“briv funem arkhiv”

A melodramatic studio photograph illustrates the widening gap between the American and Soviet branches of the author’s family.

Josie Naron gives us a glimpse into the pressures felt by the children of Jewish leftists targeted by McCarthyism and the role of Yiddish summer camps at the height of the Red Scare.

Is there a more extraordinary and self-lacerating letter in all of Yiddish literature than this airmail from its most beloved poet to its most celebrated novelist?

On this 1933 flyer for a Kultur-lige pariz event, a walking, talking Eiffel Tower exclaims, “All of Paris is going to the Kultur-lige’s excursion to Garches, and you want me to stay here?

Yiddish poet and translator Yehoash lived at the famous Hotel Klibitsky in Rehovot for almost four months in 1914; the hotel featured frequently in his published travelogue. This note in the hotel’s guestbook, now in the city archive, marks his stay.

Posters like this one for special events, graduations, sales of Hasidic garments, computers, new books, videos and more are still popular in the Hasidic neighborhoods of Brooklyn. However, in recent years the internet has changed the business.

For our briv funem arkhiv series, Artur Rudzitsky discusses letters between Vladimir Naumovich Waisblat and Sholem Aleichem concerning Yiddish theater in Kiev.

Sam Shonkoff shares a receipt issued to Martin Buber for his purchase of thirty-three Hasidic volumes to be shipped from Przemyśl, Galicia, to his current home in Berlin, in October 1915 — in the midst of World War I and a turbulent year for Przemyśl’s Jews.

Michael Shapiro takes us to the Worker’s Circle section of Boston’s Baker Street Jewish Cemeteries, where he encountered a moving Yiddish poem.

Rachelle Grossman digs up a revealing clerical mix-up in the distribution of Shmuel Rollansky’s 100-volume Musterverk series — a moment both funny and tragic at the end of the series’ long run.