“briv funem arkhiv”

Idishe bilder writer Moyshele Vulfart describes the visit of two Arab men from Palestine to a kibbutz hakhshara, a preparation kibbutz, in Liepaja, Latvia, in 1938. While it was not uncommon for such reports to be conveyed by Jewish comrades on return visits from Palestine, in this instance the message-bearers were Palestinian men presumably on the other side of the conflict.

A reflection on the “weighty legacy” of retellng the catastrophes and upheavals that befell the Jews of Tulchyn.

This collection — the intimate letters and a diary of an early twentieth century Zionist politician— was saved from oblivion by chance, found in a pile of trash in Israel. Through various intermediaries, the collection then ended up at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.

Winokur’s letters offer a colorful snapshot of student life in Vilna between the world wars.

In time for Valentine’s Day 2021, James Nadel introduces us to Uriel Weinreich’s 1948 bilingual, multi-page, anti-Valentine’s-Day valentine to his future wife, Bina Silverman.

Moyshe Klaynman’s remarkable 1943 manuscript relates his ten-month imprisonment at the Treblinka II extermination camp, his escape during the August 2, 1943 prisoner revolt, and much more. There is only one other known survivor source written so early, and there are no other known Treblinka survivor memoirs available only in the original Yiddish.

The newly-rediscovered “The Beach” (1996) is a striking early example of Yiddish writer, translator, editor, and teacher Jessica Kirzane’s non-Yiddish work.

A letter from a devoted reader to Moyshe Nadir, detailing the personal struggles and ideological misgivings of a disillusioned Communist.

Amye Rubinschneider interviews her mother and aunt in response to Josie Naron’s blog post about a letter from their mother, Rubinschneider’s grandmother, a teacher fired during the Red Scare.

Ezekiel Lifschutz’s diary from his time as YIVO chief archivist in the 1960s offers striking evidence of the institute’s importance in the wider Jewish world. In these passages, we see the personalities of three giants of modern Jewish literature — Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, English novelist Saul Bellow, and Hebrew writer Shai Agnon — and their relationships to the Yiddish language.