The 21st century

At the turn of the 21st century, literature continued to be written in Yiddish but its secular reading audience was shrinking. Some ultra-Orthodox Jews still used Yiddish on a daily basis, but they seldom read literature from outside their own circle. New journals, local Yiddish clubs, Yiddish and klezmer festivals, and the Internet, however, generated a great deal of enthusiasm for Yiddish. Online users began to create a “Yiddish virtual community”: one popular Web site for Yiddish language and literature was called Mendele, and the poet Sholem Berger edited a Web-based magazine called Der bavebter yid (“The Webbed Jew”), publishing poetry, prose, and commentary.

In spite of the declining readership, a small but active literary scene continued to evolve in the United States and Israel. Three prominent young Yiddish authors living in New York were Boris Sandler, Leye Robinson, and Sholem Berger. Their poems and stories were regularly published by the Forverts, Yugntruf (“A Call to Youth”), and Afn shvel (“On the Threshold”). A few other contemporary writers produced what might be called “postmodern” Yiddish poetry and fiction. (The works by ultra-Orthodox authors existed in a separate sphere.)

Naye vegn and Toplpunkt, mentioned above, are two Tel Aviv-based journals that publish works by both new and established authors. Most encouraging for the future of Yiddish literature are the contributions by writers such as Moshe Lemster, Michael Felzenbaum, and Velvl Chernin. These authors, and many of the other active Yiddish poets and fiction writers, are emigrants from the former Soviet Union. Lev Berinsky, Sandler, Chernin, and Lemster were trained in Moscow at the Gorky Literary Institute under the direction of the novelist Aron Vergelis.

Sandler was born in Belz (Bălți, Moldova) and studied in Kishinev (Chişinău). He moved to Israel in 1990 and published several prose volumes in Yiddish, including Toyren (1997; “Gates”), a strong collection of short stories that evoke the experiences of Russian immigrants in Israel. His other books included Der alter brunem (1994; “The Old Well”) and Treplekh aruf tsu a nes (1986; “Steps Up to a Miracle”). In 1998 he moved to New York and became editor of the Forverts.

Yiddish scholar Dovid Katz was born in the United States and later moved to Vilna. In 1992, under the name Heershadovid Menkes, he published the first of three books of short fiction set mainly in 19th-century Lithuania. Oyb nisht nokh kliger (“If Not Wiser”), in the collection Misnagdishe mayses fun Vilner guberniye (1996; “Tales of the Mitnagdim from the Vilna Province”), is a clever, parodic reversal of Peretz’s story Oyb nisht nokh hekher (“If Not Higher”). Gennady Estraikh, a Russian-born scholar who later taught in London, also published fiction in Yiddish, including the book Moskver Purim-shpiln (1996; “Moscow Purim Plays”). Kobi Weitzner, editor of the Yidisher kemfer, was also a writer at the Yiddish Forverts.

Among the Yiddish authors who published in the New York journal Yugntruf were Hershl Glasser, Shmoyl Nydorf, Avrom Rosenblatt, Gitl Schaechter, Yermiahu Aaron Taub, and Sheva Zucker. Since the 1970s, this journal had sponsored a shraybkrayz (Yiddish writers’ circle). Yiddish culture clubs around the United States supported the publication of books by poets such as Sarah Moskovitz and Troim Katz Handler; these writers sometimes printed their poetry in bilingual editions or accompanied it with transcriptions into Roman characters.

Yiddish authors have often been multilingual; several of them became known as well for their writing in other languages. H.N. (Haim Naḥman) Bialik, an important Hebrew poet, also wrote poems in Yiddish. S.Y. Agnon (pseudonym of Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes), who in 1966 received the Nobel Prize for Literature, published poetry and prose in Yiddish before he turned to Hebrew. Elie Wiesel, author of the important Holocaust novel La Nuit (1958; Night), published an earlier version of this work in Yiddish under the title Un di velt hot geshvign (1956; “And the World Remained Silent”).

For generations Yiddish literature found indirect expression in English and American Jewish literature. Israel Zangwill of London wrote Children of the Ghetto (1892) and many other works about East End Jewish life. He later coined the term “the melting pot” in a play of the same title. Abraham Cahan was one of the earliest American Jewish authors to publish stories and novels in English. His Yekl (1896) uses some Yiddish words that are explained in footnotes. The novel generally translates Yiddish dialogue into standard English, but it also includes what the narrator calls “mutilated English” present in the characters’ Americanized Yiddish. Mary Antin, whose family moved from Russia to Boston in 1894, incorporates numerous Yiddish words in her short stories and in her novel The Promised Land (1912). Other immigrants to New York, such as Anzia Yezierska, represent Yiddish speakers in their English-language fiction. Many of Yezierska’s characters in Hungry Hearts (1920), for example, speak English that is Yiddish-inflected; some phrases are translated word-for-word from Yiddish expressions. In the masterpiece of American Jewish immigrant fiction, Henry Roth’s novel Call It Sleep (1934), the characters’ Yiddish speech is rendered in eloquent English, while their English dialogue appears in nonstandard dialects and accents.

Most second-generation Jewish Americans abandoned Yiddish, but creative artists illustrated its continuing relevance. In The Magic Barrel (1958), Bernard Malamud presents a matchmaker and other characters whose mother tongue seems to be Yiddish. Grace Paley invented characters who speak an English that contains echoes of Yiddish. Her Goodbye and Good Luck, in The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), recalls the speech patterns and the milieu of New York City’s Second Avenue Yiddish theatre. Philip Roth, in Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), shows the continuing presence of Yiddish words and syntax in American Jewish speech. Cynthia Ozick’s story “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” (1969; included in The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories [1971]) is set among aging Yiddish writers and brings in dozens of Yiddish expressions. Following this example, Clive Sinclair’s Ashkenazia, contained in Bedbugs (1982), centres on a character who resembles Isaac Bashevis Singer. A few of Irena Klepfisz’s poems, especially “Etlekhe verter oyf mame-loshn /A few words in the mother tongue”, are essentially bilingual. Steve Stern’s stories in The Wedding Jester (1999) often include Yiddish words.

Yiddish and Hebrew have switched positions in the secular life of Ashkenazic Jewish communities. Until the Holocaust, Yiddish was the dominant vernacular of the Jews in Europe, while Hebrew was the largely unspoken, “high” literary language of scripture and prayer. Afterward, however, Hebrew was revived as the vernacular in Israel, and Yiddish began to lose its voice. Few of the secular Yiddish authors and scholars of the 21st century will have learned Yiddish as their mother tongue.