Essay

As I think is true for more and more young Jews of my generation, learning that Yiddish literature existed was a revelation for me. For most of us here in America, Yiddish is a few words: shlep, kvetch, gefilte fish, and so on. How can you fill a book with that? A joke book, maybe, but serious literature? It seemed unlikely. Then I arrived at the Yiddish Book Center. I walked into a massive room filled with row after row of Yiddish books of all sorts, on every imaginable topic. There were books of poetry, memoirs, novels, scholarly works, and childrens books from Argentina, Russia, America, Poland, Australia, and beyond.

And they were the most beautiful books I had ever seen. There is something about books printed in movable type that I cannot really describe, though I think about it often. I think it comes down to the fact that every single letter is very slightly different. Perhaps there was slightly less ink on one, or another was shifted just a little. In a well printed book printed with movable type, this slight randomness gives each page a warmth and a particularity that digital printing could never match. Each and every analog printed book is different from the next to an extent that is perceptible, however subtly, to the human eye.

And these were not just any books printed with movable type: they were Yiddish books – books written in sacred letters – square letters borrowed from Babylonians by the Judeans in exile to replace their scrawled paleo-Hebrew, then modifed and reconfigured in various ways to be able to represent the Slavic and Germanic elements of Yiddish. These were letters that I could barely make out: my Hebrew school days were brief and lay behind a thick veil.

But I knew some German, and sitting in the Yiddish Book Center’s library, working piecemeal, with tremendous effort I could read a few words. Was this even reading? It was more like decoding. I felt like an archaeologist discovering a lost world. But this world was not truly lost – it seemed, instead, that those around me had chosen to forget it. I bought some books and took them home: the poetry of the murdered Soviet poets Markish and Hofshteyn, the comic short stories of the American Der Lebediker, Stutchkoff’s Treasury of the Yiddish Language, Weinreich’s dictionary, a volume of Sholem Aleichem. This is the core of my collection, and I come back to these works consistently.

Since then I have sought out books that evoke in me the awe I felt five years ago. I am always on the lookout for Yiddish books, but Yiddish is not a pre-requisite. I like books that are particular to their time and place, books through which you can feel history coursing. I seek in books concrete representations of moments in the history of the Jewish diaspora, and this includes the ruptures and the moments where things stop making sense. My copy of the New Testament in Yiddish, for example. This edition was printed in Baltimore and translated by one Khayim (or Henry) Einspruch D.D., and presented by the obscure “Lederer Foundation” in order to convert Jews. The book has a weight to it that is hard to describe. Another such rupture is R. Crumb’s illustrated Book of Genesis. Here we have the Jewish text itself in a sort of diaspora. R. Crumb is a legendary and highly controversial underground comics artist, known for his often bigoted and pornographic illustrations. He does an excellent job illustrating Genesis.

As much as I particularly love books that proceed from or produce moments of rupture, I am interested in the tradition of diasporic Jewish cultural production more generally. For me, this begins with the compilation of the Hebrew Bible, a process which was only made possible through the knowledge that the Judeans gained living in forced captivity in Babylonia, and which was heavily influenced by Persianate textual culture. The crown jewel of my collction is a Sammelband of six Hebrew religious texts, published in the late 19th century in various cities of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. The fact that someone, long ago, had these six separate texts in their possession and then decided to combine them into one volume is extremely impressive to me. This volume represents the particular history of an individual in relation to a history of publication that existed previously to them. After it left the hands of its creator, the volume passed through many hands, as evidenced by the many names in many different scripts written on the front and back boards. Now it is somewhat tattered, but I am honored that it has come into my possession. If I win this prize, I intend to bring it to a bookbinder to return it to its former glory.

I am also interested in the more contemporary side of diasporic Jewish textual production. This includes a wide variety of modern scholarship and translations, primarily focused on European Jewish literature. Of particular interest among my more modern pieces are the issues of Mikaan V’eylakh and Veker. Both are periodicals that have come out in the last five years. They are radically different, but are both fascinating manifestations of contemporary diasporic Jewish publishing. Mikaan V’eylakh is a journal whose stated aim is to publish works of Hebrew literature and scholarship that decentralize the language from its newfound position as the national languag of the state of Israel. It is by and large a secular publication, and its editor-in-chief is the head of the Medem Bibliotheque, a European Yiddish organziation. Veker, on the other hand, is an independent, New York based, Yiddish-language Hasidic publication that covers contemporary issues. The issues I own have cover stories dealing with the groundless removal of images of women from Hasidic publications and the Covid pandemic.

This June I will be graduating with a triple major in Comparative Literature, German, and Jewish Studies. After that, I am not sure what awaits me, but I will likely be living in New York City or Mainz. My personal history will affect the future of my collection greatly. If I end up in New York, I envision that a great deal more Yiddish books printed in New York City, and in America more generally, will come into my posession. If I end up in Mainz (or somewhere else in Germany), the German-Jewish section of my collection will likely see the largest increase.

My collection is an expression of my particular moment in the Jewish diaspora, and it will form alongside my personal history. I am very glad that wherever I end up, there will be beautiful books of the Jewish diaspora waiting for me.