The Mendele Review: Yiddish Literature and
Language
(A Companion to MENDELE)
---------------------------------------------------------
Contents of Vol. 12.011 [Sequential No. 202]
Date: 18 May 2008
1) This issue of TMR (ed.).
2) Yiddish periodicals (ed.)
3) Kadya Molodowsky: Clearing the Mist (Zelda
Kahana-Newman)
4) Table
of Contents of Khulyot, Volume 11
(ed.)
5) Periodicals
Received: Gilgulim 1 (Paris); Davka 4 (
1)---------------------------------------------------
Date: 18 May 2008
From: ed.
Subject: This issue of TMR
In this issue of TMR
we briefly review the situation of the Yiddish periodical, give the table of
contents of the forthcoming issue of Khulyot (vol.11), and illustrate
the front covers of some of our leading Yiddish serials. Zelda Kahana-Newman
shares with us her current research on Kadya Molodowsky. We delay our
promised discussion of romanization until we have heard from TMR
linguists on the subject. Note that we spell the name of the periodical which
has been referred to often as "Heshbon" according to the rules of the
Standard Romanization as khezhbm.
2)---------------------------------------------------
Date: 18 May 2008
From: ed.
Subject: Yiddish
Periodicals Today
***Periodicals: This issue of TMR notes (but does not
comprehensively assess) the capital possessed by our highly variegated field of
Yiddish studies in the form of periodicals (as distinct from books and
reference works). They may call themselves weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies, or
annuals, but often enough are of irregular frequency. They are literary,
literary-political, partisan, non-partisan, all-Yiddish, partly Yiddish,
all-English, all-Hebrew (e.g. Khulyot, see below). They are information
bulletins (local or international, e.g. Der bay.) They are hard-copy
(printed or photographed), cybernetic (e.g. The Mendele Review) or both
(e.g. the Forverts). They are
principally pedagogic (e.g. Tam-Tam, Vayter) or of a "Notes
and Queries" character (Mendele – these very days celebrating its
seventeenth birthday!) A few are sold but almost all are in some way
subsidized. None have large readerships. Every few years one of them expires,
more likely for lack of writers than readers (e.g. a recent [2008] case: Heshbon
[Khezhbm] of
Among the periodicals in or about
Yiddish language, literature and culture, the Yiddish Forverts – hard
copy and online – commands a leading place. Recent articles of particular
interest to readers of TMR are 1) Dov-Ber Kerler's review of the new
Yiddish textbook Shlisl by Miriam Hoffman [February 2008: http://yiddish.forward.com/node/1335];
Prof. Yechiel Szeintuch's preliminary study of a decades-long dispute between
the journalist and writer Mortkhe Shtrigler and
David Ben-Gurion [May 2998: http://yiddish.forward.com/node/1365].
Shtrigler strongly opposed Ben-Gurion's near-"Canaanite" privileging
of the Tanakh and the subsequent rejection of the rich tradition that
encompasses Talmud, Rambam and numerous other classic post-Biblical Judaic
texts.
Many of the finest studies in the field of Yiddish appear in
sophisticated English, French or German academic journals devoted to Jewish
studies or contemporary Jewish problems, e.g. Shofar. Individuals with
academic connections can reach full-text journals from home computers.
"Little magazines" today happily print lively essays on Yiddish
writers. To keep abreast of what is being said about Yiddish culture and its
place in the larger web of Jewish life, one needs to read very widely – and not
simply in the Yiddish-language periodicals. As Yiddish-lovers and
Yiddish-students we live off the interest that this multi-lingual portfolio of
periodicals provides. If we fail to review our holdings from time to time, we
might find ourselves divorced from the yerid ('market, fair') of
intellectual exchange.
Yiddish literature was always closely tied to the Yiddish
press and that press is for the most part now history. The haredi-supported New
York Yiddish press is regarded by some Yiddishists as a vigorous source – or at
least a potentially vigorous source – of new writing. There is still a place for original writing
in Yiddish in the few remaining secular cultural journals (e.g. Yerushalmer
almanakh, edited by Dov-Ber Kerler). Happily, our French comrades of the
Paris Medem center have now published a very attractive new journal entitled Gilgulim
(see below). We salute this brave action and wish it every success – and we
urge all TMR readers to help assure the magazine a generous reception.
Yet while we can be pleased with what we have, we must not be misled by
attractive covers. (The graphic resources of contemporary publishing are
breath-taking!) We need to be concerned with quality, with widening the circle
of contributors and not least of all with strengthening the material
foundations of content-rich periodicals. We need to maintain high editorial
standards by being more self-critical and less self-lauditory. *** Reviews. I mention books and reference
works above. As often as books of Yiddish interest are reviewed in TMR,
the sum total of books reviewed here in a year is but a fraction of the
relevant reviewable volumes. TMR has been successful in recruiting
skilled reviewers but many potential book-critics prefer to write for
hard-cover media – an attitude that is slowly changing. TMR has a
backlog of books waiting to be reviewed. Hopefully, the list will grow progressively
shorter. *** Reference work: Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. No event
in the area of Yiddish studies in the past decade merits greater celebration
than the 2008 publication of the monumental two-volume Yivo Encyclopedia of
Jews in Eastern Europe, doggedly and brilliantly edited by Gershon David
Hundert. Students of Yiddish, lay and professional both, will consult this
authoritative work with profit and fargenign ('pleasure') for years to
come. This reference work should have a permanent place on our bookshelf, just
as our mailbox should regularly receive a Yiddish periodical. ***More: This, of
course, though much, is not enough. We must not desert the few Yiddish
book-publishing companies still in business, try to use public or university
libraries to borrow Yiddish books and encourage them to build Yiddish
collections, patronize Yiddish booksellers and, especially, institutions such
as the National
Yiddish Book Center. "Yidish darf men lernen" and we can learn by
reading and listening (to native speakers [Vu nemt men zey?], CD's, to Di
velt fun yidish [http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il]).***
Feedback: It would be helpful if readers
gave more
feedback to the editor.
3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: 18 May 2008
From: Zelda Kahana-Newman
Subject: Kadya Molodowsky: Clearing the Mist
Kadya Molodowsky: Clearing the Mist
Kadya Molodowsky is probably one of the most prominent
Yiddish writers of the twentieth century1. The outlines of her
biography are more or less known, but much more remains clouded. This is an account of some of the things Noga
Rubin and I have uncovered and a promise of things to come.
Like many Yiddish writers of her time, Molodowsky wrote an
autobiographical memoir that was
serialized in a journal. The first installment of this memoir, entitled Fun
mayn elterzeydes yerushe ('From My
Great-Grandfather’s Inheritance'), appeared in 1965 in Svive ('Milieu'),
the journal she herself edited2 at the time. The installments appeared erratically till
19743,
shortly before she was forced to retire.
This memoir is a chronological account of her life, starting from her
childhood in the shtetl of Ber(e)ze, through her education, to her young
adulthood, her marriage, and her emigration to the
As it happens, about 25 years earlier, in 1942, Molodowsky
wrote a fictive biography called “Fun
What do we know about the columns that
Molodowsky wrote under the Rifke Zilberg pseudonym? Do they identify this “fictive” Rivke? A natural place to look for the answer to
this question is the Forverts archives.
Unfortunately, the Forverts has not digitized back issues or
correspondence. However, the researcher
is not without recourse. YIVO's
Molodowsky archive has hand-written pieces that Molodowsky wrote for the Forverts
under this pseudonym, along with personal and family correspondence and a host
of other papers.6
The Forverts archivist, Chana Pollack, was able to
tell us that “Rivke”’ articles in the Forverts were about Jewish women. Examination of the archive articles, however,
tells a slightly different story. A
series of folders7 in the YIVO archive contain papers that have
the name “Rivke Zylberg” in the upper right-hand corner. These are mini-biographies of women, many of
them Jewish, but by no means all. Among
these mini-biographies we find an article on Betty McDonald, a now-forgotten
author of a best-selling novel of the 1940s.8 Biographies of
non-Jewish writers who used pseudonyms, George Elliot and George Sand,9 are also there,
together with biographies of Greta Garbo10 and Harriet Beecher
Stowe.11
These articles may never have been published.
We will not know whether the Forverts published them until the
newspaper has been indexed (hopefully, even digitized). What is important for us is that Molodowsky
was moved to write about women. She wrote about Bruria, the learned wife of R.
Meir of Talmudic fame, about the wife of Theodore Herzl and about Amalia Freud,
but essentially what interested her was the life of women, not just the lives
of Jewish women. Apparently then, Rivke
Zylbeg was the “womanly” part of Molodowsky’s personality, not simply the
Jewish-womanly part, as we might have supposed.
A parallel reading of Molodowsky’s memoir
and her fictive biography shows us that the issue of clothes pre-occupied
her. In her memoir, she tells us that
her sister was appalled at the sight of
her mended, hardscrabble clothes12, while in the fictive
diary Rivke’s aunt tells her that she cannot possibly walk around in the “rags”
(in Yiddish shmates) she has landed with13 . The rags that characterized her life in
Europe appear once more in her poem “Yerushe”14, in which she admits
that in
This theme could have
been addressed without a reference to clothes; after all, the question at hand
is a matter of spirit and not of body.
And yet the metaphor Molodowsky chose was one of clothes: those which
are truly one’s own as opposed to those which are borrowed and not one’s
own. For Molodowsky, then, clothes were
both a genuine concern and a metaphor.
They concerned her insofar as she had to adapt in the
Although the YIVO archives illuminate some aspects of
Molodowsky’s life, they leave other areas entirely in the dark. Like many others of her generation who lived
to witness the end of Jewish civilization in
Why did Molodowsky leave
(Zelda Kahana-Newman,
_______________________________________________
1 Note that Molodowsky is one of the few women writers
to get her photo put into Dovid Katz’s Words on Fire (
2 The first installment appeared in number 15, April 1965, àãø á úùë"ä , pp. 38-45.
3 The last installment appeared in number 41, April
1974, ðéñï úùì"ã , pp. 50-54.
4 This story, published in
5 I became aware of this identity when I went to an
exhibit about the Forverts in the Museum of the City of
6 This entire collection is given the number 703 in the
YIVO archives. The personal
correspondence alone contains 55 folders, most of which are poorly organized
and not at all in chronological order.
7 These are folders #67, #68 and #69 of the Molodowsky
archive.
8 See folder #67.
9 For both these biographies see folder #69.
10 See folder #68.
11 See folder #69.
12 This can be found in her memoir, chapter 52, 1967, p.
56.
13 This can be found in the “diary”, p. 5.
14 See In land fun mayn gebeyn (‘In the Land of
My Bones’) (
15 The words there are “in antleyene shikh” (‘in
borrowed shoes’) and “mit a late farlatet” (‘patched with a patch’).
16 This can be found in the YIVO archives, folder no.
65.
4)-----------------------------------------------------------
Date: 18 May 2008
From: ed.
Subject: Table of Contents of Khulyot, Volume 11
Khulyot
Volume
11, Spring 2008
Table of Contents
Shmuel Werses
---Yiddish Language and Literature in Bialik's Worldview
Nikham Ross
---Scholarly Personality in Perets' "Between
Avner Holtzman
---Bialik's Hidden Eulogy In Memory of M. Y. Berditshevski
David Roskies
---Bialik in the Ghettoes
Maya Duber Defen
---Joshua Perla's [Yehoyshue Perle's] Wartime Writings
Lea Ayalon
---On Shalom Asch's [Sholem Ash's] Novella "The Death Sentence"
Zelik Kalmanovitsh
---Dr. Khayim Zhitlovski's Yiddish
Elisha Porat
---Khanan Ayalti – A Modern Ahasuerus
(1910-1992)
Bilha Rubinstein
---Stories and Their Tellers in Isaac Bashevis-Singer's Works
Leah Garfinkel
---A Riddle of Two Worlds
Noga Rubin
---The Motif of Water Without End (from Kadya Molodowsky to Yaakov Shavit)
Noga Rubin and Zelda Kahana-Newman
---A New Purim Composition About Women
Ruth Dorot
---Mark Chagall's "Cattle
Dealer" and Isaac Bashevis-Singer's "A zokn" ('An Old Man')
Compared
Shalom Luria
---Reflections on Menakhem-Mendl's Character and Deeds
Dov Sadan
---The Critic Shmuel
Folklore
Boris Kotlerman
---The Dybbuk Motif in Yiddish and Hebrew
Mordechai Zalkin and Nurit Orkhan
---"A Story of a Soldier," or Megilat Astrakhan, as Told by
Yitskhak Ben Shmuel Yehuda Kastover
Noga Rubin
---The Motif of Water Without End (from Kadya Molodowsky to Yaakov Shavit)
Figures
Lea Ayalon
---"One of Three Million": A Neglected Sholem Asch [Yiddish: Sholem
Ash] Manuscript
Reviews
Shalom Luria. Griner umet ('Green Sadness') fun
Aleksander Shpiglblat.
" " Katoves on a zayt. Nekhtike lider 1993-2001. ('I kid you not! Poems of
Yesteryears')
fun Boris Karlov.
Leonard Prager. Inventory
of Yiddish Publications From the
Children's Literature
Adina Bar-El
---Women Write Literary Works for Children in Yiddish
In Memorial
Dov Levin
---The Struggle for Jewish Cultural Institutions in Soviet Lithuania in the
Post-Stalin Period (1956-1958) [In Memory
of Berl Cezarek / Tsezarek who died in Jerusalem on the tenth of
November 1990.]
Books Received
Abstracts in Yiddish and English
5)-----------------------------------------------------------
Date: 18 May 2008
From: ed.
Subject: Periodicals
Received: Gilgulim 1 (Paris); Davka 4 (
***A new journal from
*** Davka,
the new Israeli Hebrew-language publication about the world of Yiddish in its
fourth number examines the Yiddish theatre. A nicely illustrated issue.
(Click on image to enlarge)
*** The latest issue [no. 124] of the Parisian Yidishe
heftn maintains its high graphic standards with focus on the artist Shmuel
Bak.
(Click on image to enlarge)
*** The new Afn shvel [340-341] carries the issue title Khurbm un
voglenish – partizaner, pleytim, d.p.'s, yisker-bikher, especially appropriate
to this memorial season. It is liberally illustrated and carries a
"Laytish mame-loshn" section in the spirit of the late Mordkhe
Schaechter. Afn shvel ; gezelshaftlekh-literarisher zhurnal [Organ fun
der yidish-lige Vinter-Friling 2008 [Winter/Spring] 340-341. See http://www.leagueforyiddish.org/ishi.html.
(Click
on image to enlarge)
Organ fun der yidish-lige Vinter/Friling 2008, 340-341
*** Lebns-fragn, the veteran Israeli Bundist periodical continues to feature
biting articles of political analysis. Lebns-fragn,
aroysgegebn durkh dem "Arbeter-ring" in Yisroel. Redaktor: Yitskhok
Luden.
(Click on
image to enlarge)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
End of The Mendele
Review Issue 12.011
Editor, Leonard Prager
Editorial Associate, Robert Goldenberg
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