David Herman
The Yiddish Culture that was Lost: The Writers

David Herman | The Yiddish Culture That Was Lost The Writers | 06.07.21

- David, thanks very much for joining us again. I’m going to hand over to you.

• Such a pleasure, thank you so much. Welcome, everybody from Sunny London. I’m going to be talking about the Yiddish culture that was destroyed during the war and let me begin with a particular Yiddish poet, Itzik Manger.

My father was from Warsaw and in the last days of his life, he spoke to me of his oldest friends, among them, the Yiddish poet, Itzik Manger from Czernowitz. In these last conversations, the years fell away and he spoke of people far away and long ago and that’s what seemed to matter at the end. Who was Itzik Manger? He was a Yiddish poet who my father had known in Warsaw and they both came to Britain as refugees. In order to improve his English, Manger tried translating Shakespeare sonnets into Yiddish. On a late summers night in 1943, my father came across Manger at Edgeware Road Tube Station in London, seeking refuge from the Blitz.

“Manger”, he wrote, “was hunched over his small leather suitcase.” He carried the suitcase with him wherever he went. It contained all his worldly possessions, that is his manuscripts. He sat on the escalator with a fantastically thick English German dictionary printed in very small type. The exercise was to find a German equivalent to the English word and then define from memory a Yiddish equivalent to the German. “No one is as lonely as a Yiddish poet”, Manger would say.

So who was he? He was born Isador Helfer in Czernowitz in 1901. His father and brother were both tailors. Czernowitz was also the birthplace of the great Paul Sallan and Aaron Athalfalt. There is a plot today in Czernowitz which reads, “Czernowitz, halfway between Kiev and Bucharest, Krakow and Odessa, was the secret capital of Europe, where there were more bookshops than bakeries.” In the world according to Itzik’s selected poetry and prose, the editors describe Manger as the last of the Yiddish Troubadors, a folk poet, an admirer and re-creator of oral literature of the ballad, “The folk Tale, the Purim play.” In short, a romantic poet for whom the gypsy with his homelessness, his rootlessness and his music was an attractive figure.

In 1927, Manger went to Warsaw and he called this period before the war “my most beautiful decade”. It was certainly by far the most productive. He joined the Yiddish Writers Club in 1930 at the same time as Izaak Beshavis, now known as Isaac Beshavis Singer about whom I’ll be talking at the same time on Thursday. Manger burst onto the literary scene in late 1920s Warsaw. He gave interviews, he published articles and several volumes of verse. He published his own literary journal filled with his own manifestos, poems and literary reflections. He wrote a history of Yiddish literature from the 18th century to early 20th century and a fictional autobiography, and that gives you a flavour I think, of what the Yiddish literary world was like in pre-war Warsaw.

In 1938, Manger left Warsaw for Paris and escaped to Britain in 1940. He later settled in Israel and died in Tel Aviv in 1969. Let me just give you a little flavour of Manger from his poem, “Let us sing simply”. I’ll just read the first few verses.

“Let us sing simply, directly and plain of all that’s familiar and dear, of aged beggars who curse at the frost and of mothers blessing the fire, of indigent brides with their candles who stand at cyclist mirrors for lawn, each of them seeking the intimate face they loved and that laughed them to scorn. Of those who cast lots and who steal the last coin of their victims with speech that obscure and of wives who deserted curse at the world slinking away through back doors, of housemaids whose fingers are worked to the bone and who hide from their mistresses sight. The morsels they save for the soldiers who come on their visits to them every night. It’s a vanished world of aged beggars, of mothers by the fire, of indigent brides, of housemaids working their fingers to the bone, a world that is vanished and is far away.”

Czernowitz, where Manger was born, played a huge part in the birth of modern Yiddish literature. In 1908 when Manger was just seven, A conference in support of Yiddish took place in Czernowitz, which was a historic event. It had the important effect of increasing confidence, self-respect and a consciousness of the status of Yiddish literature as a modern literature. At the same time, however, following the attempts of several extremists to have Yiddish as opposed to Hebrew proclaimed as the national language of the Jews, the conference intensified the rift between the two literatures. In certain situations among Yiddish authors adherent to the non Zionist labour movement and in the Soviet Union after the revolution, these extremist views led to a deliberate denial of jury’s vital sources and subsequently to a simplified evaluation of the traditional cultural heritage. Among those who attended were Peretz and (indistinct).

The conference is now seen as a reminder of the high tide that Yiddish and Yiddish activism reached in the first decades of the 20th century. What followed was the establishment of Evo in 1925, the organisation of a network of Yiddish secular schools in 1921, of the Yiddish the Yiddish Culture Association in 1937 and of the world Congress for Yiddish culture soon after the end of the Second World War. Two thirds of Czernowitz Jewish population were killed in the Holocaust. Today, of roughly 250,000 people who live there, about 3,000 are Jewish. This was a moment when a new generation of Yiddish poets invigorated Jewish poetry with new images and new metres and expanded the range of its subject matter and wrote fine lyric poems and at the same time, Yiddish prose changed.

Most of the authors helped develop the special character of modern Yiddish literature. They remained alive to the problems of the generation which was struggling under the burden of conflicts affecting them as Jews and as inhabitants of the modern world. Peretz had expressed doubts in his first Yiddish work, “Monish” in 1888 as to whether the Yiddish language could describe the Jewish way of life and the idiomatic pungency of popular speech, but this disappeared completely at the time of the First World War and was replaced among Yiddish authors by new confidence in the capacity of the language to prove itself in any field of artistic and literary expression.

The three decades following the outbreak of the First World War were hugely dramatic for the history of modern Yiddish literature. These years saw the First World War, the revolutions and pogroms in Russia, migrations and changes of regime, World War II and above all, the Nazi Holocaust, which brought East European jury almost the only source for Yiddish authors to the brink of extinction. These events were the background for the transformation in the development of Yiddish literature. The continual spread of Yiddish literature and the increased importance of its centres overseas extended its horizons. At the same time, especially after the Holocaust, immigrant authors were torn between their emotional attachment to the ruined lands of their origin and their aspiration to be integrated in their new homes and established a new generation of authors there.

Before the First World War, Yiddish literature was basically bilingual. Many authors wrote in both Yiddish and Hebrew and many readers understood both languages. After the deaths of the three great founding fathers of modern Yiddish, Peretz, Sholem Aleichem and Abramovich, who all died during the First World War, this close bond was severed and no successor arose with the influence in prestige to bridge the gap. So, despite the great tension throughout the period in all centres of Yiddish literature and the constant and drastic decline in the number of readers, the stock of authors and literary output increased. There were important artistic achievements and new literary territory was conquered.

So, let us return to Itzik Manger who arrived in Warsaw in the late 1920s, and by then, Poland was really the centre of European Yiddish literature. Stretching down to Romanian in the south and Lithuania in the north, Poland was the main centre of Yiddish literature before the war. It was the main source in which Yiddish literature overseas could draw after World War I. By the 1920s, there were three really major cultural and geographical centres of Yiddish literature: America, Poland and the Soviet Union.

In their introduction to a treasury of Yiddish poetry in 1969, Irving Howe and Eliza Greenberg write, “These were not merely distinct in space, they also represented sharply different possibilities for Yiddish writing, the American towards increasing worldliness, the Soviet towards a Marxist stress and the repudiation of traditional Yiddish guide and the Polish towards an organic Yiddish culture tied to the past, but also responsive to modern European experience. In other words, it had one foot in the past, folk sources, Hasidic wonder tales, Yiddish folk songs, and above all, the traditional religious culture of the Eastern European Jews, and one foot in the present, which also seemed the future, secularism, socialism, zionism, the new world of the industrial working class and the growing cities of central and East Europe.”

You cannot make sense of artists like Chagall or poets like Manger without grasping this tension and this is perfectly summed up in Isaac Barbell’s great story, “The Reber’s Son in Red Cavalry”, his greatest collection. Towards the end, the narrator says, “Portraits of Lenin and Maimonides lay side by side, Lennon’s nodular skull and the tarnished silk of the portraits of Maimonides. A strand of female hair had been placed in a book of the resolution of the sixth party Congress and in the margins of communist leaflets swarmed crooked lines of ancient Hebrew verse. In a sad and meagre rein, they fell on me, pages of the song of Songs and revolver cartridges, the traditional and the modern.”

Again, to quote Howan Greenberg, “What this tense coexistence of past and future within the prison cell of the present often led to was a blend of tradition and experiment, faith and scepticism. In the daily work of Yiddish literature, there was an effort to extract the best from and perhaps, create a new synthesis of past and future.”

In Warsaw, a group of writers centred around Isle Peretz took Yiddish to another level of modern experimentation, and this was the main source in which Yiddish literature overseas drew after the World War I. A later Warsaw group, "the Gang” as they were called, included writers such as IJ Singer, brother of Bashevis, who emigrated to New York. Peretz Hirschbein, Melech Ravitch and Uri Zvi Greenberg. Like their New York counterpart, “de younga”, the young ones, they broke with earlier Yiddish writers and attempted to free Yiddish writing, particularly verse from its preoccupation with politics and the fate of the Jews.

For a considerable part of the community and its authors, the very existence of a modern Yiddish literature expressed an attachment to tradition which had assumed a new form in their time. In Poland, Yiddish folklore lived in all its forms. The popular literature of previous generations, both religious and secular was alive and new kinds of Yiddish writing were born. The new literature in Yiddish became a vital community asset and was regarded as worthy of admiration and subject for lively discussion. For a considerable part of the community and its authors, the very existence of a modern Yiddish literature expressed an attachment to tradition which had assumed a new form in their time.

Yiddish literature in Poland was characterised by a rich variety of ideological, political and literary trends, temperaments and forms of expression during the brief period that proceeded the destruction of Polish jury. Their prose was realistic with strong tendencies to naturalism. Their trials and tribulations as Jews were almost their principle subject. It’s difficult to evaluate of course the achievements of this flood of creative activity, especially as many of the writers fell victim to the Holocaust in their youth before reaching the age at which they would’ve published their best work and before collecting in book form work scattered among numerous literary periodicals, but mention should be made of several points specific to Yiddish literature in Poland and the neighbouring countries between the two wars, particularly of new departures created against the background of cultural continuity from which they sprang.

Steinberg in Romania cultivated the fable in Yiddish and achieved a high level of virtuosity. Cyclen, Manger and Sidscavar also ventured at stylized adaptation of the language and forms of pre 18th century Yiddish poetry. This introversion and deliberate return to earlier literature, literary traditions, was a new trend in Yiddish, one not fully realised before the Holocaust which destroyed the communities that gave birth to the Yiddish works in which the tendency was so clearly marked. The other great centre in Europe was the Soviet Union and in the Soviet Union, the Yiddish literature also underwent a dramatic flowering, but a very different one because the first key point was the February revolution in 1917 which led to a huge upsurge of Yiddish cultural activity.

Newspapers in Yiddish, literary publications, Jewish political parties, a whole new generation of Yiddish writers and artists inspired by the revolutionary turmoil of 1917, hope that the new Russia might bring a better life to the Jews. Between 1917 and the early twenties, note that Chagall, for example, left the Soviet Union for France in 1923, there appeared a remarkable number of talented Yiddish novelists and poets. Between 1917 and ‘21, approximately 850 Yiddish books were published in the Soviet Union, a remarkable number for a time of famine and civil war, and in Yiddish poetry was the quality as much as the quantity of the writing, new motifs, new voices, new tones.

The younger poets like Markesh, Fefa, , Charek Kushnirof, turned their backs on the old world of the Stetle and embraced the new world as in this poem “Parade” by David Hochstein. “We move with you in your advancing ranks, marching mankind, the proud and the courageous, the seething and the chill, step by step. Held high on poles of shame, swaying, swaying there, the old God. It’s taters patched with air, they’re flutters still and flutters the old red banner, no step back,” or the opening verse of to Odessa by Libe Klvitco, “Mama, let me mama go to Odessa. I too want to hear how the is sung, see how the workers stand on the barricades, how hopes beat back this dark century.”

Note that both poets, David Hofshtine and Libe Klvitco were murdered by Stalin in 1952. But at the same time, especially the older poets, cast a nostalgic look back at the remembered world of their childhood and youth. You can see exactly the same tensions in non-Yiddish Soviet writers like Barbel’s stories about his childhood in Odessa and Vasily Grossman’s writings about his hometown of Berdichev in Ukraine. Most of the Jewish writers in the Soviet Union as well as many and other centres of Jewish literature attached great hopes to the Soviet regime. They believed in the continued development of a secular Jewish culture in Yiddish.

As early as the 1930’s, however, these expectations were disappointed with the decline and contraction of this cultural activity, which it had been hoped was to serve as a firm basis for the development of Yiddish. This young generation born in the 1880s and 1890s included greats such as David Bergelson, Denista, who died in the Gulag, Heritz Markesh, Itsy Chareck and Kolbach, executed in Minsk during the purges. They died respectively in 1952, 1950, 1952, 1937. Note the years in which they all died, between 1937, the high point of the purges of the thirties and 1950 and especially 1952. Some 30 writers were murdered during a starless purge known as the night of the murdered poets, August the 12th to the 13th, 1952, including Itzik Fefa, David Bergelson and Libe Klvitco.

The Yiddish literary historian, Elias Schulman, estimated that more than 500 additional Yiddish writers died in the Gulag. I dunno how familiar you are with the younger writer, Nathan Englander, but in his first breakthrough collection of stories for the relief of unbearable urges published in 1999, the first story is called “The 27th Man” and is the story of the murder of the Yiddish poets in the Soviet Union. Let me read you just the final few paragraphs. “Outside, all the others were being assembled. There were Hurianski and Lubervich, Lavin Stalsky, all those great voices with the greatest stories of their lives to tell and forced to take them to the grave.

Pincus, having increased his readership threefold, had a smile on his face. Pincus Pelevitz was the 27th or the 14th from either end if you wanted to count his place in line. Bretzski supported Pincus by holding up his right side for his equilibrium had not returned. supported him on the left but was in bad shape himself. 'Did you like it?’ Pincus asked. ‘Very much,’ said. You’re a talented boy. Pincus smiled again then fell, his head landing on the stockingless calves of . One of his borrowed shoes flew forward though his feet slid backward in the dirt. Bretski fell the top of the other two. He was shot five or six times, but being such a big man and such a strong man, he lived long enough to recognise the crack of the guns and know that he was dead.”

Among the victims during these years were Peretz Markesh, whose extensive literary heritage included poems and who managed before his arrest to embody his lament for the Holocaust of World War II in his book, “War”, published in 1948, Hofshtein, one of the most important lyric poets, Klvitco, a poet who expressed himself in a most original manner in the twenties and was later distinguished for his children’s verse. Fefa, one of the leading representatives of the ideological tendencies of Soviet Yiddish poetry, Bergelson, a talented novelist and short story writer, Pincus Kahanavich, known by his curious pseudonym, Denista, meaning “hidden one”, outstanding for his original symbolist stories, who after seeking new paths that would placate Soviet criticism, started writing his novel , the Mashba family in 1939.

He managed to publish two volumes of this extensive epic in which he diagnosed the disintegration of late 19th century East European Jewish society. Jewish writers who survived, and there were some, wrote for the draw, meaning the drawer in their desk out of which their manuscripts would never see daylight. To quote Howe Greenberg again, “It begins with modernist flame and ends with conformist ashes.” Important Soviet writers who escape persecution included Altman, Rivka Ruben, Shera Gorshman and others. Many of the surviving members of the JAC immigrated to Israel in the seventies and a memorial for the JAC victims was dedicated in Jerusalem in 1977 on the 25th anniversary of the night of the murdered poets.

Someone asked me last night, last week when I was giving my talk about Vasily Grossman, why did Vasily Grossman survive the terrible purges of the thirties when many in his family and many of his closest friends were killed? And I answered luck, contingency, and this may have seemed looking back on it, a rather lame response to an important question and I’m sorry if it sounded that way, but one of the main essays on post-war Yiddish poetry in the Soviet Union says, “There appears to be no reason to explain why certain writers were not persecuted as all these writers pursued similar themes in their writing and participated in similar groupings of Jewish intellectuals, Soviet totalitarianism allowed space for Lark.”

This influenced an important idea in the writings of the Jewish political thinker, Isaiah Berlin. He was one of the few British thinkers to visit the post-war Soviet Union at the height of Stalinism. Then he met Anark Mahtivah and Boris Pastinak, meetings which changed his life. Berlin himself was lucky enough to escape post World War I Russia and then Latvia, with his parents. Those who stayed in Latvia were all murdered by the Nazis. An uncle who stayed in the Soviet Union was brutally tortured by the regime and died of a heart attack when he saw his former torturer in the street after his release. Berlin elevated the idea of luck and contingency to a philosophical principle. “Nothing is inevitable, certainly not history,” he wrote.

One of his most famous essays was called “Historical Inevitability” and was written at the high point of the Cold War. And then of course, there was the Holocaust. There was a wide range of writing in the ghettos of World War II where many authors were incarcerated. Only a small part of the work of the writers killed by the Nazis has survived, having been saved with great devotion and almost by miracle. Among these are the prose fragments by Perler in the Warsaw ghetto, stories by Spiegel in the Lodz ghetto, the poems of Shavitz in the Lodz ghetto, a few poems by Gebirtig in the Krakow ghetto, Danny Levitz in the Warsaw Ghetto and Glick in the Vilna ghetto. Above all, the songs and poems, biblical plays and Diary of (indistinct), who continued the tradition of writing in Hebrew and Yiddish, both in the Warsaw ghetto at the brink of death and in the Vitel camp, are an authentic testimony from the Valley of death, standing beyond any mere literary evaluation.

Ghetto literature found perhaps it’s most agonising expression in his great lament. “The Song of the Murdered Jewish People”, which was completed in the concentration camp at the beginning of 1944 in full and appalling knowledge of the destruction of Polish jury. A few writers, (indistinct), Briks and Spiegel, who personally witnessed the destruction of their people but survived, embodying their work from the ghetto period in the years following the liberation, the continuity and endurance of Yiddish literature in the face of the extinction which overcame its most vital centre which was Polish jury, Abraham Sutzkever’s became a ghetto diarist. He began dating his poems and composing a new one nearly every day during his incarceration in 1941, Sutzkever’s accounts from the Vilna ghetto in Lithuania, which he wrote and dated in descriptive poems are among the most unusual and affecting testimonies of ghetto life.

Only 1% of the approximately 40,000 prisoners survived. One of the poems, “The teacher Mira”, chronicles how teacher Mira cared for her dwindling flock of charges in the ghetto, orphans whose parents have been murdered. Sutzkever named one of his two daughters Mira, after that teacher. Another verse recounts how Bruno Kitel, the Nazi SS officer who oversaw the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto, executed a man while holding a pistol in one hand and playing a piano with the other. Sutzkever’s mother was murdered near the ghetto and he wrote about that too. His father had died in Siberia when he was seven, forcing the family to move to Vilnius. In 1943, Sutzkever and his wife escaped the ghetto and he joined the partisans.

In 1944, a red army plane was sent to retrieve the Sutzkever’s from near the partisan camp where Fredker acted as a nurse, but it was downed by German anti-aircraft fire. A second plane was sent two weeks later. The Sutzkevers had to cross a minefield to reach it. Sutzkever and his wife Fredker needed to walk through a minefield to reach the plane that would take them to freedom and to do so, they stepped to the rhythm of poetic metre. Short, short, long, and sometimes long, short, long. Two years after his escape, which was featured on the front page of the Communist Party, “Daily Pravda”, Sutzkever testified at the Nirenberg trials in Germany. He wanted to deliver his testimony in Yiddish but Soviet authorities forced him to do it in Russian. In 1947, he managed to leave the Soviet Union for Palestine.

To an overwhelming extent, Yiddish poetry after the Holocaust became Holocaust poetry. All the questions of style and form that had so engaged Yiddish writers in the cafes of Warsaw and Moscow between the wars seemed trivial for survival, for survivors. In 1947, 1 critic wrote, “Insofar as Yiddish writers are conscientious, and they are, they no longer want to be reckoned with as artists or mere artists. It is as if they feel guilty that their peoples and their own tragedy has become no more than a theme for their poems and stories.” Take this poem by Malka Heifetz Tusman “In Spite”, which begins, “You say you are a Jew and a poet and you’ve written no poems on the destruction. How can a Yiddish poet not when the destruction is enormous, so enormous?”

Many of the writers who wrote during and after the 1940s responded to the Holocaust in their literary works. Some wrote poetry and stories while in ghettos, camps and partisan and groups, and many continue to address the Holocaust in its after effects in their subsequent writing. Isaiah Spiegel was sent to Auschwitz and in 1951, immigrated to Israel, and this is his poem, “My Father’s Boots”. “Patched and cleated, my father’s boots are lying in the sand of the Auschwitz Hill. Shiny and white, the cleats are glittering in the sand of the Auschwitz Hill. From your holy patched boots, from your holy shining cleats, I hear you say to me, ‘My son, with these patched boots and these shining cleats, I can even go to the Messiah.’”

Abraham Sutzkever’s wrote this poem, “In 1981”. “A letter arrived from the town of my birth, from one still sustained by the grace of her youth. Enclosed between torment and fondness, she pressed a blade of grass from Pona. This grass and moribund cloud with its flicker once kindled the alphabet letter by letter, and on the faces of the letters in murmuring ash, the blade of grass from Pona. The grass is my doll’s house, my snug little world where children play fiddles in rows as they burn. The maestros are legend, they lift up their bows for the blade of grass from Pona. I won’t part with this stemlet that yields of my home, the good earth I long for makes room for us both and I’ll bring to the Lord my ablation at last, the blade of grass from Pona.”

Another poem by Sutzkever’s was “The Fiddler Plays”, published as part of poems for my diary in 1977 and translated in 2014. “The Fiddler plays and grows ever thinner, thin and thinner, already thinner than the fiddle bow, thinner than a string. In place of its master by itself, the fiddle plays thinner, ever thinner, and its master burns for his faith on a white pire. The fiddle plays alone now ever thinner, thin and thinner. The fiddle cannot pass it a sip of water. On their own, the sounds play and they play thinner, thinner until sounds glow on the pire, sounds glow. Sounds glow on the pire, glow thin and thinner. Now, the darkness plays without fiddle and without bow. It plays without sounds and it’s playing thinner, thinner, thinner until we sparkle through its black eyes. Oh darkness, for whom do you play ever thinner, thin, and thinner, for us, the small tears, are your favours destined for us? Music from tears, tiny tears, thinner, thinner, thinner, together with the white pire and the dark earth.”

Heim Greid, 1910 to ‘82, was born in Vilna and became a leader of young Vilma, a literary group, and he escaped to the Soviet Union after the Germans invaded Lithuania in 1941. In 1948, he settled in the United States and in one of his greatest stories, Mike Querrel with in 1954, he brings to life the spiritual struggle of Eastern European Jews after the Holocaust. Here is part of a speech by , the Rabbi.

“All Jews mourn the third of our people who died of Marty’s death, but anyone with true feeling knows that it was not a third of the house of Israel that was destroyed, but a third of himself, of his body, his soul, and so we must make a reckoning, you as well as I. Anyone who doesn’t make the reckoning must be as Bastille as the beasts of the wood. Let’s make the reckoning together, in justice and in mercy. May we forgive the murderers? No, we may not. To the end of all generations, we may not forgive them. Forgiving the murderer is a fresh murder, only this time of brother by brother. Neither you nor I has the right to sleep at night. We have no right to flee the laments, the eyes and the outstretched arms of the murdered. Though we break under the anguish and affliction, we have no right to flee their outcry. But then I know that the reckoning is not yet over, far from it, but you Heim, how can you eat and sleep and laugh and dress so elegantly? Don’t you have to make your reckoning too? How can you thrust yourself into the world when you know it consorts with the murderers of the members of your own house and you thought the world was becoming better? Your world has fallen. As for me, I have greater faith than ever.”

In 1954, while passing through the Uruguayan capital city of Montevideo, the Yiddish literary editor, Mark Turkoff, met a Jewish journalist from Paris who’d begun writing a book about his experience in Auschwitz. Turkoff invited him to submit it to a Yiddish book series he was editing out of Buenos Aires called “Polish Jury”. Two years later, Turkoff published and the world was silent. The book attracted no literary interest and the author continued with his journalism and is now remembered mainly as the first version of a very different book that would later be known to English audiences as “Knight”. The author, of course was Eliza or Eli Vizo.

For others, it was the sense of isolation that was overwhelming. What affects me the most, Laments , is the continual sense of isolation that I feel as a survivor, an isolation enhanced by my being a Yiddish writer. I feel myself to be like an anachronism, wondering about a page of history on which I don’t belong. The fate of the Yiddish language, of course, is at the crux of this isolation for so many writers. If writing as a lonely profession, continues Rosenfeld, the Yiddish writer’s loneliness has an additional dimension. His readership has perished, his language has gone up with the smoke of the crematoria, he or she creates in a vacuum almost without a readership, out of fidelity to a vanished language as if to prove that Nazism did not succeed in extinguishing that language’s last breath and that it is still alive. Others thought silence was the only decent response.

The poet Aaron Cyclen wrote, “Were Jeremiah to sit by the ashes of Israel today, he would not cry out a lamentation nor would he drown the desolated places with his tears. The Almighty himself would be powerless to open up his well of tears. He would maintain a deep silence, for even an outcry is now a lie. Even tears are mere literature, even prayers are false. And if prayers are false, what then?” In his poem, I believed Cyclen wrote, “Can I then choose not to believe in that living God whose purpose is when he destroys seeming to forsake me, I cannot conceive? Choose not to believe in Him who having turned my body to find ash begins once more to wake me?”

Livek wrote, “Oh, who on the steps of the path to will forgive me the sins of my song?” And Kadia Molodovsky who had survived by immigrating to New York in 1935 wrote “God of mercy” in 1945, which begins, “Oh God of mercy, choose another people. We are tired of death, tired of corpses. We have no prayer, no more prayers. Choose another people. We have run out of blood for victims. Our houses have been turned into desert. The earth lacks space for tombstones. There are no more Lamentations nor songs of woe in the ancient texts.”

And in a poem written by Jacob Gladstein, born in Lublin, who’d immigrated to New York in 1918, he wrote, “The Night is endless when a race is dead. Earth and heaven a wiped bear, the light is fading in your shabby tent. The Jewish hour is guttering. Jewish God, you are almost gone.” There were a number of other options for postwar Jewish writers and Yiddish writers remembering the golden age of Yiddish literature. One of course was Israel.

Manger survived by escaping to London, then went to the States and finally emigrated to Israel where he died in 1969, and where the Itzik Manger prize for outstanding Yiddish writing was established in 1968. The inaugural prize was awarded to Manger himself at a banquet attended by Golda Meir, then Prime Minister and by the President. Or go to America. Isaac Beshavis Singer like his brother, IJ singer before him left Warsaw for New York. I’ll talk more about this in my talk on Singer on Thursday but for the moment, we should acknowledge that Yiddish literature had an extraordinary afterlife and still does in post-war America. Thanks to writers like Singer, Cynthia Osik and Saul Bellow, who famously translated Singer’s story, “Gimble The Fool”, and more recently, Nathan Englander and Jonathan Saffran , to translators and editors and to archives in Yiddish centres.

A third option was to change your subject, to find a new literary or artistic voice, to move on from the past. When Manger died in 1969, my father wrote his obituary illustrated by a portrait that he had made in 1940 when they’d both found sanctuary in Britain, and for the next few years, my father drew and painted images of Jewish life from his pre-Warsaw childhood, but these subjects were unbearable and he soon found another very different subject which made his name in post-war Britain.

And a fourth option was to translate and preserve the memory of Yiddish writers who’d been murdered. In 1953, Jacob Sontag like Manger, a refugee from Bukavina, founded a literary journal in London called “The Jewish Quarterly”. The editorial of the first issue written by Sontag is a work of mourning. There are references to the tragedy of European jury and the wholesale destruction of the great Jewish communities in Europe. Elsewhere in the first issues, there are references to the last Jew from Halberstadt and an article on the glory of Vilna that was. The aim of the quarterly was to be a magazine which would be Yiddish in English.

At a dinner in 1974, to celebrate the quarterly’s 21st anniversary, Sontag said, “If I were asked how I envisaged the Jewish quarterly when I started more than 20 years ago, I would say that it was to cultivate literary journalism in the best tradition of Central and Eastern Europe and in particular, in the best tradition of Eastern European Jewish writing. We felt called upon to add a link to the golden chain, handed us by an earlier generation.”

A later editor wrote, “The gaze of the quarterly in the first three decades was turned eastwards, towards the Ravage East European landscape of Sontag’s past. The magazine focused on three main areas, the legacy of the Holocaust, Israel and Zionism and the cultural heritage of Eastern Europe. Legacy and heritage, it was a real sense of a golden chain which linked these refugees to the golden age from the 1860s to the 1930s, a golden age destroyed by Hitler and Stalin.”

Thank you so much for your time and patience. I can see there are a number of questions here.

Q&A and Comments

Hindi Hurt. “A friend of mine owns an anthology of Shakespeare and Yiddish, and the cover page reads, which translates to 'translated and improved’, true Yiddish chutzpah.” I love it. And Ruth asked,

Q: “How is his name spelled?” A: Itzik Manger. Well, of course, because it’s a transliteration, the most usual spelling is I-T-Z-H-I-K and then M-A-N-G-E-R, but this collection, the world according to Itzik is I-T-Z-I-K, but it’s always Manger, M-A-N-G-E-R.

Let me see if I can find… Perhaps Judi, you could kindly help me since yet again, I can’t seem to find the other questions.

• Do you not see anything on the Q and A?

• I do, but only the first page I’m afraid.

• I think you need to scroll down. If you just take your mouse and scroll down on the side, you’d be able to…

• No, I don’t seem to.

• Okay.

• I’m sorry.

• Right. So, I’ve got Veronica Belling saying,

Q: “Did you teach Yiddish and is your Yiddish Polish or Lidvish or do you read Yiddish in translation?” A: I’m ashamed to say, Veronica, that I don’t teach Yiddish and I don’t even read Yiddish, so I read it I’m afraid in translation. I say this with all humility and with great apology.

• Right? Jocelyn is saying, “Surprised not hearing you mention Lithuania and Vilna.”

• Yes, I’m sorry. You are absolutely right. That’s a very, very good point. I mean, I guess you, of course, it was one of the great Eastern European centres of Yiddish literature and Yiddish culture and Jewish learning, and the ghetto was one of the great centres of Yiddish writing in any of the Nazi ghettos. I guess you just have to sort of, I also didn’t talk about New York, of course, which was a hugely important centre for Yiddish literature from the late 19th century all the way through to the present. So, you know, I guess you just have to make your choices and I chose to focus on Warsaw and the Soviet Union primarily, but there was no particular reason for that. Another talk could be on on Vilnius and another one on New York and you know, it’s sort of almost endless, really. So…

• All right, David Septon is saying,

Q: “Yiddish flourished in New York until mid 20th century. Why not in Great Britain?” A: Well, that is a really excellent question. In firstly, New York had, of course, a much larger Jewish population. It had a much larger Yiddish-speaking population. It had a much more vibrant Jewish literary culture, not just in Yiddish but you know, if you think of all those writers who emerged after the Second World War in particular, people like Bellow and Roth and Alan Ginsburg and Arthur Miller and Cynthia Osik, and you know, on and on and on, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, and the point was, there were Jewish literary agents. There were Jewish reviewers and critics.

Lionel Trilling was the first Jewish professor of English literature at Columbia University and was at one point, the most eminent literary critic in post-war America, at the time of the publication of the Liberal Imagination. Irving Howe reviewed Henry Roth’s masterpiece, “Call it sleep”, on the front page of the New York Times book review, Howe and Eliza Greenberg asked Saul Bellow to translate Bashaka Singers “Gimple the Fool”. So, there was this enormous literary culture, and in Britain, I’ve just written a review for the TLS or a piece for the Times Literary Supplement a week or so ago about Roland Kamberton.

Now, I don’t suppose many of any of you have heard of Roland Kamberton. He wrote two wonderful, he was a British writer. He wrote two wonderful novels in the 1950s and it was his centenary last week, and there were no equivalents of Lionel Trilling or Irving Howell to promote and champion his writing, and after those two early novels, he sort of disappeared without trace. Alexander Barron, a wonderful Jewish writer from Hackney, his first novel from the city, from the plough about a battalion of British soldiers fighting in the Second World War, taking part in the Normandy landings, that sold something like 400,000 copies. It was a absolutely massive bestseller. He was a very fine writer, but really by the end of the 1950s, it was just too much of a struggle and he moved to writing television dramas and had a very successful career as a television dramatist.

There are, there just wasn’t the infrastructure, there wasn’t the size of the readership, there wasn’t an influential enough readership and there wasn’t the… There just wasn’t the infrastructure of agents, publishers who would champion these writers. When Alexander Baron wrote his first book, he was born Alexander Bernstein, and Jonathan Cape, I think it was, who were publishing this book, said perhaps he could change his name to Baron from Bernstein because it would fit more easily on the spine of the book. People like Bellow and Rothwell, of course they had short names, and Ozik and so on, but also the point was they weren’t under that kind of pressure from unsympathetic publishers, and so, and once you had one or two succeeding, then that created possibilities for other writers. So, I hope that gives you a sort of sense that this problem was amplified manyfold for Yiddish writers and Jewish artists and many others.

And I can see here the Morris Block has asked,

Q: “Did Jonathan Saffran Fowe, Nathan Englander, write in Yiddish as well as in English?” A: I don’t think they do. They did together put together a translation, which Nathan Englander did the translation of and Fowe edited for “Passover”, and Englander lived in Jerusalem for quite a few years and was very devout, but the point was not so much that they could write in Yiddish or read Yiddish, but they were interested in Yiddish speakers and in Yiddish writers. You know, there’s the central, and as is Nicole Krause and the central character of her best book is a Yiddish-speaking, an old Yiddish-speaking refugee in New York. And this was something that generation criticised people like Bellow and Roth for, that they didn’t really take sufficiently seriously their Jewishness and their Jewish identity, whether in terms of writing about the Holocaust, whether in terms of writing about Yiddish literature. It’s not entirely true because of course, Bellow did write “Mr. Samuel’s Planet”.

There is a very fascinating letter or exchange between Cynthia Ozik and Sol Bellow in the 1960s, when Ozik wrote to Bellow why was he so late to write about the Holocaust, and Bellow replied unusually meekly and modestly because he was not a meek or a modest person, but he did reply very humbly that he really could not justify it. He couldn’t explain it, and this was actually just a few years before he wrote, before he published “Mr. Samuel’s Plan”. So maybe, there was an aspect to that, and with Roth as well, actually, and not only of course did he famously write about a lot of different kinds of Jewish characters, but he was also absolutely fascinated and absorbed by a lot of great European and Israeli Jewish writers.

He also, he introduced Cynthia Ozik to Bruno Schultz for example, the Polish Jewish writer who was killed during the Holocaust, and Cynthia Ozik went on to write a novel about Schultz. And he had very close friendships with people like Primo Levy, with Aaron Appelveld, with the Czech dissident writers, and you know, he edited a series, which you may be familiar with. It was published by Penguin in Britain, I’m not quite sure who published it in America, called “Writers from the Other Europe”, which introduced a whole number of, now very famous East European writers to English-speaking readership, and I think what seized his imagination during the 1970s and eighties when he travelled regularly to Prague until he was no longer allowed to go to visit Prague, but I think what absolutely seized his imagination was the sense that what if he had been in the East Europe?

What would’ve happened to him if, thinking about some of these writers, they were, when he was their age, he was playing baseball, he was going to high school, he was making out with girls. He then went to college. He had this incredibly safe and secure life, and he started to wonder, during the seventies and eighties what would that life had have been like at his age when he was a small child? Aaron Appelveld was hiding in fields and forests for several years, some and later managed to escape to post-war Palestine. Others were in concentration camps. Others like Primo Levy of course, was famously an Auschwitz.

People who were from his generation had completely different fates and outcomes. It slightly goes back to the question I raised about luck and contingency, Roth became very interested in that question, that it was just luck that meant that Philip Milton Roth grew up in a Jewish neighbourhood in Newark, New Jersey, and these other people grew up in God-forsaken parts of Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union. And so, he did take their fate very seriously, and some of his best writing, I think, “The Ghost Writer” which raises the question, a novella which raises the question, is one of the characters Anne Frank?

He wrote a wonderful story about Kafka. What would Kafka have, what would’ve become of Kafka if he’d been an English teacher in tutor in post-war New Jersey? And of course, I suppose the classic example would be the Plot against America, his novel about what would’ve happened to Jews like his family, like the Roths in New Jersey in the 1930s if Lindbergh and antisemite had been elected president instead of FDR. And so, it’s a kind of counterfactual history, and it’s a very powerful novel about what could have happened to a Jewish family in an antisemitic America, and I suppose Roth was very, it struck a very strong chord with Roth, I think.

So sorry, to go back to your question. I think some of these, Mr Block, I think some of these criticisms by the younger generation, yes, they were more interested in Israel. Yes, they were more interested in Hebrew, yes, they were more interested in Yiddish culture and history, but one shouldn’t forget that people like Bellow and Roth also were. Arthur Miller, one of his best later plays was “Broken Glass” about Christal Night. So, many of them started to move, perhaps more and later in their careers, but they did start to move towards Jewish history and Jewish culture, if not Yiddish literature. Yes. So, I think, I hope that answers your question. I’m sorry if it doesn’t.

And Sandra Bragger says she was very moved by Erin Lansky’s book, “Outwitting History”, which I’m ashamed to say I don’t know but thank you very much for the recommendation.

And Claudia points out rightly and interestingly, Johannesburg was another significant post-war Yiddish literary space, including important poets like David Fram and David who won the Itzik Manger Prize in 1983. So, thank you very much. I mean, a lot of, it’s worth looking down the list of people who were awarded that prize. I don’t think it’s given any longer, but it did include a lot of major, major Jewish and Yiddish writers. Abigail Hirsch writes,

Q: “What about Brazil?” A: Well, my ignorance is yet again, brutally exposed. I can’t tell you. Of course there is a Jewish population and indeed one of, I dunno if any of you read or subscribe to the quarter, the British Quarterly Magazine, “Jewish Renaissance”, but they published, I think either in the last issue or the penultimate issue, a short story by Isaac Beshavis Singer, which hadn’t previously been translated, which was set in Rio, Rio de Janeiro, where a Yiddish writer meets another Yiddish writer that he’d known many years before. I’m afraid to say it’s not one of the best Singer stories, but anyway, and Hindi Hurt writes,

Q: “From what I understand, Yiddish is still flourishing in Australia, especially in Melbourne where a friend of mine teaches in a day school. What accounts for that?” A: Well, again, what accounts for that is that there were in South Africa and in parts of South America and in Australia also significant Jewish communities who were either immigrants from the late 19th century or descended from refugees from the 1930s and forties.

And Linda Falks Newstead says, “Just an FYI, for your information, Nathan Englander is currently living in Toronto.” Well, I didn’t know that. So, he seems an extraordinary itinerant individual. I didn’t know that, and I have to say, I mean, I think this book of short stories, “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges”, I do strongly recommend it. It was his first book and it was his sort of breakthrough book, and rather like Fowe and Nicole Krause, he wrote, I think his best first, his best book is his first book. Actually in Nicole Krause’s case, that’s not true. It’s her second book, which is her best book in my Humble Opinion, “The History of Love”, but Fowe, “Everything Is Illuminated” I think still remains his best book, but that’s very interesting about Englander.

“And you didn’t mention Bernard Malamitz,” says Milton Seggerman, and you are absolutely right. I hope I’ve pronounced your surname correctly. You’re absolutely right, I didn’t, and I hope perhaps another time I can return to some of the Jewish American writers of whom Malamud, of course, is one of the most interesting. And in the new, there are two new biographies for Philip Roth. I’m sorry to keep going on about Philip Roth but having just read these two massive biographies and one is 900 pages and one is 600 pages by Blake Bailey, which has now, well, it’s just actually been made available again because it’s original publisher pulled it and took it out of publication because of the sex scandals about the author, Blake Bailey, the alleged sex scandals I should say, and also Iren Adle.

He wrote a 600 page biography, and both of which, particularly perhaps Bailey, have very interesting references to Roth, exchanges between Roth and Bellow on the one hand and on the other about Malamud. They sort of formed, in the fifties and early sixties, they sort of formed a kind of trio really, Bellow Roth and Malamud as the three leading Jewish writers, Jewish American writers of that time, and I think Bellow and Roth had a very strong sense. I mean, Roth of course was much, much younger than Malamud and , but I think they both had a sense that they brought to their writing and perhaps their lives, a kind of vitality and energy and comedy and a kind of different kind of American voice in Bellow’s case from Chicago, in Roth’s case from New York, New Jersey, the Malamud who they considered a little bit too saintly, a little bit too dry, a little bit too Jewish in an old fashioned, low energy kind of way.

Alfred Kazen, who was a sort of friend of Ralph and Bellow, when Ralph wrote a tribute to Malamud after Malamud’s death, Alfred Kazen wrote in his diary that he thought that Roth was just trying to basically say that he was a better writer and was still alive and was rather putting Malamud down. It was a very acerbic kind of set of remarks. So I’m sorry, you’re absolutely right. Malamud was of course very interested in the old Yiddish-speaking Jewish world of New York in particular. And Bellow of course, and this is one of the things, you know, there was a big divide.

I’m sorry, do please say if I’m going on too much about this, but there was a very interesting divide between the older Yiddish speaking writers and critics like Bellow, like Irving Howe, like Alfred Kazen, like Malamud and those like Roth who consider themselves really more American and were brought up in the world of the New Deal and the Depression and the Second World War, and Irving Howe, perhaps in particular, considered Roth an inauthentic Jew for that, that he felt, you know, that he, Irving Howe was, and he would admit that some, this was also be true of someone like Bellow.

You know, they were Yiddish speaking, they were brought up in the old Jewish neighbourhoods of the Lower East side of Brooklyn, of Chicago, and that was the real Jewish world, the Jewish world of America between the wars and immediately after the war, and that Roth grew up in sort of suburban New Jersey, and what the hell did he know about what it was to be Jewish and Roth’s revenge was to create one of his most appalling and monstrous characters, Milton Apple, who was clearly based on Irving Howe. So, never mess with writers is the moral of that because he’ll be immortalised as a terrible schmuck. And Linda says,

Q: “Wasn’t Saul Bellow born in Canada and not American born?” A: Absolutely correct. He was born in Quebec, but when he was a very small child, his family moved across the lakes to Chicago and that’s where he grew up, and if you remember the opening sentence of the Adventures of Orgi March 1st published in the 1950s, his breakthrough novel, you know, Orgi March says, I can’t remember the exact words, now I’m American born and there is a sort of sense of Orgi as a kind of Columbus-type, Christopher Columbus type figure. So, although there is a library named after Bellow in his old hometown in Quebec, he really did consider himself primarily an American, and not only an American but a person from Chicago, just as Roth always considered himself someone from New York, New Jersey.

• David, I think we have another question here. Someone’s just said, I think you’ve missed David Seton’s question.

Q: “How did Israel, which discouraged the use of Yiddish, perceive the Yiddish authors who made Aleah?” They’d like to know. A: That is a very good question. I mean, of course, particularly Soviet writers, Yiddish writers came to Israel in the seventies. Others came immediately after the Second World War and they were well received. I mean, the most interesting book I think on the experience of moving to Israel as a Yiddish speaker is an extraordinary novel which is very close to a memoir he’d already published by Aaron Appelveld from Buccavina, and he went to Palestine immediately after the Second World War still as a, in his early teens, and he writes in this novel an extraordinary evocation of somebody who’d had to change his name, he’d had to change his language, he’d had to change his identity so that although he was Jewish, although he was Yiddish-speaking, although he’d come from Buccavina, he’d had to completely reinvent himself when he came to Israel, and he did, and there was these unforgettable scenes where he talks about his dreams when he’s visited by his parents, who were of course by then dead.

His mother was killed almost immediately after the, when he was still a small child in Buccavina. And his parents come to him in his dreams and are completely baffled. You no longer have the same name. You no longer speak to us in our language. You know, what has happened to you? And it’s an extraordinary evocation from what it felt like from the inside for a Jewish immigrant to Israel, from a completely different world and a different experience, and I do strongly recommend both the memoir and the novel. “The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Sleeping” is the title of the novel. So, it clearly was not easy at all. On the other hand, an older generation who came to Israel before the war, people like, came to Palestine, Jewish Palestine before the war, people like Benjamin Tamoos, you know, didn’t have the same kinds of problems of assimilation. I hope that goes some way to addressing you. Very good question.

• Thank you, David. Would you like to take one more or…

• Sure. Fire away, fire away.

• No, you can… Can you see them or you can just pick the last one?

• Yes. Somebody who’s Mrs. Rogers writes, “In Toronto, Diane Landers and Morris Green, brother and sister antique dealers spoke Yiddish with Scottish accents. Perhaps that was the Queen’s Yiddish.” That’s a nice idea.

Q: “Did the Hebrew University in Jerusalem do anything to encourage a renaissance of Yiddish?” A: I’m sure they did but I don’t know anything about that. I mean, the real centres of Yiddish learning are now, I think, in America really, and that has played an enormous part in the new translation and publication of Yiddish writers from the inter-war period in the post-war period, and the archival work and the work of these translators and these scholarly editions, like this book about Itzik Manger. I’d never seen a book about Itzik Manger before. This was published, I think in the early 2000’s, published by Yale University Press, and it’s just a book of selected poetry and prose in English with a wonderful 50 page introduction by David Roski and Leonard Wolf.

And, you know, these people have done an immense job or are continuing to do an immense job. This isn’t over and done with. This work is still going on at a number of centres on the East Coast in particular and a number of American, other American universities. So yes, I’m sure the Hebrew University is doing enormous and valuable work, and of course used to, just outside Oxford, but I think America remains the sort of centre for keeping Yiddish culture and Yiddish literature alive.

• Thank you David. Well, would like to know if the painter Joseph Hermann was your father?

• He was, he was. That’s correct, yes. He grew up speaking Yiddish. Yiddish was his first language so for him, meeting up with Manger again in London in 1940 was an extraordinary moment and he painted Manger’s portrait at that time, and it was an extraordinary moment for him because to meet somebody from pre-war Warsaw from the 1930s was an extraordinary moment, and then the same sort of thing happened to him when he moved to Glasgow in 1940, and he spoke many languages at that time but English wasn’t one of them, and he met a journalist in a library in Glasgow who happened to speak French, so my father asked him, “Do you know where I can find somebody who speaks Yiddish?”

And he recommended a Estonian sculptor called Benne Schaltz. And so my father went round to see this sculptor. They became lifelong friends and he happened to know another friend of my father’s from Poland, the artist Yancle Adler, who also of course spoke Yiddish. And so Adler, Manger and my father became really intensely close friends. It was like sort of coming back from the dead somehow to meet people from, to meet Jews from Poland who still spoke Yiddish, and it was an enormously important moment, couple of moments in his life.

• Great. Well, Lucy Huberman says, “Goodness, David. My mum had a print drawing by your dad. I never made the connection between you.”

• Well, how lovely to hear from Lucy Huberman again. That’s an absolute delight. That’s wonderful. One of the joys of giving these talks is you, it’s wonderful to be reunited with old friends.

• Wonderful. Thank you so much Dave. It was lovely having you here today and we will see you again on Thursday, you’re back with us.

• On Thursday, same time, same channel, talking about Isaac Beshavis Singer.

• Thank you so much and thank you to everybody who joined us today, and we’ll see you tomorrow. Thanks everyone.

• [David] Thank you. Bye-bye.

• Bye-bye.