Yiddish Literature In America 1870–2000 ed. by Emanuel S. Goldsmith (review)

Yiddish language and culture took root in the United States. in the late nineteenth century, primarily in the big cities where Yiddish-speaking immigrants settled and created new lives, far from their homes scattered across Eastern Europe. They brought with them the beginnings of the literature that was emerging in Yiddish back home, and from them fashioned a new and ultimately modern Yiddish literature that reflected and often wrestled with their American surrounds. American Yiddish literature moved from social realism to high modernism in fifty years or less, “with the speed of supernatural transport,” as Abraham Tabatshnik comments in his essay “Tradition and Revolt in Yiddish Poetry,” included in Yiddish Literature in America. Yet the drama of its development took place during a time of mass Jewish acculturation and eventual assimilation—resulting in relatively few contemporary readers for a vast treasure-house of books. Yiddish writing depends on translation to gain readers and recognition of its place in American literature. Emanuel S. Goldsmith’s Yiddish Literature in America appeals to Jewish readers in particular, and his preface calls on them to embrace not just the literature but to actively support Yiddish culture. His anthology is clearly a significant effort and even a labor of love, and despite its weaknesses (which I will discuss below), it offers a good introduction to Yiddish literature in America.

A dozen or more anthologies of Yiddish literature have been published since the 1950s, and the majority have focused on poetry. Of these volumes, the ones published since 2000 have taken depth rather than breadth as their approach—for example, picking fifteen to twenty poets representing several developments or “generations” of Yiddish poetry in America, as in Benjamin Harshav’s 2006 anthology Sing, Stranger and Richard J. Fein’s idiosyncratic With Everything We’ve Got (2009)—or focusing on a group of poets representing one trend, as in Proletpen: America’s Rebel Yiddish Poets (edited by Amelia Glaser and David Weintraub, 2005). Careful attention is given in these “depth” anthologies to the literary and historical contexts for approaching the poets as well as to offering a generous representation of the writers’ most compelling work. What is lacking in these anthologies, of course, is just what Goldsmith’s volume attempts to redress: a sense of the broad sweep of Yiddish writing in America. And indeed, Yiddish Literature in America contains diverse examples of writers across genres, including critical essays by Shmuel Niger and N. B Minkov; excerpts of fiction by Sholem Ash, Ayzik Raboy, and Khayim Grade; memoir excerpts from Ruvn Ayzland’s recounting of the early years of Di Yunge and Yiddish romanticism—and so on. There is even one excerpt from a well-known play, Mirele Efros by Yankev Gordin. Seventy-one writers in all are represented in Yiddish Literature in America (in translations by Dr. Barnett Zumoff), about two-thirds of whom are poets. And the volume is itself an abridgement of Goldsmith’s prior, monumental effort, Yidisher Literatur in Amerike 1870–2000, a thirteen-hundred-page anthology of Yiddish originals, published in two volumes by CYCO Books (1999–2002). Goldsmith does not discuss the approach he took in making his selections from the earlier publication—only, as he states in the preface, that the current volume consists of “approximately one-fourth of the content.” This content, now made available in English, is presented roughly chronologically. The poems include a number that appear elsewhere in translation. Perhaps most engaging are the essays, which take up such topics as the development of Yiddish literature in America, the problem of assimilation, and the inner workings of the literary group Di Yunge, and indirectly provide some of the context that is otherwise missing in the anthology.

The content of the anthology does not consist of what I would call “the best” of American Yiddish literature, in terms of its aesthetic appeal or even in terms of the leaps that writers took...