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Salvaging a Polish-Yiddish Literary Heritage in New York, 1946

Mon, December 18, 5:00 to 6:30pm, Marriott Marquis Washington, DC, Union Station Room

Abstract

Edited by two Polish Yiddish writers, Y.Y. Trunk and Aaron Zeitlin that fled to New York in 1940-1941, Antologye fun der yidisher proze in Poyln tvishn di tsvey velt-milkhomes was published in 1946 by the Tsiko publishing house. It consisted of short stories and excerpts from novels by 32 Polish Yiddish writers most of whom perished in the Holocaust. Only a few survived and escaped to Stockholm, Melbourne, Tel Aviv, Montreal, and New York. Only two remained in Poland after 1945. As Yitskhok Bashevis summed up in his Forverts review: ‘Ot dos hot di tsayt un der soyne gemakht fun di yidishe shrayber fun Poyln: getoyt, fartribn, tsevorfn.’ (The passing of time and the enemy did this to the Yiddish writers in Poland: killed, expelled, cast out)
In this paper, I will discuss how the different critical credos of the two editors are reflected in the selection of texts for the anthology. Trunk was a literary critic who had published books about contemporary Yiddish literature and Scholem-Aleichem in interwar Poland. He completed the critical work Yiddish Literature Between the Two World Wars in 1942. It was published as vol. 46 in the book series Dos poylishe yidntum in 1951. This book is a blueprint for Trunk’s a Bundist ideology that informed his selection of texts for the anthology. As a result, the anthology’s texts are deeply rooted in the Polish-Jewish landscape and embody in literary form the Bundist term of doikeyt (hereness).
Aaron Zeitlin’s criticism combined neo-Hasidism, supernaturalism and neo-romanticism that highlighted a very different approach to Polish Yiddish literature. I will analyse how the two editors’ different views of Yiddish literature resulted in an idiosyncratic and incomplete selection of texts. Nevertheless, the anthology succeeded in salvaging a small, cohesive selection of the Polish Yiddish literary heritage for a post-war Yiddish readership.

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