Briv funem arkhiv: “Fun Hitler-land”

1. A Hitlerist asks a Jew for financial advice (the Jew has no nice answers).

2. A two-liner compares the paralyzed condition shared by Kaiser Wilhelm II and Josef Goebbels and suggests these two men are actually not alike despite their shared disability and shared attempts to rule over Germany—i.e., Goebbels is a sad successor to Germany’s past great leader.

3. A pun about Hitler shutting down Reinhardt’s Theater, in order to create his “Rein-narish” Theater. ^{3 3}

4. Wordplay in Yiddish that blends the words for meals, grains, and courts describes Hitler as creating gross meals that can also be interpreted as grossly-ran courts.

5. Another two-liner mocks Göring’s love of executions.

6. One last pun claims that literature from Germany can no longer be considered literature: It’s now “Hitliterature.”

All six jokes all depict Hitler and his henchmen as idiots bound to fail, maintaining a breezy tone while discussing very serious subjects. To me, this represented confidence in the inevitable failure of immoral actors, in a faith still held by many Latvian Jews that their home republic would shield them from destructive neighbors. At the same time, they knew danger loomed and chose to use humor as a way to push through the fear.

Latvia’s diverse population included ethnic Latvians, Russians, Germans, and Jews. During the initial phase of the first Latvian Republic, the government ensured minority protection and representation in the Saeima (parliament). Jews established political parties, social and cultural organizations, presses, and more, including newspapers in Yiddish and Hebrew. Diverse forms of Jewish ideological and cultural life blossomed in Latvia.

This all changed in 1935 when Kārlis Ulmanis and his far-right Peasant's Party seized the Saeima in a bloodless coup on May 15th, 1934. Nearly every Jewish political party was outlawed, except for the Agudas Yisroel, the Orthodox party, which secured its position through a very questionable arrangement. The new, fascist Saeima arrested left-wing Jewish party affiliates and sent them to a concentration camp at Libau to meet a grim fate. Further repression and devastation came in 1939 following Soviet occupation after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and truly unprecedented levels of horror followed Germany’s occupation in 1941.

This context is what makes “Fun Hitler-land” so interesting. Yiddish cultural life in Latvia is not very widely known. The archive is one of the places where it can still be uncovered. “Fun Hitler-land” sits on the precipice of immense historical change, revealing the difficulty of envisioning future events before they arrive. To the writers and readers of Frimorgn (and likely the Yiddish-speaking community at large), humor and faith in their circumstances served as a form of spiritual resistance.

I not only found “Fun Hitler-land” interesting from a historical perspective—I also found it compelling as a student of Yiddish. The text tested my linguistic abilities to understand and translate Yiddish jokes (which necessarily rely on Yiddish language conventions and 1930s cultural contexts) into contemporary English. This fun little exercise in thinking across time and culture revealed much about language itself as a mode of expression. For example, the first joke about the Jewish financier ends with the Hitlerist (a common pre-World War II term for any supporter of Hitler) asking the Jew for advice on the best investment. In the original, the Jew answers: “A tsuker-shtrikl.” A sugary string? Initially, I had no idea what this meant, leading me down a rabbit hole of specific historical research. It turns out that at this time in Eastern/Central Europe, sugar was not sold in the granulated form we all know today. Instead, it came in a large conical brick called a “sugarloaf,” whose triangular shape was maintained by a string, the “tsuker-shtrikl.” So what did the Jew mean when he told the Hitlerist to invest in one? I understood this joke to say that without something unexpected to hold them together, the Hitlerists are going to blow apart like sugar in the wind. In my translation, the Jew answers that they should invest “in something to keep you from falling apart,” but perhaps an answer like “a new belt” might also make sense, given our modern sensibilities. Not only did I have to come up with sensible English phrases, I also had to recreate Yiddish puns using appropriate English words, while continuing to maintain a “punny” feeling. Frimorgn’s writers joke that Hitler turns the Reinhardt Theater into the Rein-narish Theater, a pun that makes perfect sense in Yiddish. Well, what ending could I give to Reinhardt to demonstrate a sense of foolishness while still maintaining the pun? The answer for me was comically simple: the “Reinfart” Theater. I’d never have guessed in a million years that making fart jokes in academic research might be possible, but funnily enough it seemed like the best way to recreate the wordplay of the original while still having it make sense in English.