Jewish People, Yiddish Nation: Noah Prylucki and the Folkists in Poland by Kalman Weiser (review)

Other than experts in the field of Yiddish cultural studies, it is unlikely that most scholars of modern Jewish history today will have heard of Noah Prylucki (1882–1941). In the decades following World War I, however, Prylucki was among the most widely known and discussed Jewish political and cultural leaders in Poland. In his various capacities as attorney, folklorist, theater critic, politician, editor, philologist, and professor, he exerted an influence on Polish Jewry that was without parallel. As a significant new biographical study of Prylucki and the Folksparty movement of pre-World War II Poland by York University scholar Kalman (Keith) Weiser shows, the Autonomist ideals of the historian Simon Dubnow attracted Prylucki at an early age and he sought to construct a space within independent Poland in which Jews could live free from anti-semitism, rule over their own affairs, and conduct their lives fully in the Yiddish language.

Given the large number of better-known Eastern European Jewish intellectuals such as Dubnow and Max Weinreich for whom we still lack full-scale English-language biographies, Prylucki may seem a curious choice. Yet Weiser does not err in choosing to single him out for consideration. This highly-detailed account of Prylucki is encyclopedic in its scope and is supported by both archival research from several countries as well as published sources in half a dozen languages. It demonstrates well—unlike many books on the topic—that one can understand Polish Jewish life without focusing on its ideological extremes. Neither an orthodox Jew, communist, socialist, revisionist (or even mainstream) Zionist, Prylucki sought to chart a middle path for Jewish nationalism at a time when more utopian visions captivated much of Polish Jewish society.

In addition, Prylucki’s path to Yiddish activism differed from that of many of his Yiddishist and Diaspora Nationalist colleagues. He was not, like so many others, a product of the kheyder and yeshiva who transferred his religious fervor to the revolutionary movement in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. Instead, he was raised in a secularized middle-class Jewish home dominated by his father Tsevi’s Zionism, and he received a Russian state education. Although an advocate for left-wing Zionism while a law student at the University of Warsaw (from which he was expelled for his activism), he turned toward Yiddishism and Diaspora Nationalism by the time of the Czernowitz Yiddish language conference in 1908. Based in Warsaw for much of his adult life, Prylucki was active in both cultural and political realms. He was a patron to Yiddish authors, an advocate for Yiddish secular schools, a collector of folklore, and a founder of and regular contributor to the Yiddish daily Der Moment. During World War I, while Warsaw was under German occupation, he helped establish and lead the reconstituted Folksparty, a political party established in 1916 and inspired by Dubnow. Although the Folksparty never garnered much support, its platform of Jewish cultural autonomy and insistence on the vitality and necessity of Yiddish persuaded Zionists to adopt a more sympathetic stance towards the language. Prylucki’s political career in the Polish Sejm was short-lived, however, as he was expelled by opponents on a technicality, but only after making a record-setting number of speeches on the parliamentary floor.

Rather than disappear after the collapse of his political career (which was over by the mid-1920s), Prylucki instead plunged headlong into Jewish cultural and communal work. He toured the United States on behalf of pogrom victims (even meeting with President Warren Harding), spent time in Paris, wrote groundbreaking works on Yiddish linguistics that helped lead to its standardization, joined the philological section of the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO), and continued to advocate for the centrality of Yiddish in Jewish national development. With the September 1, 1939 German invasion of Poland, Prylucki fled to Vilnius, which soon came under Soviet occupation. In what many viewed...