Between Exclusion and Belonging: Beethoven in Interwar Yiddish Children’s Books

• In Event: Jewish Belonging in the Second Polish Republic

Abstract

In a trio of Yiddish-language children’s books published in Warsaw and Vilna in the late 1910s and early 1920s, three Jewish writers found an unexpected topic: the life of German composer Ludwig van Beethoven. All three authors were deeply involved with efforts to create a secular Yiddish school system—and a morally uplifting canon of Yiddish children’s books for use in those schools. The authors’ fictionalized versions of Beethoven emerge not only as a hero and role model for young Yiddish speakers, but also an honorary Jew. He was not only an appealing symbol of Enlightenment universalism, but also a figure who could absorb narratives of difference, exclusion, and suffering—and eventual triumph over adversity. Focusing on one writer, David Kasel, and his book Di kindhayt fun a groysen menshen (The childhood of a great man), this paper examines how Polish Jews imagined a future for their children—a future in which those children would, like Beethoven, overcome exclusion and find belonging at the very center of European culture.

Author

• Jules Riegel, Harvard U