What sort of typing instruction manual includes a practice sentence like, "Better a terrible end than terror without end?" Better yet, what kind of typing manual offers, also as practice texts, excerpts from Pirke Avot, stories from the Talmud, quotes by Goethe, and the writings of Khaym Zhitlovsky, the grand theorist of
Yiddishist socialism?
As Itche Goldberg, a well-known
Yiddishist, Communist, and activist in both Canada and the US, affirmed in an interview with the author in 1996: "Jewish consciousness led us very naturally to the Soviet Union." (37)
Although her focus is clearly on New York City, she also manages to engage with the historical frameworks of Yiddishism, as well as the re-emergence of
Yiddishist and Klezmer music in Europe.
The third, Zelig Hirsh Kalmanovitch, was another
Yiddishist scholar and activist who worked as an administrator at the Yiddish Scientific Institute.
Sholem--a
Yiddishist, a charmer, a teller of tales, a speaker of five languages, and a self-educated intellectual--had an abundance of virtues but none that prepared him very well for earning a living.
The Bund was
Yiddishist, Marxist, and secular (51).
As she writes in a sequence called "Lonely Planet," "listening to what might possibly be emptiness / takes courage." It does indeed: as a
Yiddishist in the early twenty-first century, there is no way Bachman can avoid the grim fact that European Yiddish culture, its language and many of its greatest writers, was destroyed by the Shoah, while American Yiddish culture has been nearly lost through assimilation, particularly the failure of American Jews to maintain the mother tongue of their forbears.
(5) For a recent article on Jacob Lestschinsky, see Gennady Estraikh, "Jacob Lestschinsky: A
Yiddishist Dreamer and Social Scientist," Science in Context 20, 2 (2007): 215-37.
Her 1961 memoir--edited in its first edition by the same Polish-born
Yiddishist, S.
Peretz was raised in a lower middle-class,
Yiddishist household in the Bronx and attended the Bronx High School of Science before going on to Brandeis in its Jewish intellectual glory years.
But first, a relevant aside: employed at the time by a Jewish cultural organization, moving in
Yiddishist and Judaic Studies circles, I had heard about the paper and its mixed reception when it first was published.
He concludes that Litvakov might be characterized as a 'self-hating
Yiddishist', who sought a place for classical Yiddish writers in the new proletarian culture but was unable to reconcile nationalistic Zionist and universalistic Marxist ideologies (p.