Survivors And Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust by Jan Schwarz (review)

Jan Schwarz, a professor of Yiddish studies at Lund University in Sweden, sets out in this book to “present a multi-faceted picture of a transnational Yiddish culture” (3) that grew out of the near complete annihilation of its speakers during the Holocaust. Focusing on the years 1945–1971, Schwarz argues against the common portrayal of Yiddish as being in a state of “irreversible decline and extinction” during these postwar years, instead claiming that its “cultural leaders emphasized consolidation and continuity . . . completing historical and cultural projects that in some cases had been initiated during the war” (7). He symbolically derives these questions and goals from the poem “Yiddish” by Avrom Sutzkever, written in 1948: “Where will the language go down? / Maybe at the Western Wall? / If so, I shall come there, come, / Open my mouth, / And like a lion / Garbed in fiery scarlet, / I shall swallow the language as it sets. / And wake all the generations with my roar!” (3).

Sutzkever (1913–2010) was born in Eastern Europe, survived the Holocaust via the Soviet Union, and settled in the Land of Israel in 1947 prior to the state’s establishment. Two-thirds of his life were spent in Israel, and it is there that the core of his literary work was produced. Schwarz’s fascinating recount of Sutzkever’s works in chapter 1, “Vilna,” continues the trend of past scholars by strongly deemphasizing Sutzkever’s “Israeliness” and highlighting instead his “European” Holocaust poetry.

However, even the poem, “Yiddish,” which serves as the book’s starting point, portrays a clash between the refugee Yiddish poet and the Land of Israel, both as symbolic and physical reality. Unfortunately, the story of this clash and the creation of Yiddish Israeli culture after the Holocaust is not a part of Schwarz’s book. This omission equally applies to his chapter devoted to another Yiddish writer who also survived the Holocaust and settled in Israel, Leib Rochman (1918–1978). But more broadly, it speaks to the need for a dual outlook on Yiddish culture, both through the transnational framework, which Schwarz emphasizes, and also via the local-national perspective. Schwarz acknowledges the latter when he deals with the influential role that Yiddish American culture had within the American and the Jewish-American cultural spheres.

Chapter 3 tells the story of Rochman’s memoirs. Schwarz writes that the memoir genre was “the main feature of the Yiddish cultural world, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, that welcomed and encouraged the survivor writers to publish their Holocaust memoirs” (68). However, since these memoirs were written in a minor language, none of them even came close to the popularity of Anna Frank’s or Primo Levi’s works, despite their tremendous value. Schwarz uses historian Timothy Snyder to assert that they were just too Jewish and too Eastern European for mass Western consumption (76).

A highly interesting fourth chapter is devoted to the monumental Yiddish Argentinean project of Dos poylishe yidntum (Polish Jewry). It was a series of hundreds of books that came out in the years 1946–1966 in Buenos Aires that were distributed in 22 countries in hundreds of thousands of copies. This project “indicates the existence of a vibrant Yiddish book market that empowered Jewish survivors to share their experience about life before, during, and in the aftermath of the Holocaust” (93).

This valuable resource of survivors accounts “became a venue of hope for the continued creativity of Yiddish literature” (116); and this rich body of work remains accessible to this day almost exclusively in Yiddish. It was followed by another Argentinean project focused on republishing Yiddish literary classics (the Musterverk series).

The centrality of the Yiddish cultural center established in North America, with New York City as its undisputed capital, explains why Schwarz dedicated the second half of his book to this region. Chapter 5 focuses on particular years (1953–1954) in Yiddish literature, which included I. B. Singer’s debut in English translation. Chapter 6...