Ellen Kellman

Fradel Shtok’s Yiddish poetry and prose is distinctive for its treatment of the inner sensual lives of Jewish women. Immigrating to America from the Galician shtetl of Skale at age seventeen in 1907, she published poems and short stories in several anthologies and literary journals, especially those of the literary group Di Yunge [The Young Generation]. Although she showed great promise as a poet and prose writer, she was discouraged by the unenthusiastic reception of her collection of short stories by leading critics in New York in 1919 and withdrew from the Yiddish literary scene. No collection of her poetry ever appeared. In recent decades, feminist poets and literary historians have rediscovered Shtok’s work and made it known to English-language readers through translation and critical interpretation.

Miriam Karpilove was a prolific and widely popular writer of fiction about the changing roles of Jewish women in American immigrant culture. Her publishing career in the American Yiddish press spanned five decades, and her serialized novels became staple fare in the leading Yiddish dailies. Raised in a traditional Jewish home near Minsk, Belorussia at the end of the nineteenth century, she immigrated to the United States in her teens and became one of a small handful of women who achieved success as writers of Yiddish newspaper serials. Her writing is remembered for its pioneering treatment of important contemporary issues of female socialization, gender roles and sexual mores.

A Yiddishist cultural organization, the Kultur-lige was founded in Kiev in 1918 on the principle ofumparteyishkeyt(non-partisanship). After successfully working in several cultural fields, even in the midst of revolution and civil war in Ukraine, it was coopted by Soviet loyalists, so its leadership relocated to Warsaw. In a manifesto published there in Spring 1921, the organization announced its intention to operate both within Poland and transnationally, calling for unified efforts across political boundaries. It attempted to establish centers of activity in Berlin and Paris during the early 1920s. In both cities, opponents of the idea of non-partisan cultural work competed to take over the Kultur-lige. precluding its success. The article assesses the extent to which the Warsaw leadership succeeded in giving guidance to the founders of the Berlin and Paris centers, and the limitations imposed by political strife and class conflict on the work of the Kultur-lige.

Forty-two stories from America’s greatest Yiddish newspaper, in English for the first time. The Forward, founded in 1897, is the most renowned Yiddish newspaper in the world. It welcomed generations of immigrants to the United States, brought them news of Europe and the Middle East, and provided them with sundry comforts such as comic strips and noodle kugel recipes. It also published some of the most acclaimed Yiddish fiction writers of all time: Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer on justice slyly being served when the governor of Lublin comes to town; celebrated Forward editor Abraham Cahan on how place and luck can change character; and Roshelle Weprinsky, setting her story in Florida, on the rupture between European parents and American children. Cahan described the newspaper as a “living novel,” with good reason. Taken together, these stories reveal the human side of the challenges that faced Jews throughout this time, including immigration, modernization, poverty, assimilation, the two world wars, and changing forms of Jewish identity. These concerns were taken up by a diverse group of writers, from novelists Sholem Asch and Chaim Grade to short-story writers like Lyala Kaufman and Miriam Karpilove. Ezra Glinter has combed through the archives to find the best stories published during the newspaper’s 120-year history, digging up such varied works as wartime novellas, avant-garde fiction, and satirical sketches about immigrant life in New York. Glinter’s introductions to the thematic sections and short biographies of the contributors provide insight into the concerns of not only the writers but also their avid readers. The collection has been rendered into English by today’s best Yiddish translators, who capture the sound of the authors and the subtleties of nuance and context.

The 1950s and early 1960s have not traditionally been viewed as a particularly creative era in American Jewish life. On the contrary, these years have been painted as a period of inactivity and Americanization. As if exhausted by the traumas of World War II, the American Jewish community took a rest until suddenly reawakened by the 1967 Six-Day War and its implications for world Jewry. Recent scholarship, however, has demonstrated that previous assumptions about the early silence of American Jewry with regard to the Holocaust were exaggerated. And while historians have expanded their borders and definitions to encompass the postwar decades, scholars from other disciplines have been paying increasing attention to the unique literary, photographic, artistic, dramatic, political, and other cultural creations of this period and the ways in which they hearken back to not only the Holocaust itself but also to images of prewar Eastern Europe. Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades brings together scholars of literature, art, history, ethnography, and related fields to examine how the American Jewish community in the post-Holocaust era was shaped by its encounter with literary relics, living refugees, and other cultural productions which grew out of an encounter with Eastern European Jewish life from the pre-Holocaust era. In particular, editors Eliyana R. Adler and Sheila E. Jelen are interested in three different narratives and their occasional intersections. The first narrative is the real, hands-on interaction between American Jews and European Jewish refugees and how the two groups influenced one another. Second were the imaginative reconstructions of a wartime or prewar Jewish world to meet the needs of a postwar American Jewish audience. Third is the narrative in which the Holocaust was mobilized to justify postwar political and philanthropic activism. econstructing the Old Country will contribute to the growing scholarly conversation about the postwar years in a variety of fields. Scholars and students of American Jewish history and literature in particular will appreciate this internationally focused scholarship on the continuing reverberations of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Coming at a moment when Jewish political parties in Poland were engaged in an intense struggle for hegemony on the Jewish street, the communiqué addressed the many opponents of the Kultur-Lige's assertion that cultural work could be most effectively conducted outside the confines of party politics, outlining fundamental ideological differences that had isolated the umparteyish leadership and thwarted its efforts to re-establish the organization in Warsaw after the Bolshevik takeover of the Ukrainian Kultur-Lige in 1920. The story of the Kultur-Lige after its original group of leaders left Kiev in winter 1920–1 was one of stymied effort and ultimate disappointment. While ostensibly less successful than Bundism or Labour Zionism, kultur-ligizm (culture league-ism) was an important iteration of diaspora nationalism, spearheaded by a group of socialist Yiddishist intellectuals, some of whom had been early architects of diaspora nationalism. They believed that modern Jewish culture could be best nurtured by organizations that were supported by democratic states and allowed to operate autonomously. The present study examines their visionary creed in order to explicate the fateful decision they made to decamp from Kiev in 1921 with the intention of transplanting their thriving cultural organization outside revolutionary Russia. It investigates their attempt to establish a centre in Warsaw during the early 1920s and to guide the development of branches in several locations in Poland and western Europe, and considers the [End Page 459] failure of the Kultur-Lige in the context of the declining fortunes of diaspora nationalism in the period between the two world wars.

Yoysef Opatoshu died in 1954 after a long and productive career as a fiction writer and activist in the worldwide Yiddish cultural movement. His novels and short stories have been largely ignored by scholars and translators during the past six decades, however, and have fallen into obscurity. Several of Opatoshu's longer works were serialized in newspapers and literary magazines before they appeared in book form. By 1914, Opatoshu had, with Yoysef Rolnik, Y. Y. Shvarts, Yoyl Slonim, and M. Y. Khayemovitsh, broken artistic ties with Di Yunge, producing a new anthology, entitled 'Di naye heym'. Opatoshu was a regular contributor of short fiction to the New York daily Der tog (Day) from its inception in November 1914. The First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the subsequent wars over the borders of new states had vitiated cultural contact between Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and other parts of the world.

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is pleased to announce the publication of the Milstein Conference Proceedings, “New York and the American Jewish Communal Experience,” published with the generous support of the Howard and Abby Milstein Foundation and the Paul and Irma Milstein Foundation. The new volume, edited by Fruma Mohrer and Ettie Goldwasser, contains 8 scholarly papers based on the Milstein Conference which took place at the YIVO Institute in November 2009. The contributors are Ellen Kellman (Brandeis University), Kirsten Fermaglich (Michigan State University), Marsha Dubrow (The Graduate Center, CUNY), Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz (Bar Ilan University), Myuki Kita (Kitakyushu University), Rebecca Kobrin (Columbia University), Beth Cohen (California State University, Northridge) and Roberta Newman (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research).

In this volume we announce materials of the international conference JEWISH SPACE IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE: DAY- TO- DAY HISTORY which took place in Vilnius, on 10-11 th May, 2006. In the articles of appreciated scholars and perspective young researchers the Jewish space is revealed as diverse forms of life and relations developing in the rich context of urbanism, social life, leisure, economic expression, and coexistence with the non-Jewish world. Having undergone various transformations, the Jewish space has preserved its authenticity and individuality. In the proceedings, the Jewish space is analyzed in a wide chronological period from the point of view of literature, history, architecture, and social relationships. It is worth opening this volume for everyone who is interested in means of entertainment, (sports, leisure, parties in cabaret), living and participating in social life, reading and writing of Jews in towns and shtetls of East Europe in during the 19 th and at the beginning of 20th century.