The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture

by David E. Fishman

The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture explores the transformation of Yiddish from a low-status vernacular to the medium of a complex modern culture.  David Fishman examines the efforts of east European Jews to establish their linguistic distinctiveness as part of their struggle for national survival in the diaspora.  Fishman considers the roots of modern Yiddish culture in social and political conditions in Imperial Tsarist and inter-war Poland, and its relationship to Zionism and Bundism. In so doing, Fishman argues that Yiddish culture enveloped all socioeconomic classes, not just the proletarian base, and considers the emergence, at the turn of the century, of a pro-Yiddish intelligentsia and a Yiddishist movement. As Fishman points out, the rise of Yiddishism was not without controversy. Some believed that the rise of Yiddish represented a shift away from a religious-dominated culture to a completely secular, European one; a Jewish nation held together by language, rather than by land or religious content. Others hoped that Yiddish culture would inherit the moral and national values of the Jewish religious tradition, and that to achieve this result, the Bible and Midrash would need to exist in modern Yiddish translation. Modern Yiddish culture developed in the midst of these opposing concepts. Fishman follows the rise of the culture to its apex, the founding of the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) in Vilna in 1925, and concludes with the dramatic story of the individual efforts that preserved the books and papers of YIVO during the destruction and annihilation of World War II and in postwar Soviet Lithuania.  The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture, like those efforts, preserves the cultural heritage of east European Jews with thorough research and fresh insights.

200 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Natan Bedrosian]

An interesting writing by David E. Fishman shows different visions for the Yiddish culture implemented by different political currents like Bundism and Folkism.
The most fascinated part of the book was the struggle between both Bundists and Folkists to draw their painting of the Yiddish school system and kehila. A struggle between secularism and orthodoxy, Yiddishism and Hebraism, national-cultural autonomy and zionism.

[Jay Resnick · Rating 5 out of 5]

The overview of chapter 1 summarizes clearly the modern Yiddish culture that arose in Eastern Europe beginning in 1860. Prior to this time, Yiddish was subordinate to Hebrew in the culture . In the 18th century, tales of Hasidic Rebbes were published in Yiddish. Proponents of the Jewish enlightenment, mask ilium like Moses Mendelssohn, derided Yiddish as jargon, and advocated use of Hebrew and the language of the dominant culture --- German in Germany, Polish in Poland and Russian in Rusia. Isaac Meir Dik, a mask ill, who wrote in Yiddish in the 1840's and 50's was derided by other maskilim.
Despite the maskilim,97% of Russia's 5.3 million Jews in the 1897 census listed Yiddish as their mother language, while only 26 % claimed Russian literacy. The first modern Yiddish expression was theYiddish press in the 1860's during Alexander II's reforms. Kol Mevasser was published by a maskilim in Odessa from 1862 to 1873. It ipublished news, but also Yiddish stories, including the first serialized novel ( The Little Man ) by S.J. Abromovitch, Mendele Moykher Seforim. After Kol Mevasser, Alexander Zeaderbaum published Yiddishes Folksblat in St Petersburg (1881-90), and published , Sholem Rabinovitch, aka Sholem Aleichem. Yiddish theatre also began with Abraham Goldfaden in the 1870's. His , The Two Kuni Lemls is a love story about a couple thwarted by the institution of arranged marriage.
In 1888, Sholem Aleichem published Di Yidishe Folksbibliotek, an annual journal of Jewish literature. In the 1890's , the Jewish labor movement, The Bund, published political pamphlets in Yiddish.
From 1888 to1912, Russian Jews experienced rapid modernization, with movement to cities, and the readership of Yiddish exploded, as they read new daily Yiddish newspapers that came after the liberalization of 1905, Haynt and Moment. They attracted readers with sensational headlines,and by distributing for free the first chapters of romances that would be serialized in the dailies.
As a new Yiddish intelligentsia appeared in the 1890's, it created its own high culture of belle letters and theater. Literary monthlies appeared in Vilna in 1908. In theatre, Jacob Gordin's, Mirele Efros, was a serious drama, without music, portraying an inter-generational class ...it was performed in Warsaw in 1905.

Yiddishists pressed Russian authorities for Yiddish schools in ca 1905. Yiddish advocates held the conference for Yidish language in 1908 in Ccernowitz, Bukovina. Lead by Y.L. Perez, Birnbaum,mans Zhitlovsky , it proclaimed Yiddish as the Jewish national language.

The final chapter is a moving description of "The Paper Brigade", a group, who clandestinely subverted the efforts of Nazis to destroy all af Yiddish literature in YIVO and other libraries in 1942-43.