was to travel to the larger town of Rovno (also called Rivne), but he was unable to keep up his pretense of being a partner with some Ukrainian soldiers. The problem occurs when he encounters a market woman wrapping her goods in pages of the Talmud, which he takes away and pockets. With the soldiers, he consumes "pork, black bread, eggs, and bottles of vodka," but despite this un-Jewish act, they notice him respectfully holding the scrap of paper, and torment him. Emmanuel, too, takes his revenge.

A very typical story in this collection is titled "The Encounter in Ramat Gan" (p. 59-64) It begins with these words: "'Excuse me...' I said. 'I think I know you... we've met somewhere before...'" The narrator was speaking to a woman on the street, walking with a small child. He describes a hot day in Ramat Gan, where he was waiting for a bus. He tries to explain to her what he remembers: "I traveled across Ukraine with the Soviet army, and somewhere in a shtetl in Volhynia I met you. It was  a strange encounter. Don't you remember the Russian soldier who talked to you in Yiddish? Have you forgotten a night journey in a truck with two armed soldiers?" She denies this: "I don't want to know you!" she shouted.

The narrator thinks about her all night. In the morning he sees her again, while waiting for his bus, and follows her. Angrily she says "The woman you met is dead. She doesn't exist any more." She calls their former meeting a surreal dream. She accuses him of trying to make a legend of his past. Then she produces a long story of how they met during her ordeal during the war, her abuse by peasants, her encounters with Russian officers, and more war stories. The narrator, she recalled, had been a Jew in disguise as a Russian soldier -- obviously hoping himself to evade the murderous Ukrainian and Nazi troops. She describes how he helped her get to the Rovno where there were "thirty Jewish families," and he could leave her with an elderly Jewish women who would protect her. But after telling her detailed memories, the woman concluded: "Everything I have told you was invented, a lie, a mistake. My life has started now, here, with my husband and children. Forget, and let me forget."

A majority of the stories in the book have a certain similarity with this encounter and with the woman's wish to erase her past. The new country of Israel, where most of the stories take place, offers a new life for the former victims of European persecutions. The sun burns hot, it's difficult to earn a living, and many of the characters struggle to adapt and to earn their bread. But it's all new and full of promise. I've made it sound simplistic, which it isn't -- it's a very interesting book of stories about a few moments in the lives and memories of a variety of characters.

Now, about Rovno, which is mentioned in several of the stories, along with a few other nearby locations in a region of Ukraine. These references were especially interesting to me because my mother's parents and other relatives came from the Rovno shtetl in the early 20th century. I've never known much about it other than generalizations about shtetl life. I suspect that some distant relatives were still in Rovno during World War II, but I don't know anything about them, and I was fascinated (when I looked it up after reading Mendel Mann's stories) to learn that Rovno was important during the early days of the war. In looking for information, I was also astonished to learn that the mother of Israeli author Amos Oz was a native of Rovno (source).

I also learned of the end of the Jewish community of Rovno, which the author of the stories must also have known. I read this: "The majority of the Jews of western Ukraine town of Rovno, around 23,000 people, had been murdered shortly after the Germans invaded in June 1941. Between 5,000 and 7,000 Jews remained in the ghetto that was established there." In July of 1942, the remainder of the Jews were murdered in a cooperative act by the SS Nazi soldiers and the Ukrainian militia, which supported the invaders. (source)

A street in Rovno before the war. From the JewishGen Website. (link) 

"Bad Rabbi"

The fat guy was named Martin "The Blimp" Levi. He weighed 600 to 700
pounds, and was a sensational wrestler. You can also learn about his promoter,
who specialized in publicity for all kinds of freaks. Wow!

Suppose you want to read news items about sensational divorces and bigamy cases, bizarre sports figures, petty but colorful crimes, tales of pimps or their victims, neighborhood brawls, violent murders and family fights, religious zealots trying to force others to obey their rules, anti-religious people fighting back, or other diverse facts? You'd go right to your favorite click-bait locale on the internet, right?

Suppose you want to read about the same types of mindless and entertaining stuff that happened in Jewish Warsaw or Jewish New York in the early part of the 20th century? You can go to Eddy Portnoy's recently published book Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press. Obviously, if you can read Yiddish, you can go find microfilms of the various Yiddish newspapers of that era for yourself, but how likely is that? I'm telling you: read Bad Rabbi! Nothing has changed except the language. And you'll enjoy the illustrations taken from the original papers.

Bad Rabbi offers all kinds of dirt that was dished by the resourceful journalists of New York and Warsaw. These stories were published alongside very serious journalism about society, politics, etc. in the Yiddish papers. Illicit lovers pushed their paramours out of windows. Fistfights broke out at ritual circumcisions, at weddings, and at other usually innocent events. A habitual criminal failed to steal a side of beef from a delivery truck because the delivery men chased him down the street. In 1929, we learn, all sorts of readers in Warsaw -- those who followed both the Yiddish and the Polish press -- were fascinated by the "Miss Judea" contest, eventually won by a girl named Zofia Oldak. A criminal who worked under the pseudonym Urke Nachalnik (meaning: "brazen master criminal") wrote a popular autobiography in 1933, and later wrote other successful works. For a while, he studied criminal lingo in documents at the pre-war version of YIVO, but he got in big trouble with his fellow criminals who thought he was betraying their secrets.

Sadly, as we read, we are often reminded of the coming fate of the Jews who stayed in Warsaw, but they didn't know what was coming. For example: "No one seemed to know what happened to Zofia Oldak. An octogenarian cousin of hers who lived near Tel Aviv said she couldn't remember if Oldak went to Australia or to Treblinka. But she was pretty sure Miss Judea ended up in one of those two places." (p. 142) And the criminal/linguist Urke Nachalnik joined the underground, tried to organize reprisals against the Nazis, and sabotaged rail lines to Treblinka. He "was eventually caught by the Germans in 1942 and as he was being led in shackles to his execution... he attacked his guard and nearby soldiers shot him to death." (p. 114) Another colorful character, it's said, "went up in smoke." Literally.

The Rabbinical divorce court in Warsaw was a popular place for journalists to uncover these sensational bits of human interest. For example, there's the story of Rivka Tsadik, who wanted a divorce because her husband didn't like her cooking: "If she cooks him potatoes and egg drop soup, he yells that he'd rather have potatoes and borsht. If she cooks him potatoes and borsht, he'd rather have potatoes and egg drop soup. In short, they start fighting and the husband eventually runs out of the house with an empty stomach." Rivka was willing to take an exam "to see if she can cook a good lunch or not." It seems that we'll never know if she passed her exam or not -- she went home to wait for the rabbis to call her back. (p. 159-160)

Bad Rabbi has lots of good blurbs by quite famous writers.

I originally wrote this post for maefood.blogspot.com, my other blog, but it fits with my theme here, so I'm adding it.

New Book: "Yiddishkeit"

Yiddishkeit by Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle, published last week, is a mixed bag of short vignettes about Yiddish authors; one-page summaries of various historic trends (especially political activism and persecution of left-wingers); graphic-novel treatments of the lives of movie script writers, actors, and other entertainment figures; and one full-length play containing excerpts from many Yiddish theater works.

The visual treatment of literary and biographical topics in Yiddishkeit is fun, but very truncated: for example, it offers a 3-page summary of Aaron Lansky’s memoir Outwitting History, (and by the way, I think Lansky's treatment of Yiddish in America in Outwitting History is better and more comprehensive) and a 12-page “retelling” in graphic form of the 1937 Yiddish movie “Greenfields.” And more.

Needless to say, it has quite a few things to say about Yiddish having been a secular language, but now having become the everyday language of the religious Chassids, and of few others. Although many of the writers, performers, and political figures that appear in the book were indeed secular Jews, I was a bit disappointed that among other ideas, this wasn't particularly well fleshed-out in the vignettes. All in all, the book tried to do much more than would be possible in such a short treatment, and didn't live up to what it promised.

The introductory narratives in this book suggests that it is some type of comprehensive treatment of Yiddish culture – Yiddishkeit – in America. It implies that there will be material about the exceptionality of Yiddish as a language, though I don’t think that’s really achieved. And while it covers a lot of other cultural material, it also misses some very big topics, and I think it misses them with a bias.

Would you be surprised if I thought it was biased against women? That it missed the presence of Yiddish-speaking Jews and Yiddish culture outside of New York and Hollywood? That it skipped over the existence of scholars of Yiddish language and culture prior to the current academic version of Yiddish studies? In other words, it has a very limited view of the subject.

Here are some of the topics that might make a more complete story of Yiddishkeit that are dismissed, glossed over, or not there at all:

• Food. I’m sure there’s a mention of a New York deli somewhere, but here’s one example of how this doesn’t exactly deal with the food of the Yiddish speakers in America – no mention of the adoption of the bagel by the American mainstream. I wish it had a graphic bio of Ari Weinzweig of Zingerman’s Deli!
• Social Work. The political activist Yiddishists are reasonably well-covered but the way that Jews trying to help the poor immigrants to assimilate and in the process inventing the modern field of social work doesn’t appear. A graphic treatment of the Settlement Cookbook would be welcome here. But in this world, women don’t count, I fear, unless they are minor writers or actors.
• Organizations of immigrants from specific communities (Landsmanshaften). These receive a passing mention, but don’t do justice to them. How about a graphic treatment showing how they were critical in the process of transmitting Yiddish culture from immigrants to their families.
• The Forward and Abraham Cahan. Sure the Forward is mentioned, but its importance is dismissed. For example, Hershl Hartman is listed as “the first native-born Yiddish journalist” (p. p.229) and his work is more than half a century after that of native-speaker Cahan and others writing in either or both languages. If the real issue is what Yiddishkeit gave to American culture, a description of the influence of the “Bintel Brief” – the Forward’s advice column – would be in order.
• English-language novels about Yiddishkeit. Cahan also wrote very important novels about Yiddish-speaking immigrants – in English. Several other writers also did, but there’s little or nothing about them. Much more about the European Yiddish novelists, and lots of attacks on I.B.Singer.
• YIVO. Scholarly Yiddish study and attempt to document the language began in Vilna and moved to New York when hounded out of Europe. A bit more detail on this important institution -- mentioned only in passing in the book -- would fill out the story.

I’m no scholar at all. I can’t imagine how many more topics would be needed to deserve the claims this book makes about its achievement.

Note: I posted some of this little review on the Yiddishkeit page at amazon.com.