Lodz is not unique in the cultural life of Jews in Poland.

In a province as large as Galicia, with a Jewish population of over three hundred thousand souls, there is almost no sign of a Yiddish cultural pulse. There are three large Jewish newspapers in Polish, and they sell brilliantly. The once extensive daily Yiddish newspaper in Lwow, the Togblat, has morphed into a pitiful ten-groszy pamphlet that gives the impression of a droopy tallow candle at the head of a deathbed.

No polemics about Yiddish as the only language of the Jewish masses can deny the facts: in public and at home, the youth—and especially the youth of the parties making Yiddish demands to the state and communal departments—overwhelmingly speak to each other in Polish. In the largest Jewish library in Lodz, named after Borochov—an institution of the Left Poaley Tsiyen, who are kosher Yiddishists—seventy percent of the books are in Polish and a measly thirty percent are in Yiddish. The claim that Yiddish is the vernacular of the Jewish people falls apart. No amount of heated debate and hairsplitting will do any good here.

Holding up the Polish Census of 1931 as key evidence is a fool’s errand. Everyone knows perfectly well that Jews marked Yiddish as their mother tongue in the census simply for demonstrative reasons, and as a token to the agitation of the Jewish parties. ^{6 6} Per the 1931 Census, which included questions about religion and mother tongue (but none about “nationality,” which had been a question on the 1921 Census), 79% of those identifying as Jews said they spoke Yiddish as their mother tongue, whereas 12% listed Polish and 8% listed Hebrew. Post-war scholarship echoes Rabon’s assertion that the self-reporting of Yiddish was inflated. Celia Stopnicka Heller, On the Edge of Destruction: Jews of Poland Between the Two World Wars, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977), 68.

Go on the streets of Lodz, Warsaw, and other cities today and you’ll see Jews with twisted peyos and frocks, speaking “Poylish” with their wives and children.

Sholem Asch arrived in Palestine and witnessed the rise of Hebraism. He saw the evidently respectable Hebrew press and the lively activity of the many publishing houses—funded by healthy sales, not by tycoons—that publish books which actually have readers. He heard the language of the Bible being spoken by thousands of children as a natural, robust mother tongue. Seeing all this, comparing Hebrew in Palestine with Yiddish in Poland, it’s no surprise Asch could have slipped into singing Hebrew’s praises.

In Palestine, Hebrew is the language, the literature, the schools—a matter as vital as daily bread. In Palestine, one buys a Hebrew poet’s book and looks proudly at the new release: what a wonder! What are the Yiddishists in Poland doing for the Yiddish writer?

First of all, they go out of their way to make him a caricature, a straw man.

The pillar of Yiddishism in Poland, the Bund, has “delegated” Mr. Yankev Pat to Literature. Pat assembled a gang of graphomaniacs, and for a few years they put out a literary weekly with the holy task of throwing sand and ash, week after week, on every Yiddish writer who isn’t sufficiently Marxist or Proletarian

These critics have badmouthed every significant phenomenon in our little Yiddish literary world. They fail to understand that the Yiddish writer’s social origin endows him with a proletarian mentality, which he intuitively instils in the character of his work. (Though it should be said that a writer’s social origin by itself is irrelevant to his literary quality).

Even before Asch apparently said something mean about Yiddish, Mr. Pat’s literary organ pilloried Asch’s first-rate work, Der tilim yid, which is simply one of the most marvelous, belles-lettristic creations in recent years. The reason? The protagonist of the novel is a zealous follower of the Psalms, rather than of Karl Marx. His splendid epos of synagogues and great rabbis was written off as insignificant. And yet what a work, with its masterfully crafted personages, powerful depictions, and a virtuosic recreation of a vanishing Jewish way of life. Yoshe Kalb by I.J. Singer (the novel, that is, not the play) was criticized because its heroes say nothing about the “class struggle” or the “proletariat”.

The result of this and similar defamation is that the Bund-supporting public, which numbers in the tens of thousands in this country, wants nothing to do with the most important Yiddish writers because they are, according to Mr. Pat, “counterrevolutionaries” and insufficiently proletarian. And he doesn’t care for our own “poets” because they simply lack any talent.

The Folkstsaytung is the only newspaper in Warsaw that pays the porter for delivering paper, the errand boy for picking up a letter of type, the custodian for sweeping the room—but it hasn’t a grosz to spare for the Yiddish poet. I don’t want to praise the Yiddish press and its attitude towards Yiddish writers, which leaves much to be desired, but for honesty’s sake I must state that even the “reactionary” and Hebraist-Zionist newspaper Haynt has the most honorable attitude towards Yiddish writers, ninety-nine percent of whom are sworn Yiddishists. The most important Yiddish prose writers and poets in Poland who publish their pieces there can corroborate my claims.

The sorry state of Yiddish cultural life forces many Yiddish writers to publish books with their own money. Then, to cover their basic needs, they must make back part of their investment through direct distribution to the reader via the outdated practice of traveling from city to shtetl with a bundle of books. These writers know already that the sworn Yiddishists in Poland, the Bundists, are not among the buyers. If Itzik Manger, who has recently become the Bundist Folkstsaytung’s polemical literature and theater sprite, is willing to be honest, he’ll have no choice but to back my words. He is, after all, the king of the wandering poets who sell their work in the cities and towns (to borrow, for a moment, the language of the boulevard paper).

And so: a paradoxical situation has been created. The pillars of the Yiddishist movement in Poland have crushed Yiddish literature—the very essence of the Yiddish cultural movement—in the eyes of the greater Jewish masses, and all because of some tall tale about proletarian literature.

It has reached the point that some fellow (belonging to the Bund or another Yiddishist party) grew so agitated by the Folkstsaytung’s literature wonks that he disrupted a reading by the well-known poet and outspoken, fanatical Yiddishist and anti-Hebraist, Z. Segalovitsh. “Down with the counterrevolutionaries! You won’t read to us! Go to the ‘Whites’…” he yelled, with all the courage of a barricade fighter.

Meanwhile, the literary readings of Mr. Yankev Pat, a man with very dubious knowledge of literary questions, draw audiences by the thousands in every city he goes.

With the help of the party badge, he steals the bravissimi owed to the talented Yiddish literati.

Perhaps the spirit of the Yiddish writer in Poland is now somewhat gnawed-on by the worm of contempt towards Yiddish as a healthy literary language. Should that be the case, I blame those mentioned above: they’ve gotten their fingers dirty in the matter—and likely their entire hands as well.

Dr. Max Weinreich is the cream of Yiddishist Vilna and the writer of some Mekhires-Yosef-Shpil, ^{7 7} Max Weinreich published Mekhires-Yosef in Berlin in 1923. It is in fact not a play, but a Yiddish narrative of the Biblical “selling of Joseph” episode, which was a common subject for Purim-shpiln and other Ashkenazi folk plays. Weinreich derived his source material from collections of midrashim. Perhaps the derivative nature of the work led Rabon to describe it as belonging “in a national graphomania treasury.”
which among other peoples would belong in a national graphomania treasury, but which our schoolteachers in Vilna have described almost as a scientific revelation. Attendees of the Literature Day ^{8 8} The official YIVO conference publication indicates that the “Yiddish Literature Day” (Tog fun der yidisher literatur) took place on August 17, 1935, and was organized by the Yiddish Pen Club. See Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut, Der alveltlekher tsuzamenfor fun yidishn visnshaftlekhn institut tsum 10 yorikn yoyvl (New York: YIVO, 1936), 8, 101-102, https://archive.org/stream/nyb....
at the YIVO conference will remember perfectly how Weinreich declared—in the confident, blithe, and direct tone of a Yiddish cultural bigshot—that YIVO was disavowing its association with Literature Day. All this, even though the most important members of the Yiddish Pen Club in Poland had taken part—that is to say, that Yiddish literature in Poland had gathered in Yerusholayim-Delute. ^{9 9} Rabon intentionally misspells ירושלים־דליטא “Yerusholayim Delite” (Jerusalem of Lithuania) as ירושלים־דלותּא “Yerusholayim Delute.” This is a jab at the prescriptivism of YIVO’s standard Yiddish, which adopted the Litvak pronunciation of the vowel “וּ”. Spelled this way, “daluta” resembles the Yiddish word דלות “dales,” meaning “poverty”.

I am no Hebraist, inasmuch as the word is understood in our newspaper industry: it’s nonsensical to think, and even more so to desire, that Hebrew should take the place of Yiddish among the Jews of Poland. But it is no sin against Yiddish when one hopes that, if another nation’s language should succeed Yiddish, Hebrew would be the rightful heir. Hebrew is clearly a language of the Jewish people, a medium of the luminous emanations, the radiant spirit of the great poets, shining through generations and millennia, and admired by the world’s peoples to this day. It is the language of the prophets, and many other brilliant poets and thinkers, like Yehuda Halevi and Bialik—giants of song and thought.

If Sholem Asch expressed insult and injury towards Yiddish, as Dovid Pinsky says, he deserves his sentence. But if instead, he only spoke about Hebrew enthusiastically, as one does about a living, creative, and awakened language, he has committed no crime against Yiddish. Measuring Hebrew and Yiddish against each other as if they were two rival stalls at the Mier Halls in Warsaw or Baluty Square in Lodz is small-minded. It is utter stupidity to hate a language. If you were to say to some Europeans, “I hate Dutch,” they would answer, should they even stoop to your level: “Mein Herr, you are a fool.”

In our little world there are cultural workers who brand themselves as outspoken Hebrew-haters. No need to name names—we know who they are. Say a good word about the Holy Tongue and you’re immediately declared a fascist. I know I may not be spared the same fate—surely I’ll be dispatched to Mussolini’s Black Shirts. In the USSR, Maxim Gorky risked nothing when he declared at an open writers’ conference that Hayyim Nachman Bialik is an excellent poet. Even after his pronouncement, half a million people attended Gorky’s funeral. But if Yankev Pat said something like that, he’d be sent packing from the Folkstsaytung at once!

I am deeply convinced that this isn’t in any sort of contradiction with my unwavering belief in the victory of socialism, which is the only salvation for bloodied mankind. I also hold the conviction that Yiddish is our language, in which the elegiacal creations of generations of Yiddish writers glow like the scarlet-red flowers of sorrow. It is the language which the genius of the Jewish folk masses, the dwellers of those scorned, impoverished alleys, brought into the temple of our art. But nor would I contradict myself if I were to say that Hebrew is also one of our languages, and that in Palestine it exhibits all the attributes of a living and natural literary tongue.

Nor do my words exclude me from the ranks of those who stridently protest the persecution of Yiddish in Palestine.

[...]

These few printed words of mine will surely be called bad blood by the board of the Yiddish Pen Club.

I think that it is high time to acknowledge the truth, even if it’s as brutal as a heavy Siberian frost. And especially now, when Yiddish literature has turned into just a few authors who haul their bundles of books to sell in the market of readers that are nowhere to be found.

The Yiddish writer is surely not at fault for this. My sympathies are with him, as he drags himself through cities and towns with a satchel over his shoulder. I’ve largely shown who’s at fault. They have committed the crime. But it’s our poor mameloshn, Yiddish, that bears the punishment.