Yiddish Literature

Yiddish poetry did not attain true literary merit until the 20th century. All the leading poets were born in Eastern Europe; most of them eventually migrated to the U.S. or to Palestine. The outstanding poets were Simon Samuel Frug, who wrote songs expressing his yearning for Zion; Morris Rosenfeld, who spent much of his life in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City and who composed impassioned protests against the sufferings of Jewish workers in the slums and sweatshops there; and Hayyim Nahman Bialik, the greatest of modern Hebrew poets, who also wrote verses in Yiddish. Other noteworthy poets include Melech Ravitch, who settled in Montréal, and three writers who went to the U.S.: Aaron Zeitlin, Itzik Manger, and Chaim Grade. Grade was noted for his poems of the Holocaust and his short stories re-creating the life of yeshiva students.

Yiddish drama began to achieve artistic distinction only toward the end of the 19th century, largely through the work of the playwrights Jacob Gordin; Shloime Anski, author of the well-known Between Two Worlds, or The Dybbuk (1916; trans. 1926); and David Pinski. Abraham Goldfaden founded a Yiddish theater in Iaşi, Romania, in 1876. Theaters were also established thereafter in Odesa (Odessa), Warsaw, Vilnius (Vilna), and other cities in the Jewish Pale. After 1883, when the Russian government closed Yiddish theaters, most of the actors moved to New York City, which then became the center of the Yiddish stage; into the 1980s plays, and especially musical comedies, in Yiddish have remained popular. At their zenith, the Vilna Troupe, the Moscow Yiddish State Theater, and the Yiddish Art Theater of New York were among the finest drama groups in the world. Each year since 1915 in New York City the Folksbiene, or People's Stage, has presented at least one production a season. One of the most famous of all Yiddish amateur theatrical groups, it is devoted to plays of serious literary worth, by Jews and non-Jews, contemporary work and the older repertoire.

Journalism figured significantly in the development of Yiddish literature. Because the demand for books was limited by the poverty of potential readers, most writers depended on newspapers both for livelihood and as outlets for their creative work. The first successful Yiddish newspaper was the weekly Kol Mevasser (The Voice That Brings Tidings), founded in Odesa in 1863. In 1865 the first Yiddish daily newspaper, Yiddishes Tageblat, was founded in New York City. The Jewish Forward, established as a daily in New York City by the American editor and author Abraham Cahan in 1897, and still being published weekly (in Yiddish and in English), attained a large circulation.

Yiddish literature often focuses on life in the ghetto, particularly its deprivations, narrowness, and insecurity. It reflects also the warmth and personal feeling of people who have little contact with the land or with the larger world about them, and whose relationships are mainly with each other and with their God. Life in the New World, however, gradually stimulated a more universal orientation in Yiddish literature. Chief among the interpreters of the new culture were Max Weinreich, a historian; Abraham Joshua Heschel, a philosopher and theologian; and Haim Greenberg, an essayist and proponent of Zionism.

The Holocaust is reflected in many Yiddish literary works—records of martyrdom and heroism and inquiries into the nature of evil. Outstanding among these are the poetry and drama of Itzhak Katzenelson, who took part in the Warsaw ghetto uprising and was executed in a concentration camp. One of his poems, written in 1943-44, is considered to be among the greatest literary expressions of the Holocaust tragedy. Other witnesses to the tragedy are Emanuel Ringelblum, who perished in the uprising, author of Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto (1952; trans. 1958); and Elie Wiesel, author of many novels concerned with the Holocaust. Wiesel, who lives in France and New York City and now writes in French, is nevertheless steeped in the spirit of eastern European Jewish culture. By the 1980s Yiddish writing showed a slight resurgence in several parts of the world: in the works of younger writers such as Leybel Botwinik, in Montréal, founder of a Yiddish periodical New Generation (1978), and Elinor Robinson, a non-Jewish English poet who has written in Yiddish.

Melech Ravitch edited a three-volume anthology of Yiddish writers (1954-58), and the American critics Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg coedited several anthologies of Yiddish stories, poetry, essays, and memoirs.