Introduction

For Shlomo Berger (1953–2015) ז״ל and

David Shneer (1972–2020) ז״ל

On 30–31 October 2012, a conference on “Twentieth Century Yiddish Culture in its European Context” was held at Lund University. The conference, organised by Jan Schwarz, Marion Aptroot and Shlomo Berger – the chairs of the Yiddish Programmes at the Universities of Lund, Düsseldorf and Amsterdam respectively – marked the establishment of the chair of Yiddish Studies at Lund University.

In 1999, Sweden recognised Yiddish as an official national minority language. Since 2000, governmental funds have been made available for Yiddish TV and radio programmes (mainly for children), Yiddish translations of Swedish literature,¹ and an academic chair of Yiddish studies was established at Lund University in 2011.² A further law was enacted in the summer of 2015 that enables students from first grade through high school to choose Yiddish as an elective heritage language, “arvspråk,” even if Yiddish is not the language the students speak at home.

The present volume reflects the topic of the conference held in Lund in 2012. The essays explore political, sociological, literary and linguistic aspects of modern Yiddish culture. With the exception of Efrat Gal-Ed, the essays focus on the most recent period of Ashkenaz, Central and Eastern European Jewry, following the destruction of its main centres in World War II. After 1945, a significant number of writers and performers including Holocaust survivors continued to use Yiddish as their primary cultural, literary and linguistic medium.

As the position of Yiddish weakened and as more Ashkenazi Jews adopted the vernacular of their countries of residence, the post-war period witnessed an increase in the post-vernacular use of Yiddish.³ However, Yiddish, remained a primary vehicle for the survivor generation after 1945 which expressed their connection to yidishkayt (Jewishness) in various secular and religious contexts.

The survivors and their children became the main bearers of a transnational Yiddish culture that increasingly became a site of memory (lieu de memoire). This post-war Yiddishland encompassed a global virtual culture for the ingathering of cultural treasures in “memory banks” such as the thousand Yizker books (memorial books in Yiddish and Hebrew) and book series such as Dos poylishe yidntum and Musterverk in Buenos Aires, and Yidish-bukh in Warsaw.⁴

An increasing number of scholarly studies have begun to address the post-Holocaust period of Yiddish cultural activity. The silver age of Yiddish culture post-1945, a term suggested by the bibliographer Zachary Baker, resulted from the concerted effort of a small cadre of Yiddish cultural activists and writers who had survived the Holocaust in Poland, the Soviet Union and in safety in North and South America.⁵ It was their extraordinary devotion to commemorating the memory of the annihilated Ashkenazi communities that fuelled the cultural activity of Yiddish performers and writers in the DP camps, and resulted in a significant number of Yiddish cultural and commemorative events and publications in post-war Paris, Warsaw, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Montreal and New York.

In her essay, Efrat Gal-Ed’s analyses the concept “Yiddishland” and its history. The transnational Yiddish cultural congress held in Paris in 1937 attended by about four thousand people, among them a hundred delegates representing over 600 organisations, was a striking manifestation of this ideal. The congress represented the impressive scope and range of Yiddishland as a Jewish diasporic culture prior to the Holocaust. Behind its rousing speeches, however, a fragmented Jewish reality revealed multiple opposing political forces that fought for hegemony. What united Zionists, Bundists, Communists and various religious fractions at the Congress was their being part of the same Ashkenazi, Yiddish speaking culture. However, that was not enough to establish a unity of political and cultural purpose at the Congress. Yiddish culture in the interwar period was a political battlefield on which communists were pitted against anti-communists, Zionists against Yiddishists, assimilated Polish-Jewish intelligentsia against Bundists, and religious factions against secularists.

The Yiddish poet Melekh Ravitsh had been the secretary of the Yiddish PEN club in Warsaw and Nakhmen Meisel, the editor of the important literary weekly in Warsaw Literarishe bleter (1924–1939). Ravitsh and Meisel’s memoirs about the Yiddish Writers’ Union in Warsaw, Tłomackie 13, the main address of Yiddish culture in Poland in the interwar period, represented a major trend of post-1945 Yiddish culture that tended to whitewash the fault lines of the ideological struggle between its contentious factions.⁶ Both memoirs were published in the book series Dos poylishe yidntum in Buenos Aires. Under the editorship of Mark Turkov, it brought out an impressive 175 volumes between 1946–1966 about all aspects of Polish Jewish civilisation. Dos poylishe yidntum exemplified the virtual character of Yiddishland as a quasi-territory featuring the works of Polish Yiddish writers and reprints of classical works. The book series served as a textual Yiddishland that embodied and mourned Ashkenaz. It was infused with utopian aspirations through its elevation of Yiddish culture and language as vehicles through which Jews would continue to create an imaginary homeland and collective sense of belonging.

In post-war Warsaw, a Communist Yiddish literature was created by Yiddish writers who returned to Poland. They had been transferred to Central Asian Soviet Republics in 1941 by the Soviet occupying forces before the invasion of Eastern Poland by Nazi Germany and had evaded the Shoah there. They were ardent communists committed to employing Yiddish culture in the creation of a Polish Communist state. This Yiddish literature articulated the ideological constraints and censorship of the newly established Polish Communist regime. At the same time, as Evita Wiecki demonstrates in her essay about Yiddish teaching material for children in Poland between 1945 and 1949, before the Polish Communist state had been fully established, Yiddish culture had played a central role as an autonomous expression of Jewish memory, culture, and war trauma. Particularly because so few Jewish children had survived the war in hiding, in concentration camps or in the Soviet Union, Jewish children became a powerful symbol for the survivors’ will to live and their hope for the future. Wiecki’s essay delineates the attempts to create new Yiddish teaching material in the aftermath of the war which she analyses for its ideological content in shaping a new Communist post-war yidishkeyt. As she concludes, the attempt was far from successful due to external factors that were very difficult to overcome.⁷

In her essay “The Jewish Labor Committee’s Actions for the Continuation of Yiddish Culture in France 1945–1950,” Constance Pâris de Bollardière delineates how the surviving Yiddish writers in Paris played a crucial role in reviving and commemorating Jewish life in France after four years of German occupation. Important post-war writers such as Mordechai Strigler, Avrom Sutzkever, Chaim Grade, Shmerke Katcherginsky, Avrom Zak, Yitskhok Yanosovitsh and Khayem Leyb Fuks, were supported by the Jewish Labor Committee during their brief sojourn in Paris.⁸

In addition to the creation of new Yiddish works by young writers, the post-war period saw a collective effort to salvage, collect and publish works written during the war in the form of testimonies. Particularly important were the collections of Yiddish songs and folklore undertaken by the Yiddish cultural activist and poet Shmerke Katcherginski in Vilna, Ben Stonehill in New York, and David Boder in Paris during the mid- to late 1940s. YIVO’s pre-war guidelines for collecting the Jewish cultural heritage of Ashkenaz were implemented in the immediate post-war period by individuals and collectives of surviving Jewish writers, journalists, and historians. The thematic unity of Yiddish culture – to commemorate, to chronicle a world that is no more, to testify about war atrocities – was greatly facilitated by the Jewish mass media, particularly the Yiddish press and cultural performances.⁹

As discussed in essays by Simon Perego and David Shneer, vernacular and post-vernacular Yiddish was concurrently part of the commemorations that took place among Jewish survivors in Paris and Berlin in the 1940s and 1950s. These events were conducted partly in French or German, and partly in Yiddish. The rich heritage of Yiddish culture was transmitted through performances, translations and adaptations in Yiddish and other languages.

Simon Perego demonstrates the centrality of Yiddish as a colloquial language of a cohesive Jewish population in post-war Paris that was invigorated by the arrival of a new wave of Yiddish speaking survivors including several key writers. The question of language – Yiddish or Not? – in Holocaust remembrance and commemorative practices became a central issue during the two decades following the liberation of Paris in the autumn of 1944. Several books have rejected the so-called “myth of silence” and “repression” of the Jewish survivors in the two decades following the Holocaust.¹⁰ Perego adds evidence about survivors’ activities in Yiddish in the form of commemorative practices and the continuity of cultural practices in Paris during the two decades following World War II.

Lin Jaldati, one of the Yiddish performers discussed in Perego’s essay, is the protagonist of the late David Shneer’s essay, along with her husband Eberhard Rebling. Lin Jaldati, a Dutch Jew who had been deported to Auschwitz, was reunited with her husband, the German musicologist Eberhard Rebling after the war. They settled in East Berlin in the late 1940s where they gave some of their most memorable performances for Jewish and non-Jewish audiences. Their collaboration as performers brought them on tour to Berlin, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Lodz, Prague and other European hubs of post-war Jewish life on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Their negotiation of Jewish memory and identity in the form of Yiddish song performances at memorial events for Kristallnacht and other memorials created new spaces and vehicles for the transmission of Yiddish and Jewish identity in Communist East Berlin. The leading members of Yiddish culture had been imprisoned and persecuted in the Soviet Union between 1948 and 1952, and many of them were executed on Stalin’s order on August 12, 1952. In East Berlin, however, Yiddish culture was permitted and came alive in Jadalti’s performances in the 1950s. Shneer concludes that Jaldati became, “one Jewish Aushwitz survivor (who) sang Yiddish music to audiences of all kinds – German, Polish, Jewish, socialist, and sometimes, all of those at once. In doing so, Jaldati bequeathed Yiddish music to post-war Germany.”¹¹

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Shlomo Berger and David Shneer. Their untimely death was a major loss to the field of Yiddish.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jan Schwarz

Jan Schwarz, since 2011, Associate Professor of Yiddish Studies at Lund University, Sweden, the only academic position in the field of Yiddish in Scandinavia. Author of Imagining Lives: Autobiographical Fiction of Yiddish Writers (2005) and Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust (2015). Danish translator of Abraham Sutzkever's Grønt akvarium. Fortællinger fra Lithauens Jerusalem (2017), Scholem-Aleichem's Mælkemanden Tevje (2009) and editor of Den gyldne kæde. En antologi af jiddisch litteratur (Rhodos 1994). Currently working on a research project previously supported by the Swedish Research Council (2014–2016), The Worlds of I. B. Singer: Feuilletons, Translations, Life-Writing and the main editor of I.B. Singer, In the World of Chaos: Early Writings 1925-1936 (forthcoming).

Notes

1 A translation of August Strindberg’s drama A Dream Play (Ett drömspel) was published in 2014. Recently, several children’s books in Yiddish have been published in Sweden.

2 The Yiddish programme at Lund University is supported through the governmental mandate to maintain and develop the academic program of one of Sweden’s five official minority languages. It is part of the interdisciplinary Jewish Studies programme based in the faculties of Theology and Humanities.

3 On the phenomenon of Yiddish as a post-vernacular medium, see Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland.

4 See Nalewajko-Kulikov, “The Last Yiddish Books Printed in Poland”; Chinski and Fiszman, “A biblyotek vos felt” and Schwarz, “A Library of Hope and Destruction.” See also, Schwarz, Survivors and Exiles.

5 See Baker, Essential Yiddish Books.

6 The two memoirs are: Nakhmen Mayzel (1887–1966), Geven amol a lebn. Dos yidishe kultur-lebn in Poyln tvishn beyde velt-milkhomes; Melekh Ravitsh, 1975 Dos mayse-bukh fun mayn lebn. Volume 3 of Dos mayse-bukh fun mayn lebn covering the period 1921–1938 was published in 1975 in Montreal. For a discussion of the two memoirs, see my article “Transnational Ashkenaz: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust.”

7 For a study of the Yiddish teaching material for children created by various Yiddish cultural organizations in America, see Kadar, Raising Secular Jews. See also, Finder, “Child Survivors in Polish Jewish Collective Memory After the Holocaust.”

8 A volume of the Yiddish writer Mordechai Strigler’s correspondence during his sojourn in Paris, 1947–1953: Between Destruction and Reconstruction.

9 See the volume Finder et al., POLIN 20: Studies in Polish Jewry; Bret Werb, “Shmerke Kaczerginski, the Partisan-Troubadour”, POLIN 20, 2007; Alan Rosen’s introduction to the life and work of David Boder: http://voices.iit.edu/david_boder; and Miriam Isaac’s introduction to the life and work of Ben Stonehill: http://www.ctmd.org/stonehill.htm.

10 See Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love; Cesarani and Sundquist, After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence; Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation.

11 Shneer’s article in this issue.