Yiddish Culture and Language

This study explores an important Hasidic manuscript rediscovered among the papers of Abraham Joshua Heschel at Duke University. The text, first noted by Heschel in the 1950s, is a collection of sermons by the famed tzaddik Judah Aryeh Leib Alter of Ger (d. 1905). These homilies are significant because they were transcribed by one of his disciples, in many cases capturing them in the original Yiddish. Comparing this alternative witness to Alter's own Hebrew version (called Sefat emet), printed shortly after his death, reveals substantive differences in the sermons' development, structure, and themes. But the manuscript's importance extends beyond a critical new perspective on Alter's teachings. It offers a snapshot of the processes behind the formation of Hasidic books, and calls for scholars to consider the unavoidable divergences between Hebrew and Yiddish, between orality and textuality, and the transmission of ideas from a teacher to his disciples, vectors of change that inhabit all Hasidic literature.

The vast majority of Holocaust victims and survivors were Ashkenazim. Their main language was Yiddish. Yiddish is very close to German, the main difference being that the former is written in Hebrew letters, while the latter in Latin ones. Postwar Europe' s moral foundation is Holocaust remembrance. But this remembrance to be effective, it must be active in the absence of Holocaust survivors. A way to ensure that could be the novel school and university subject of Yiddish for reading purposes. As a result, researchers and interested Europeans would start reading documents and books in Yiddish again. Germany' s premiere cultural organization, Goethe-Institut, is uniquely well-placed and morally obligated to facilitate the relaunch, popularization and cultivation of the skill to read Yiddish-language sources and publications for both the sake of research and for pleasure.

Focusing on the pivotal 1917–1919 conjuncture in Russia and Ukraine, this paper analyzes the efforts of the divided Jewish nationalist intelligentsia to disseminate new forms of Jewish culture to a mass audience, the reception of these efforts in the former Tsarist empire’s variegated Jewish population, and the intelligentsia’s parallel exploration of other forms of cultural formation less dependent on popular support. Comparing the cultural programs of Hebraism and Yiddishism, it demonstrates important parallels in their cultural visions and highlights their shared belief in the possibility of implanting a secularist, aestheticist intelligentsia culture in the whole of “the nation.” The paper reconstructs both substantial forms of popular openness to this culture and its sociocultural weaknesses. Finally, it examines experiments made by the intelligentsia with alternative routes to cultural transformation: suppression of popular culture, non-market cultural arrangements, cultural revolution through education, and the uses of the state. The paper seeks a fuller understanding both of the roots of interwar cultural programs in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and of the Jewish nationalist intelligentsia’s underlying conception of “culture,” its own authority, and the evolving relationship between these conceptions and the realities of East European Jewish social, cultural, and political life from the 1890s onward.

Among the hand-puppet theatres that cropped up in New York during the 1920s was the Modicut theatre, an offshoot of the flourishing Yiddish theatrical literary culture. Created in 1925 by artists-writers-satirists Zuni Maud and Yosl Cutler, Modicut enjoyed great success in Yiddish-speaking communities in the United States and Europe. Modicut, satirizing Jewish and general politics and culture of the day, provided an experience unlike anything previously seen in Yiddish theatre.

This paper published in the magazine of the Jewish museum of Belgium gives a first overview of the development of Yiddish culture in Belgium in the 1930s. It focuses on the establishment of a Yiddish literary journal in Belgium in the second half of the 1930s.

בשנת 1980 הוציאה לאור המשוררת היהודייה ראשל ופרינסקי
ידיש ראשל וועפרינסקי( אסופה ממכתביו של בן זוגה, אהובה,
המשורר מאני לייב (שם העט של מנחם בראהינסקי). האסופה ראתה
אור בהוצאת י.ל. פרץ בתל אביב, ואולם, חייהם המסקרנים של
השניים התנהלו כחצי מאה מוקדם יותר, מעבר לאוקיאנוס, בלואר
איסט סייד בניו יורק. העיר ניו יורק בין שתי מלחמות עולם הייתה
מרכז של תקווה לכמיליון וחצי מהגרים יהודים ממזרח אירופה
שנהרו אל שעריה בכדי להגשים את הפנטזיה האמריקאית; להמשיך
ולחבוק את זהותם היהודית בגאווה ולהנות מרוח החירות המאפשרת
פרנסה ויצירה. במסגרת מציאות הניגודים שאפיינה את התושבים
בבנייני המגורים המשותפים, הטנמנטס, אנוסים היו המהגרים
לחוות צפיפות ודחק, עוני וחולי, ואולם, לצד אלו פרחה גם תרבות
בתי הקפה, ערבי שירה וחגיגת מילייֶה ספרותי תוסס. כזה היה
מרחב מערכת היחסים שנרקמה בין המשורר מאני לייב לאהובתו,
המשוררת ראשל ופרינסקי, משנטשו השניים את משפחותיהם
האחרות כדי לחיות את חייהם יחד. בחירתם המודעת ללכת אחר ציווי הלב והתשוקה כמו גם
התמודדותם עם המחיר אותו גבתה בחירה זו, יצוקים אל שירתם
ההופכת רוויה במוטיבים ומטאפורות של תשוקה ואהבה, פחד וחרדה.
יצירתם של השניים מתמקדת, לעיתים באופן כמעט דיאלוגי, בהגשת
אינטרפרטציות פואטיות לתחושותיהם ובתמלול הרגש המתעורר
בדרך התלאות המשותפת.
מאמר זה בוחן כיצד נסיבות חיים וחוויות רגשיות מתורגמות לשירה,
ובתוך כך הופכות תיעוד מציאות אמיתית ומורכבת ברובד מדומיין.
כתיבת שירה המתקיימת בתוך זוגיות העוברת תקופות של חולי (מאני
לייב סבל כמחצית מחייו ממחלת השחפת) עוני ומחסור מאפשרת
בחינה מחודשת של מקומו של רגש החרדה בתוך התמודדות יומיומית
אותנטית ואמיתית ובדרך תרגומה ליצירה המשקפת את רוח התקופה
________________________________________________________________
In 1980, the Jewish poet Rochelle Weprinski published a collection of letters that her lover, the poet Mani Leib (pen name of Menachem Brahinsky), wrote to her. The I.L. Peretz Publishing House issued the collection in Tel Aviv; however, the couple's intriguing lives had taken place half a century earlier, across the ocean, in New York's Lower East Side. At the turn of the 20th century, New York City was a center of hope for over one million Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. They followed their hearts to pursue the American dream, wishing to embrace their Jewish identity, on the one hand, and to enjoy the spirit of freedom that enabled livelihood and creativity, on the other.
A reality of contradictions characterized the lives of the tenements' residents. Jewish immigrants experienced overcrowding, poverty, and illness, alongside the flourishing of literary cafes, poetry evenings, and thriving secular culture. After leaving their families, Mani Leib and Rochelle Weprinski forged their romantic liaison in this enlightened milieu. Their deliberate choice to follow their hearts' desires and consequences were all cast into their poetry, which became saturated with motifs and metaphors dealing with fear and anxiety. Both poets penned their intimate feelings as poetic interpretations of their lives, transcribing the emotion that arose through shared hardship.
This article examines how life circumstances and emotional experiences were translated into poetry, forming significant documentation of Jewish American immigrants' crude reality. Rochelle Weprinski and Mani Leib experienced harsh circumstances; they both went through periods of illness (Mani Leib suffered from tuberculosis), poverty, and deprivation, even homelessness at times. Their creative writing, constituting a fascinating dialogue, allows for a re-examination of poetic representations of anxiety within the context of their zeitgeist.

This publications accompanied the exhibition
Expressions of Freedom. Bunt (Revolt) and Yung Yiddish. An exhibition that never took place in the Museum of City of Lodz in 2019.
It contains my comments on the contacts of the both mentioned groups in Berlin and Rhineland.

Maramures (Hungarian: Máramaros) was a north-eastern county of the Hungarian monarchy. Due to its rough terrain, which was ill suited for agriculture, and its remote location, it was poorly inhabited. Jews, usually immigrants from nearby Galicia, constituted one quarter to one third of its population, which made it the most "Jewish" county in greater Hungary. The Jews of Maramures were known for their Hasidic and pious lifestyle. The population of the region, which consisted of Hungarians, Romanians, Germans and Ruthenians, was known for its poor socioeconomic status and lack of basic education. Following WWI, Maramures county was divided between the newly formed Czechoslovakia, who got its northern part, which was included in the Carpatho-Rus' region, and Romania who got the southern part, including the county's capital – Sighet (Hungarian: Máramarossziget, Romanian: Sighetu Marmatiei). The Romanian ruled in Maramures until 1940, and during WWII, Hungary took over Carpatho-Rus' and the Northern part of Transylvania.
Despite the poor economy and the scattered population, the newspaper industry of Maramures flourished. Starting in 1865 with the first newspaper of Maramures and ending with the last Jewish newspaper published after the Holocaust, roughly one hundred newspapers and magazines were published.  Most of the papers were published in Sighet, but a few were also published in the smaller villages and towns. During that period, Jews played a significant role in the newspaper industry. They served as printers, publishers, editors, and correspondents in both Jewish and non-Jewish press. Considering the fact that during that time, Hungary and Romania were known for their anti-Semitism, this type of collaboration is all but obvious.

For best access results go straight to: <<http://zeltenebikher.blogspot.com/2014/10/1929.html>>

Introduction to a specially digitized copy of Shimon Dubnov's articles and memoirs about Yiddish language, culture, and "politics", entitled "Fun zhargon tsu yidish un andere artiklen...", Vilna 1929

To follow all the hypertexts (links to other texts containing primary and secondary materials introduced in this entry or relevant to its discussion) please go to the original post at:
http://zeltenebikher.blogspot.com/2014/10/1929.html

1919 saw a tremendous growth of modern Yiddish poetry. Five of it's great superstars published their first collections of poems that year -- two in New York -- Moyshe-Leyb halpern and H. Leyvik, and three in Kiev -- Dovid Hofshteyn, Peretz Markish and Leyb Kvitko. At the same same  the acclaimed Yiddish modernist poet Zishe landau publishes an interim summing up Anthology of Yiddish American poetry created until 1919. A Yiddish collection of articles by Moyshe Olgin presented in a monographic form  and dedicated entirely to Yiddish and some general poetry, and a new "small magazine" dedicated exclusively to poetry and poetry criticism were published in New York. The latter while a short-lived publication, had a direct role in stimulating the rise of the Introspektivist Yiddish poetry.

Yiddish scholar Zelig Kalmanovich was incarnated in the Vilna Ghetto following Nazi occupation and became a spiritual leader. He developed a philosophy of resistance based on learning from Jewish history and survival through keeping Jewish morals and humanity, engaging in cultural and educational endeavors and by doing so securing Jewish continuity. He rejected the military underground and supported the Judenrat's obedience to the Germans. This is the main reason for Kalmanovich's disregard from the collective history. Based on his diary, rare correspondence, and unique resources the article tells the story of an unusual man's philosophy of resisting in 'another way'.

The paper is constructed as a reply to Alexander Beider's paper in the maiden issue of "Journal of Jewish Languages" and also to Brill's editors' policies both in permitting personal invective against Max Weinreich, Solomon Birnbaum and other towering giants of Yiddish linguistics. The crux of this paper's argument is that the comparative method trumps on all counts the Wexlerian construction of multiple hypothesized languages and interrrelationships based on some curious stray lexical items. Paper is in Yiddish, abstract in English.

While much ink has been spilt to corroborate or refute the so-called Spielmann, or Shpliman, theory, i.e. the hypothesis that Yiddish medieval bards wrote and propagated Old Yiddish epics, much less scholarly attention has been dedicated to the historiographical and political incentives behind the theory that dominated the field of Old Yiddish for many decades. In this chapter I aim to fill this gap and investigate the Shpilman theory in its historical context through a close examination of the theory's main founders and propagators, and a discourse analysis of the scholarly works in which the Yiddish Shpilman was constructed, and even invented. Ultimately, I argue that the hypothesis should be understood in light of the rise of interest in Jewish folklore, and especially Jewish folk performance between the two world wars. More specifically, the Spielmann theory constitutes part of a much wider endeavour, undertaken by artists and historians alike, to reinterpret and reimagine Yiddish folklore as art heritage.

The history of the modern Yiddish-language press in Poland is inextricably
entwined with the careers of two Ukrainian Jews — Zwi Pryłucki, founder
of Warsaw’s first Yiddish daily, Der Veg (1905-1907) and editor of Der
Moment (1910-39), and his son Noah, best known for his work in Yiddish
philology and leadership of the interwar Folkspartey. One of two journalistic
families to dominate the Warsaw Yiddish newspaper scene (the other was
the ‘family’ of Samuel Jackan, publisher of Haynt), the Pryłuckis helped
to build the Yiddish press into the most effective means for the diffusion of
Jewish politics and culture to a mass audience. Father and son typified the
new breed of Jewish cultural leader — part ideologist, part entrepreneur —
that laid the foundations of modern Jewish culture in Congress Poland. Their experiences illuminate not only the socio-cultural currents within Polish Jewry during the early decades of the twentieth century but also the transformative role of Yiddish newspapers as both products of modernity and modernizing agents.

In Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin, Marc Caplan explores the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture in the days following World War I. By concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers—Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, and Moyshe Kulbak—working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, Caplan examines how these writers became central to modernist aesthetics. By concentrating on the character of Yiddish literature produced in Weimar Germany, Caplan offers a new method of seeing how artistic creation is constructed and a new understanding of the political resonances that result from it.

Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin reveals how Yiddish literature participated in the culture of Weimar-era modernism, how active Yiddish writers were in the literary scene, and how German-speaking Jews read descriptions of Yiddish-speaking Jews to uncover the emotional complexity of what they managed to create even in the midst of their confusion and ambivalence in Germany.

Caplan's masterful narrative affords new insights into literary form, Jewish culture, and the philosophical and psychological motivations for aesthetic modernism.

https://iupress.org/9780253052001/yiddish-writers-in-weimar-berlin/

This document details hundreds of collections of Yiddish songs published c. 1900-2002, including information about language and script use, categorization of songs, and whether musical notation is included. The list is not exhaustive, but includes material held in many prominent collections. I compiled this index as part of my PhD thesis (University of Cambridge, 2004) and am making it available here in .pdf form for anyone interested.

As the first prominent Yiddish writer from the Polish territories of the Pale of Settlement, I. L. Peretz (1852-1915) was from the beginning of his career an outlier in the geographical politics of Yiddish culture. He dramatized this difference in a number of ways: insisting on the linguistic difference of his Yiddish from that of his colleagues, dispensing with the overt appeals to oral discourse which Yiddish literature had adopted and adapted from Russian literary models, and demanding of himself and his readers a sensitivity to literary style on the highest level of sophistication. As an outlier, these aesthetic differences find representation in analogously exceptional approaches to the question of literary space. Unlike his primary colleagues, and competitors, in Yiddish literature of the day-Sh. Y. Abramovitsh (c. 1835-1917) and Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916)-Peretz dispenses with the convention of creating prototypical, imaginary shtetlekh in order to situate his stories, including his most fantastic and parodic narratives, in a verifiable Eastern European geography. He is moreover the first great Yiddish writer to describe these traditional communities from a perspective of the writer living in a modern metropolis, even if the metropolis itself figures in comparatively few of his narratives. What emerges from these strategies is a writer who situates himself not only as an "outlier" with respect to the linguistic and literary conventions of his contemporaries, but also with respect to the territories he describes. His narratives are neither traditional nor modern, neither metropolitan nor peripheral, neither realistic nor phantasmagoric, but in each instance somewhere in between and, more significantly, constantly in a state of flux among these contrasting locations. This essay will trace the narrational techniques and representations of space in Peretz's fiction to demonstrate the dislocations which determine his best writing and provide a model for the leading trends in Yiddish modernism that follow in his wake. ___________________

The Formation of the “Russian Soviet Canon” of Sholem Aleichem’s Works

* Abstract: The author refers under the term “the Russian Soviet canon” of Sholem Aleichem’s works to the corpus of Russian translations, which includes three editions of his collected works in six volumes (1st edn: 1959–1961; 2nd edn: 1971–1974; 3rd edn: 1988–1990). The appearance of these collections was the most important achievement of the long-term program of publishing the Yiddish classic writer’s works in the USSR – a program that has been unprecedented in its size in the history of translations from Yiddish.

The article traces the history of the formation of the “Russian Soviet canon,” analyzes the specific features of translations presented in six-volume collections and in other editions, examines some examples of translation errors and identifies the cases of omissions that were motivated by either ideological or aesthetic considerations.

The author emphasizes that in fact, the “Russian Soviet canon” of Sholem Aleichem’s works was not determined once and for all since all the three editions of his six-volume collections differed significantly from each other.

The essay examines translation issues in Yitzak Katzenelson's "Dos lid funem oysgehargetn yidishen folk" and their implications for the interpretation of Shoah literature. It provides a new English translation of the first canto of "Dos lid" as well.

There was a terrible typographical error in the original posting: the Yiddish term for Auschwitz is "Oshventshim,"  comparable to the Polish Oświęcim, and not "Oshventshtim". I apologize for this mistake.

Lecture on Contemporary Yiddish creativity especially in the realm before poetry in the 21st century.
(INCL. LINKS TO LITERARY SAMPLES AND ADDITIONAL INFORMATION IN THE APPENDICES IN THE LAST TWO PAGES OF THE HANDOUT)

Presented at the Chicago YIVO Society, February 14, 2021

At the turn of the 20th century, the Russian Empire’s 5.2 million Jews were in crisis. Having quintupled in number since 1800, they were substantially impoverished and crammed into Russia’s 25 westernmost provinces. Some pinned their hopes on emigration, others on being granted permission to live in the Russian interior. Some labored with hand tools in dingy workshops but most were forced to eke out a living as petty merchants and paupers. Hardly any were able to find work in Russia’s large, mechanized factories.

In this context, the young Yakov Leshchinsky, influenced in equal measure by Marx and the Zionist thinker Ahad Ha-am, embarked on a lifelong task of analyzing the fate of the Jewish people. In The Jewish Worker in Russia (1906), a combination political pamphlet, theoretical excursus and empirical analysis, he established a foundation for the ideology of the Zionist Socialist Workers Party, presaged modern sociological concepts explaining the limited proletarianization and industrialization of the Jewish working class, and gave substance to the theory by analyzing a large body of unique statistical data, mainly from official sources and a quasi-survey of Russian Jews funded by the Jewish Colonization Association. It was a landmark work that underscored the limitations of pure Marxism, Zionism, and liberalism; led eventually to the view that Jews would be best off seeking democracy, socialism, and personal and cultural autonomy in many geographical centers; and foretold the course of Leshchinsky’s own life and career as a founding father of Jewish social science, Director of YIVO’s Economics and Statistics Department, and resident of Ukraine, Switzerland, Russia, Poland, Germany, and the United States who spent his last years in Israel.

"Megaleh Temirin (Revealer of Secrets), ed. Jonatan Meir, Three volumes, Mosad Bialik, Jerusalem

Megaleh Temirin (Revealer of Secrets), first published in Vienna in 1819, is one of the sharpest and wittiest pieces of Jewish literature written in the first half of the nineteenth century, and is perhaps the most important piece of Hebrew prose composed before the stories of Mendele Mocher Seforim. A sly and complex story deriding Hasidism and Hasidim, it is told through the correspondence between the beadles of Hasidic courts and contemporary rabbis, and it presents a dark picture of  avaricious frauds and swindlers whose main concern was control over territory and the souls of believers, a goal achieved by beguiling the authorities and attacking all opponents. Perl lends his book a ‘Hasidic’ feel both in its physical design and in its language, presenting a Maskilic version of In Praise of the Ba’al Shem Tov that lays Hasidism bare so that no reader will ever be able to look at that, or any other Hasidic book, in the same way again. In addition to the book’s satiric sting, which would have been enough to bring its readers a dual pleasure, Perl’s hints at contemporary people and places, hidden within anagrams and numerological tricks. With the unraveling of these clues, which also include the use of actual Hasidic sources, the book is a valuable, contemporary view of historical reality. A meticulous reading of the book may therefore open a window on the hidden worlds of Hasidism and the Haskalah at the start of the nineteenth century.


The first volume (Imagined Hasidism) serves as an introduction to the complex satirical writings of Josef Perl of Tarnopol (1773-1839). At the center of the book stands an analysis of the satires, Megaleh Temirin (1819) and Bochen Tzadik (1838), including a systematic treatment of the ‘characters’ in the central works and a discussion of the dozens of manuscripts to be found in the Perl Archive in Jerusalem. Perl’s writings are analyzed here in the fuller context of Hebrew and Yiddish literature in general and Maskilic and Hasidic literature in particular, as well as other polemical writings and governmental records critical of Hasidism. The study thus presents a complex and nuanced picture of the relationship between literature and history, between the anti-Hasidic reports and the more complicated historical reality, and lays the groundwork for further research into the genre of nineteenth-century Maskilic satire.

The second and third volumes (Megaleh Temirin) present for the first time an annotated edition of Megaleh Temirin. It is based on the first edition and the scattered manuscripts and it includes a comparison to its Yiddish translation. The book is accompanied by appendices on its origins and contents, including fundamental treatments of several passages: an explication of the encoded names, the Hasidic sources used by the author, and the variants found in the manuscripts and in the only edition of the book in Yiddish.

The editor of the book, Professor Jonatan Meir, teaches in the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University. He has published several articles on the Haskalah of Eastern Europe, Hasidism, and a number of varied topics in twentieth-century Kabbalah.


Contents

Volume 1  - Critical Edition

Concerning this edition
Key personalities
Sefer Megale Temirin – Critical Edition


Volume 2 - Appendixes:
1. Glossary, Abbreviations, Acronyms
2. Explanation of the Speaking Names
3. Perl’s Hasidic Sources
4. Manuscripts of Sefer Megale Temirin
5. Yiddish Introduction to Sefer Megale Temirin
Bibliographic Abbreviations

-------------------------------
Reviews:
(1) Dan Meron, 2013, ‘Megaleh Temirin’, Kivunim Hadashim 29, 55 pages (Hebrew)
(2) David Assaf, 2014, ‘Hasidim will not Read it but Tear it’, Haaretz, Tarbut ve-Sifrut, p .6 (Hebrew) http://onegshabbat.blogspot.co.il/2014/04/blog-post_18.html
(3) Eliezer Brodt, 2014, 'New book Announcement- Megale Temirin', The Seforim Blog http://seforim.blogspot.co.il/2014/01/new-book-announcement-megale-temirin.html
(4) Matan Hermoni, 2014,  הסבתא המופקרת של הספרות העבריתHaaretz, Sfarim (Hebrew) http://www.haaretz.co.il/.premium-1.2382365
(5) Shinichi Yamamoto, 2015, 山本　伸一, "ヨナタン・メイール編著『想像のハシディズム』", ユダヤ・イスラエル研究　第28号  http://www.waseda.jp/assoc-jsjs/jistudies.html
(6) David Biale and David Assaf,, 2015, 'Revealer Revealed', Jewish Review of Books, pp. 17-21  http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1454/revealer-revealed/
(7) Hillel Halkin, 2015, "Sex, Magic, Bigotry, Corruption- and the First Hebrew Novel', Mosaic Magazine,  http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2015/05/sex-magic-bigotry-corruption-and-the-first-hebrew-novel/
(8) Tomer Persico, 2015, "Interview", Lula'at haEl Blog, http://tomerpersico.com/2015/08/10/meir_perl/

Die Entstehung einer, dem eigenen Selbstverstandnis nach modernen, jiddischen Literaturszene in Wien ist vor dem Hintergrund politischer Bewegungen vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg zu sehen. Im Kontext der Nationalitatenkonflikte der Habsburger Monarchie wurde die Anerkennung des Jiddischen sowohl bei den judischen Diasporanationalisten wie in der judischen Arbeiterbewegung zu einem politischen Ziel. Dieses wurde teilweise gemeinsam verfolgt, etwa bei den Kampagnen, die vor den Volkszahlungen fur das Recht, Jiddisch als &quot;Umgangssprache&quot; anzugeben, gefuhrt wurden. Vor diesem Hintergrund entstand in Galizien eine nationalromantische literarische Bewegung, bekannt als „Yung-Galtisye“ (Jung-Galizien), die auf eine Modernisierung der jiddischen Literatur ausgerichtet war und gepragt wurde von ihrem Wortfuhrer S. J. Imber. Die kulturpolitischen Ideen des „Jiddischismus“ wurden nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg zum bestimmenden Bestandteil der Ideologie des Linken Poale Zionismus. Die Linke Poal...

A family memoir with immigrant tales from the 1880s to the 1920s and the American lives that followed, including my long Yiddish correspondence with my grandmother, some canonical Yiddish letters from great-grandfathers, my mother's account of her exodus to America when she was 12, my returns to her hometown in later years, and various personal family reminiscences, with many photographs and some poems.