Documenting Immigrant Lives at an Immigrant Institution: Yivo’s Autobiography Contest of 1942

In 1942 the Yiddish Scientific Institute (Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut, or Yivo) organized a competition for the best autobiography by a Jewish immigrant to America. Itself an immigrant institution, having relocated its center from Vilna to New York just two years before, Yivo asked contestants to write on the theme, “Why I left Europe and what I have accomplished in America.” The instructions made clear that the institute wanted accounts covering all aspects of life in both the old country and the new, and, for the most part, the writers obliged. By the end of the year more than 200 people had submitted their autobiographies, creating an outstanding collection documenting Jewish life in Eastern (and to some degree Central) Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as the process of migration and resettlement in the United States and, to a lesser extent, Canada and Latin America. ¹

The contest organizers stressed repeatedly their commitment to the “scientific” study of Jewish life and their belief that the autobiographies could help them in that endeavor. Heavily influenced by American social science even in Europe, Yivo’s scholars nevertheless struggled to find a role for themselves once they arrived in the United States at the outbreak of World War II. As it had in Poland, Yivo sought to recruit members of the wider public to its scholarly enterprise. Making common cause with members of the Yiddish-speaking community, it initiated a collaborative project designed to document the mass migration of East and Central European Jews to America. The immigrant autobiographers had their own reasons for writing, however, and cooperation between immigrant intellectuals and their broader constituency was not always easy.

As an effort to document immigrant lives, the 1942 contest raises a number of interesting issues. What were the roots of Yivo’s interest in this method of inquiry and in this particular subject? What was the agenda of the autobiography writers, and how did it compare with that of the scholars? How did the theme set by the organizers, particularly its emphasis on “accomplishment,” together with the historical context in which the contest took place, influence the contestants’ responses? Finally, how did the scholars at Yivo respond to the writers’ submissions, and what did they hope to do with the autobiographies that they gathered?

Max Weinreich and the Intellectual Roots of the Autobiography Contest

Any inquiry into Yivo’s scholarly agenda in the 1940s must begin with Max Weinreich, the institute’s research director and guiding intellectual light. Born in 1894 to a middle-class family in Kuldiga (Goldingen), Latvia, Weinreich’s first language was German. By the time he was a teenager, however, he fell under the influence of the socialist Jewish Labor Bund and developed a deep commitment to Yiddish and the Jewish culture it represented. Earning a doctorate from the University of Marburg, Germany, Weinreich began to establish himself as an authority on the history of the Yiddish language. He also taught at the Vilna Jewish Teachers’ Seminary and wrote for several Yiddish newspapers. ²

Although best known as a linguist, Weinreich in fact had much broader interests in the social scientific study of Jewish life. As one of the founders and intellectual leaders of Yivo in Vilna, Weinreich consciously strove to infuse the institute’s work with a high degree of methodological sophistication and an awareness of contemporary research currents in Europe and the United States. ³ In particular, American trends in sociology and anthropology influenced Weinreich deeply well before he settled permanently in the United States. As a fellow in a seminar funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and led by Eduard Sapir at Yale University in 1932–33, Weinreich read the works of Louis Wirth, Harold Lasswell, and William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki. Returning to Poland, he sought to apply American methods, particularly those developed by the Chicago School, to the study of East European Jewish life. ⁴

Most of all, the work of Thomas and Znaniecki shaped Weinreich’s thinking and, especially, his methodology. In this, of course, he was not alone. Thomas and Znaniecki’s monumental five-volume study, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, published between 1918 and 1920, had pioneered the use of “personal documents” in critical social investigation, putting the “subject’s point of view” at the center of analysis. ⁵ Tremendously influential, their work helped to set the tone for the Chicago School and to determine the subsequent development of the fields of sociology, anthropology, social psychology, and history. ⁶

The methodology of The Polish Peasant was especially influential in Poland, because Znaniecki returned to his native country in 1920 to take a chair in sociology at the University of Poznan. As one of the founders of Polish social science, he made the use of life-histories one of its methodological cornerstones. A number of contests to gather autobiographies from workers, peasants, and others were held in Poland during the interwar years. ⁷

Weinreich shared Thomas and Znaniecki’s interest in the “application of the methods of social psychology to an evolving human personality” as well as their belief in the “marked superiority [of the life record] over any other kind of source.” ⁸ Specifically, Weinreich hoped to develop a new field to study the interaction between what he labeled “personality and culture”—that is, between the individual and his or her social environment. Since this interaction, with all of the reciprocal influences it entailed, was inevitably extremely complex, such “wholesale” methods as mass surveys, censuses, and tests could not possibly provide adequate insights into its composition. Only complete and detailed life histories, Weinreich contended, could offer a window on the “full personality in the full situation.” ⁹ Distinctly Freudian in outlook, Weinreich further argued for the importance of stages in the individual’s psychological development. Biographies and autobiographies seemed particularly well suited to follow the individual through the successive stages of his or her life. ¹⁰

Unlike Thomas, Znaniecki, and the rest of the Chicago School, Weinreich put his interest in social research at the service of national, even nationalistic, goals. Indeed, Weinreich’s vision of an engaged Jewish studies was decidedly social therapeutic. He believed that members of minority groups faced enormous strains that inevitably produced emotional maladjustment if not “compensated” for by a positive sense of affiliation with the group and a conscious appreciation of its culture. The individual adjusted to minority status, Weinreich contended, in the course of his or her normal emotional development. Childhood and adolescence therefore formed crucial periods in the determination of a healthy ethnic personality. ¹¹

To this emphasis on youth, Weinreich added the idea of social disorganization as a consequence of modernization, a concept he borrowed from the work of Thomas and Znaniecki. Jewish youth, Weinreich argued, could no longer avail themselves of the consolation that their parents and grandparents had found in traditional Judaism. Without some sort of replacement to bind the young generation to its people and give it a proud awareness of Jewish history and culture, it would have to face a hostile world without any psychic protection.

Social research could not only uncover the sources of social and cultural dislocation, Weinreich believed, but also come up with an antidote. The three autobiography contests that the institute sponsored for Jewish young people in Poland in the 1930s formed an integral part of this effort. Yivo’s most important tasks were to raise the status of the Yiddish folk culture and to provide a modern yet authentically Jewish replacement for the untenable Jewish religious tradition. The significance of the autobiography contests, therefore, lay not only in the documentation they produced but also in the way they brought young people into Yivo’s orbit and connected them to a new form of Jewish spiritual and intellectual life. ¹²

The Americanization of Yivo

The outbreak of World War II in September 1939, shortly after the completion of Yivo’s last autobiography contest, cut short the institute’s work with Jewish youth in Poland. At the time of the invasion, Weinreich was abroad to attend an academic conference. Making his way to the United States, he joined with a number of other Polish Jewish refugee scholars to expand Yivo’s already existing “American Section” and to reconstitute the institute with its center in New York. ¹³

Although they hoped at first that enough of Polish Jewry would survive the war to allow Yivo someday to resume its activities in Europe, Weinreich and the others immediately realized that Yivo would also now have to find a specifically American mission. Despite Weinreich’s high regard for American social science, however, he realized that finding a place in the Jewish community for Yivo’s style of scholarship would not be easy. He lamented that American Jews showed little interest in social research, at least when applied to their own community. Weinreich’s address to Yivo’s annual conference in January 1941 appealed in an almost desperate tone to American Jewry “to give us a chance” to prove the communal value of scholarly research. ¹⁴

Weinreich himself never doubted the necessity of Jewish social science, even in the United States. American Jewry did indeed need Yivo, he believed, perhaps even more desperately than Yivo needed American Jewry. Yivo could bring to American Jewry the knowledge that was necessary to set communal priorities and that no one else then provided. It could, for example, supply information on the economic situation of American Jews as well as on past successes and failures in the Jewish struggle for civil rights. During the war years, it could also counter the pernicious effects of Nazi pseudo-science with its own honest research on Jewish life. Moreover, as Weinreich pointed out, even seemingly abstract pure science could ultimately lead to important practical applications. ¹⁵

Most of all, American Jewry needed Yivo because American Jews faced essentially the same social-psychological problems that East European Jewry had faced. If anything, Weinreich argued repeatedly, conditions in the United States only exacerbated the ill effects of the Jewish condition. One of Weinreich’s central assumptions was that assimilation could not work. Unmoored from traditional sources of emotional and spiritual strength, American Jews inevitably suffered psychologically from social discrimination and feelings of inferiority, despite their comparative material well-being. The American Jewish community, “atomized” and “chaotically amorphous,” could not provide the positive emotional reinforcement its members needed. Many American Jews, particularly young ones, thus displayed the maladjustment typical of minority individuals without the support of a healthy ethnic community, alternating between nervous over-aggressiveness and cringing servility. ¹⁶

Weinreich thought a healthy ethnic communal life necessary for the emotional health of its individual members. He saw research as the necessary first step toward a healthy ethnic communal life, if not as an outright cure for the ills of social disorganization:

We can hope to find an answer to these problems of personality only in a more or less healthy collective. . . . From the atomization of millions of individual “Americans of Jewish faith” we must arrive at a consciousness of a community [klal] of American Jews. To do this we must first of all recognize the elements that make up the essence of this community [klalishkayt]. . . . Recognition means research. ¹⁷

While not surrendering its traditional focus on East European Jewry, Yivo therefore set out in its early years to increase American Jewry’s knowledge of itself. In Freudian terms, Yivo would help American Jewry overcome its neurosis by making it “conscious” of the “split in its soul.” ¹⁸ But it would also help uncover potential sources of emotional strength hidden in its history and cultural heritage.

In the United States, as in Poland, Weinreich intended to make youth a central focus of Yivo’s activities. He believed that young people suffered most from the demoralization of American Jewish life and that they were most susceptible to the remedy. Based on his own observations, Weinreich concluded that young American Jews were “missing something” and that they could “be made happier with more yidishkayt.” ¹⁹ At first, many of Yivo’s efforts to attract young Americans resembled its efforts in Poland. In fact, when he first arrived in the United States, Weinreich hoped to continue “Jewish youth research in this country along the same essential lines” by carrying out psycho-social research based on autobiographies collected from young American Jews. ²⁰

As Barbara Kirshenblat-Gimblett has demonstrated, however, Weinreich found it more difficult in the United States than he had in Poland to make headway with Jewish youth. Barriers of language and culture made it hard for Yivo to convince young American Jews that it offered something they needed. Yivo simply did not have the same kind of access to English-speaking American young people as it had had to Yiddish-speaking young people in Eastern Europe. Failure to attract the necessary funding forced Weinreich to drop his plans for a massive research project involving American Jewish youth. ²¹

Significantly, Weinreich and the other Yivo scholars saw many parallels between the condition of Jews and that of African-Americans. This comparison was perhaps a natural one for Weinreich to make, given his affinity for Thomas and Znaniecki’s theories concerning social disorganization. Indeed, one of Weinreich’s closest American academic friends and sponsors, Yale’s John Dollard, had himself published a study of black youth. ²² Yet whereas both Dollard and members of the Chicago School were essentially assimilationist, Weinreich drew opposite conclusions. As early as 1935, he remarked on the emotional shock suffered by black children from acculturated families when, having no autonomous cultural aspirations to fall back on, they encountered racism for the first time. ²³ In 1941, already in the United States, Weinreich likened the alienated situation of the deracinated and assimilationist American Jew to that “of the ‘nigger’—not of the Negro, but of the nigger who knows that he lives only with the indulgence of the white man.” ²⁴

But Yivo’s attention to black studies had a deeper significance. As the historian Hasia Diner has noted, many Jewish leaders in the early twentieth century used their identification with the cause of black civil rights as a way to orient themselves in American society. ²⁵ For the scholars at Yivo, a sociological interest in African-American life served a similar purpose. Widespread racial tension in 1943 led Yivo to focus on the study of African-American life and black-Jewish relations. That year, members of the institute heard lectures by Dollard on the black community (with the participation of “several Negro leaders and students”) and Milton Konvits on “Negroes and Jews.” After the race riots in Detroit, Yivo commissioned a study on black-Jewish relations, and the following year it undertook to publish a volume of essays on the same subject. ²⁶ These efforts, together with Weinreich’s frequent comparisons between the emotional degradation of many American Jews and that of many blacks, reflected Yivo’s efforts to find its own place in America.

Within a few years of its relocation to New York, Yivo could point proudly to its growing body of work on American topics. It did so with characteristic statistical precision. Yivo librarian Mendel Elkin began his summary of the institute’s accomplishments in 1943 by noting that a third of its publications concerned “purely American” subjects and arguing that this figure indicated the degree to which Yivo had sunk roots in its new home. Weinreich cited an even higher figure, calculating that 40 percent of the articles that year in Yivo bleter, the institute’s scholarly journal, had concerned America. ²⁷ In its first several years in New York, the institute also published a two-volume study of the American Jewish labor movement and several other books on Jewish life in the New World. A list of major projects under way at Yivo in 1944 indicated that the number of such publications was likely to grow in subsequent years. ²⁸

Moreover, Yivo had come into increasing contact with wider circles of American Jewish intellectuals, drawing them into its research. “There is a Jewish academic intelligentsia in America,” Weinreich proclaimed happily. “One only has to approach it and ‘degentilize’ it.” The Americanization of Yivo had also drawn its American collaborators closer to Jewish concerns. ²⁹

The Autobiography Contest: Yivo’s Scholarly Agenda

One of the American projects to which the institute’s members pointed proudly was the autobiography contest for Jewish immigrants they organized in 1942. That year Yivo decided to sponsor a competition similar to the ones it had carried out among Jewish youth in Poland. This time the researchers would ask immigrants to write on their experiences before, during, and after migration. The Yivo workers realized that a contest focusing on immigrants would draw many more old people than it would young ones, and the new project marked a move away from the emphasis on youth.

Several factors appear to have influenced Yivo’s decision to undertake this project. ³⁰ First, by organizing an autobiography contest, Yivo resorted to a method with which it had a great deal of prior experience. Not only would such a contest help the institute to publicize its goals but it would also help to build its collections. Moreover, the collection of life-histories comported with Yivo’s long-standing philosophical commitment to the methodology pioneered by The Polish Peasant and introduced to Poland by Znaniecki. A report on the project, published in the institute’s newsletter after its conclusion, acknowledged Thomas and Znaniecki as well as more recent autobiography contests sponsored by such American institutions as Harvard University. ³¹ In addition to the autobiographies themselves, the contest brought in a great many of the other kinds of personal documents—such as family letters—valued by the school of research to which Yivo adhered.

Second, the formulation of the theme, “Why I left Europe and what I have accomplished in America,” facilitated descriptions of the social dislocation that first caused, and then was exacerbated by, the migration process itself. But just as significantly, it also encouraged stories of reintegration and resocialization in the United States. The contest would thereby contribute to Yivo’s agenda of helping American Jewry understand itself by uncovering evidence not only of dysfunction but also of patterns of successful social and emotional adjustment to American life. (After the end of the contest, one of the first projected research projects to be based on it was a study of immigrant “adjustment” situated in the institute’s Section of Psychology and Education.) ³²

Third, by undertaking such a project among East European immigrants, Yivo turned, in effect, to a natural constituency. Not only did the immigrants themselves speak Yiddish, but the Yiddish press readily provided a medium through which to reach them. Moreover, the immigrant community’s institutions proved more willing to collaborate with Yivo than did some of the mainstream English-speaking Jewish organizations. This was especially true of the labor-oriented sector of the community; the Jewish Labor Committee, after all, had rescued a number of the institute’s staff members.

Most crucially, as Weinreich pointed out, Yiddish-speaking American Jews retained a healthy respect for scholarship and research: “Among those elements with a connection to Yiddish, we do not find, perhaps, a clear understanding of the meaning of research. But neither is there fear of it. On the contrary, the respect for learning lives on, a respect that combines the old Jewish reverence for Torah study with the socialist labor movement’s faith in science as a bearer of progress.” ³³ A project like the autobiography contest promised success, not only in attracting the participation of individual writers but also in drawing the necessary financial and moral support from communal institutions.

By placing the “masses of immigrants” in the center of broad historical developments, and by stressing the importance of the subjects’ own point of view for understanding those events, Yivo once again heeded the call issued by Thomas and Znaniecki 20 years earlier. It also anticipated many of the concerns of social historians 30–50 years later. ³⁴ In fact, despite its written form, the autobiography contest was nearly as collaborative an undertaking as the oral history projects of the 1970s and after. That is, the organizers of the contest helped to shape the submitted narratives.

The contest announcement appeared in Yivo’s journal as well as in the Yiddish press. It explained why such materials were important to collect and gave detailed instructions to prospective writers. ³⁵ The designers of the contest stressed the need to document the seemingly mundane details of the lives of ordinary immigrants in addition to their participation in great historical events. The central historical event around which the contest was organized, of course, was the nearly unprecedented “revolution” wrought by the mass migration of East European Jews since the end of the nineteenth century. Noting that some prominent individuals had already published their memoirs about the years of immigration and resettlement, the contest announcement nevertheless argued that the “great masses of immigrants, those who struggled and with their own hands built their personal lives and communal institutions in the new world, have not yet had their say. This is a great lack for research.”

The announcement went on to reassure readers that the contest was open to “every adult Jew, man or woman, not born in the United States or Canada, without regard to level of education, background, occupation, or party affiliation.” Neither did inexperience at writing pose an obstacle to participation in the contest, or even to winning a prize. The contest offered six monetary prizes ranging from $20 to $100 and 19 additional book prizes.

After giving some general directions—the works should be “detailed,” “precise,” and “sincere”—the announcement suggested a full list of topics to cover. The list followed more or less the life course of an individual, from a description of his or her parents, through education, marriage, work, emigration, resettlement, changes in material conditions, communal activities, and relations with children. A large proportion of the items on the list concerned work, social mobility, and aspirations for children, factors that might help a writer finally judge what he or she had “accomplished in America.” Many of the autobiographies did, in fact, adhere with varying degrees of closeness to the outline provided, though others deviated substantially.

The announcement gave additional technical instructions to prospective participants. It asked them to write, neatly and legibly, a minimum of 25 notebook-sized pages, and it requested that they send in supporting material—diaries, photographs, and letters—as well. Autobiographies could be composed in any language. Writers were told to sign their manuscripts only with pseudonyms but to enclose their real names and addresses in envelopes accompanying their entries. The organizers would open the envelopes after the jury had made its decisions, and the names of the prize winners would be publicized in the Yiddish press unless they specifically requested anonymity. Finally, the organizers assured the contestants that their words would be kept strictly confidential; Yivo would only publish them with permission of the authors. In fact, as will be seen later, this assurance of confidentiality betrayed some confusion on the part of both organizers and contestants concerning the issue of publication.

Yivo found the response to the contest, which “exceeded all expectations,” to be gratifying indeed. The organizers extended the deadline twice at the request of contestants. The competition ended officially on January 1, 1943, although the last submissions did not arrive until March. In all, 223 individuals composed autobiographies, contributing approximately 25,000 pages of material (a handful of very long submissions inflated the total somewhat). Analyzing the returns, the Yivo staff found that 176 of the works had been written by men and 47 by women; that just over half had come from New York, while the others arrived from 62 other places in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, and Cuba; and that the majority of writers were between 51 and 70 years of age. The writers came from all over Eastern Europe, as well as Germany and Palestine, and they arrived in America in every decade from the 1880s to the 1940s, though most had come in the years of mass migration between 1882 and 1924. Ninety percent of the works were written in Yiddish, with the rest in English, German, and Hebrew. ³⁶

The Autobiography Contest: The Writers’ Agenda

In turning to the immigrant community, Yivo had found the right constituency for its work. Many in the Yiddish-speaking milieu did indeed have, as Weinreich said, a deep respect for scholarship and literature, even when they did not completely understand them. Hearing about the contest from friends, or reading about it “after a day of housework” in the Forward or the Workmen’s Circle’s Fraynd, those who entered the competition seized on the opportunity to contribute to the work of the esteemed Yiddish Scientific Institute. ³⁷

The participants viewed the task of writing as a serious responsibility, but they sometimes needed encouragement to undertake what seemed like a daunting task. One writer reported that he had passed through several emotional stages before deciding to write. Reading the announcement, he had become “inspired,” now he would have “the opportunity to give his life history to an important institution, the Yivo.” Then he had fallen into despair—his physical condition would not allow him to complete the task. Finally, he had begun to write. ³⁸ Some of the autobiographers talked it over with friends before beginning their work. Others, unsure of their skills as writers, wrote to the institute for reassurance that literary talent was not a requirement for entry, or turned to intellectual acquaintances for editorial assistance. In his replies, Weinreich always confirmed that all entries, however amateurishly written, would have tremendous value for the research work of the institute’s scholars. ³⁹

The contestants had a variety of motivations for writing their autobiographies. These they largely worked out in direct relation to the contest itself, often in the course of correspondence with Weinreich and the other scholars at Yivo. In this way, the organizers helped to set not only their own agenda but that of the writers as well. Nevertheless, the two agendas sometimes diverged. Yivo’s interest in immigrant autobiographies grew out of its grounding in certain social scientific theories, its work with Jewish youth in Poland, and its efforts to find a place for itself in America. The interests of the autobiographers stemmed from their own experiences, including their need to make sense of their bifurcated lives as immigrants, as well as from their desire to collaborate with Yivo on a project of importance to both social science and the Jewish people.

A variety of contexts, some intrinsic to the contest, others well beyond it, helped to determine both the form and the content of the submissions. The prospect that East European Jewry would disappear entirely from its native territory gave some of those writing in 1942 a special sense of urgency as they recorded their memories of a way of life that had been fading fast even before the war. ⁴⁰ Moreover, all of the writers had good reason to be thankful that they had emigrated when they did. The autobiographers’ painful awareness of the ongoing destruction of European Jewry (however incomplete their understanding of it may have been at the time) undoubtedly contributed to the unanimous high regard for America that contest secretary Moses Kligsberg later noted in the narratives. Indeed, a number of the works conclude by damning Hitler, praising Roosevelt, and expressing the hope for a swift Allied victory.

Other factors also shaped the content of the autobiographies. The formulation of the contest theme, for instance, undoubtedly influenced the tone of the narratives. The theme’s emphasis on accomplishment seems to have encouraged the writers to concentrate on their material success and upward mobility. Not surprisingly, a contest that asked people to describe what they “had accomplished” attracted many people who felt they had accomplished much, though their material success was, in fact, often quite modest. Neither had most of the contestants ever managed to attract the attention of the newspapers or achieve fame within or without the immigrant community. The contest allowed these moderately successful immigrants to express openly their pride in having used their wits and hard work to gain a foothold in America, though these assertions sometimes included a note of apology. S. Garson, who won second prize in the competition, spoke for a number of the writers when he wrote, as if someone were challenging his assertion, “You will concede that an immigrant who has just acquired a house from which he had rental income, who has just sold a partnership in a business and comes with 29,000 dollars in cash in his pocket to investigate another business proposition, has the right to consider himself well settled in America.” ⁴¹

Had the organizers not worded the theme as they did, would the works have had the same emphasis? Would the contest have attracted a completely different group of participants? These questions are impossible to answer. Clearly, however, the writers responded to the agenda of the organizers, even as the scholars depended on the memories of the subjects for their view of the past. Despite its written form, therefore, the autobiography contest constituted a collaborative enterprise, much like those oral history projects in which the give-and-take between scholars and subjects is more obvious. ⁴²

Prompted by the organizers, then, many of the contestants used the opportunity to look back and take stock of their lives. They did not always need much prodding. Not only is this kind of stock-taking common among older people, but the contest constituency’s immigrant past made such evaluations even more imperative. Immigrant biographies often seemed unnaturally bifurcated, experiences growing up in far-off countries having little to do with lives in America. Reviewing their own histories and ordering them on paper, the writers connected the two parts and thereby made sense out of their lives.

Indeed, for some first-time authors, writing proved a deeply emotional experience. As one participant wrote with a note of surprise,

When I sat myself down at my desk, my God! No exaggeration. Not as in a dream, but as if in reality, I once again became that baby watching his sister make noodles as I played with the toys. And there sits the teacher, Simcha, instructing us children with his beautiful sorrowful voice. . . . And I cry as I write about it, as I cried then when I was learning Bible. . . . As I wrote I involuntarily opened my mouth and then clenched my teeth. And when I was at the train station about to leave for America, I burst into tears as I parted from my young wife and my sister. And, remarkably, while I wrote that I was saying goodbye, I cried so hard that I had to wait quite a while until I calmed down enough to resume writing. ⁴³

Writing thus had a cathartic effect for some of the writers, a psychological benefit perhaps not unanticipated by the sponsors of the contest.

Writing also provided therapy for those who felt they had led especially hard lives (and indeed had done so), whether because of strictly personal circumstances or because they had lived through such major upheavals as World War I. The contest finally offered them the chance to unburden themselves to people who were apparently interested, justifying, in a sense, the difficulties they had faced. As one woman put it, “I have lived my whole life with these events in my heart, and many times I thought that if I had had someone to tell my life story to my heart would have been less burdened.” ⁴⁴ Many of those who had lived through dramatic events such as the war also expressed the conviction that their stories had inherent interest for a broader public. As one participant put it, “I have been through so much that all the movies that I see pale in comparison. If I made my own movie it would be much more powerful.” ⁴⁵ Indeed, to the extent that all of the autobiographers had taken part in the great wave of migration, their lives had all included at least that one dramatic and historic moment. Virtually all of the Yiddish-reading public shared an interest in that moment, which appeared often in fictional and historical form in the Yiddish press and theater.

On one point, Yivo had to convince some writers. This was that the experiences—and therefore the autobiographies—of “ordinary people” had as much historical value as those of well-known personalities. Some writers expressed surprise that their stories would be of much “scientific or social interest,” and were happy to find that they were. ⁴⁶ But many of the writers already appreciated the historical significance of their own lives, a characteristic noted also by Virginia Yans-McLaughlin among Jewish immigrants interviewed for an oral history project some 30 years later. ⁴⁷ They saw themselves not as isolated individuals but as representatives of their people and their times. ⁴⁸ These writers expressed complete agreement with Yivo’s social-historical bias. “We often read various descriptions of great and important people,” wrote one contestant echoing the contest announcement itself, “but of the masses of immigrants, who without a doubt also have plenty of interest to relate—of them we hear little.” ⁴⁹

The desire to pass on a legacy to future generations also informed the autobiographers’ writing. Weinreich noted as much when he quoted Sholem Aleichem to the effect that “writing an autobiography and making a will are almost the same thing.” ⁵⁰ Yet, for all their faith in the social and historic importance of their experiences, the autobiographers did not always believe that their children and grandchildren would share that appreciation. One of the writers, S. Ginsburg, apparently felt differently at different times. In an autobiography he had composed in 1926, and which he submitted together with the manuscript prepared especially for the contest, he had written hopefully, “Perhaps our posterity will in the future be interested in knowing about their grandfather who was the first in our line to cross the Atlantic.” But, in 1942, he wrote that Yivo should keep his manuscript whether or not it intended to publish it. “[M]y children will not read it,” he despaired, “and their children certainly not.” ⁵¹

Most of the writers were therefore grateful for the attention that Yivo paid them and for the legitimacy its interest granted their lives. Yivo assured them that it would take their accounts very seriously, not simply reading them but “study[ing them] very carefully and with great diligence,” not only in the near future but for many years to come. ⁵² Significantly, nearly all of the contestants wrote in Yiddish, a language that few members of subsequent generations could read. The immigrant scholars at Yivo, however, could read the Yiddish-language accounts and, given the institute’s Yiddish ideology, would likely value the works even more for their use of the language. Moreover, although not all of the contestants would have known this, Yivo shared their anguish at the younger generation’s detachment from the immigrants’ culture. Since Weinreich believed that American Jewish youth desperately needed to reconnect with their parents’ legacy, he argued explicitly that the collections generated by the autobiography contest would benefit the American-born youth more than they would the immigrants themselves. ⁵³

In September 1943, Yivo distributed the prizes at a gala ceremony held in its auditorium and attended by several hundred contestants, family members, Yiddish journalists and writers, cultural activists, and scholars. After a number of speeches, the winners received their awards. Unfortunately, the composition of the jury is unrecorded, though it certainly included Max Weinreich and Moses Kligsberg, a Yivo staff member who served as contest secretary. Kligsberg, it seems, had read all, or nearly all, of the manuscripts, rating them according to how well they followed the organizers’ instructions to be detailed, precise, and sincere. Judging from his notes, now filed together with the autobiographies themselves, the overall quality of the manuscripts impressed him. The full jury first selected the 25 prize winners and then determined their order. So happy was the jury with the results of the contest that it decided to award a number of special citations in addition to the original prizes and to present certificates to all of the contestants. ⁵⁴

The awards and certificates pleased the writers, several of whom indicated their intention to frame the diplomas and hang them on the walls of their homes. The prizes gave the participants something to show for their efforts and confirmed that they had become partners in Yivo’s important scholarly work. As Mordkhe Sigel put it, the very fact that the researchers at the institute would use his autobiography constituted one of his most gratifying accomplishments in America. Sigel even composed a poem expressing both his high regard for Yivo and his pride in contributing to its scientific enterprise:

The diploma makes me feel like I have received a fortune, And suddenly become very rich. Who can compare to me now?

I may rightly be proud. The diploma gives me a guarantee That my effort was not in vain When I wrote my biography.

One might happen to find some money, But a diploma one must earn. The Yivo would not give to just anyone A diploma signed with such names.

The diploma will hang on my wall. I will bless and praise the hands of all those Who do the work so thoroughly and well. May your will and courage be strengthened. May everything you do be crowned with success. Long live the Yiddish Scientific Institute. ⁵⁵

Not all of the writers expressed as much satisfaction as Sigel, however. The project was, after all, a contest, and the results disappointed some of the losers. Some competitive autobiographers had apparently entered the contest fully expecting to win a top prize and were deeply disgruntled when they failed to do so. One participant wrote from Winnipeg, where he was a prominent Yiddish cultural activist, that he had gone from local hero, as presumed winner of the contest, to local goat overnight. A banquet in his honor had been canceled, as had plans to publish his autobiography in installments in the local Yiddish newspaper. Weinreich responded by reminding him that he had indeed won an award and by expressing the hope that the newspaper would run his life-story after all. Other disappointed contestants wrote even more bluntly, accusing the jury of “having not the most elementary understanding of how to evaluate the ethical value of a narrative,” or simply exclaiming, “I did not win an award and Sprecher did? That’s enough [dayenu]!” Finally, one contestant demanded payment for her work. Why should Yivo make money from her material? Had not the call for entries promised payment? Weinreich responded by pointing out that the announcement had promised cash prizes only to the top six winners. Besides, he wrote indignantly, “we are not an institution for the sake of profit, but for communal and scholarly work.” ⁵⁶

Yivo’s Response to the Autobiographies

Clearly, despite the collaborative nature of the project, the scholars and the contestants sometimes found communication difficult. In their anxiety over their abilities as writers, some of the participants could not understand all of the directions. In his letters to contestants Weinreich sometimes resorted to abstract language seemingly aimed more at overawing them than at explaining clearly why Yivo really wanted the autobiographies. He often used the word “scientific” (visnshaftlekh), for example. But what did his correspondents, many of whom had had only a few years of pre-modern education, make of this word? ⁵⁷ Indeed, what did they make of the entire original announcement for the contest, which was written in an academic style of Yiddish that Yivo itself had invented over the previous 17 years? Many of the young people who had contributed to the similar contests Yivo had sponsored in Poland during the 1930s had attended modern Jewish schools where they learned this new sort of Yiddish. But the closest thing that the pre-World War I immigrants who made up the majority of the 1942 contest entrants had seen was the journalistic language of the Yiddish press. Despite their common roots in Jewish Eastern Europe, then, and their common status as immigrants, the Yivo scholars and their public constituency did not share completely the same culture.

Kligsberg wrote about these problems of communication in an article that appeared in both the Yiddish- and the English-language journals published by Yivo. He argued that the inability to follow simple directions revealed a number of “socio-psychological problems” on the part of the writers. Vague about what those problems might have been, Kligsberg could not conceal his pique at the contestants’ lack of understanding or apparent disregard for the technical provisions of the contest rules. After all, the call for manuscripts had been “edited with great care” and “submitted for approval to outstanding American authorities in the field,” yet the writers persisted in asking questions about such obvious points as the minimum page requirement. Worse, many contestants willfully misinterpreted the announcement to mean that all of the autobiographies would be published. Some simply ignored the provision requiring that they submit entries under pseudonyms, arguing that they had nothing to hide and that they wanted “to show the world their achievements in life.” From this, Kligsberg concluded that it hardly mattered how clearly or logically a text was formulated; their “emotions, personal ambitions, etc.” would color readers’ understanding of it. ⁵⁸

Fifty years later, Kligsberg’s analysis of the “socio-psychological” aspects of the contest seems to betray a decided lack of self-reflection on the part of the social scientists who organized it. He failed to explore the ways in which the contest sponsors had shaped the public’s response, not only in strictly technical matters but in the content of the autobiographies as well. Did “most participants think very highly of their achievements”? Perhaps the contest theme had asked them to do so, or had attracted the participation of those who already did. Did the writers believe that their autobiographies were “of unusual interest to the world of learning”? This was, after all, what Yivo had told them in its most authoritative voice.

The judges also had a hard time sticking consistently to some of the contest’s proclaimed tenets concerning the kinds of experiences that it valued. For example, Kligsberg complained that the writers tended to privilege unusual events and extraordinary experiences over the commonplace, whereas social scientists sought to “discover laws, principles, and general tendencies.” But in his grading of the autobiographies, Kligsberg himself was often swayed by the authors’ accounts of dramatic historical events and political movements. Inevitably, the top prizes also tended to go to the most fluently written works, despite the assurance of the organizers that style did not count in the judging. ⁵⁹

Such considerations may help account for the fact that only one woman received one of the 25 prizes, although women made up a fifth of all contestants. ⁶⁰ Without records of the judging it is impossible to say definitively what led to such disproportionate results. But female writers may have been less likely than their male counterparts to concentrate on the political involvements and business careers that tended to impress Kligsberg. Even the contest theme itself, with its emphasis on “accomplishment,” may have discouraged participation by housewives and mothers who had not worked outside of the home.

Yivo itself also contributed to some of the confusion concerning the intended use of the manuscripts, especially its plans to publish them. The contest announcement had promised confidentiality, vowing to publish the works only with the express permission of the authors. In subsequent communications, however, including personal letters to a number of contestants, the organizers indicated that they did indeed hope to publish substantial amounts of material from the contest. Just how much, and in what form, remained unclear. But on a number of occasions they spoke of “several volumes,” to include narratives drawn not just from the winners but from other manuscripts as well. As Kligsberg noted in his analysis of the participants’ motivations for writing, many fully expected that their autobiographies would appear in print. ⁶¹

His involvement with Yivo’s essay contests for Polish Jewish youth in the 1930s colored Kligsberg’s reactions to the American autobiographies. The immigrants’ disdain for confidentiality puzzled Kligsberg, given the young people’s insistence on it. But a reading of the autobiographies themselves should have explained the reasons for this difference, much of which could be attributed to the different experiences of the writers. Trained by their youth movements, and perhaps to some extent by Yivo itself, the young people of the 1930s had been much more introspective and therefore more self-revealing than the immigrants who had been educated before World War I. Further, because of their age, the young writers had still been enmeshed in the families and other social situations about which they wrote. Historical circumstances provided additional reasons for the young people to desire confidentiality and for the immigrants to reject it. Where the youth had displayed “intense pessimism and frustration,” the immigrants exhibited satisfaction and optimism. Where many of the young people in Poland had seen themselves as failures, the Americans (most of them middle-aged or older) saw themselves as successes. ⁶²

Ultimately, Yivo did very little with the material it amassed from the autobiography contest and several subsequent collecting campaigns of a similar nature. ⁶³ The institute did publish Zikhroynes fun a shriftzetser (Memoirs of a Compositor) by Samuel Schoenfeld, who had responded not to the original autobiography contest but to a later call for manuscripts from members of the typographical union. In his preface to Schoenfeld’s book, Weinreich explained the importance that Yivo attributed to such “life documents,” giving due credit to the influence of Thomas and Znaniecki, and he reported that even before the war Yivo had considered publication of some of the life documents it had assembled in Poland. As both Weinreich and the title page indicated, Schoenfeld’s book was supposed to be the first volume of a “Yivo Personal Documents Series,” but no other titles appeared. At least one of the prize-winners from the contest, however, published his own work with editorial assistance from Kligsberg and an imprimatur from Weinreich. ⁶⁴

Yivo scholars also made scant use of the autobiographies. In addition to his analysis of the social-psychological problems inherent in the contest itself, Kligsberg published two other articles based on the collection. Both articles, one appearing in 1948, the other in 1967, stressed the aspirations of immigrant Jews for upward social mobility as well as their own perceptions of success in achieving it. The autobiographers, Kligsberg reported in the earlier article, were nearly unanimous in their satisfaction with their decision to emigrate and with their lives in America. Later he expanded on this theme, using several case studies to explore the role that culture played in Jewish business success. In 1948 Kligsberg conceded that the wording of the contest theme may have encouraged satisfied entrants, but by 1967 he was convinced that the structure of the contest ensured that the writers would “succumb” to neither “the temptations of self-congratulation” nor “apologetics.” ⁶⁵

In addition, the two-volume history of the Jewish labor movement in America published by Yivo in 1943 and 1945 under the editorship of Elias Tcherikower made use of four autobiographies, including that of the second-prize winner. (It is not clear, however, whether the others were actually produced in response to the contest). Perhaps the four projected additional volumes of the history of the Jewish labor movement would have incorporated more of the autobiographical material. But Tcherikower, the guiding light of that project, died in 1943, and the subsequent volumes never appeared. Some student fellows associated with Yivo apparently also wrote unpublished papers based on the material. ⁶⁶

Why did Yivo’s scholars do so little with the autobiography collection? It certainly had nothing to do with the quality of the material; the institute rightly characterized the collection as an important set of documents concerning Jewish life in both Eastern Europe and America. Nevertheless, the nature of the material itself undoubtedly had something to do with Yivo’s failure to make more use of it. Scholars have always been torn between two inclinations concerning the proper use of such documents. On the one hand, such texts offer the advantages of sustained narratives showing the impact of social conditions on individual lives over long periods of time. Even more important, they express the point of view of the subjects of study themselves. For both of these reasons some have felt that they are best presented whole, with minimal intervention by scholars. On the other hand, as Kligsberg pointed out, social scientists and historians look for general trends. They are therefore often tempted to use the autobiographies as storehouses of bits of information to be extracted and reconstituted in narratives of their own devising. It may be that, despite Yivo’s methodological commitment to the use of life histories in its research, it was unsure of exactly what to do with the documents it had collected.

In addition, despite Weinreich’s assertion that the methodology of The Polish Peasant had gained in influence by the 1940s, the opposite was true. By the 1930s, many American social scientists criticized the work of Thomas and Znaniecki, questioning whether the reliance on life narratives could possibly yield enough representative data to draw scientifically valid general conclusions. ⁶⁷

Subsequent historians have consulted the autobiographies, but the collection nevertheless remains underutilized. Unable to read Yiddish, some scholars who have taken an interest in the history of East European Jewish immigration have found the language barrier insurmountable. Ironically, the growing interest since the early 1970s of historians in the life-histories of workers, immigrants, women, and others has further marginalized the Yivo autobiographies. As oral historians have helped to create new bodies of first-person narratives, again mostly in English and in formats designed by the historians themselves, the 1942 autobiographies have come to seem less unique. Moreover, the research questions driving the new narrative projects, with their emphasis on resistance to American culture, differed from those that governed the Yivo contest. ⁶⁸ Perhaps the greatest legacy of the autobiographies, as Weinreich promised, was that Yivo would keep them “like an eternal treasury of Jewish studies and Jewish culture.” ⁶⁹