Yiddish: A Global Culture at the Yiddish Book Center: Reflections on an Exhibit

The capaciousness is also in the variety of medium and genre. We are in the Yiddish Book Center, of course, and the Center’s attractive orientation film, the one you can sit and watch in a small room before proceeding onward, is focused on book-collecting and on Jews as am ha-sefer, “the people of the book.” Jews are indeed that. But the exhibit makes of the Jewish people a people not only of books but also of sheet music, song, theater, typewriters, a steamer trunk and a medicine ball, clothing, bits of rock, photos, illustrations, voices, interviews, posters.

Most importantly, the capaciousness is in the representation of women. By kind fate I was in the audience for Di froyen, “The Women,” the pathbreaking 1995 conference in New York on women in Yiddish, and I remember what Irena Klepfisz said in her opening remarks – az me lebt, derlebt men altsding – freely translated, “if you live long enough, you’ll experience everything.” There was wonder in her voice, a sense that this conference was unprecedented and almost unthinkable, as indeed it was.

But in this regard at any rate, the moral arc of the universe has bent towards justice, and Klepfisz and her collaborators have won – in every field of Yiddish known to me, and magnificently in this exhibit. There is a section devoted specifically to women’s writing, but women are not sequestered there, they are everywhere: in a section on the Holocaust, for example, with its focus on Rokhl Oyerbakh, who survived, and on Rokhl Brokhes, who did not, nor did her work. We have a heartwarming photo of Blume Lempel, leaning against a car in sunlight with a river behind her, full of joy. In another corner we have Kadya Molodowsky’s great poem El Khanun, part of it presented on the wall in Kathryn Hellerstein’s fine translation (all honor to the curators for so scrupulously naming translators), and the whole of it presented in a quiet, melancholy audio recording made by Molodowsky herself: el khanun, klayb oys an ander folk, “merciful God, choose another people.”

You can have a view of the whole exhibit, from the entrance level looking down. The exhibit has a beginning, the aforementioned Yiddishland mural, which is on your right as you descend the ramp. After that, though, you are on your own, no signs or persons are telling you where to go. You might turn right, into the section on Yiddish theater, and find yourself staring at a brilliant photograph, not of anyone on stage, but of the audience at the Grand Theater in all its abundance and variety, so that for a moment, and perhaps longer than that, you can feel as though you were on stage and being gazed at. But maybe you will not arrive at that picture until later, because you might go straight ahead from the bottom of the ramp into a simulation of the Y. L. Peretz salon, Peretz being as close to a normative figure as the exhibit allows itself, and you see the room and the realia and the photos of the many members of Peretz’s circle., and this more conventional image of guru and (not always deferential) disciples will shape your experiences, so that by the time you get back to the theater exhibit you will be thinking of centers of influence and teaching and will be drawn to the accounts of Stella Adler’s school of acting and its illustrious students. Or maybe you are more rebellious or whimsical, and will at first turn away from the more formal exhibits, drift down the main corridor, look up at the vivid and diverse magazine covers (triumphs of the graphic and calligraphic arts), find your attention caught by the linotype machine at the end, reflect on the materiality of all literary culture, or stand in wonder at Guedale Tenenbaum’s Buenos Aires portrait of Chaim Zhitlowsky, magnificently composed of tiny letters of the alphabet. And if you come back another day, maybe you will make different choices, produce a different sequence of thought and experience. The exhibit feels playful because it is free: no docents, no arrows, just choice after choice to be made by whim or reflection.

The exhibit offers not only variety and play but also affirmation. Yiddish culture is represented as full of vitality, resourcefulness, endurance, creativity, love. Such affirmation can sometimes get in the way of critical scrutiny, and sometimes I thought critical scrutiny needed more room. Take the presentation of Yiddish writing about race; some noble and clear-eyed statements are quoted, but not examples of the racist representations that were common in American Yiddish literature, up to and including the work of foundational figure Sholem Aleichem. In his Motl Peysi dem Khazns, for example, which is a frequently taught text, the title character regards the African Americans he sees on the subway in repellent and racist terms, referring to their “monster lips” and comparing them to animals. That too needs to be part of the story.

But one can also contrast affirmation with despair, in particular with the despair that sometimes lingers over accounts of Yiddish culture, which see that culture only in the light, or darkness, of the Holocaust, and which cannot see its vitality, before the Holocaust and during it and after it. If given the choice between such affirmation and such despair, I’d side with affirmation. It feels deeply right that the exhibit has room for the Shoah without being overtaken by it: Molodowsky’s poem, and evocations of Rokhl Oyerbakh and Rokhl Brokhes, are here and heartbreaking, but they are part of the story, not the only narrative in town. Hence also my delight, as I finally and reluctantly walked beyond the mural, to come across a profound and witty poem by Mikhl Yashinsky, with an indication of his birth year: 1988, 36 years old, eight years younger than my children. The story of Yiddish here is continuous; despair is present but doesn’t get the last word.

Almost any exhibit has to exclude more than it includes, so bemoaning what did not make the cut is an easy critique to make but not often a fair one. The curator has had to make difficult choices, and deserves, if not immediate agreement, then at least sympathy and curiosity. I myself might have wanted the exhibit to have a fuller representation of earlier Yiddish, but of course can see why the chronological center of gravity is where it is. I might have wanted the exhibit to give more space to masterpieces – Yankev Glatshteyn’s poems, for example, or the 1937 film of Ansky’s The Dybbuk, or Bergelson’s Nokh alemen. But to give them more space would have meant giving less space to shund, to material culture, to sheet music and photos like the one of Lempel, even to unfamiliar masterpieces like Tenenbaum’s micrographic portrait. And giving more space to familiar masterpieces has its own downsides; it imposes a narrow canon on a vast and various culture. The exhibit’s egalitarian plenitude is better than a reverence for canon would have made it, my own preferences to the contrary notwithstanding.

Insofar as critique is concerned, therefore, the exhibit raises two real questions for me: One is about Jews, one is about politics, and the two are related. Both are questions about how expansively we ought to be able to think about Yiddish as a global language and culture.

Yiddish is presented here as a language of Jews. Which of course it is, as witness even its name: Yiddish means “Jewish.” But that name is being challenged these days, notably by Saul Zaritt in his A Taytsh Manifesto, which proposes “Taytsh,” i.e., “translation,” as a substitute for “Yiddish,” so as to help us to learn to read putatively Jewish texts that move between languages and cultures. We also have an account of early non-Jewish speakers of Yiddish in Aya Elyada’s A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish - from which we learn, among other things, that one of those speakers was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe!

To its credit, the exhibit includes some of these speakers. The great African American singer and activist Paul Robeson turns up on the Yiddishland mural, singing the partizanerlid. The Austrian Catholic anarchist Rudolf Rocker, editor of three Yiddish periodicals, turns up there as well. And Marlon Brando and Salma Hayek are named in the corner devoted to Yiddish and American movies.

But this is not enough. What is at issue is not a set of exhilarating exceptions to a rule but the rule itself, the identity of a language.

This is a tricky issue to talk about, and evokes strong emotions. But it is also an issue where there are concrete questions to ask and concrete facts to consider. What non-Jews have spoken or studied Yiddish, what non-Jews are speaking it now? Few visitors to the exhibit could, I think, guess how many of the latter there are, or how significant their scholarly contributions have been and are. I think of the great scholars Erika Timm and Jerold Frakes, of some of the founders of the Medem Bibliothèque, of some of the German scholars doing the superb work of the Khalyastre Translators’ Collective, founded by Efrat Gal-Ed for the purpose of translating Yiddish stories into German. I think of Daniel Kennedy, once a Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow, a superb translator even then and still better now, now also a mentor to a new generation of fellows; and of Martin Haake, the Gentile German artist who created the Yiddishland mural.

I make this list not to play gotcha with the exhibit, but because the way in which Yiddish has made contact with non-Jews is part of what makes it a global culture, global across boundaries not only of geography but also of ethnic identity. This is one of the things Peretz meant when in words that the exhibit prominently displays he called on Yiddish culture to “unite culturally with all countries and all times.”

One way in which such uniting has taken place is by translation. Here the exhibit gets it half right, I think. It rightly emphasizes the marvelous history of translation into Yiddish. It does not sufficiently emphasize the equally marvelous history of translation out of Yiddish. (It does admirably name each quoted translator of Yiddish, which is not a small merit.) This other history too is part of the global reach of Yiddish culture, and one of its glories, an enterprise by which Yiddish has been imprinted on many of the world’s languages and literatures, just as those languages have imprinted themselves on it.

A somewhat similar question is raised in the exhibit’s presentation of politics. Yiddish culture is full of radical politics: socialists, unionists, anarchists, strikers, and protesters, even an assassin or two. The exhibit pays tribute to those traditions: covers of proletarian and anarchist periodicals, the anarchist Rudolf Rocker and the assassin Sholem Schwartzbard on the mural, and most powerfully a photo of two young women marchers at a May Day demonstration in 1909.

The photo holds us, demanding a response. The women are astonishingly young. They look radiant, fierce, hopeful. One, darker of hair and complexion, likelier to be read as Jewish, is carrying a Yiddish sign: anider mit der shklaveray, “down with slavery.” The other, fairer of hair and complexion, harder to assign to an ethnic type, carries an English sign: “abolish slavery.” Yiddish and English, the darker woman and the fairer woman, perhaps a Jew and a non-Jew, unite in opposing slavery and shklaveray. Those words in 1909 at a May Day demonstration must have meant wage slavery, the oppression that weighs on all workers, Jews and non-Jews alike, and all workers can join together to denounce it.

But something strange happens in what one might call the exhibit’s paratexts: In the exhibit itself, in the photo, the two women and the two signs are equally prominent. In the adaptation of the photograph on the cover of the exhibit booklet, however, the darker woman and the Yiddish sign are prominent, the fairer woman and the English sign hardly visible. The altered photo has none of the original’s universalist power. And the same is true of the photograph in the online presentation of the exhibit; the fairer protester cannot be seen.

Does this matter? The exhibit is after all the text, the booklet and online documentation only two of its paratexts.

It does matter. The paratexts emphasize the notion that this history belongs to “us” – a target audience of Jews – rather than to the universalist community suggested by the protesters themselves. This is particularly troubling in a moment when specifically Jewish and broadly universalist definitions of slavery and injustice are often at odds. We see this most often in arguments about Israel and Gaza, of course. “Never again” is apparently at odds with “never again for anyone.” The universalist and Jewish left-wing claim that “every single life is a universe” is at odds with its Talmudic source, which speaks more narrowly of nefesh achat miyisrael, “a single Jewish life” (Sanhedrin 37a).

This exhibit, like all exhibits, exists in particular times and places, which shape our experiences of it, the questions we ask of it and the questions we hear it asking us, the tasks we devote ourselves to when we leave. These contemporary disputes are the context in which we look at the protesters of the past and their universalism. They ask us, 115 years later, What are we doing towards their goal? Do we treat them as part of our history, safely contained in an exhibit, or as part of our present, summoning us as well to fight against whatever mode of slavery we encounter? Where in this present moment, in the community of Jews and workers, in the community of Yiddish or taytsh, are those revolutionary energies to be found?

When I try to draw together my impressions of the exhibit, I find myself thinking about the eerie photograph of the audience at the Grand Theater. We can look at that photograph, and when we look we can see how the spectators are dressed, what their faces look like, how numerous and crowded and formal and joyous they seem. We can learn a lot about Yiddish theater that we would not know if we focused only on what happens on stage. But the photograph is also looking at us; as we stand in front of it, we are the ones on stage, and the mute faces before us are wondering what play we will put on for them tonight.

That duality of perspective seems to me characteristic of the exhibit generally, and is its greatest strength. We can look at it, we can contemplate it as witnesses to a part of our past, we can learn from it a richer, more moving, more surprising sense of Yiddish culture than we began with, of who the people were who created and lived in that culture. But we can also let ourselves be looked at, and in being looked at we are being asked hard and urgent questions: who are we, what play are we putting on, what modes of slavery are we opposing, with whom do we make common cause, from whom are we separated?

When we recommend a play or a movie, we say, “go and see it.” I would make that same recommendation regarding this wonderful and challenging exhibit. By all means go and see it. But also go and be seen by it.