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  • The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903-1917
  • Jeremy Dauber
The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903-1917, by Barry Trachtenberg. Syracuse University Press: 2008. 222 pp. $24.95.

One of the signs of the increasing maturity and development of the field of Yiddish scholarship and Yiddish criticism is its attention to Yiddish scholarship and Yiddish criticism. That is, recent work by scholars like Cecile Kuznitz, Kenneth Moss, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Mikhail Krutikov, and others has increasingly, and with great nuance, delved into the history of the remarkable individuals in the first third of the twentieth century who, singly and in ever-shifting and constantly-arguing groups, shaped the contours of the Yiddish literary canon and rendered the previously marginalized Yiddish language a suitable medium for a wide range of historical, economic, and sociological scholarship. More, many of these individuals were committed to the Yiddish language as in some way the basis for a kind of nationalism, landless as it was, analogous to the movements sweeping through Europe at the time. Barry Trachtenberg's study is an important addition to this growing body of work; it addresses a lacuna of two sorts, one of emphasis and one of content.

The former—perhaps the most important—is Trachtenberg's emphasis on what might be referred to as the missing generation of Yiddish activists: that is, those formed in the crucible of the events surrounding the Revolution of 1905. While its effect on world history was certainly overshadowed by its successor, the Revolution—along with the pogrom in Kishinev that preceded it and its repression by reactionary forces—radicalized a generation of young activists, a generation who have often been marginalized in previous scholarly accounts, which have focused on the foundational figures of the Haskala in the last decades of the nineteenth century or the efflorescence of Yiddish activity in the wake of the October revolution. An emphasis also on what Trachtenberg terms the "brick and mortar institutions" of Yiddish scholarship like YIVO may also have obscured, at least in part, this generation as a generation. Trachtenberg's early chapters, which include an excellent summary of the historical scholarship on the period to date, make a compelling case for its study as not merely the noting of "an event of only transitional significance" (p. [End Page 181] 5)—after all, those who lived through it hardly knew what would come later, and were quite certain that events of historic import were occurring. This may be the book's most important—though hardly sole—contribution: a crystallization and undergirding of a shift in conceptual understanding of how the twentieth century in Yiddish came to be.

This understanding is borne out by Trachtenberg's attention to the second lacuna: a close look at some of the major activists of this period. Shmuel Niger, Ber Borokhov, and Nokhem Shtif are three of the most important figures in the Yiddish world of the twentieth century, and none have received, certainly in this context, their scholarly due. Borokhov, as Trachtenberg notes, has been studied as the political activist who tried to reconcile Marxism and Zionism, but his substantial work on developing the study of Yiddish philology—including his shaping that study to reflect ideological concerns about the place of Yiddish as a basis for cultural identity—have never been addressed as fully as they are here. Niger, one of the most important and prolific Yiddish literary critics, whose sweeping and passionate essays formed the Yiddish canon more than the work of any other individual, gets the first steps towards his critical due here. Nokhem Shtif, perhaps the most purely scholarly of the three, whose "combative personality and rigid insistence on objective scholarship" (p. 135) made him both an ideal practitioner of Yiddish visenshaft and a bête noire to almost all other active and activist figures in the field, is aptly contextualized here. Trachtenberg's sensitive attention to biographical details, and his expertise at weaving in the history and context of the dizzying array of venues in which these figures' efforts played themselves out—short-lived journals, anthologies, encyclopedias—will make these chapters essential reading for those seeking the big picture writ in individual lives...

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