“briv funem arkhiv”

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.

Our new Briv funem arkhiv section will feature short pieces about interesting, significant, funny, or surprising archival finds.

In 1935, New York’s Buczacz-American Benevolent Sick and Aid Society received this appeal—in Yiddish and Polish— from the Jewish Relief Committee in Buczacz, Poland. One of the signatories was my grandfather, Moses Wolfthal.

This 1939 article and photograph in a Warsaw Yiddish weekly — depicting “a typical female cocaine addict [kokainistke] with a crazed expression in the eyes,” according to the caption — point to the spread of recreational drug use within the Jewish community and its emergence as a subject of interest in the Yiddish press.

A little piece of bureaucratic university paperwork reminds us of the international scope and depth of the work of great Jewish scholars like Max Weinreich.

From the collections of the University of Capetown, recently damaged by fire, an important document of Bundist history and a reminder of the global breadth - and precarity - of Yiddish archives.

While we usually conceive of the archive as a place to learn about the past, today we’re looking at a repository that can tell us about the place of Yiddish in today’s world full of rapid digital communication… and spam.

Saulė Valiūnaitė finds Chaim Grade’s mother Vella listed as a fruit and vegetable seller in interwar Vilna, just as Grade movingly depicts her in his memoir.

For our first briv funem arkhiv, Alyssa Quint shares a Halloween-themed find: a pamphlet for a 1925 masquerade ball in Warsaw.

A briv for khanike: a handmade menorah — complete with a row of tiny chairs — and handmade pedestal, a family heirloom donated to YIVO for safekeeping.