Different (Key)strokes: The Yiddish Typewriter and the Standardization of Modernity

• In Event: The Modes and Objects of Yiddish Popular Culture

Abstract

Looking at the history and features of the Yiddish typewriter, I explore the instances when it can—and, more importantly, CANNOT—do the symbolic work of stabilizing subjectivity. Through this analysis, I situate the Yiddish typewriter within the landscape of the broader effort to make Yiddish recognizable as a modern, literary language, which can be discussed in modern terms and in relation to other modern languages. Media theorist Friedrich Kittler shows the typewriter to be a transformative force in Western culture in the 20th century. It turns writing into a series of countable, spatialized signs, it distances the hand and eye from the act of writing, relegating both to the keyboard, and it standardizes the writing itself. This paper takes as its starting point this understanding of the role of the typewriter in the 20th century discourse network and probes the points of tension between Kittler’s theoretical framework and the ontology of the Yiddish typewriter. It draws on an array of sources, including newspaper advertisements, works of fiction and memoir, and samples of typewritten text. The most important sources, however, are the machines themselves. Variations in appearance and functionality over time and between manufacturers reveal the variegated roles the machines play. Multilingual machines—and the advertising strategies for those machines—demonstrate the impossibility for a 20th century Yiddish speaker and writer to exist within the bounds of the signs displayed on a Latin keyboard alone, or a Yiddish keyboard alone. The inconsistent inclusion of doubled letters and of characters with and without diacritics points to the ideological weight of orthography in Yiddish writing, and therefore to the ramifications of a keyboard which cannot be standardized fully—and of the attempts to do so anyway. Furthermore, the mechanical, functional, and visual proximity between the Yiddish typewriter and the Hebrew typewriter call into question the existence of a consistent demarcation between a Yiddish typewriter and a non-Yiddish typewriter. These features of the machine and its development inform the encounter between the typewriter (the person) and the typewriter (the machine) and collapse the theory of the typewriter as a tool for standardizing sense-making.

Author

• Sophia Elizabeth Shoulson, Johns Hopkins University