Yiddish in the City

In contrast to most national cultures, modern Yiddish culture came into being in geographically disconnected landscapes and without the support of a nation state. Recently, scholars have begun to think about Yiddish culture in global terms, imagining a Yiddish cultural landscape in which people and communities are connected through a wide-ranging exchange of periodicals, theater productions, literature, chorus performances, congresses, exhibitions, and political ideologies, just to name a few. What seemingly calls for further research in contemporary discussions about Yiddish culture, however, is how exactly, urban spaces, specifically cities, contributed to what we might call “Yiddishland.”

Several recent studies have examined Yiddish culture in the context of individual cities. Elissa Bemporad’s study of Minsk, for example, examined how Yiddish culture and language shaped the specific context of Minsk as an urban space in the Soviet Union.¹ Scott Ury argued that the Yiddish public sphere consolidated an ethno-linguistic community among Warsaw Jews during the 1905–1907 revolution, providing new collective bonds and a sense of order for recent arrivals struggling with the disorienting experiences of life in a big city.² The study of Yiddish in urban contexts would benefit from a transnational, interdisciplinary approach as well. In the wake of the “transnational turn” and the recent push to think of Jewish and world history as being shaped by an on-going stream of migrations, as in Rebecca Kobrin’s study of Bialystok,³ it is helpful to re-address the ways in which we evaluate the role that cities played in the development of Yiddish culture. Given the transnationality of global Jewish culture and history, an analysis of a variety of cities, both large and small, can change our understanding of not only what we might call a transnational Yiddishland, but the development of Yiddish culture more broadly.

This issue of East European Jewish Affairs interrogates the idea of “Yiddish in the city” within the contexts of transnational and migration history. The articles explore notions of centers, hubs, margins, and borderlands; cultural and national exchanges of ideas; the role that urban space plays in idealizing a transnational community; and the role (both real and imagined) that language played in building a multilingual, transnational Yiddishland. Articles also explore how institutions, politics, gatherings, and performances tied together the local and international components of Yiddish culture.

Cities were the centers of modern Yiddish culture. On one hand, the physical spaces of cities were a critical aspect to that culture: the cafes and writers’ clubs where Yiddish writers gathered; the local lending libraries where Yiddish books circulated to the masses; the courtyards, streets, and parks that were the settings for Yiddish novels, short stories, and poems. At the same time, the migration of both people and ideas across geographic borders created a global Yiddish network of institutions, publications, writers, and readers. Yiddish culture in large urban environments embodied the tension between rootedness and migration, between local belonging and global movement. This volume examines both historical developments and literary works that reflect that duality.

In large urban centers, Jews in both Eastern Europe and the cities to which they migrated encountered the upheavals of modern life, but they also were the setting where new bonds of community formed and where visions for transforming the realities of the present developed. As scholars working on place and the history of the city demonstrate, the city was where new identities, whether national, cosmopolitan or otherwise, could be formed.⁴ In Yiddish studies, too, there has been a recent impulse to think of cities as a transnational network of knots holding together modern Yiddish culture.⁵ In contrast to Abraham Joshua Heschel’s idealized notion of Judaism as a “religion of time aimed at the sanctification of time” – a characterization that a “space and place” approach in Jewish studies challenges – the city and the spaces it contained defined modern secular Jewish culture.⁶

It is that tension between the disorienting effects of life in the metropolis and visions for a different future that provided so much of the dynamism of Jewish urban life. This tension is epitomized in the concept of do’ikayt, which emphasized Jewish belonging as centered on the places in which Jews found themselves. Do’ikayt implies more than the word’s literal translation of “hereness.” Rather, as Madeline Cohen argues in her examination of the term’s history, do’ikayt implied a “different here, a different now.” The concept emphasizes the development of a political and cultural identity rooted in Yiddish culture but transcending a territorial approach to the national collective – the right to a national culture in the places of the diaspora where Jews live. The tension between “here” and “now,” on the one hand, and the hoped-for future, on the other hand, is fundamental to literary representations of the city in Yiddish literature. The mythologized city, she notes, is a kind of counterpoint to the mythologized shtetl of Yiddish literature.

“Literary do’ikayt,” to use Cohen’s term, is, in a sense, a manifestation of the symbolism of the city – not only in Yiddish – as a place of both sin and redemption that has long been a feature of literary representations, drawing on biblical stories of Babel, Babylon, and other cities. Since St. Augustine’s fifth-century City of God, the biblical city symbolized both moral decline and hope for deliverance; Dante, in the Divine Comedy, emphasized the estrangement from community in the city and at the same time hope for redemption of humanity. As industrialization transformed urban life, the biblical city increasingly emphasized the negative aspects of urban life: chaotic streets, the confusion of language, and decaying buildings.⁷

Reading for “literary do’ikayt” in Yiddish literature, Cohen notes, illuminates the rootedness of East European Jews in the local, physical spaces of the city. In her analysis of Sh. An-sky’s In shtrom [In The Stream], Cohen finds that the “lived Jewish space” of the city park was the main setting for revolutionary Jewish politics, which sought to establish an identity firmly rooted in Yiddish culture while at the same time promoting a sense of local belonging. The action, which takes place over one month during the 1905 revolution in an unnamed provincial city, underscores the centrality of cities beyond the large metropolis to East European Jewish life.

The dehumanizing effect of the big city is also a key theme in Sholem Aleichem’s stories about Yehupets, as Mikhail Krutikov argues in his article. The experiences of the characters in the city are shaped by the specific history of Jews in Kiev, on which Yehupets is modeled, together with Sholem Aleichem’s own encounters with Kiev. The requirement for Jews living in Kiev to have a residency permit – an obstacle that Sholem Aleichem himself encountered in the city – magnified the precariousness of existence that often characterizes literary depictions of life in the metropolis. The author’s unstable financial situation in Kiev shaped his depictions of life in Yehupets: his emphasis on the insecurity of big city life as well as his satire of the Jewish bourgeoisie. Sholem Aleichem, Krutikov notes, chose shtetl Jews to guide readers through the labyrinth of Yehupets streets, showing the dehumanizing urban environment and its class divisions through the eyes of an outsider.

So, too, is Moshe Kulbak’s “The City” narrated through the voice of an outsider, as Jordan Finkin finds in his analysis of the poem, whose tension between “ardor and hesitancy” about life in the metropolis echoes the ambivalence in Sholem Aleichem’s Yehupets stories. The city is, for Kulbak, the embodiment of the dichotomy that Cohen labels “literary do’ikayt”: the “constant tension between rest and restlessness, silence and sound, the past and the present,” according to Finkin. There is a tension, too, between rest and movement, between city life and migration. The dichotomy is not only in the poem’s representations of urban life; the revolution, too, holds danger. In Finkin’s reading, the city and the revolution merge in Kulbak’s poem through the ambivalence of the “revolutionary Yiddish poet” toward both.

Representations of the city in Yiddish literature were not only the domain of the Left, as Gil Ribak emphasizes in his study of the Yiddish humorist Yisroel-Yoysef Zevin, who wrote under the name Tashrak. The widely read writer, who published in conservative Yiddish newspapers, transported the maskilic criticism of the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe, whom they sought to “civilize,” to the New York immigrant world, though with moderation to his criticism. In Tashrak’s feuilletons, New York City became a “large shtetl,” transforming the disorienting spaces of big-city life into the heymishe svive (familiar environment) of the mythological East European Jewish small town. In Ribak’s reading, the mythologized shtetl and the mythologized city of Yiddish literature became one in Blotetown (“trash town”), which is Tashrak’s moniker for New York City. Despite Tashrak’s popularity, Ribak argues, his writing has been overlooked in Yiddish scholarship because of his apolitical, conservative traditionalism.

Modern Jewish politics of all stripes is, nevertheless, a central theme in Yiddish literature. It was politics that helped to make order out of the disorder of big city life during an era of rapid industrialization. As Jews moved to the cities, they also began to make connections between themselves and their place within the broader history of the world. World histories published in Yiddish at the end of the nineteenth century, argues Thomas Prendergast in his article, popularized an evolutionist way of thinking that enabled Jews to accept the idea that cultural work was central to the national collective. He documents the flourishing of cheap, mass-market world histories in Yiddish and how they shaped the worldviews of a mass readership even more so than works by the now well-known Jewish historians of that era. Drawing on Scott Ury’s approach to the study of Jewish politics in Warsaw during the 1905 revolution, Prendergast argues that the mindset promoted by world histories in Yiddish was not specific to any political party and provided a way to understand the urbanizing Russian Empire, especially for newcomers to the big city.

The emphasis on cultural work as the basis for a national Jewish collective provided the conceptual framework for the activists of the Kultur-lige, an interwar, transnational, unaffiliated Yiddish cultural organization that sought to establish an institutional foundation for a global Yiddish culture. Ellie Kellman traces the Kultur-lige’s activities from its origins in Kiev to Warsaw, Berlin, and Paris to find that the institution was ultimately unable to establish a strong foundation for a Yiddish cultural infrastructure that transcended both party politics and geographic borders. The large urban centers were at once a fruitful locus for the Kultur-lige’s goal of creating and promoting Yiddish high culture to the masses, Kellman argues, and at the same time the center of the intense culture of competing political ideologies that limited the appeal of a non-party organization.

Just as cities transformed Jews’ historical and cultural understandings, perceptions, and undertakings, so too did the transition to urban spaces affect Jews’ understandings of marginality as well as their conceptions of belonging. In Buenos Aires, as Mariusz Kałczewiak argues, Yiddish-speaking Jews tried to make their new home there a “heymishe svive” (a familiar environment) through an attempt to both import Yiddish culture as well as make Yiddish culture anew in Argentina. They sought to appeal to immigrants’ new and old homes. In Argentina, Yiddish proved to be an avenue for inclusion for Jewish migrants.

Inclusion was also on many Jews’ minds in Warsaw, as Kalman Weiser makes clear in his article on what was considered a “Jewish” name. Through an examination of name changing, Weiser highlights how with movement to cities, Jews began to employ naming practices that echoed the non-Jewish societies in which they found themselves. In the particular case of Warsaw, Weiser argues that these practices were seen as a possible mode for inclusion.

In addition to these articles, this special issue includes three pieces that fall under the “EEJA in Action” rubric. These translations – some short, some long – by Madeline Cohen, Gil Ribak, and Robert Brym highlight how Yiddish-speaking Jews reacted to their new urban surroundings either through literature, as Cohen’s partial translation of Sh. An-sky’s In shtrom demonstrates; through journalism, as Ribak’s translation of Tashrak highlights; and through scholarship, as Brym’s full translation of Yakov Leshchinsky’s 1928 publication Di antviklung fun idishn folk far di letzte 100 yor (The Development of the Jewish People over the Last 100 Years). These translations are intended to further ground the contexts and ideas detailed in this special issue. It is our hope that these articles and translations contribute to our understanding of how Jews encountered modernity, how those encounters were expressed through Yiddish culture, and how the cities in which they found themselves shaped their understandings of the world in which they lived, one park bench, one meeting, one busy intersection, and one lecture hall at a time.

Notes

1 Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews.

2 Ury, Barricades and Boarders.

3 Kobrin, Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora.

4 For classic examples, see Lefebvre, The Production of Space and de Certeau, “Walking in the City.” In the realm of Jewish and Yiddish studies, histories in English of individual cities in Eastern Europe, in addition to the works by Bemporad, Kobrin, and Ury cited above, include Nathans, Beyond the Pale; Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa; Tanny, City of Rogues and Schnorrers; Meir, Kiev, Jewish Metropolis; Khiterer, Jewish City or Inferno of Russian Israel?; Martin, Jewish Life in Cracow, 1918-1939; Frick, Kith, Kin and Neighbors; and Cammy, “Tsevorfene bleter: The Emergence of Yung Vilne.” For a transnational approach to urban European Jewish history, see Wobick-Segev, Homes Away from Home.

5 On a transnational approach to Yiddish studies, see Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Yiddish Culture; Caplan, Yiddish Empire; and Underwood, Yiddish Paris.

6 Heschel, The Sabbath, 8; and Kaplan, “Time, History, Space, and Place.” Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert’s studies of the eruv challenge Heschel’s emphasis on time over space. She argues that the eruv in the rabbis’ conception “operates as a boundary-making device, quite concretely in relationship to the residential space of the neighborhood that the eruv community inhabits.” Fonrobert, “The Political Symbolism of the Eruv,” 10. On space and place in Jewish studies, see Fonrobert and Shemtov, “Introduction”; Mann, A Place in History, especially chapter 1, “Jews in Space,” 1–25; and Mann, Space and Place in Jewish Studies.

7 On the city in literature, see Hawkins, “Divide and Conquer”; Lehan, The City in Literature; Pike, The Image of the City in Modern Literature; and Wirth-Nesher, City Codes.