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YIDDISH LITERATURE IN AMERICA, 1870 — 2000 Anthology in Two Volumes, Vol. I Emanuel S. Goldsmith, Editor Congress for Jewish Culture, New York, 1999

In the May 1969 issue of Yugntruf, a slim but passionate Yiddish journal published by young adherents, that was dedicated to the memory of both Max and Uriel Weinreich (father and the son who predeceased him), there appeared an article by a Rabbi E. Goldsmith. The author, a doctoral candidate at Brandeis at the time, who was preparing a dissertation on the oeuvre of the pious, metaphysical protester poet Aaron Zeitlin, traced his concentration in Yiddish literature to an earlier chance event — a guest lecture at New York City College Hillel by Professor Max Weinreich. A short while later they met casually in the subway and walked together to the college where one was an undergraduate and simultaneously a pre-rabbinic student at the Jewish Theological Seminary and the elder, Dr. Weinreich, and august member of the faculty in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages. Weinreich's near-magical inspiration propelled the young man into introductory courses in Yiddish literature — and the rest is history.

Today Emanuel Goldsmith is one of the major exponents in the tough business of earnest perusal of Yiddish literature. Moreover, he is a rare — in fact the sole — exemplar in this field in the Rabbinate, anywhere.

Volume I of a two-volume Anthology of Yiddish Literature in America, 1870 — 2000 was published by the Yiddisher Kultur-Kongress so late in 1999 that one can safely proclaim this encyclopedic work as the very first serious one of the year 2000. (Norton beware, there is another volume, equally exhaustive, on the way!)

Goldsmith, the consummate investigator, takes the reader — scholar, teacher, student, Yiddish enthusiast — back to the earliest sproutings of "true literature" here in the latter third of the 19th century in Vol. 1. With very few exceptions the writers, poets, essayists and dramatists were not born in North America. They arrived at various ages ranging from young boyhood through mid-life and include many who only began to publish on these shores. Other writers already matured and acknowledged in Eastern Europe, reestablished a home and literary reputation in this milieu.

In his sampling Goldsmith has defied prior categorization based on academic "canon," on political affiliation, on social admissibility and organizational favoritism that reigned in the unruly Jewish institutional and communal experience. Within the list of 50 names in Vol. I alone are some no longer recognized by the reader of today. Whose eyes glimmer in response to names like Sharkanski, Libin, Kobrin, Maslyanski, or Entin, to recall just a few who were widely read and admired eighty years ago? Each of the fifty individually, and the mosaic together, exemplify and amplify his appraisal of the underlying and unifying philosophy, of the literary sweep and of the inner soul of the Yiddish writer on American soil. The prefatory article is beautifully laid out, like an architectural vision and blueprint in the planning of a multipurpose edifice. The introduction, presented in both Yiddish and in English, could easily stand alone as a fine critical analysis of the earlier half of those 130 years.

Goldsmith is a rabbi at heart and by almost filial dedication to Mordecai Kaplan, a Reconstructionist and a prolific writer in support of these aspects of his calling. His literary pursuits, as a professor of Hebrew and of Yiddish literature, further converge to support his convictions and belief in the enduring valences of refashioned Yiddishism as a mortar capable of holding disparate blocks of Jewishness together. He has argued in his writing and teaching, that the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, is hardly over but remains an ongoing readaptation and that the Yiddish component in that process is a potent vector that must be reckoned into the total.

In the mammoth task of finding and choosing the most appropriate samples to include in this emblematic anthology, Goldsmith does not overturn the conventional categories of time, form and content. Rather, he binds social revolutionaries, radicals, innovators, traditionalists, impressionists, and Utopians — or better, he loops them — into a Jewish continuity. Let it be remembered, of course, these successive waves of modernisms were generated here and emanated from the avant-garde of resident American groups and figures. They did not emulate nor did they wish to reflect contemporaneous work being published in Warsaw, Lodz, Berlin or Vilna during the pre-World War II decades, when contact was rich and mutual.

Goldsmith moves beyond the allocated plots and "schools" that previous and present establishments have named and into which they admitted or kidnapped the writers and poets whom they knew, or assisted or exploited for political and institutional benefit. By means of his choices and the sequence of presentation he extracts the national historicity and Jewish essence that his protagonists bring to the literary kaleidoscope. His sampling highlights the changing manifestations of these impelling forces as they are implemented within an American corpus that keeps changing in format and expression as it perforce learns from and adapts to the non-Jewish literary energies within which it is forever recreating itself. It will not do to approach this anthology with fixed and fervent preconceptions. This reviewer admits to gasping more than once at associations previously overlooked but suddenly made clear in the configurations of this galaxy.

Yiddish Literature in America, Vol. I is still very new on our bookshelves. Most devotees of Yiddish literature, even professionals, are barely aware of this new storehouse and certainly have not yet turned its pages. One must assume that good libraries, Judaica or Jewish Studies Departments in universities and even JCCs that still care about their cultural forebears will acquire and use this collection. But this new book deserves far wider distribution and appreciation. It could and should become a sourcebook for classes in American Literature, American Ethnic Studies, Jewish/American (or A/J) Experience, Immigrant Acculturation and for the respective courses with historical or sociological perspectives. It will certainly become a major text in "Yiddish-Lit" and "Jewish-Civ-and Lit" courses.

The typeset is modern, sunlit and highly readable. The orthography is fully normalized (i.e., standardized). Each writer's work is prefaced by a portrait, dates of birth and death and, wherever available, at least one facsimile of the frontispiece, frequently illustrated, of a publication. The visual component immediately places the writer in a temporal context.

Given reasonable anticipation of funding, the second volume will appear within the next half decade and will include a brief synopsis of each protagonist; place of birth, age at arrival to North America and a few other salient facts. For the intelligent reader and especially for the teacher of any of the courses mentioned earlier such data are almost inaccessible outside of major Jewish cities. And in this area the Internet is still very barren.

Incipient effort has been launched to gather a team of translators who will make these collected materials available in contemporary and creditable English to a Yiddish-impaired readership. And this reviewer takes comfort in the promise that the proportion of women represented in Vol. II will rise significantly, reflecting the far greater number of female writers during the latter three-quarters of the 20th century.

Emanuel Goldsmith has performed a major service — actually a mitzva. He has achieved the first milestone of a hallowed task, whereby scholars, rabbis and compilers throughout Jewish literary history have collected, edited and published units from variegated oral sources and miscellaneous nonmatching publications into coherent anthologies. From the Bible itself, through the Oral Torah, on to the Responsa and commentators, the legal codes of Joseph Karo and the REMA (Moshe Isserles) to the En Yaakov (which our grandparents fondly called Ayen Yankev), certainly Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews and Bialik and Ravnitzki's Agadas, just to name a very few, over to the more "secular" collections for adults and for schools that tapped the growing bounty of Yiddish writing in our century — such lasting collections most frequently represented the heroic investment by a dedicated and persistent scholar. Our new Anthology becomes a member of the continuing list.

Yiddishland has neither Capital nor National Library. There is no one place — not even the stacks of self-proclaimed redemptive institutions that acquire and purvey Yiddish literature of all kinds from all sources — that teaches its citizens a course in the consolidated history and variety of American Yiddish Literature, certainly not from the pages of one book! This Anthology marks the beginning.