_The Mendele Review_: Yiddish Literature and Language (A Companion to _MENDELE_) ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 02.029 1 November 1998 1) Yiddish Matters: From the Editor (Leonard Prager) 2) Review of _Stalin's Forgotten Zion_ (Abraham Brumberg) 3) Abstracts of Khulyot ('Links') 5 (1998) (Leonard Prager) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: 1 November 1998 From: Leonard Prager Subject: Yiddish Matters a) Statement. _The Mendele Review_ strongly and categorically censures abusive criticism of respected colleagues in the academic Yiddish community. b) Birobidzhan. We are pleased to publish Abe Brumberg's review of a recent book on Birobidzhan, a subject which cannot be separated from the history of Yiddish in the Soviet Union and from that of Yiddish in the modern period as a whole. The disheartening Birobidzhan story is illuminated in numerous Yiddish sources, two of which are particularly notable: Yisroel Emyot [Israel Emiot], _Der birobidzhaner inyen_, ca. 1960 [translated into English as _The Birobidzhan Affair_, Philadelphia: JPSA, 1981] and Ester Rozental-Shnayderman, _Birobidzhan fun der noent; zikhroynes, gesheenishn, perzenlekhkaytn_ (Tel-Oviv: Leyvik farlag, 1983). c) _Khulyot ('ringen'); zhurnal far yidish forshung_ 5 (1998). Continuing the special relationship between _The Mendele Review_ and _Khulyot_, we are happy to give the English abstracts of the coming issue of _Khulyot_, vol. 5. It can be ordered from: _Khulyot_, Dept. of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, University of Haifa, Mt Carmel, Haifa 31905, ISRAEL. Subscription rates per volume in Israel are 45 shekels; abroad they are $15 for individuals and $28 for institutions. Max Weinreich"s Yiddish essay "What Would Yiddish Be Without Hebrew?," translated into Hebrew in _Khulyot_ 5, will appear in a future issue of _The Mendele Review_. 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: 1 November 1998 From: abe brumberg <102142.2545@compuserve.com> Subject: retsenzye vegn birobidzhan [review of a book on Birobidzhan] Abraham Brumberg A Dream Gone Awry* [Robert Weinberg, _Stalin's Forgotten Zion -- Birobidzhan and the making of a Soviet Jewish homeland_: An illustrated history, 1928-1996. With an Introduction by Zvi Gitelman. Photographs by Bradley Berman. Berkeley: University of California Press, l998, iv, 105 pp., maps; 27 cm.] Of all the projects launched by the Soviet government, the attempt at creating a "Jewish Homeland" in the country's Far East was probably among the strangest and its results among the most pathetic. It was the brainchild of Jewish Communist ideologues eager to confer the status of "nation" on the three-million Soviet Jews, a classification reserved -- according to Lenin and his prize pupil Joseph Stalin -- for a linguistically-homogeneous ethnic group boasting its own territory. The idea was to channel hundreds of thousands of unskilled laborers and petty bourgeois merchants into "productive" professions, mainly agriculture. Soviet Yiddishists welcomed the project in the hope that it would help render Yiddish the lingua franca of Soviet Jews; others regarded it as a way to counteract the appeal of Zionism. In the higher reaches of the Kremlin, the idea of a barrier of settlements to deter potential Chinese and Japanese territorial appetites struck a particularly responsive chord. In l928, the Soviet government proclaimed the Birobidzhan District available for Jewish agricultural settlement. Soviet sympathizers abroad hailed the decree, a few of them even departing for the Soviet Union to lend a hand in the construction of a glorious Jewish socialist future. Alas, the grand design ran aground from the very beginning. The thousands of Jews from Ukraine and Byelorussia who embarked on the arduous two-week trip to the other end of the USSR found a land, about the size of Belgium, covered with forests, swamps and marshes, alive with ravenous mosquitoes, lashed by rains in the summer and icy winds in the winter. The wretched conditions drove the colonists into abject poverty, beggary and prostitution. Many of them immigrants left, but colonizing efforts continued, and some improvements were introduced. In l934, the Birobidzhan District was officially upgraded to Jewish Autonomous Region. Several Yiddish schools and other Yiddish cultural institutions opened, and delegations of Yiddish writers and actors came from Moscow and Kiev, though less for the purpose of settling there than "pour encourager les autres." By l937, the capital city boasted l0,000 inhabitants, but still lacked a sewage system and electricity. Two years later Jews constituted only l8,000 out of the Region's l09,000 residents. Despite a postwar campaign to bring more Jews from Russia's war-ravaged territories, most of them seething with antisemitism, few showed any inclination to eke out a living in tumbledown kolkhozes or primitively equipped factories thousands of miles from home. And so "productivization" turned out to be a delusion, the whole "experiment" a bust. Only 9000 Jews live in Birobidzhan today. What continues to thrive is the Potemkin village tradition: the autonomous region is still nominally "Jewish," the names of the streets and towns are written in Cyrillic and Yiddish (Hebrew) lettering, the local radio occasionally broadcasts concerts of Yiddish folk songs, and the paper _Birobidzhanskaya zvezda_, features a Yiddish column. What explains this doleful denouement? Weinberg, in his cogent and lively account, rightly points out that the steady decline of Yiddish all over the Soviet Union was due largely to the lure of the Russian language and culture. Why should Jewish children learn algebra or history in Yiddish, if the one sure path to professional advancement and cultural integration was signposted in Russian? Weinberg is right, too, in stressing Stalin's furious attack on Jewish "bourgeois nationalism," part of the Great Terror of the l930s, which resulted in the wholesale disbanding of Yiddish schools, journals and other cultural institutions, as well as the arrest of some leading Jewish personalities. Stalin decimated other national cultures, too. Yet there was always something sui generis about the Jewish case. From the l920s on, Yiddish writers were subjected to humiliating attacks on grounds of "clericalism," "Zionism" and "nationalism," in fact for any seeming expression of Jewishness, or sense of commonality with Jews outside the USSR. For a long time, Jewish religious practice was combatted by the (Jewish) Association of Militant Atheists (_krigerishe apikorsim_, an inane mistranslation, literally "quarreling heretics"). Hebrew was banned, Hebrew words in Yiddish had to be spelled out phonetically rather than retaining their original form, Yiddish orthography was revised. And so eventually Jewish culture was denuded and Yiddish became little more than the instrument for composing flatulent hosannas to Lenin and Stalin and hymns to socialist tractors tilling socialist soil. There was also the problem of antisemitism. Weinberg writes about it, but fails to make the connection between the l930s and the l940s, when Jews were singled out -- quite unlike any other nationality -- for brutal treatment, with all the familiar images of traditional anti-Jewish hatred. In the l920s and l930s, parents were reluctant to send their children to Yiddish schools because they saw no future in Yiddish, but also because they wished to protect them from antisemitic attacks. By the late l940s, antisemitism had graduated from the level of communal attitudes to that of state policies. Like many others whom he brought to power after the mammoth purges of the l930s, Stalin himself was an authentic antisemite. The demise of secular Jewish culture in the Soviet Union and of the JAR might have occurred anyway, earlier or more likely later: there were certainly plenty of "objective" reasons for it. But Stalin provided the coup de grace. _Stalin's Forgotten Zion_ contains splendid photographs edited by Bradley Berman and an informative historical introduction by Zvi Gitelman. My minor caveats notwithstanding, the book is to be heartily recommended to anyone with the slightest interest in the curiosities of contemporary history. [*This is a lightly revised version of a review entitled "Israel in Siberia" that appeared in the _Times Literary Supplement_ on September 11, 1998 (No. 4980), p. 29. -- L.P.] 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: 1 November 1998 From: Leonard Prager Subject: Abstracts of Khulyot ('Links') 5 (1998) ______________________________________________________ _Khulyot ('ringen'); zhurnal far yidish forshung_ 5 (1998) / _Khulyot; dapim le-mekhkar be-sifrut yidish ve-zikoteha le-sifrut ivrit 5 (1998) / Khulyot/Chulyot ('Links') 5 (1998) ABSTRACTS Shmuel Werses How Maskilic Writers Viewed Yiddish The author surveys the openly hostile attitudes toward Yiddish held by writers of the Haskala ['Enlightenment'] and their efforts to convince their readers, especially in Germany, that Yiddish must be eliminated from all pedagogic spheres and that efforts to translate the Scriptures into Yiddish must be discouraged. These were the views of Moses Mendelssohn and his disciples, and of Naphtali Herz Weisel as expressed in his _Divrei shalom ve'emet_ ('Words of Peace and Truth'). The author discusses the analogous situation in Eastern Europe, where the most militant maskilim (Joseph Perl in Galicia, Ayzik Meir Dik in Lithuania, and Avraham Ber Gotlober in Russia) wrote in both Hebrew and Yiddish -- though they were by no means exponents of Yiddish. Ambivalence towards Yiddish can be found in the great Hebrew poet and opponent of Yiddish, Yehuda-Leib Gordon, who published a booklet of his own Yiddish verse, _Sikhes kholin_ ['Weekday Talk']. The author surveys the career of Shalom-Ya'akov Abramowicz [Mendele Moykher-Sforim], who began with typical maskilic hostility to Yiddish but cane to write in both Hebrew and Yiddish and grew into a classic figure, the "grandfather" of modern Yiddish literature. ---------------- Avraham Greenbaum Mikhl Gordon and his _History of Russia_ Mikhl Gordon (1823-1890) was a well known maskil and a Yiddish popular poet many of whose Yiddish poems became songs. He undertook to write a _History of Russia_ with the aim of teaching Yiddish-readers "in plain Yiddish" the history of a country and people among whom Jews had been living for generations. The first volume appeared in Zhitomir in 1869, in the halcyon years of Alexander the Second's reforms. The manuscript of the second volume (which was ready for publication) was apparently lost. The present essay succinctly discusses a work which was an innovation in its day. ---------------------- Avraham Keren The Conflict over Rabbinic Posts in Joseph Perl's _Megale Tmirin_ ('Revealer of Secrets') Joseph Perl (1773-1839), in his bilingual _Megale Tmirin_, illuminates all kinds of dark corners of society in early nineteenth-century Jewish communities. The subject here is a vicious clash between the hasidim of two different rebes over filling a vacancy for a rabbinical post. The Hebrew and Yiddish texts illustrate the actions and the intrigues as though they were actual historical documents. --------------------- David Assaf "My Beloved Friend, The Magid of Dubno": Satirical Letters in the Style of _Megale Tmirin_ ('Revealer of Secrets') Exchanged between Shalom Aleichem and Simon Dubnov In the 1890s Shalom Aleichem and the historian Simon Dubnov both lived in the great Jewish literary center, Odessa, but in different parts of the city. Since Dubnov's home was outside the postal boundary, Shalom Aleichem agreed to receive all of Dubnov's mail and forward it to him by special courier. Taking advantage of this arrangement, the two authors corresponded with each other frequently. These unique short letters from the summer of 1891 are composed in the ridiculing style of _Megale Temirin_ ('Revealer of Secrets'), Joseph Perl's famous anti-hasidic satire (1819). The humoristic correspondence contains rich historical, biographical and literary material that reveals the dynamics of everyday life among an important group of writers which included Shalom Aleichem, Dubnov, S.Y. Abramowitsh (Mendele Moykher-Sforim), Y.Ch. Rawnitzki and M. Ben-Ami, most of whom (with the exception of Mendele) were in their thirties. The article describes the social context of the letters (unpublished, though Dubnov tried to issue them), analyzes their content and style, and reviews their history. The twenty-five extant letters in the Shalom Aleichem Archive are critically edited from the original manuscripts (twenty of Shalom Aleichem and five of Dubnov). -------------------- Sophie Grace-Pollak Shomer in the Light of _Shomers mishpet_ ('Shomer's Judgement') Shm"r [= Shomer], the acronymic pseudonym of Nokhem-Meyer Shaykevitsh (1846-1905), was famous in his day as the author of hundreds of novels and stories, mainly in Yiddish. While beloved by his numerous readers, critics and writers attacked his work as harmful and stamped it as "shund" ('trash'). The principal attacks on Shomer appeared in the Yiddish press between the years 1887-1888, but their culmination point was Sholem-Aleykhem's pamphlet _Shomers mishpet_. Sholem-Aleykhem not only criticized Shomer's artistic taste, he called for banishing him from Yiddish literature totally. Sholem-Aleykhem's influence was enormous and Shomer's name was gradually forgotten. What has remained is the impression of a mass-circulation pulp fiction by Shomer and his imitators. The present essay discusses the debate surrounding Shomer's writings, analyzing in detail Sholem-Aleykhem's _Shomers mishpet_, which is today little known. A retrospective-historical overview must acknowledge the cultural-historical value of Shomer's work, which in its time created thousands of new readers for Yiddish literature. The sharp criticism of Shomer is based on a limited body of his work and intentionally ignores its positive qualities. A just approach must redraw the crooked picture presented by _Shomers mishpet_, restoring to Shomer the position owed him in the annals of Yiddish literature. -------------------- David G. Roskies The Shtetl in Jewish Collective Memory Whether viewing the shtetl through the lens of emancipation, which exaggerated all the ills of traditional Jewish life, or viewing it through the lens of nationalism, which focused on the Jewish collective ethos, Yiddish and Hebrew writers did not experience a "crisis of representation" vis-a-vis the Jewish market towns of Eastern Europe. By the 1860's, they had developed a "metonymic" (in Miron's formulation) or symbolic landscape, which was then tested and refined in the light of subsequent upheavals: the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the World War and Civil War, the emergence of Poland as an exclusive nation state, the Holocaust. Every piece of that landscape -- the besmedresh, the bathhouse, the marketplace, the kohol-shtibl, the tavern-teashop, and especially, the cemetery -- was recycled from one decade to the next, and then traveled from the native realm to the Americas and the Palestinian Yishuv. The ultimate vindication of this complex and many-layered literary construct was the grass roots phenomenon of the yizker-bikher, in which the deconstructed shtetl landscape was reconfigured into an archetypal narrative: from obscure birth, to full flowering, to suffering and mass martyrdom, to rebirth in the Promised Land. Most recently, this paradigm has resurfaced in the writings of third- and fourth-generation American Jews. ------------------ Ziva Shamir Bialik's Comic Dramatic Monologue "Mayn Gortn" ('My Garden') Despite its comic facade, Bialik's pseudo-folkloristic poem "Mayn gortn" ('My Garden') is a serious debate on the precarious situation of East European Jewry at the turn of the century. Its speaker, an arrogant provincial nouveau riche (a kinsman of Arye Ba'al Guf, the protagonist of Bialik's first short story) brags about his fruitful garden which he claims is unique in the shtetl for its beauty and yield. The reader gradually senses contradictions in his monologue and is able to see 1) that the proud estate owner is a self-made man afraid of a future financial crisis; 2) that he is not an authentic countryman, but an old-fashioned Jewish merchant; 3) that he belongs to a half-assimilated materialistic society caught up in making money and playing cards; 4) that the idyllic picture of the owner who takes pride in his garden is a short-term illusion about to end in personal and national catastrophe. The picture of the impoverished garden standing naked with the symbolic staff and haversack of the Wandering Jew is a premonition of future crises. This 1903 poem resembles Bialik's well known "In the City of Slaughter" ("In shkhite shtot" in the author's own Yiddish translation). A comic dramatic monologue rich in luxurious pleasures, it turns out to be a bitterly ironic tragic prophecy. The complacent Jew who is so sure of his real estate is totally unaware that an earthquake is imminent, and that his own fate will not differ from the collective fate of his smug brethren, old-fashioned Jews who own no garden, symbol of earthly delights. ----------------- Avner Holtzman Hillel Zeitlin, M.Y. Berdyczewski and _Dos idishes vokhnblat_ The article surveys the personal and literary relationship between the writers Hillel Zeitlin and Micha Yosef Berdyczewski between 1900 and 1921. The focus of this long relationship is 1907, when Berdyczewski participated regularly in _Dos idishes vokhnblat_, a weekly Warsaw Yiddish magazine edited by Zeitlin. Ten of Zeitlin's letters to Berdyczewski from that period are published here for the first time together with explanatory notes. The letters reveal the complex, tense nature of Berdyczewski and Zeitlin's attitudes toward each other. While Zeitlin was eager to develop a deep, spiritual lasting contact with Berdyczewski, the latter kept a formal distance from him. Berdyczewski's essays on Zeitlin (written in 1909 and in 1920) expose the reason for his suspicious reactions. He saw Zeitlin's writings as noisy, hysterical public utterances lacking a private voice and quiet reflection, vital signs to Berdyczewski of a sincere spiritual message. ------------------------------ Bilhah Rubinstein: The Messiah Has Not Arrived and Satan Dances in the Streets: On I. Bashevis Singer's _Satan in Goray_ _Satan in Goray_ is a modern metaphysical allegory based on a poetic pattern of the traditional "Dybbuk-Tale". The novel represents a model of a recurrent phenomenon in history: intense yearning for salvation follows a traumatic experience and swells to a monstrous false messianism. The article discusses the novel's poetic frame, its symbolic substructure and the ways in which it absorbs and employs kabbalistic and folkloristic source-materials. The novel leaves the reader asking: Is it possible to exorcise the Dybbuk of evil and destruction from human nature? Is it possible to prevent the recurrence of false messianism? -------------------------- Jacob Steinberg "In a shlitn" ('In a Sled' [source and translation]) -------------- Nirit Mitrani The Dialectic Basis of Jacob Steinberg's "A yidishe tokhter" ('A Jewish Daughter') This analysis of the story "Bat yisrael" ('Daughter of Israel') presents the protagonist Tsipora in a light different from that of previous critical inquiries. The author claims that the conventional perception of Tsipora as the "Innocent Daughter of Israel" ignores the complexity of her character. While the story does open with light radiating from Tsipora's eyes, she behaves in a morally suspect manner. An unequivocal denuciation of her actions does not follow. The story makes possible two interpretations of the protagonist which, when combined, reveal a character of great mental intricacy who is compelled to repress her individuality because of social pressure. ------------------ Yechiel Szeyntuch _a.dm.e._ [alef.daled/mem.ayin] -- A Symbolic Concept in the Works of K. Tsetnik** The known corpus of K. Tsetnik's works includes six books, each of which deals with the experiences of Jews in and after the Shoa: _Salamandra_, _Dos hoyz fun di lyalkes_, _Pipls_, _Der zeyger vos ibern kop_, _Kakhol me'efer_ and _Tsofen: adme_. K. Tsetnik began his bilingual writing career at the end of his twenties, yet to this day no serious attempt has been made to study and uncover the secrets of his art. One generally reads him without looking for connections among his books, even though they are all artistic explorations of Shoa experiences, analyses of their nature. One can imagine that the author has divided a single work into multiple parts for both aesthetic, compositional reasons as well as for the practical reason of avoiding inordinate book length. The author has himself discussed this question in the introduction to his _Salamandra_ (1947). This introduction was deleted from all subsequent editions. Few of K. Tsetnik's Hebrew-readers know that he is a bilingual writer who composed all of his Shoa novels originally in Yiddish. His principal theme is life and death in the Jewish towns of Eastern Upper Silesia in the years 1939-1945. His last book _Tsofen: adme_ (1987) is in some sense a summing-up and a commentary on his works. The unraveling of the symbolical abbreviation "a.dm.e." [alef.daled/mem.ayin] is the main theme of this essay. These four letters serve as a motto for all of K. Tsetnik's works, from 1946 to today, in Yiddish, Hebrew, and in all the fifteen languages into which he has been translated. -------------------- **Known in Yiddish as "Katsetnik," he was born Yisroel Fayner and in Israel changed his name to Yisrael Di-Nur. His general pseudonym is K. Tsetnik. -------------------- Nathan Cohen The Contribution of the "Bund" to Jewish Cultural Life in Poland between the Two World Wars Alongside its diversified political activity, and sometimes as a part of it, the Jewish Workers' Party (the Bund) paid much attention to secular Jewish culture and education. To provide an education imbued with class-consciousness, the Bund was the first to establish a modern Yiddish secular school-system. During the interwar period the Bund's impressive TSISHO school-network included kindergartens, elementary schools, high-schools (gymnasia) and evening schools for adults. In spite of great difficulties TSISHO became the second largest Jewish secular school-system in Poland. Initially under the Russian Empire and later in independent Poland, the Bund published a large number of periodicals, legal and illegal, in Warsaw and the provinces, mainly in Yiddish but also in Russian and Polish, which were literary as well as political. The Bund encouraged talented young Yiddish writers (not necessarily Bundists) by providing them with platforms for their works. The Bund's daily newspaper, the _Folkstsaytung_ (Warsaw), included a weekly literature and art supplement edited by the well known poet Meylekh Ravitsh. As the Bund's political power grew, it reached a central position in Jewish cultural life. It controlled the Kultur-lige organization and its publishing house, turning it into one of the most active Yiddish cultural institutions in Poland. The Bund also promoted libraries, dramatic studios, popular university courses, lectures and symposia, summer-camps for children and adults. In the early 193Os the Bund also tried -- with a degree of success -- to dominate the Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists in Warsaw. Even under the Nazi occupation of Poland the Bund maintained its cultural and educational activities and contributed significantly to Jewish spiritual resistance. ------------------------------- Dov Sadan Fragments: A Letter; On Israel Tsinberg; On _Tse'ena ure'ena_ ["the Yiddish pentateuch"] Here we present a letter by Dov Sadan to Shalom Luria together with two interesting fragments: one about the genial literary historian Israel Tsinberg and the other on _Tse'ena ure'ena_ (also known as "the Yiddish pentateuch") much beloved (but not exclusively) by women. ------------------ Shalom Luria On Two Poetic Gems (by Avraham Sutskever and Itsik Fefer) Here are presented two Yiddish poems and their Hebrew translations, one by Itsik Fefer and the other the first of Avraham Sutskever's "koymenlider ('Chimney Poems') cycle, written in the first days of the Nazi occupation of Vilna. A brief interpretation of each poem is also given. ---------------------------- Sh. An-ski On Jewish Folk-Creativity [Hebrew translation] -------------------------------- Haya Bar-Yitzchak Comments on An-ski's Jewish Ethnopoetics This article deals with An-ski's seminal 1908 Russian essay on Jewish ethnopoetics which appeared in _Perezhitoye_ (here translated for the first time into Hebrew; cf. Zalmen Reyzn's Yiddish translation in Sh. An-ski, _Gezamlte shriftn_, Vilna/Warsaw/New York: Ferlag "An-ski", 1928, vol. 15, pp. 29-95). An-ski's own dramatic life experiences help explain his credo regarding the centrality of folklore in understanding Judaism. An-ski saw Jewish folklore as the spiritual expression of the Jewish people and urged that its particulars be collected from respondents in their natural settings. ---------------------- Max Weinreich What Would Yiddish Be Without Hebrew? This essay, which appeared in _Di tsukunft_ (New York) in 1931 (pp. 194-205) is a polemical response to Nokhem Shtif's "Social Differentiation in Yiddish: The Hebrew Elements in the Language," published in Shtif's journal _Di yidishe shprakh_ (Kiev) 17-18 (1929). Shtif was highly learned and an expert on Yiddish. His effort to conform the Yiddish language to Soviet ideological doctrines was strongly opposed by Yiddish scholars abroad. Max Weinreich analyzes the Hebrew elements in Yiddish and clearly shows the weakness of Shtif's ideological position. -------------------------- BOOKS Velvl Tshernin [Chernin] The Kneeling Rebel: National History in Soviet Yiddish Prose (1960-1990) This article surveys Yiddish prose works written in the Soviet Union after the Stalin period on themes of Jewish national history. Soviet ideology made it impossible to write about the Palestine roots of Soviet Jewry and there were limitations with regard to presenting Judaism as an integral part of Jewish national life. An exception is Nosn Zabara's unfinished tetralogy _Galgl hakhoyzer_ ("The Revolving Wheel'), which was later published in _Sovetish heymland_, and in book form after the author's death. This novel about medieval Jewry in western Europe called forth opposing responses: the readers were enthusiatic but the critics strongly disapproved of the novel's sympathetic treatment of the Jewish religion. The Haskala ('Enlightenment') theme has a special place in Soviet Yiddish literature. It deals with events in Jewish life at the end of the eighteenth and in the nineteenth centuries on the territory of the Russian Empire. After Stalin's death several prose works on the Haskala theme were published in the Soviet Union. Irma Druker and Ber Halpern are two notable authors of such works. One should also mention the bilingual (Russian and Yiddish) Birobidzhan writer Roman Shoykhet, author of _Khuzarim_ ('Khazars'), two fragments of which appeared in the periodical _Birobidzhaner shtern_. ---------------------- Adina Bar-el Mordecai Halter's Novel of a Pioneer Training Commune ["hakhshara-kibuts"] in Poland Mordechai Halter's Yiddish novel _Mir greytn zikh: roman fun hakhshore-lebn_ ['We Are Preparing Ourselves -- A Novel of Communal Life'] was published in Warsaw in 1937. It describes a group of Halutsim in a training commune in a small town in Poland who suffer from unemployment, cold and hunger, but do not give up their dream of Aliya to the Land of Israel while creating a communal social and cultural life. Halter (Poland 1906 - Israel 1976) edited and translated the book into Hebrew three times: From 1937 to 1939 he published a version for youth in the "Tarbut" educational network's periodical _Olami_, with the chapters bearing the title: "Lekhayim khadashim" ('Towards a New Life'). In 1939 a book with the latter title was published in Warsaw by "Avoda". In 1942, after Halter's aliya, he published a book titled _Khalutsim ba'u ha'ira_ ('Halutsim Came to the City'). Comparing the various translations into Hebrew shows in both Warsaw translations the desire to spread the Hebrew language and propagate the ideas of the communal life and of aliya to the Land of Israel. The version published in Erets-Yisrael is more faithful to the Yiddish original; it memorializes and preserves a picture of the life of the Jews in interwar Poland for the Hebrew readers in Erets-Yisrael. ----------------------- Yiddish Abstracts English Abstracts [ed. and/or tr. L.P.] ------------------------ End of _The Mendele Review_ 02.029 Leonard Prager, editor Subscribers to _Mendele_ (see below) automatically receive _The Mendele Review_. Send "to subscribe" or change-of-status messages to: listproc@lists.yale.edu a. For a temporary stop: set mendele mail postpone b. To resume delivery: set mendele mail ack c. To subscribe: sub mendele first_name last_name d. To unsubscribe kholile: unsub mendele ****Getting back issues**** _The Mendele Review_ archives can be reached at: http://www2.trincoll.edu/~mendele/tmrarc.htm