Yiddish: A Global Culture, by author and curator David Mazower, is a lavish catalog that brings the Yiddish Book Center‘s landmark permanent exhibition to a general readership, situating the sweeping story of Yiddish culture within broader world history
A collection of literature, theater, art, music, journalism and politics, Mazower also fills this handsomely designed book with incredible individual stories—from the onstage lesbian love affair that outraged conservative opinion to the Yiddish pulp fiction detective whose exploits entranced a future Nobel Prize–winning author. It covers passionate social reformers, avant-garde artists, courageous women writers and Holocaust-survivor poets. (The exhibition itself was also curated and developed over five years by Mazower, a BBC journalist and great-grandson of Yiddish writer Sholem Asch.)
Below, he speaks about the richness of this collection and its role in reestablishing Yiddish as a living language with an incredible legacy.
Does modern Yiddish culture exist?
I’m tempted to say: “Steven, you’re winding me up, right?” But since we’re here, and not sat in a pub in my hometown (London), I’ll let folks in on the joke. You’re asking the exact same question that I write about in the catalog. It caught me off guard when a visitor to the Yiddish Book Center put it to me some years ago. And not just any visitor but the daughter of Yiddish-speaking immigrants to Israel. She genuinely couldn’t understand how “Yiddish culture” and “modern” belonged in the same phrase. For her, Yiddish was firmly in the past. It represented a world that had been swept away in the Holocaust and was now superseded by Hebrew and Hebrew culture. There’s a long and complicated answer to her, and your, question, which involves peeling back layer upon layer of Jewish angst, trauma and stereotyping. Luckily, there’s also an easier answer, which is: If it looks like a challah, twists like a challah and tastes like a challah, then it probably is a challah! There’s ample evidence that modern Yiddish culture is doing pretty well. There’s a vibrant Yiddish music scene; new Yiddish poets, animators, translators, and zine makers; there is brilliant and inventive Yiddish theater like the recent off-Broadway Yiddish Fiddler on the Roof; there is an abundance of brilliant Yiddish studies scholarship; and equally if not more important, an ever-expanding world of contemporary ultra-Orthodox Yiddish culture—newspapers, writers, podcasters, singers and more. All of this features in this book!
Would you consider Yiddish the Latin of the Jews?
Another wind-up! No, I take it back—this is a great question, with multiple possible answers. One is a categorical no, since Latin is the official language of the Vatican and a defining feature of Yiddish is that it has always been a diasporic language, never the official language of a Yiddish-speaking state. On the other hand, both Latin and Yiddish tend to be the butt of poor-taste jokes about dying and resuscitation (or resurrection), which could be seen as a backhanded compliment to their staying power. In terms of cultural capital, you might say that Latin is more akin to what Hebrew was before the 20th century—high status, elite, with specific religious functions—whereas Yiddish was the day- to-day vernacular, much as Italian is used in the Vatican today. But more fundamentally, I see at least two major differences: First, Yiddish still has hundreds of thousands of native speakers in large neighborhood communities. Yiddish is their mame-loshn, their mother tongue, and it’s constantly evolving just like any other contemporary language. Second, our book reveals a world of Yiddish Modernist artists, avant-garde playwrights, campaigning journalists and pioneering activists and campaigners. Modern cultural history would look very different without them, not least Broadway and Hollywood. I doubt you could say the same for Latin. Finally, your question reminds me that there’s an entry in my timeline of modern Yiddish culture, which mentions a world-famous figure who was fluent in both languages!
Is Yiddish the Jewish language?
There was a time when that was a burning question. That time was 1908, when a Yiddish Language Conference in Czernowitz held heated debates on the issue. They weighed up the competing claims of Yiddish and Hebrew, the two main Ashkenazi Jewish languages, and concluded that Yiddish was not the, but only a Jewish language. (They weren’t considering the many other Jewish languages such as Judeo-Arabic or Ladino.) And they were right, since modern Ashkenazi culture has been thoroughly bilingual for centuries, unimaginable without both Hebrew and Yiddish. Satirists and cartoonists have had great fun with this question. Our catalog reproduces one of the best of these cartoons, featuring the writer Y.L. Peretz, who loved both languages but chose Yiddish as the best means of reaching a mass audience.
Did women have a substantial role in Yiddish culture? The book seems to suggest this is true.
Yes! A major role, and in many ways, a majority role too. Not that you would have known it from most of the books written about Yiddish culture until well into the 20th century. The received wisdom was that women wrote poetry, but they didn’t write novels, plays or memoirs. In fact, they not only did write in all these genres, but they also ran theaters, edited literary journals, led strikes, and were prominent in Yiddish politics. The issue of course was entrenched misogyny, which put up barriers to publishing or acknowledging their work and explains their lack of visibility. Highlighting and explaining these processes and bringing these neglected voices to the fore has been probably the single-most important development in modern Yiddish studies and scholarship. Our catalog draws on this work and, I hope, makes its own contribution to this fundamental “course correction.” Among many such stories, we highlight memoirist Ita Kalish, poet Celia Dropkin, theater stars Ester-Rokhl and Ida Kaminska, and the young Modernist artists of 1920s Poland.
You continue to ask the questions I planned on asking. Isn’t Yiddish a “bastard” language? Or as my grandparents practiced it, an old country-coded mystery language used for keeping secrets from me?
Bastard language, mongrel language, jargon … all these slurs were part of the mud that was thrown at Yiddish in the context of a broader culture war within the Jewish world and beyond. Yiddish was caught up in bigger debates about modernity, assimilation and the trade-offs minority groups felt they needed to make to be accepted within empires or nation states. In short, it’s not a “bastard” language (whatever that may mean!) but a fusion language, like English, and so many others. And yes, it was coded as a secret language in America, a way of keeping secrets from American-born children or grandchildren. But think of it another way: If you had learned Yiddish, there would be no secrets! Rather than “a language my grandparents didn’t want me to understand”—a phrase we hear a lot at the Yiddish Book Center—maybe some of those grandparents felt heartbroken at what they perceived as the impossibility of passing on their mother tongue and its culture.
How did the Avant Garde in Europe promote and encourage Yiddish?
That suggests a deliberate strategy or a process of outreach, and I guess I wouldn’t put it that way. The European Avant Garde wasn’t a unified movement, it was a loose sensibility shared by many disparate individuals and organizations. For sure, there were prominent non-Jews who were extremely sympathetic to Yiddish and Hebrew modernism—for example, Stanislavski and Vakhtangov in the Russian theater world. Polish art academies were also surprisingly supportive of Jewish students. But for the most part, Yiddish-speaking Avant Garde designers, painters, writers and theater artists simply created within a cosmopolitan world, switching between languages depending on the occasion and the company they kept. And Yiddish wasn’t always on the periphery: It was at the heart of literary Modernism in Greenwich Village, just as it was in Avant Garde art circles in Paris, or interwar theater in Warsaw.
Why is Yiddish written with Hebrew characters?
Most Jewish languages are written with Hebrew characters since that is the alphabet most familiar from the synagogue, the daily prayers and the commentaries. Regardless of their linguistic roots (German in the case of Yiddish, Spanish for Judeo-Spanish or Ladino), they tend to use the Hebrew alphabet.
In your foreword you mention there is a particular story to tell. What is that story? And what are the alternative narratives?
In essence, it’s the emergence of Yiddish as a modern mass culture and its flowering as a worldwide network with centers in Europe, North America and Latin America. We tell that story thematically through Yiddish literature, theater, music, politics, the press and more. It’s anything but parochial: Yiddish audiences devoured world literature and drama, and plenty of non-Jews played significant roles in the Yiddish world—people like Paul Robeson and the anarchist thinker Rudolf Rocker.
Alternative narratives? Well, a pessimist might choose to stop at 1939, with European Yiddish culture on the brink of an abyss. Or make responses to antisemitism and persecution a more defining element of the story. I briefly considered another idea: using a set of multigenerational family stories to highlight not just Yiddish culture but its influences and legacy. For example, connecting Yiddish theater legends Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky with their grandson, the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, or joining the dots from my great-grandfather, Yiddish writer Sholem Asch to his son Moe Asch, who absorbed ideas of internationalism and brotherhood and went on to found Folkways, a pioneer world music label. In other words, teasing out how elements of the Yiddish DNA seep into wider American and European culture. I still think the idea has potential, but it felt too constricting and prescriptive for the bigger story we wanted to tell.
Who would you say is the audience for this exhibition and book?
Anyone who likes a really good story. Anyone who is open to inspiration and wonder and beauty. Anyone with an interest in history, memory, identity, religion, immigration and diaspora experiences, minority cultures, or the ways different languages, peoples and traditions coexist and influence one other. Also, anyone looking for inspirational stories of resilience: Yiddish culture is full of examples of remarkable people who surmount all sorts of obstacles, defy all sorts of expectations, to create the lives they want to lead. That’s especially true of girls and young women. Of course, both the exhibition and this catalog also tell a distinctively Jewish story of a thousand-year-long Yiddish civilization that tends to be overlooked amidst dominant Jewish narratives centering the Bible, the Holocaust, and the State of Israel. Finally, this catalog is for anyone who likes magnificent and beautiful books. We’ve worked hard to bring words and images together to tell powerful stories. I’ve always been a big fan of image-led histories—books like David King’s wonderful anthologies of Soviet history and culture—and, as you know well, Steven, these books are far from easy to pull off! I am proud of the book we made. I think it stands comparison with the best examples of this genre. Oh, and the book is also perfect for anyone looking for a present or festive gift!
What are the (randomly) three most surprising artifacts in this book based on your criteria as a curator? (My favorite is the Ollie Harrington woodcut.)
I particularly love artifacts that seem to possess supernatural powers of survival and tell extraordinary stories. Three random examples: 1) An exquisite, fragile, hand-painted wooden figurine, collected in the 1920s by Yiddish writers Peretz Hirshbein and Esther Shumiatcher as they toured Tibet. 2) An industrial weaver’s hand-inked portrait of Yiddish culture hero Chaim Zhitlowsky, made in Buenos Aires in 1945. It’s a micrograph—a portrait created from miniature letters—the size of an Easter Island head that was presented to a Yiddish school, thrown out, rescued, and finally, 50 years later, found its way to us! 3) My great-grandfather’s leather exercise ball, which he reluctantly parted from in the 1940s. He promised it to the young son of friends, withdrew the promise, then was overruled by his wife, who made him hand it over. It’s the perfect illustration of something he wrote about in his novels: the Talmudic concept of competing good and evil inclinations which coexist within every one of us!
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