Abraham Tabachnik and the Hope of Recording

• In Event: Digital Jewish Culture: From Documentation to Interpretation

Abstract

In the mid-1950s, the Yiddish poet Abraham Tabachnik recorded a series of poetry readings and interviews with Yiddish poets in New York. Tabachnik's essay proclaiming the project hinged on the aesthetic - historic values embedded in recordings: "A poet's voice," he wrote, "is... no less important for future generations than photographs of him as a child, a bridegroom, or a firefighter, like Peretz." Yet Tabachnick was forced to rely on a much older mechanism and technology to transmit the project: the printed literary journal. This paper pursues Tabachnik's series as a series of hopes: hope in the existence of future generations (an audience), hope in technology (preservation and reproduction), hope in the possibility of the archive (access). It sets these series of hopes against Tabachnik's aesthetics and the physical story of the of the recordings the path from New York to the Jewish Public Library of Montreal to the Yiddish Book Center's digital library.

Author

• Eitan Kensky, Stanford University