CHILDREN

AND YIDDISH LITERATURE

FROM EARLY MODERNITY TO POST-MODERNITY


LEGENDA
LEGENDA, founded in 1995 by the European Humanities Research Centre of the University of
Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge.
Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view
of the modern humanities, including works on Arabic, Catalan, English, French, German,
Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. an Editorial Board of
distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly bodies such
as the Society for French Studies, the British Comparative Literature Association and the
Association of Hispanists of great Britain & Ireland.

MHRA
The Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA) encourages and promotes advanced
study and research in the field of the modern humanities, especially modern European
languages and literature, including English, and also cinema. It aims to break down the barriers
between scholars working in different disciplines and to maintain the unity of humanistic
scholarship in the face of increasing specialization. The Association fulfils this purpose
through the publication of journals, bibliographies, monographs, critical editions, and the
MHRA Style Guide, and by making grants in support of research.
www.mhra.org.uk

Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the
humanities and social sciences. Founded in 1836, it has published many of the greatest thinkers
and scholars of the last hundred years, including adorno, Einstein, Russell, Popper,
Wittgenstein, Jung, Bohm, Hayek, McLuhan, Marcuse and Sartre. Today Routledge is one of the
world’s leading academic publishers in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It publishes
thousands of books and journals each year, serving scholars, instructors, and professional
communities worldwide.
www.routledge.com


EDITORIAL BOARD
Chairman
Professor Colin Davis, Royal Holloway, University of London
Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (French)
Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish)
Professor anne Fuchs, University of Warwick (German)
Professor Paul garner, University of Leeds (Spanish)
Professor andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex (English)
Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret,
Queen Mary University of London (French)
Professor Catriona Kelly, new College, Oxford (Russian)
Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford (Italian)
Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (Linguistics)
Professor Peter Matthews, St John’s College, Cambridge (Linguistics)
dr Stephen Parkinson, Linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese)
Professor Suzanne Raitt, William and Mary College, Virginia (English)
Professor Ritchie Robertson, The Queen’s College, Oxford (German)
Professor David Shepherd, Keele University (Russian)
Professor Michael Sheringham, all Souls College, Oxford (French)
Professor Alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish)
Professor David Treece, King’s College London (Portuguese)

Managing Editor
Dr Graham Nelson
41 Wellington Square, Oxford OXI 2JF, UK

www.legendabooks.com

STUDIES IN YIDDISH

Legenda Studies in Yiddish embrace all aspects of Yiddish culture and literature. The series
regularly publishes the proceedings of the International Mendel Friedman Conferences on
Yiddish Studies, which are convened every two years by the European Humanities Research
Centre of the University of Oxford.

PUBLISHED IN THIS SERIES

1. Yiddish in the Contemporary World

2. The Shtetl: Image and Reality
3. Yiddish and the Left
ed. by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov
4. The Jewish Pope: Myth, Diaspora and Yiddish Literature, by Joseph Sherman
5. The Yiddish Presence in European Literature: Inspiration and Interaction
ed. by Joseph Sherman and Ritchie Robertson
6. David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism ed. by Joseph Sherman and
Gennady Estraikh
7. Yiddish in the Cold War, by Gennady Estraikh
8. Yiddish in Weimar Berlin: At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture, ed. by
Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov
9. A Captive of the Dawn: The Life and Work of Peretz Markish (1895–1952), ed. by Joseph
Sherman, Gennady Estraikh, Jordan Finkin, and David Shneer
10. Translating Sholem Aleichem: History, Politics and Art, ed. by Gennady Estraikh, Jordan
Finkin, Kerstin Hoge and Mikhail Krutikov
11. Joseph Opatoshu: A Yiddish Writer between Europe and America, ed. by Sabine Koller,
Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov
12. Uncovering the Hidden: The Works and Life of Der Nister, ed. by Gennady Estraikh,
Kerstin Hoge and Mikhail Krutikov
13. Worlds of Yiddish Literature, ed. by Simon Neuberg and Diana Matut
14. Children and Yiddish Literature: From Early Modernity to Post-Modernity, ed. by
Gennady Estraikh, Kerstin Hoge and Mikhail Krutikov
15. Three Cities of Yiddish: St Petersburg, Warsaw and Moscow, ed. by Gennady Estraikh
and Mikhail Krutikov

www.legendabooks.com/series/siy


Children and Yiddish Literature

From Early Modernity to Post-Modernity

EDITED BY GENNADY ESTRAIKH,
KERSTIN HOGE AND MIKHAIL KRUTIKOV

LEGENDA
Studies in Yiddish 14
Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2016

Published by the
Modern Humanities Research Association
Salisbury House, Station Road, Cambridge CB1 2LA
and
Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

LEGENDA is an imprint of the

Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

ISBN 978-1-909662-33-9 (hbk)

ISBN 978-1-315-56061-8 (ebk)

First published 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or disseminated or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in any retrieval system, or otherwise
used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the copyright owner.

Disclaimer: Statements of fact and opinion contained in this book are those of the author and not of the editors,
Routledge, or the Modern Humanities Research Association. The publisher makes no representation, express or implied,
in respect of the accuracy of the material in this book and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability for any
errors or omissions that may be made.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested

© Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2016

Printed in Great Britain

Cover: 875 Design

Copy-Editor: Dr Anna J. Davies



CONTENTS

Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Introduction: Yiddish Writing for and about Children

1 The Spanish Pagan Woman and Ashkenazi Children Reading Yiddish circa 1700
SHLOMO BERGER

2 The Sabbath Tale and Jewish Cultural Renewal

MIRIAM UDEL

3 Heavenly Father: Portraying the Family in Hasidic Yiddish Children’s Literature

ASYA VAISMAN SCHULMAN

4 The Design of Books and Lives: Yiddish Children’s Book Art by Artists from the Kiev
Kultur-Lige
KERSTIN HOGE

5 Illustrating Yiddish Children’s Literature: Aesthetics and Utopia in Lissitzky’s Graphics

for Mani Leib’s Yingl Tsingl Khvat
SABINE KOLLER

6 Reading Soviet-Yiddish Poetry for Children: Der Nister’s Mayselekh in ferzn 1917–39
DANIELA MANTOVAN

7 An End to Fairy Tales: The 1930s in the mayselekh of Der Nister and Leyb Kvitko
MIKHAIL KRUTIKOV

8 The Upside-Down World of Baym Dnyepr: Penek

HARRIET MURAV

9 Jewish Wards of the Soviet State: Fayvl Sito’s These Are Us

GENNADY ESTRAIKH

10 ‘A Language Is Like a Garden’: Shloyme Davidman and the Yiddish Communist School
Movement in the United States
JENNIFER YOUNG

11 Soviet Propaganda in Illustrated Yiddish Children’s Books: From the Collections of the
YIVO Library, New York
LYUDMILA SHOLOKHOVA

Index



This volume is dedicated to the memory of our dear friend and colleague SHLOMO BERGER
(1953–2015)
Zol er hobn a likhtikn gan-eydn


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors wish to thank the Mendel Friedman Fund and the Faculty of Medieval and Modern
Languages, University of Oxford, for sponsoring the publication of this volume. We offer warm
thanks to Jack and Naomi Friedman for their generous and extensive support of Yiddish studies
at Oxford, which made possible the conference at which this book began to take its shape.
Thanks are due to all participants at this conference, and to St Hilda’s College, Oxford, which
superbly hosted the event. Copy-editing of this book was skilfully provided by Anna Davies.
Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the help, support and expertise of Graham Nelson,
Managing Editor of Legenda Press, without whose expertise and patience this book would
have been much poorer.

G.E., K.H. & M.K., September 2015


LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Shlomo Berger, Professor of Yiddish Studies, University of Amsterdam
Gennady Estraikh, Associate Professor of Yiddish Studies, New York University
Kerstin Hoge, Associate Professor in German Linguistics, University of Oxford
Sabine Koller, Professor of Slavic-Jewish Studies, Regensburg University
Mikhail Krutikov, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Judaic Studies,
University of Michigan
Daniela Mantovan, Lecturer/Research Fellow in East European History, University of
Heidelberg
Harriet Murav, Professor of Slavic and Comparative and World Literature, University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Asya Vaisman Schulman, Director of the Yiddish Language Institute at the Yiddish Book Center
and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Hampshire College
Lyudmila Sholokhova, Head Librarian, Acting Chief Archivist, YIVO Institute for Jewish
Research
Miriam Udel, Associate Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture, Emory
University
Jennifer Young, Director of Education, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research


INTRODUCTION

Yiddish Writing for and about Children

Yiddish, for nearly one thousand years the mame-loshn (‘mother tongue’) of Ashkenazi Jews,
was traditionally the main language mediating education and entertainment for its speakers. It
was the language in which children first encountered the (Jewish) world, and which defined
recreational reading outside the (for males) obligatory framework of formal study.
In the medieval and early modern periods, reading for entertainment most likely included
children, but it only rarely acknowledged them. The Yiddish literary scholar Chone Shmeruk
draws attention to two eighteenth-century mayses (‘stories’), which list children among their
addressees on the title page, and thereby attest to the existence of a child readership.1
However, as Shmeruk observes, child and adult readers were not usually recognized as
distinct groups; and with no books specifically created for a child readership, children’s
reading did (and could) not greatly differ from that of adults.
The first public calls to create texts just for children (described by Shmeruk as ‘naïve and
moralising’),2 appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century, to which the writer and
editor Mordkhe Spektor (1858–1925) responded with the publication of the collection
Yontevdike dertseylungen (Holiday Tales, 1888/9). While, according to Shmeruk, ‘it is
doubtful that there is even one story in that book which we would find appropriate for children
today’, Spektor must be credited with putting children’s writing on the agenda of modern
Yiddish literature. It was Spektor’s friend and colleague Sholem Aleichem who published Dos
meserl (The Pocketknife, 1887), often claimed to constitute the beginning of Yiddish children’s
literature.3 However, the genesis of Dos meserl suggests that it was not conceived as a work
explicitly aimed at children, which problematizes its classification as children’s literature and
draws attention to the difficulties of defining and delimiting the genre.
What is not in doubt is that the flourishing of Yiddish children’s literature was inextricably
linked to the emergence of modern secular Jewish schools (in Yiddish as well as Hebrew) at
the turn of the twentieth century. These news schools reflected and arose out of the project of
Jewish national revival, which, in the words of Kenneth Moss, ‘aimed at nothing short of
cultural revolution in — and through — the lives of Jewish children’.4 Modernity, which saw
the emergence not only of new political ideologies but also of new psychological and
pedagogical theories, prompted a radical revision of the understanding of the Jewish child,
questioning the traditional curriculum and methods of the kheyder, the religious elementary
school for boys. The kheyder largely ignored children’s interests, abilities and environment,
and, like the community as a whole, had no conception of children as essentially different from
adults. The Yiddish critic and cultural activist Shmuel Niger (1883–1955) aptly made this
point when in his 1935 survey of the state of Yiddish children’s literature,5 he equated the
traditional view of a Jewish child with the description of young Hershele in Mendele Moyker
Sforim’s novel Dos vintshfingerl (The Wishing Ring, 1865): ‘[…] a miniature adult:
distracted, depressed, with a careworn face and all mannerism of the adult Jew with a family
to support. All he needed was the beard.’ As Mendele observed with bitter irony, with Jewish
life so short and full of sorrows, ‘there’s no time left over for childhood’.6
For Niger, only secular Yiddish schools could secure the future of Yiddish literature.
Moreover, he considered children’s literature — an essential part of the Yiddish school
movement, which had elevated Yiddish from a mere medium to the focus of instruction — to be
one of the key components of Yiddish cultural survival. While the first creators and publishers
of Yiddish children’s literature had been teachers, the production of children’s literature soon
became an area of activity for Yiddish cultural organizations and institutions, stalled only
temporarily by the outbreak of World War I.
The end of World War I saw a surge of interest in Yiddish children’s literature, in part
because the collapse of the Russian monarchy in 1917 eliminated all restrictions on Jewish
cultural and political activities, but also because the war had produced vast numbers of
orphaned, homeless and displaced children, which created an urgent need for educational
institutions and materials. In the words of Niger, World War I was a mazl (‘good luck’) for
Jewish education, enabling children’s literature to become the most dynamic and creative
branch of Yiddish cultural production. Its main centres of activity were in Vilna and Kiev, with
considerable number of children’s books also published in Odessa, Moscow, Petrograd and
Warsaw.
It was in the early years of the Russian Revolution that Yiddish children’s literature became
the home of new artistic forms of expression and content. During this short but crucial period,
Yiddish poets and writers like David Hofstheyn, Leib Kvitko and Der Nister wrote modernist
prose and poetry for children. Their books were illustrated by Jewish artists like Marc Chagall
and El Lissitzky, who, along with Yosef Chaikov and Issakhar Ber Ryback, developed
strikingly new styles, creating an avant-garde book art that placed children’s literature at the
very centre of artistic vision. Writers and artists alike saw children’s literature as an integral
part of the comprehensive project of creating a new secular Yiddish culture — a project,
which found its institutional realization in the framework of the Kultur-Lige, the Yiddish
‘league for culture’, founded in early 1918 in Kiev.
In these early interwar years, Yiddish children’s literature became an established arm of
cultural activity in all three centres of Yiddish culture, viz. the Soviet Union, (non-communist)
Eastern Europe and North America. The artistic exchange and cross-fertilization that existed in
these cultural spaces also involved children’s literature, with Yingl tsingl khvat (The
Mischievous Boy, 1919) written by the American poet Mani Leyb and illustrated by Lissitzky
as one of the most remarkable examples of collaboration between Eastern European and
American artists. In all three Yiddish-speaking centres, children’s literature occupied an
important place on the agenda of cultural and political institutions, as reflected in the existence
of specialized press and publishing houses, and, perhaps most importantly, dedicated groups of
professional writers and educators who, regardless of whether they affiliated with socialist,
Zionist, or traditionalist viewpoints, shared Niger’s conviction that the future of Yiddish
culture was dependent on education.
 In the Soviet Union, children’s literature became the most successful and viable branch of
Yiddish literature, even after the forced dissolution of the Kiev Kultur-Lige by the Bolsheviks.
In fact, it enjoyed increasing popularity by means of translation into other languages, especially
Russian and Ukrainian. In Eastern Europe, children’s literature maintained its close link to
Yiddishist education. Schools, summer camps and youth clubs operating under the auspices of
different political and religious institutions all provided receptive audiences for a great variety
of literary production. In North America, Jewish cultural organizations, which had originally
catered to adult working-class immigrants, gradually expanded their reach, and here, too, a
network of youth organizations was created, with the dual aim of promoting ideology and
countering assimilation. Despite political divisions, ideological and cultural difficulties (as
well as financial constraints), children’s literature was arguably the most dynamic and
globalized branch of Yiddish cultural production. As such, it may have benefited from the
marginalized space standardly allocated to children’s literature. Deemed on the whole to be
less important than ‘serious’ adult literature, children’s literature could carve out a greater
degree of freedom, attracting less attention and censorship from both inside and outside
authorities.
While Yiddish children’s literature has from its outset been the subject of critical discussion
and academic study, for the most part this discourse has been conducted in Yiddish and
Hebrew. Indeed, the bibliography to the informative entry on this subject in the 2008 YIVO
Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, written by the eminent Israeli scholar Adina Bar-El,
contains no references in English. Consequently, Yiddish has had little impact on children’s
literature studies more widely. The present volume in no way pretends to offer a
comprehensive picture of Yiddish children’s literature, but hopes that it can help bring the
subject to the attention of a broader scholarly community, marking new avenues of research.
The collection of articles presented here, which grew out of the 2013 Mendel Friedman
conference on this topic at the University of Oxford, includes contributions that address
Yiddish writing for and about children. The chapters that make up this book are arranged in
three sections: (i) ‘Yiddish Children’s Literature and the Role of Tradition’; (ii) ‘Yiddish
Children’s Literature in its Engagement with Literary and Aesthetic Modernity’; and (iii)
‘Children and the Yiddish Communist Experience’.
The first section, ‘Yiddish Children’s Literature and the Role of Tradition’, contains three
articles that address either the tradition of Yiddish children’s literature or the representation of
tradition in Yiddish children’s literature. Shlomo Berger’s chapter, ‘The Spanish Pagan
Woman and Ashkenazi Children Reading Yiddish during the Eighteenth Century’, is concerned
with early modern Yiddish literature. Providing a close analysis of a Yiddish adaptation of a
seventeenth-century Dutch poem (which in turn is based on a novella by Cervantes), Berger
argues for the text to belong to a literature on the border between traditional Judaism and
European culture. On the one hand, Yiddish mayses were perceived as the entry point into the
life-long process of learning that was the cornerstone of traditional Ashkenazi culture; on the
other hand, Yiddish functioned as a ‘buffer language that enabled the absorption of the
surrounding non-Jewish culture’. Designating texts like The Spanish Pagan Woman as texts for
children (by ostensibly claiming that they could aid children’s literacy skills) meant that a
work could be ‘tolerated and eventually accepted as permissible and rightful literature’.
 Miriam Udel’s contribution, ‘The Sabbath Tale and Jewish Cultural Renewal’, analyses two
children’s stories from the ‘golden age’ of interwar Yiddish children’s literature, viz. Yankev
Pat’s Der vunderlekher leyb (The Magic Lion, 1921) and Yaakov Fichmann’s Shabes in vald
(Sabbath in the Forest, 1924). Unexpectedly, given the authors’ socialist allegiances, these
folktales for elementary school-aged children are wonder tales that celebrate the resolute
observance of the Sabbath in face of a host of fantastical obstacles. In Udel’s reading, the
stories ‘enact a mutual accommodation between religio-halakhic ideals and more broadly
universalist ones’, highlighting the ‘dialectical tension between religion and secularity in the
quest for authentic modern yidishkayt’.
Traditional Jewish religious life forms the background to the final chapter in this section,
Asya Vaisman Schulman’s ‘Heavenly Father: Portraying the Family in Hasidic Yiddish
Children’s Literature’, which explores the depiction of gender roles in books for small
children produced in and for the ultra-Orthodox Yiddish-speaking community. Schulman shows
how these culturally sanctioned books serve to reinforce familial structures (and, for the
outside reader, provide surprising glimpses into ultra-Orthodox daily life, as when showing the
high degree of autonomy that children have in the busy Hasidic household). In line with the
religious proscription against wasting time (bitul zman), these books are characterized by a
distinctive didactic intent, teaching children that change, ‘whether in improving the behaviour
of a wilful child or in ensuring the recovery of a sick person’, can be enacted only with divine
help.
The second section of this volume, ‘Yiddish Children’s Literature in its Engagement with
Literary and Aesthetic Modernity’, encompasses five articles concerned with the impact of
avant-garde arts on the development of Yiddish children’s book art and Yiddish literature for
and about children. Two of the chapters focus on illustrations in Yiddish children’s books and
the activities of artists associated with the Kultur-Lige. In ‘The Design of Books and Lives:
Yiddish Book Art by Artists from the Kiev Kultur-Lige’, Kerstin Hoge takes a close look at
four Yiddish children’s books published in the period from 1917 to 1927 and illustrated by the
artists Chaikov, Ryback, Lissitzky and Meyer Akselrod. Considering the socio-historical and
ideological context in which these illustrations were produced, she argues that the artists take
up different positions in the debate about the place of Jewish folkloric tradition in the
development of a new Jewish art, which in turn can be shown to mirror the debate on the
nature of modern Yiddish literature conducted by writers and literary critics. Hoge then further
explores the theme of turning inwards and outwards by considering how Yiddish children’s
book art both reflected and exerted influence on aesthetics and practices in Russian children’s
book culture.
Sabine Koller’s chapter, ‘Illustrating Yiddish Children’s Literature: Aesthetics and Utopia
in Lissitzky’s Graphics for Mani Leib’s Yingl tsingl khvat’, examines the interaction of
folklore, poetry and visual arts in Soviet Yiddish books, providing a case study of the iconic
edition of Mani Leib’s poem Yingl tsingl khvat, with Lissitzky’s illustrations. By closely
examining the illustrations in conjunction with the text, Koller argues that Lissitzky’s
dissolution of boundaries between text and image mirrors the transgression of borders between
the real and the fantastic found in the poem. In Lissitzky’s treatment, the book becomes a
‘synthetic’ object of art, which represents both Jewish artistic utopia and an important step on
Lissitzky’s path to the universalist, suprematist stage in his artistic career.
The following two chapters address modernism in children’s literature, and in particular the
work of Der Nister. In ‘Reading Soviet-Yiddish Poetry for Children: Der Nister’s Mayselekh
inferzn, 1917–1939’, Daniela Mantovan traces the evolution of the genre of mayses in the
work of Der Nister, reading his stories as part of a complex and ambiguous dialectical process
of adjustment and resistance to increasing ideological pressure. Der Nister’s enigmatic poetic
mayselekh, most of which centre on death or illness, are argued to provide an encoded
criticism of the violence and cruelty that became an inherent element of Soviet reality.
Approaching Der Nister’s children’s poetry of the 1930s from a somewhat different angle,
Mikhail Krutikov’s contribution ‘An End to Fairy Tales: The 1930s in the Mayselekh of Der
Nister and Leyb Kvitko’, focuses on the ambiguity of the narrative voice. Krutikov suggests
that Der Nister’s apparently simplistic and naïve poems reflect his increasing sense of
insecurity and anxiety, which finds expression in his depiction of horrifying animal cruelty. Der
Nister’s troubling and dark imagery is contrasted with Kvitko’s optimistic representation of
pastoral life as a new ideal for Soviet Jewish future. In Kvitko’s world, violence is firmly
controlled by the authoritarian regime, whose semi-divine leader’s watchful eye allows both
people and animals to feel secure and happy.
The final chapter of this section, Harriet Murav’s ‘The Upside Down World of Baym
Dnyepr: Penek’, turns to writing about children. Published on the eve of the author’s return to
the Soviet Union in 1933, Bergelson’s autobiographical novel narrates the story of an unloved
child born to affluent elderly parents, and casts it as a tale of developing proletarian class
consciousness. Reading this ‘Soviet revolutionary Bildungsroman and … portrait of the artist
as a young man’ against the grain, Murav discovers episodes and images that subvert the
dominant ideological discourse by turning upside down the established and sanctioned order
that provides the foundation of the rational, hierarchical worldview. Murav argues that
Bergelson uses this carnivalized ‘upside down world’ to respond to the Stalinist terror of his
time, signalling an all-powerful counter-reality that cannot be suppressed or tamed by either
Marxism or education.
The third and final section of the book, ‘Children and the Yiddish Communist Experience’
contains three articles that trace children’s experiences of Yiddish political and cultural life in
Europe and North America. In the first chapter, ‘Jewish Wards of the Soviet State: Fayvl Sito’s
These Are Us’, Gennady Estraikh considers representations of children and childhood in Sito’s
autobiographical coming-of-age narrative, largely set in the Kharkiv Jewish children’s home
Kinderhoyz num. 40. Estraikh shows how in this text, as well as in Soviet pedagogy more
generally, the orphanage is portrayed as a model socialist republic, where the delinquent child
of the Civil War is reformed and ‘turned into an exemplary builder of communism’. Sito, who
‘never occupied a particularly visible place in the crowded Soviet Yiddish literary
landscape’, endorses internationalism over ethnic nationalism, depicting life in the orphanage
as devoid of Jewish traditions and fully integrated in Soviet society, with only the language,
characters’ names and the occasional appearance of Soviet and foreign Jewish aid
organizations as distinguishing Jewish features.
Jennifer Young’s ‘“A language is like a Garden”: Shloyme Davidman and the Yiddish
Communist School Movement in the United States’, appraises the changing agenda and context
of the American Yiddish progressive movement in the twentieth century through the biography
of the Yiddish educator Shloyme Davidman (1900–1974), a prolific author of stories for
children and Yiddish second-language learners. Young describes how the cultivation of the
Yiddish language was understood to be a cornerstone in ‘the unfulfilled project of American
democracy’ since it provided a way to resist the American melting pot, which was considered
to be ‘the hallmark of the ruling class, who relied on the suppression of cultural and ethnic
values to better condense their hegemonic purchase on the masses’. Ultimately, however,
linguistic change outpaced cultural values, and the Yiddish-language radicalism espoused by
Davidman could not be transmitted to the next generation.
Lyudmila Sholokhova’s ‘Soviet Propaganda in the Illustrated Yiddish Children’s Books:
From the Collections of the YIVO Library, New York’ analyses the development of the style of
illustrations in the country that aspired to build a ‘bright socialist future’, and comes to the
conclusion that it was an ambivalent and complicated process with its own evolution stages:
from great romantic expectations of the early years after the 1917 revolution to symbolic
clichés of the 1930s. The chapter explores how visual signs of propaganda found their way to
the covers and pages of Yiddish children’s books and how artists interpreted these symbols.
The chapters in this volume, then, show how Yiddish culture, in different periods and
locations, recognised children as a constituency of readers, an audience for modernist art, the
builders of a new society, and, in the transforming world of Jewish American communism, ‘the
leftists’ last hope’. Notwithstanding the diverse picture that emerges, the different narratives
reveal shared concerns and tensions. First, the boundaries of child and adult readership have
always been blurred, irrespective of whether there existed a separate children’s literature. If
pre-modern Ashkenazi culture sanctioned the reading of adult Yiddish books by children,
modern Yiddish culture required the reading of children’s books by adults, who encountered
them in their roles as parents, educators, and authors. Second, Yiddish children’s literature has
always existed in the tension between children’s marginalization and the recognition of their
importance for the success or endurance of any societal movement. The former conferred the
‘benefit of marginality’,7 providing children’s literature with a degree of freedom that enabled
the exploration of new forms of Yiddish artistic expression. The latter was paramount for the
development of Yiddish children’s literature to begin with, and explains the attraction to the
genre by Yiddish writers and artists at the forefront of the twentieth-century avant-garde. If
nothing else, the present volume shows that the topic of Yiddish children’s literature is a
fascinating and rewarding subject of study from a wide variety of perspectives and interests.
The editors therefore offer the book in the hope that it can inspire future researchers on the
topic of Yiddish children’s literature and children in Yiddish culture.

Notes to the Introduction

1. Chone Shmeruk, ‘Sholem Aleichem un di onheybn fun der yidisher literature far kinder’, Di goldene keyt, 112 (1983), 39–
53 (pp. 39–40). One of the books mentioned by Shmeruk is The Spanish Pagan Woman, which is discussed in Shlomo
Berger’s contribution in this volume.
2. Ibid., p. 41.
3. Dina Abramowicz, ‘Jiddische Kinder- und Jugendliteratur’, Lexikon der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur, II, ed. by Klaus
Doderer, Peter Aley et al. (Weinheim: Beltz, 1984), pp. 69–73.
4. Kenneth B. Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p.
 201.
5. Shmuel Niger, ‘Vegn yidisher kinder-literatur’, Shul-almanakh (1935), 188–95.
6. S. Y. Abramovitsh, The Wishing Ring, trans. by Michael Wex (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), pp. 20–
21.
7. The phrase ‘benefit of marginality’ is borrowed from Iris Parush, Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and
Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press,
2004), p. xiii.

 CHAPTER 1

The Spanish Pagan Woman and Ashkenazi Children

Reading Yiddish circa 1700
Shlomo Berger

Old Yiddish literature had no genre which can be defined as ‘children’s literature’. We
encounter religious and secular texts: custom books, ethical literature, history books and also
stories. The genre of stories (mayses) is usually grounded in Hebrew sources and mainly found
in rabbinic literature and midrash; and in the course of centuries (from the fifteenth century on)
stories were also translated from European vernaculars, especially from German into Yiddish.1
The act of translation usually involved a process of adaptation, which served to remove
allusions to Christianity found in the original non-Jewish text.2 It is important to note that as far
as we can compile and assess the quantitative evidence, these stories comprise only a small
section of the Yiddish literary corpus. And, for our purposes here, it is clear that none of the
Jewish and original gentile stories belonged to the genre of children’s literature. Nevertheless,
title pages and prefaces of printed books do suggest that producers also considered children3 a
potential reading public of these books.4
Although turning into a crude and unsophisticated topos to be found in dozens of title pages
and prefaces added in Yiddish books, the claim that authors, translators, editors and book
producers in general were preoccupied with preparation of texts whose language could be
read and understood by children themselves is an indirect testimony to the possibility that a
child would read the book. Of course, being produced for mainly the less educated Ashkenazi
population, a Yiddish text was to be accessible to a wide spectrum of adult readers and the
claim that a child could read the book was evidence that the text was accessible to adults as
well. Ironically, although all texts until the end of the eighteenth century were published in a
Western literary Yiddish that nobody actually spoke, a recurrent argument refers to the spoken
language of the reading public (including children) as the criterion for judging the level of
Yiddish of the printed book.5
One kind of book was indeed intended for children but was mostly used by adults; these
were the Hebrew grammar books in Yiddish that a teacher at school would have employed in
class and occasionally a pupil would consult and read.6 Of course, grammar books are not
texts intended for leisure reading, and the educational demand governs each and every page of
the text. Paradoxically, a pupil using such a grammar was supposed to acquire knowledge of
the Hebrew of the prayer book and the Torah for the purpose of reciting liturgical texts at the
synagogue and as a basic tool for Torah study (=lernen). Language acquisition and exercise of
Yiddish was not a goal. As with other books, producers claimed that the Yiddish text of
Hebrew grammar books was readily accessible because the Ashkenazi vernacular was a
child’s mother tongue, and was therefore easy to read with or without the help of a teacher
(=melamed).
A child was also confronted with Yiddish texts within another framework: the supervised
reading event around the family table in the evening after dinner or on Shabbat and holidays. A
child would usually and normally be a passive participant in text recitation by an adult: the
father or a grown-up family member. Because it was a familial reading event, parents were
entitled to choose the text, and the child was regularly exposed to adult literature. Thus,
children were not restricted to reading ‘children’s literature’. They were treated as future
participants in Jewish religious and cultural activities. Reading and listening to Yiddish texts
functioned as an educational tool which also had an entertainment value.7
Treating children as grown-ups or striving to lead them into a rewarding adult Jewish life
may serve as a basis for the following investigation of a Yiddish text whose producers claimed
that it could help children to learn to read better.8 Indeed, definitions of the genre of children’s
literature may fit well with Ashkenazi preoccupations between the sixteenth and late eighteenth
centuries. Perry Nodelman offers a long list (five pages) of characteristics of children’s
literature in his The Hidden Adult,9 among which the following: 1. the plot of literary pieces is
focused on action and straightforward descriptions of events, though the actions also imply
something deeper. Yiddish stories were usually simpler in their structure and told rewarding
examples of people in action, which ultimately convey a deeper and meaningful (Jewish)
moral. 2. Texts are focalized and, therefore, may offer a childlike view of events as well as an
adult one.10 Yiddish tales had a similar focalization. 3. Children’s books are accompanied by
illustrations, a strategy that was increasingly in use by producers of Yiddish books.11 4. The
text presents and establishes binary oppositions: home and away, safety and danger, desire and
knowledge, adulthood and childhood. Therefore, the plot presents a basic pattern of movement:
from home to away and then back home. This is a strategy employed in midrash and Hebrew
storytelling which was transferred to Yiddish as well.12 5. The texts are didactic.13 Stories,
including Yiddish stories, contain ancient oral literature: myths and legends created in order to
explain the natural phenomena of, for instance, night and day or the changing seasons. Ballads,
sagas and epic tales were recited at court or at home to an audience of adults and children
alike who were eager to hear about adventures of heroes.
When such characteristics are transferred to Yiddish culture, it is possible to label this genre
of literature as ‘short stories’ — ‘mayses’ in particular. Old Yiddish stories may represent a
mode of education coupled with a drive to entertain; a rabbinic ruling, a ritual or a custom
(minhog) may be explicated to a less well-informed or uneducated reading public by
employing a story rather than a legal and abstract argument. The story’s envisaged readers are
grown-ups and children whose primary wish is to learn about and deepen their knowledge of
Jewish tradition.14
Ashkenazi parents were encouraged to instil the love of books in their children’s hearts and
minds, as poignantly demonstrated in Isaac ben Eliakum of Pozna’s Sefer lev tov (chapter
nine):
When he is still very young and even before he begins to speak, let the parent show
him books (sforim)15 and teach him to kiss the books in order to hold books in
 esteem. Later, when he begins to speak, [parents] should convey to him Torah
matters (divrei Torah), reciting to him the verse: ‘and He gave the Torah to Moses’,
and teach him the first verse of the kri’es shema. And when he grows up [they
should] start to teach him the alphabet, and more [things] later on… then hire for
him a rabbi (=teacher). Parents should always use flattery in order to convince a
child to learn: bribing him with a piece of fruit, candy or cake (leykekh)16 … then
coins… and the mothers should see to it that he goes to the heyder… in the end the
father and mother are responsible for their children’s deeds (maysim) and the father
should teach his child the disciplines he knows himself.17

Identifying children as readers of literature that is also suitable for an adult reading public (or
indeed is primarily produced for adults) discloses another anxiety that troubled Yiddish book
producers. Naturally, children belonged to the uneducated masses, but it is impossible to
compare a child with a grown-up male who found Hebrew books difficult to understand.
Nevertheless, being uneducated, children represented a public that was looking for Yiddish
rather than Hebrew books. As I showed elsewhere, within Ashkenazi society Yiddish books
became more than a utilitarian means of combating ignorance. Yiddish book producers
introduced and developed the idea that printing in the Ashkenazi vernacular was a measure that
supported the cause of lernen, and lernen itself received another meaning, that of supporting a
basic rudimentary form of education and knowledge, a rather individualized mode of Torah
study conducted in one’s home and not the beys midresh.18 Although there was no Yiddish
grammar composed in Yiddish by Ashkenazim until the beginning of the twentieth century and
there were many Hebrew grammars in Yiddish, one pamphlet published in 1710 already
recognized that in order to be able to learn good Hebrew, one had to know the grammar of
one’s mame loshn.19 Children were, therefore, a rewarding target group that showed the
necessity to produce Yiddish books.
Subsequently, children were encouraged to read the supreme bestseller of Yiddish literature
up till then, the Tsene rene. Jacob ben Isaac’s book turned into a classic during the seventeenth
century and was recognized as an essential book for each and every Ashkenazi household.20 In
the 1711 Amsterdam edition of the Tsene rene, the publisher Hayyim Druker discusses a
particular point when assessing older editions of the book and attempting to justify his own,
which he describes as a particularly outstanding and scholarly edition of the Tsene rene.
Among other things, he argues in the preface:
But I must confess that I have seen one edition of the Tsene rene which was printed
with illustrations. I did not find a mistake in any of the illustrations, but above,
under and alongside the illustrations there are some [mistakes].21 I must admit that
the publisher did a good job in placing the illustrations correctly, and the children
enjoy a nice shpil (=game, diversion) with these illustrations. But, thank God, here
in Amsterdam this is not our practice. Good proofreading and good language are
our illustrations.

Not being aware of any literary theory whatsoever, the publisher Hayyim Druker interprets the
inclusion of illustrations in a book as an instrument that helps children to read books. Three
aspects are of significance here: one, children were potential readers of the Tsene rene; two,
illustrations have a specific role in turning the book into a children’s book; three, producers as
well as readers recognized that there are different types of editions. A publisher is entitled to
include illustrations in editions of the book or ignore them for whatever reason. Druker is
actually belittling efforts to identify the Tsene rene as a book for children. The inclusion of
illustrations has its advantages, but one should not dismiss scholarly editions but instead locate
the book within another and more elevated category of Ashkenazi publications, thus turning the
Tsene rene into a cherished sefer. Well-prepared editions may eventually benefit all readers:
grown-ups and children.
As modern scholarship insists on the existence of parallel readerships of tales which later
are labelled as ‘children’s literature’, the Tesene rene can be seen and analyzed in a similar
fashion. Moreover, if we accept that ‘reading’ can also denote the act of ‘listening’ and
familial reading events encompass a reading followed up by interpretation and explication of
the read text, it is important to regard the Tsene rene’s readerships as active and passive
entities, as grown-ups and children.22 Illustrations give reading experiences another aspect that
locates reading between an active and a passive engagement with text.
* * * * *
Book producers did eventually print a few books that directly addressed children as a distinct
reading public. If we look at fiction in particular and not, for instance, Hebrew grammar
books, one such book is a typical example of the genre: it is a folktale; it may entertain
youngsters and adults; and although being a translation of a non-Jewish text, it nevertheless
includes a moral that the producer could recommend and an Ashkenazi audience could
understand and appreciate. The book was published in Amsterdam and a sole surviving copy
reposes in the Bodleian Library.23 The book’s title page does mention the publisher’s name,
Hendele Elkhanan Druker, but no publication date or name of the printing office;
bibliographies usually date the publication between 1700 and 1730.24 The book’s Yiddish title
is Shpanishe haydn oder Tsigayners,25 and the text is usually identified as a translation and
adaptation of a Dutch poem by the famous Dutch didactic poet Jacob Cats printed in 1637.26
This Dutch poem is based on Miguel de Cervantes’s novella La gitanilla.27 The original
Spanish novella was popular in the Low Countries, and after the publication of Cats’s poem,
two Dutch plays — which adopted Cats’s text wholly or partially — were written and
performed in Amsterdam: Mattheus Gansneb Tengnagel, De spaansche Heidin, published in
1643,28 and Catharina Verwers-Dusart, De spaansche Heydin, published in 1644. Indeed, both
plays were performed in the Amsterdam municipal theatre in 1644 within two days. Tengnagel
admitted in his book that he was inspired by both Cats’s and Verwers-Dusart’s Dutch
versions.29 The Spanish playwright Juan Pérez de Montalván also wrote a play based on
Cervantes’s novella that may have had inspired a third Dutch play performed in Antwerp and
not in the Republic.30
Neither Cervantes nor Cats was particularly addressing children when writing and
translating this romance.31 Alban Forcione32 describes Cervantes’s novella as a sophisticated
piece of literature, despite its primitivism in telling tales of exotic lands, marvellous
adventures, improbable peripeteias and recognitions, and simple conflicts between good and
evil.33 He goes on to argue that ‘[this and other novellas] are told in an ethical vocabulary that
is intelligible to nearly every age and culture… [and] it is the celebration of such essential and
universally admired values as heroism, constant love, chastity, beauty, perseverance, courtesy
and magnanimity’.34 Forcione also suggests that Cervantes is attuned to Spanish social,
religious and cultural movements of the sixteenth century and is influenced by Erasmus’s ideas
on marriage and courtship.35 Erasmus advocated a renewed Christian faith that was performed
in society and not only among martyrs, ascetics and contemplative monks; this mode of faith
can be described as ‘the sanctification of lay life’.36 Jacob Cats included the story in an
anthology called The Wedding Ring37 that encompassed stories about love and marriage and
proclaimed an overt Christian moral.38 Indeed, Cats’s poem opens and concludes with a
dialogue between two friends, Philogamus and Sophroniscus, interpreting the narrative and
analyzing its moral. The Yiddish translator and adaptor ignored these sections and narrated the
story only. Of course, the Yiddish translator could not follow the overt Christian moral and,
therefore, the story’s moral was to be drawn from the text itself. The translator did not change
the names of the story’s protagonists. By retaining an aura of exoticism and thus creating a
measure of alienation, he and the book producer could avoid responsibility for offering a non-
Jewish text to an Ashkenazi Yiddish reading public.
The romance’s plot is archetypical and may be related to different cultures. An old gypsy
woman steals a baby girl in a Madrid street, brings her back to her village and raises her as
her own daughter. She gives her an education, teaching her singing and dancing and fortune-
telling. The girl grows up showing talents in all gypsy accomplishments. One day, a young
Spanish nobleman hears her singing and falls in love with her. When he wishes to marry her,
she demands that he leaves his home, nation and culture and adopts the gypsy way of life. He
complies and they marry. Travelling, the couple encounters Spanish soldiers, and after a brawl
between a soldier and the young Spanish man, he kills the soldier. He is arrested and brought
to Madrid to stand trial. Attempting to save the young man’s life, the old gypsy woman and her
adopted daughter go to Madrid. Doubts about her past deeds begin to creep into the old gypsy
woman’s mind and she decides to reveal the story of the kidnap. Her adopted daughter
eventually meets her true noble parents. As it happens, the daughter’s biological father is the
supreme judge in Madrid, and after learning the truth, the daughter’s husband is released.
Apparently the soldier had mistreated the young man. The young couple remarries according to
the Spanish Christian tradition and they live happily ever after.
The story’s plot is inserted within a well-structured narrative. The story of the protagonists’
individual adventurous paths to ultimate happiness is embedded within a defined worldview
that contrasts two ways of living with each other: that of ‘home’, which is Christian, traditional
and socially organized, and that of ‘the other’, ‘the primitive’, ‘the natural’: a Gypsy cosmos
which did not pass through any civilizing process39 and adheres to nature and natural
conditions. Gypsy life manages to flourish outside the centres of civilization, i.e. the cities
(=the Christian cities), and gypsies operate passively and actively against the ruling classes of
the state, who continuously attempt to curtail their power. The double and antithetical images
of ‘we’ and ‘the others’ contrast nature and civilization, a Christian society and a gypsy
universe, the beauty and attraction of the natural world and the added values of the civilized
(=Christians).
 In order to present Christian, civilized society as the ultimate good, the story’s plot employs
a common theme of folktales: separation (voluntary and forced) from one’s home and family,
and a final return home when, because of the adventures undergone and the lessons learned
while visiting and living in a foreign world and experiencing another culture, the story’s
protagonist becomes a better person who deserves the rewards awaiting him/her at his/her
ancestral home and country. The separation from home may be painful, but the road away from
home and back is an enriching experience. Indeed, the protagonist never returns to live a life as
it was lived before the separation, but returns as a mature and wiser person who gained
experiences that society at home may use for its own benefit.40
According to the arguments advanced on the Yiddish book’s title page, the producer
apparently loved the story and, therefore, decided to publish a Yiddish version of the romance.
He further declared that the Yiddish printed version could serve two purposes: firstly, to help
young children to learn and perfect their reading skills and, secondly, a reader may then learn
what wondrous affairs may occur. Ascribing to the text a role in acquiring reading proficiency
as well as including a rewarding moral clearly indicates that the Yiddish mayse was intended
for children and adults.
Two arguments which explain the choice of this text for the purpose of children’s reading
proficiency can be put forward. Firstly, this Yiddish book definitely belongs to a reader’s
private sphere. It had nothing to do with Jewish tradition nor did it have a public function
within the Jewish community. Thus, within an intimate family setting a parent could support his
child’s effort to learn to read while sharing with the youngster the experience of a good and
rewarding story. Secondly, the succinct description of the text’s plot on the title page mentions
the fortunes of a stolen child and the perils of life, which may have served as a general and
good moral about life in general:
You can see in this book how an old pagan woman steals a young girl from a noble
family in Madrid, and how in the end the young girl is returned to her aristocratic
family. [And she] marries a prince, whilst the old pagan woman receives a good
reward because she had taught the child everything. This is what you read in this
little book, seeing how a life story can change in surprising ways.

As was customary in Yiddish writings from the beginning, allusions to Christianity in the base
text were removed and, therefore, the Yiddish version is religiously neutral. Furthermore,
while the Spanish and the Dutch texts naturally refer to the gypsies as non-Christians living
outside Christian society, norms and values, the Yiddish version presents the gypsies as merely
‘the others’. Of course, an Amsterdam Ashkenazi would have known much more about Spain
than Ashkenazim in central and eastern Europe. Local Ashkenazim knew and regularly met
Sephardim and were aware of their history in the Iberian Peninsula as well as their ongoing
attachment to Spanish culture in Amsterdam. Nevertheless, the emphasis on the idea of
otherness could have made such a presentation attractive to the Ashkenazi reader for different
reasons. Read by Ashkenazi children and explained by parents, the story could function as a
tool of socialization into diasporic Jewish life with its inherent daily dangers. Return to an
organized society as advocated in the story also signified the urgent need for Jews to remain
loyal to their society, religion and tradition. The Ashkenazi could, in fact, sympathize with both
camps in the story: the gypsy as the ‘other’, and organized society as representing the Jewish
community. Of course, the story’s pattern follows the logic of a folktale which was employed
in both non-Jewish and Jewish narratives. It narrates a story about love, separation and union,
leaving home, adopting another culture and way of life, which is intrinsically bad but
nevertheless can also be seen positively, if only as a test one has to undergo and pass before
receiving rewards. Eventually one returns home to reap the awaiting rewards: meeting with
parents, marrying an aristocratic young lady, returning to the correct and meaningful religion
and integrating into organized and ordinary life. Parallelisms between Jewish and non-Jewish
societies were present and easy to draw.
* * * * *
Within the corpus of Old Yiddish literature, the booklet discussed here belongs to a peripheral
subgroup of mayses whose origin is non-Jewish. Being themselves secular and consequently
attempting to highlight secularly themed fiction in the corpus, modern scholars of Yiddish tend
to exaggerate its position in the medieval and early modern Yiddish literary framework.41
Nevertheless, the existence of such a subgroup demonstrates and emphasizes distinctive
features of the use of the Ashkenazi vernacular. On one extreme, the mere translation of the
story from Dutch into Yiddish testifies to the inclusion of the Dutch version of La gitanilla
within Ashkenazi-Jewish culture. Thus, it also signifies the openness of Ashkenazi Yiddish
book culture and the readiness to integrate universal values within a Jewish structure. This
mechanism also strengthens the notion that Old Yiddish book culture rested and, in fact,
flourished within a framework that celebrated the growing importance of the private sphere:
individual reading of texts in one’s own vernacular and in one’s own chamber or within a
family setting.42 Moreover, such reading events stimulated a new form of reading that expanded
public reading events, which were mostly connected with the study group in a beys midresh or
liturgical recitation in the synagogue. Although not revolutionary in any form, reading Yiddish
can be understood as an evolutionary measure towards the introduction of modern forms of
operation within conservative Ashkenazi society. Indeed, the marginal position of non-Jewish
translated fiction ensured that it presented its own merits by not frontally attacking the Jewish
book canon. Therefore, as ‘children’s literature’, the Spanish Pagan Woman or the Gypsy
Woman could be tolerated and eventually accepted as permissible and rightful literature. As a
folktale that emphasized a presentation of ‘we’ versus ‘the other’, the Yiddish version could
reinterpret the original dichotomy between gypsies and Christians as a rivalry between Jews,
the Jewish community and the dangerous world outside. Moreover, the story enabled the
Yiddish reader to sympathize with both sides: the persecuted gypsy world and the organized
and civilized Christian universe. The Jewish cosmos included components of both: the gypsies
as a persecuted people, the organized society as an ideal to be pursued within Ashkenazi
communities.
The reading (in whatever form) of Ashkenazi children served as a profitable vehicle in
linguistic and cultural developments involving the production of Yiddish books. They
composed a reading public that ideally was directed towards the study of Hebrew, or at least
the reading of portions of the Torah and the prayer book, through the employment of Yiddish (in
fact, usually a certain style of Yiddish: the Khumesh taytch).43 They were instructed to read
Yiddish as a replacement or a sort of Torah study. And, being an Ashkenazi vernacular that
grammatically was connected with German, Yiddish functioned as a buffer language that
enabled the absorption of the surrounding non-Jewish culture. Indeed, the Germanic component
of Yiddish was neutralized by the fact that it was written down with the help of the Hebrew
alphabet, which functions as a Jewish identity marker.44 In terms of the ‘Jewish polysystem’,45
Yiddish operated as an independent literary system that canalized the import of non-Jewish
texts and books into a Jewish framework and facilitated a process of cultural transfer. Neither
Cervantes nor Jacob Cats the Dutch poet is mentioned in the Yiddish version of The Spanish
Pagan Woman, but the author of Don Quixote nevertheless becomes a literary master that
Yiddish readers are acquainted with and who serves internal Ashkenazi culture.
Notes to Chapter 1
1. For a comprehensive bibliography of Yiddish narrative prose in the early modern period, see Sara Zfatman, Hasiporet
beyidish mireshita ad ‘Shivhei haBesht’ (1504–1815: Bibliografia mu’eret (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University, 1985).
This bibliography is outdated and a new one, including discoveries in the last 30 years, is an urgent desideratum.
2. Max Weinreich, ‘The Reality of Jewishness versus the Ghetto Myth: The Sociolinguistic Roots of Yiddish’, in To Honor
Roman Jacobson: Essays on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), III, pp. 2199–2211,
defines the Ashkenazi attitude as ‘living with Christians and attempting to be insular to Christianity’; see also Sara
Zfatman, ‘Hasiporet beyidish mireshita ad “Shivhei haBesht” (1504–1815)’ (PhD thesis, The Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, 1983), p. 12 and n. 62.
3. In Ashkenazi culture, ‘children’ may be defined as infants up to the age of thirteen or fourteen, and the age group may be
occasionally expanded to include youth (boys and girls alike) until their marriage, when they become adult members of a
Jewish community. Technically, a boy becomes an ‘adult’ after celebrating his bar-mitzvah, when he is able to join the
minyan (=quorum) in synagogue. However, he still enjoys a measure of freedom as long as he is a bokher (=a lad) and
not a married balebos (=a householder).
4. See Chone Shmeruk, ‘Sholem Aleichem un di onheybn fun der yidisher literatur far kinder’, Di goldene keyt, 112 (1983),
39–40, who mentions two eighteenth-century books which were also addressed to children and one of which is discussed
in the present article: The Spanish Pagan Woman. He also claims that although until the end of the seventeenth century
there was no specific genre of children’s literature and children read whatever book came into their hands (p. 40), the
reference to young men and women and children in title pages is a clear and definitive testimony to the existence of a
children’s reading public in Yiddish: see also p. 50, nn. 5 and 8.
5. In the Amsterdam edition of Sefer lev tov (1706), the publisher Hayyim Druker explains in his preface that a text’s Yiddish
should reflect the contemporary spoken language. He does not make a distinction between spoken and written styles,
which in fact did exist; see also Shlomo Berger, Producing Redemption in Amsterdam: Early Modern Yiddish Books in
Paratextual Perspective (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), pp. 96–107, and esp. pp. 105–06.
6. On Hebrew grammar books in Yiddish, see Irene I. Zwiep, ‘Imagined Speech Communities of Hebrew’, in Speaking
Jewish-Jewish Speak: Multilingualism in Western Ashkenazi Culture, ed. by Shlomo Berger et al., also published as
Studia Rosenthaliana, 36 (2002–2003), 77–117; Zwiep, ‘Adding the Reader’s Voice: Early Modern Ashkenazi Grammars
of Hebrew’, Science in Context, 20 (2007), 163–95.
7. For a good introduction into questions of orality, writing and reading, see Dennis H. Green, Medieval Listening and
Reading: The Primary Reception of German Literature 800–1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
esp. pp. 3–54, 61–94, 113–49. It is assumed that during the early modern period, levels of literacy among Jews were higher
(particularly among Jewish boys), but oral performance was never abandoned in ritual and at home; see also Brian Stock,
Listening for the Text: on Uses of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
8. See below.
9. Perry Nodelman, The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008),
pp. 76–81.
10. Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1997), pp. 142–
61; see also Nodelman,, The Hidden Adult, pp. 18–33.
11. See discussion of the Amsterdam 1711 edition of the Tsene rene below.
12. See, for instance, Sara Zfatman, Beyn Ashkenaz liSefarad: letoledot hasipur ha’ivri biyemei habeynayim (Jerusalem:
Magnes Press, 1993).
13. On definitions of Yiddish didactic literature, see Shalhevet Ofir-Dotan, ‘History, Book, and Society: Yiddish Didactic Books
Printed in Early Modern Amsterdam’ (PhD thesis, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 2010), pp. 39–54, esp. pp. 39–42
[in Hebrew].
14. Chone Shmeruk, Hayiurim lsifrei yidish bame’ot hatet-zayn — hayud-zayin (Jerusalem: Academon 1986), pp. 41–42,
who confirms that many books were also intended for children.
15. In Yiddish vocabulary, Sforim normally refers to traditional Hebrew books: Bibles, commentaries, rabbinic literature. These
possess an aura of holiness and are essential in establishing a correct, righteous Jewish life. Yiddish books are bikher, a
noun stemming from the German vocabulary. Nevertheless, it is a question whether a Yiddish translation of a rabbinical
book is a sefer or a bukh.
16. There is a well-known Ashkenazi tradition of accompanying a child on his first day in school (or heyder at the age of three
to five) and present him with letters of the Hebrew alphabet covered with honey in order to make his learning sweet: see
Tamar Salmon-Mack, ‘Childhood’, in The Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2008), I, p. 318.
17. See Noga Rubin, ‘Sefer Lev Tov by Isaac ben Eliakum of Posen, Prague 1620: A Central Ethical Book in Yiddish’ (PhD
thesis, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 2006) [in Hebrew]; and now also Rubin, Kovshei halevavot (Tel Aviv:
 Hakibbutz ha-Me’uhad, 2013).
18. Shlomo Berger, ‘Reading Yiddish and lernen: Being a Pious Ashkenazi in Amsterdam 1650–1800’, in The Religious Life
of Dutch Jews, ed. by Yosef Kaplan (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).
19. The need to master one’s own mother tongue is expressed in the booklet Mesakh ha-petah: see Shlomo Berger, Yiddish
and Jewish Modernization of the 18th Century (The 12th Annual Lecture of the Braun Family Chair of the History of
the Jews in Prussia, Bar-Ilan University 2006), esp. pp. 13–18 [in Hebrew].
20. Chone Shmeruk mentions that Dov Sadan, the Yiddish scholar and first professor of Yiddish at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, knew the Tsene rene as a small child, before he went to the heyder: Shmeruk, Hayiurim lsifrei yidish
bame’ot hatet-zayn — hayud-zayin, p. 63; on the Tsene rene, see Jacob Elbaum, and Chava. Turniansly, ‘Tsene rene’, in
The Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), II, pp. 1912–13.
21. Druker is referring to the captions added to the illustrations.
22. Stock, Listening for the Text, pp. 20–23.
23. Morritz Steinschneider, Catalogus Librorum Hebraeorumin Bibliotheca Bodleiana (Berlin 1852–1860), pp. 645–46, no.
4077.
24. The book’s publisher was Hendele Elkhanan Druker, most probably Hayyim Druker’s son; on Hayyim Druker, see Shlomo
Berger, ‘Hayyim ben Jacob, alias Hayyim Druker: Typesetter, Editor and Publisher in Amsterdam’, in Hut shel hen: Shay
leChava Turniansky, ed. by Israel Bartal et al. (Jerusalem: Merkaz Shazar, 2013), pp. 157–80 [in Hebrew]; see also
Zfatman, Hasiporet beyidish […] bibliografia, pp. 102–03, no. 90. There are two further editions of the book: one from
Offenbach, 1717 (Zfatman, 109, no. 99) and the other from Altona, 1731 (Zfatman, 129, no. 120). Zfatman dates the
booklet to 1713. Accepting that it is a translation from Dutch, Zfatman dates the Amsterdam version before the other two,
but does not explain why she chooses this particular date, 1713. Thus, it would be safe to conclude that 1717 is a terminus
ante quem for the first Amsterdam edition. On both further editions, see below.
25. The Yiddish title includes the term ‘haydn’ (=pagan), which was also employed in the Dutch versions of the story (see
below). The original Spanish title speaks only about a gypsy. See also below.
26. Zfatman, Hasiporet beyidish […] bibliografia, p. 103; on Cats, see Johanes .H. Kruizinga, Jacob Cats (1577–1660):
dichter, drooglegger, diplomaat (Lelystad: Stichting IVIO, 1977).
27. The Gypsy woman (=La gitanilla) is one of the Exemplary Novels (=Novellas Ejemplares, Madrid 1613).
28. Leo Fuks and Renate Fuks, ‘Yiddish Language and Literature in the Dutch Republic’, Studia Rosenthaliana, 26 (1986),
34–57 (p. 54), identify Tengnagel as the source of the Yiddish version.
29. I.e., Tengnagel read Verwers-Dusart’s version before it was published.
30. See Johan A. Van Praag, La comedia espagnole aux Pays-Bas au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle (Amsterdam: H. J. Paris,
1922), 76–78; see also Ivan Gaskell, ‘Transformation of Cervantes’s ‘La gitanilla’ in Dutch Art’, Journal of the Warburg
and Courtauld Institute, 45 (1982), 263–70.
31. The title page of the third Yiddish edition (Altona, 1731) drops the claims regarding children’s reading proficiency and
concentrates on the story’s moral. The text only includes the following statement: ‘Buy this booklet (bashraybung) and
see what it means. And what the young ones (yugent) can be informed of.’ The young ones are not necessarily children:
see note 3.
32. Alban K. Forcione, Cervantes and the Humanist Vision: a Study of Four Exemplary Novels (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1982), pp. 93–224.
33. Ibid., p. 93.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., pp. 96–136.
36. Ibid., pp. 98–99.
37. The original title is: ’s Werelds begin, midden, eynde, besloten in den trouw-ring, met den proef-steen van den selven.
38. Cats, J., Het spaens Heydinnetje, ed. by Hermina J. Vieu-Kuik (Culemborg: Tjeenk Willink/Noorduijn 1976), pp. 9–21.
39. ‘Civilizing process’ is a sociological notion which attempts to explain the strategy of the emerging European central states
in the early modern period to safeguard power against the aristocracy. The mechanism of the process involved an ideology
that advanced the idea of pacification in public life by supporting a structure that ‘restrained’ and, thus, civilized society,
where people and states attempt to solve individual, social and political rivalry in a non-violent fashion. See Norbert Elias,
Über den Prozess der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen (Amsterdam: s.n. 1939).
40. Although not all parameters are to found in every tale, a general structure of tales can be put forward; see Vladimir Propp,
Morphology of the Folktale (Austin: University of Texas University Press, 1968, 20th print, 2009), esp. pp. 25–65, 92–
96.
41. See in particular the efforts of Max Erik to redefine the early history of Yiddish literature: Max Erik, Geshikhte fun der
yidisher literatur fun di eltste tzaytn biz der haskole tkufe (Warsaw: Kultur-Lige, 1928), esp. pp. 69–202.
42. On the creation of private spaces, reading habits and the history of books, see Cecile M. Jagodzinski, Privacy and Print:
Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-century England (Charlettesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), pp. 13–19.
See esp. p. 18 and the three important parameters: the physical space, distinction between elite and common reader, and
 authorized as opposed to personal reading (or how one should read); a fourth one identifies the woman as a central
example of private readers.
43. Shlomo Noble, Khumesh taytch (New York: Yivo, 1943).
44. John Myhill, Language in Jewish Society: Towards a New Understanding (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Limited,
2004), esp. pp. 1–57.
45. Itamar Even-Zohar, Polysystem Studies, also published as Poetics Today, 11 (1) (1990), 1–268.

 CHAPTER 2

The Sabbath Tale and Jewish Cultural Renewal

Miriam Udel

To educate our children in a national Jewish spirit, we must give them folktales,
folk songs, in short what forms the basis of children’s education for other peoples.
S. AN-SKY

The field of Yiddish children’s literature (YCL) remains as yet relatively unexplored. With the
temporal compression typical of Yiddish cultural production in general, YCL evolves from the
turn of the twentieth century to reach its apex during the 1920s and 1930s, a time of rapid
secularization and ideological ferment,1 but also a period of fruition for a Jewish cultural
renewal whose seeds had been planted decades earlier. ‘Eastern European Jewish intellectuals
had been working since the turn of the century’, Gabriela Safran reminds us, ‘to foster what
they defined as a new Jewish secular culture. Ordinary Jews had been engaging in new secular
cultural practices in public and private — reading, speaking, performing, and imagining
themselves in ways unconnected to older religious norms — since the 1890s, and the events of
1905 accelerated that transformation.’2 Consuming literature both constituted and further
promulgated these self-reimagining practices. As may be said of Yiddish belles lettres
altogether, roiling under every story, novel, poem, play and film were implicit claims about the
nature of yiddishkayt: in the dual senses of Jewishness and Yiddish-ness. Some texts
participated in an interrogation or renegotiation of Jewish tradition, while others implicitly or
explicitly asserted the sloughing off of Jewish particularism in favour of one brand or another
of universalist humanism. Children’s literature, the folktales and folk songs that S. An-sky
labeled ‘the basis for children’s education’,3 was an arena of particular concern, as its artistic
preoccupations and ideological tendencies would determine nothing short of the Jewish future.
Juvenile readers (and pre-literate listeners) would soon enter the ranks of the Bundists,
Zionists, territorialists, rabbis, culturists and communists; in short, they constituted ‘a means to
reform the nation’.4
An awareness of children as guarantors of the Jewish future entailed the allocation of vast
resources for their education, leisure and well-being in the interwar period, especially in the
Jewish communities of a newly independent Poland. By the tens of thousands, Jewish children
were educated in schools of diverse ideological stripes that mirrored adult ideological
divisions. The network of schools, secular and religious, included the Yiddishist
TSYSHO/CYSHO system, the Hebraist Tarbut, the religious Zionist Horev and several other
sub-branchings by political affiliation, age and gender of the pupils. In addition to primary and
secondary schools, parties including the Bund, Po‘ale Zion, and the Agudah sponsored youth
groups, sanatoria, summer camps and teachers’ colleges.5 The Bund-backed schools in
particular ensured that there would be a market for Yiddish-language literary materials for
children. From the Bolshevik period until the Second World War, YCL blossomed both in
periodicals6 and in free-standing book publications. These included not only storybooks and
picture books, but also anthologies designed for school or home use and chrestomathies
(collections of exemplary texts with explicitly didactic intent, meant for school use) and were
published in such varied Jewish centres as Warsaw, Kiev, Kharkov, Moscow and New York.
Much of the existing scholarly work on YCL focuses on translation, interrogating the
parochialist versus universalist tension that inhered when non-Yiddish texts of the Western
canon were, as the idiom has it, faryidisht un farbesert (improved by their rendering into
Yiddish). Many translations were ‘Judaized’: Grimm’s tales were often recast with Jewish
cultural markers, including names, time signature and clothing.7 But on the eve of the Bolshevik
period, these assumptions about the necessity of cultural translation or transposition were
reexamined, and in 1919, the Yiddish publishing house Kultur-Lige released a new translation
of Hans Christian Andersen by Der Nister (the pen name of Pinkhas Kahanovitsh) which
‘retained the Christian realia and references’.8 Der Nister, whose masterwork of social realism
Di mishpokhe mashber (The Family Mashber) certainly showed no reservation in plumbing
the depths of Jewish religious particularism, nevertheless also translated into Yiddish several
children’s poems that lacked any parochial identifiers whatsoever.9
While Yiddish translations throw into relief this crucial ideological axis, manifold insights
surely remain to be gleaned from the careful scrutiny of culturally and linguistically indigenous
Yiddish texts aimed at young readers and listeners. During the Bolshevik moment and in its
immediate wake, we would expect Yiddishist culture to produce stories and poems that could
demonstrate, once and for all, the suppleness of this fusion language as an instrument for a
universal humanism unmarked by the legacy of the Jewish religion. And while we certainly do
find plenty of children’s literature in this vein, especially in the Soviet Union, an opposing
trend reveals itself even among dedicated Bundists: a fascination with specifically Jewish folk
materials and motifs. Moreover, this interest does not stop at a sentimentalized shtetl setting or
incidents loosely pegged to the liturgical calendar — the trappings of Jewish culture — but
rather, foregrounds the robustly religious imagery of traditional Sabbath observance.
This essay will consider two folktales for middle-elementary aged children, published in the
early 1920s, by Bundist Yankev Pat and cultural Zionist Yaakov Fichmann respectively, whose
protagonists rise to the challenge of observing a Sabbath in trying and vulnerable
circumstances. Pat’s Der vunderlekher leyb (The Magic Lion, Warsaw, 1921) portrays a
rabbi’s choice to rest on Shabbos, despite his exposure in a desert wilderness, while
Fichmann’s Shabes in vald (Sabbath in the Forest, Warsaw, 1924) depicts a poor tailor
making a similar decision in a blizzard-blown forest. Taken together, these works gesture at a
distinctively Jewish, sabbatarian sub-species of the wonder tale even as they offer twentieth-
century children an update of an aggadic staple: Sabbath observance rewarded. Each story
celebrates the successful and uncompromised observance of Shabbos — a far cry from the
reflexive indoctrination into disdain for religious ritual that we might expect of socialist
authors. Not only is compliance with the Sabbath laws rewarded, but the day itself is imbued
with a rosy lyrical glow that encompasses both the natural setting and the ritual performances.
Indeed, Kenneth Moss has noted the prominent tendency of YCL toward aestheticism,10 which
he traces to a ‘double genealogy’: encompassing not only the general European turn-of-the-
century sensibility of l’art pour l’art, ‘but also an older Schillerian idea of culture as a public
resource for national regeneration’.11 But why should the humble Sabbath be the experience
that gets aestheticized? Why should hopes for national regeneration of an active, energetic
polity be rooted in a weekly mandated period of rest?
The prominence given to halakhic Sabbath observance in these tales prods us to reconsider
and complicate our understanding of the relationship between religious and secular in 1920s
Jewish Eastern Europe. I am inclined to agree with a position that David Biale stakes out in his
study Not in the Heavens:
These two mortal enemies are very much defined by and through the other. And not
only does it appear that religion and secularism in modernity are deeply implicated
in each other, but it may well be that their contemporary entanglement owes
something to the way the secular emerged out of the religious, not so much its polar
negation as its dialectical product.12

With respect to the Sabbath tale, adopting Biale’s dialectical view allows us to notice not only
the surprising degree of halakhic punctilio in these tales, but also the accent on non-legalistic
values that dovetail more obviously with the concerns of modernizing reformers. Shabes is
indeed kept, but with emphases that are subtly different from those found in traditional aggadot
(rabbinic lore) or Hasidic tales. Pat paints the day of rest as an opportunity for contemplation
of and communion with the natural world, while Fichmann imagines the Sabbath — a value
honoured in the breach, in his story — as a day for family togetherness. With their cross-
hatching of religious and secular, these stories enact a mutual accommodation between religio-
halakhic ideals and more broadly universalist ones. And by recasting the Sabbath as a
temporal and experiential treasure of the Jewish folk, both stories valorize the cessation from
labour — a consummately socialist message.

Why the sabbath?

Fichmann’s story literalizes the image of ‘a palace in time’, Abraham Joshua Heschel’s
signature designation for the Sabbath.13 Heschel claims that, ‘The meaning of the Sabbath is to
celebrate time rather than space’. For members of a deterritorialized nation, there is a certain
allure in investing in a temporal edifice from which none might banish or exclude them. As a
particularist practice, robust Shabbos observance valorizes the minority and subaltern status of
European Jews, celebrating their identity as, in the title phrase of another children’s anthology,
Kleyne in der groyser Velt (Little Ones in a Big World). Both stories under consideration here
set off their protagonists’ concern to keep the Sabbath against the backdrop of non-Jews who
do not share the urgency of their scheduling needs. But demarcated as a palace in time, the
Sabbath also represents a subversion of the capitalist ethos wherein time is money. In Pat’s
story, the Sabbath is an occasion for the leisurely contemplation of nature, while in
Fichmann’s, it is a day to privilege family above getting and spending or even just working to
subsist. The worker’s empowered relationship to time and prerogative to cease labour: these
are the linchpin of a socialist critique of capitalism.
Not only did the Sabbath tale speak to these politically and philosophically immediate
concerns, but it also laid compelling claim to a usable Jewish past14 — even as it contained
Jewish religious heritage and relegated it safely to the past. The stylized protagonists of these
stories are distinctly retrograde.15 Pat’s characterization of his hero is telling in this regard: ‘A
long time ago, there lived a great rabbi who always kept the Sabbath faithfully and never forgot
to act as it is written in the Torah and the Holy Books’. This characterization presents a fairly
distant if sanguine view of Jewish religious observance, as if ‘the Torah’, broadly understood,
were absolute and monolithic. An observer at closer range would likely have recognized that a
halakhic lifestyle tends to be conceived of in more multifarious terms by its practitioners, and
is therefore not easily given to such breezy summation. Although the stories contain a great
deal of embedded instruction about the laws and rituals of the Sabbath (each mentions kiddush,
havdalah, prayer services, etc.), their authors’ purpose was likely not to raise a generation of
strict sabbatarians. As David Fishman points out regarding another chrestomathy of 1912, the
seminal Dos yidishe vort: ‘…the book did not teach children to perform the Sabbath or
holiday rituals per se or intend for them to return to the lifestyle of the nineteenth century shtetl.
It attempted to implant in them favourable images of the rituals, figures, and objects of the old
way of life as part of their Jewish national consciousness.’16 Pat and Fichman contributed to
the rearing, not of a generation of Sabbath-observers, but rather to a generation of future
Sabbath-nostalgists, who would feel a sense of connection and belonging to this particularist
island in time but would likely not choose to dwell upon it every seven days. Since the Yiddish
schools were staunchly secularist, they incorporated much traditional Jewish content that had
been recast as folklore and folk literature.17 The lines between secular and religious, Fishman
insists, were fuzzier than met the eye:18 ‘Conventional wisdom has it that the Yiddishists were
archsecularists, that they rejected traditional Judaism in its entirety and sought to replace it
with a new, modern European culture in Yiddish. This image is a simplification and distortion,
more a caricature than a portrait.’19 The bridge between traditional religiosity and the secular
Jewish present was made of folklore.

Folklore, literature and a new oral torah

Under the rubric of folklore, it was acceptable for secularizing culturists to cherish the Sabbath
as a national patrimony.20 Beginning in the final decade of the nineteenth century, but
accelerating after 1905, the collection (zamlung) of authentic folkloric materials was a
widespread grass-roots prerogative; some of the topics for collection and scrutiny had to do
with children and their experiences, and these resources were then used, in turn, in the Yiddish
schools.21 The folkloric was also considered a wellspring of inspiration at the loftiest reaches
of high culture. We might trace an entire literary genealogy of modernist heirs to the proto-
modernist Rabbi Nakhmen, with his folklorizing, neo-romantic tales of rivers and deserts,
princesses, kings, beggars and enchantment. Maskilic writer Ayzik Meyer Dik embedded ‘a
veritable encyclopedia of Eastern European Jewish folklore’ in his fiction.22 The three
‘classic’ Yiddish writers, Mendele Moykhe Sforim, Yitskhok Leibush Peretz and Sholem
Aleichem, all wrote in folkloric modes, each inflected by his own distinctive sensibility.
Eliezer Shteynbarg animated his verse fables with imagery and situations from the demotic
shtetl, while the lyric poet Itsik Manger reimagined the Biblical past as a folk source and
transposed it onto Jewish Eastern Europe.
Two figures stand out, however, as composing forerunners of the Sabbath tales under
consideration here: Y.L. Peretz and S. An-sky. Both artists mounted ethnographic expeditions
(though on differing scales) for the collection of authentic Jewish folk materials. Peretz used to
pay neighbourhood domestics half a rouble to a rouble for each song they brought him to
augment his collection.23 Not only were they both personally enamoured of the stories, songs,
sayings and practices that they accumulated, but both men also utilized them as the ‘raw
materials’ for their own refined, high-literary production.24 For both Peretz and An-sky,
folklore offered the armature of a new religion. As Mark W. Kiel writes of An-sky, ‘Other
great Jewish writers and thinkers had traversed the same road from sober positivism to
spiritual and ethical secular nationalism. Like Peretz, Ahad Haam, Dubnov, and Berditchevsky,
each in his own way, felt a need to fill the vacuum left by religion’.25 In fact, it was An-sky
who developed the rich trope associating folklore with a new Oral Torah,26 which would not
only consolidate the Jewish past and secure the Jewish future but also constitute the pursuit of
revolution by other means. Safran takes care to point out how An-sky’s manifesto (‘Jewish
Folk Art’) seeks to harmonize the quest for folklore with revolutionary values, linking
‘violence with other nations and verbal art with the Jews’ (143); he insisted that the latter
would ultimately triumph.
At this point, we would do well to clarify what is meant by folklore and folkloric, which are
merely the most straightforward English equivalent for a nuanced Yiddish nomenclature. With
his folkstimlekhe geshikhtn (folkloric tales), Peretz introduced a term so new to Yiddish
literature that the typesetter for the first advertisements of the work mistook it for folks-
shtimlekhe (‘in the folk voice’).27 Shoshke Erlich draws the distinction between folkstimlekhe
mayse (or geshikhte) and folks-mayse as one between artistic intentionality and spontaneously
occurring, ‘found’ discourse. A folk tale is anonymous and pertains to the realm of folklore; a
folkstimlekh tale is carefully constructed, either on the basis of authentic folk motifs or out of
the imagination of an artist who composes in stylized (stilizirt) ‘folks-maysedikn nusekh’.28
But the term folkstimlekh is not a universally accepted one. Erlich’s note is immediately
followed by Mordkhe Schaechter’s brief history of the term and a critique of its ambiguity, and
his proposal, as a replacement, of the term poshut-folkish.29 Based on the term’s appearance in
Alexander Harkavy’s descriptive dictionary of 1893, Schaechter concludes that folkstimlekh
must have been circulating decades before Peretz’s story collection popularized the term, even
though he cannot point to a specific attestation. After explaining the Hochdeutsch abstract noun-
to-adjective formation tümlich (ibid.), Schaechter offers a piquant definition: ‘noent tsum
poshetn folk, in gayst un gust funem poshetn folk’ (‘Close to the plain folk, in the spirit and
taste of the plain folk’). The Sabbath tales we will consider partake of a spirit similar to that
which animated Y. L. Peretz’s khsidishe (Hasidic) and folkstimlekhe geshikhtn, and their style
of narration lies somewhere between the poles of folkstimlekhkayt, by which I mean the high-
art posture of folksiness, and folkshprakh, by which I mean the popular vernacular — although
they are closer to the former than the latter.
The folkloric Sabbath
‘Secular writers’, notes Biale, ‘sometimes claimed that the historical culture of the folk, as
opposed to that of the rabbis, could inspire a nonreligious renaissance of Jewish culture in the
modern period’.30 Ironically, the ‘historical culture of the folk’ often thematized rabbis and
other figures of piety. Hasidic culture, well established for over two centuries, had already
introduced a robust strain of populism into discourse about rabbis and religious devotion. In
his neo-Hasidic tales, Y. L. Peretz found a way to marshal the energies this populism released,
foregrounding interpersonal kindness and acts of ethical supererogation and displacing
scholarly erudition and other trappings of rabbinic elitism.31 An-sky enacted a similar
transposition by secularizing the motif of ‘God on Trial’.32 Yet the Sabbath wonder tales under
discussion here do not entirely conform to these conventions; they celebrate punctilious
observance of the Sabbath rituals, and not only the marking of the day through positive ritual
performances, but also abhorrence at the notion of violating the day’s prohibitions.33 Whereas
the humanistic Peretz always underscores beyn adem lekhaveyre (the interpersonal), these
stories unabashedly privilege beyn adem lamokem (between humans and God) by removing
almost all human actors besides their protagonists.
One discursive marker of the high-culture folkloric — folkstimlekhkayt — is lyrical
description of the natural world. In a sketch that S. Y. Abramovitsh (Mendele Moykher Sforim)
ultimately used to introduce his Collected Works, the author presents his mediating alter ego
Mendele as a romantic, lovesick for the beauties of nature:
As for going to do tashlikh, such a serious Jewish ritual, to shake off our sins — for
me it becomes a lovely walk. When I’m supposed to be saying all those words, my
eyes look up the river, over the green muck, which surrounds it on either side a long
way into the distance. And maybe I see a running, babbling brook, proudly
swimming geese, a little blowing wind, tall, whispering reeds, and the brook
douses and reflects a hoshana-willow, as its branches bend into the water. The sky
is clear, the air fresh, a Godly silence is in the valleys, hills, and groves all around.
Something draws my soul, it longs, craves — Oh, Master of the Universe! — only I
don’t know what.… My heart is off for a stroll. In field and forest, I am not at all
what I am in the city: I’m free, slipped from the yoke. What is wife, what is child,
what is Jew, what is worry? I rejoice, yearn for the delight of the Almighty’s Works,
I give myself over to my senses and become inebriated with God’s beautiful
world!34

How similar this seems, at first blush, to the tone Fichmann uses to describe the tailor Lipe, as
he wraps up the work week of a summer Friday: ‘From the very moment he set out for home,
he could feel all the cares of the week leave him, and his heart would fill with the joy of the
holy day. This was especially true in the beautiful summer weather, when the fields were so
green and fragrant they seemed to sing, and God himself took pleasure in the little world He
had created.’
However, a dramatic transformation had taken place during the half-century that separates
these two texts. Abramovitsh ironically couches his mouthpiece’s weakness for the natural
world as an ‘affliction’ or ‘pathology’. By the 1920s that veil of irony has fallen away, and
lyricism about the natural world, now in sync with Jewish observance, is celebrated as an
earnest ideal. Instead of feeling a tension between religious duty and the seductive delights of
nature, as does Mendele, Lipe integrates his anticipation of the Sabbath rest with his
appreciation of the natural beauty through which he passes on his way home. Whereas
Abramovitsh presents a conflict between nature and culture, Fichmann and his contemporaries
reorder Jewish experience to present nature as culture. Indeed, modernizing Jewish culturists
employed lyrical descriptions of nature, especially the Sabbath and holidays, in order to
synchronize Jewish liturgical time with natural time as marked by universally recognized days
and seasons.35 Yankev Pat’s desert-bound rabbi presumably mirrors the omniscient narrator’s
own evident satisfaction in the Friday sunset: ‘As with every dusk, one side of the sky — the
western side — glowed a wonderful red, and the sun set in a golden sea and withdrew itself
into night, while on the eastern side of the sky, the darkness was heavy with lonesome
shadows. From the east blew an evening wind that wafted the night clouds about the sky.’
Surely it is only because of his unusually exposed situation that the protagonist has leisure and
opportunity to notice the dramatic sunset; were he at home, he would likely be inside the
synagogue praying with a quorum at that time of day.36
Not only is this lyricism lavished on the natural world, but Fichmann extends it to ritual
observance as well. When Lipe finally enters the chamber where the Elders are singing the
psalms that greet the Sabbath, the narrator observes,
Suddenly he could hear a soft song arising from somewhere, floating from afar and
coming closer. And what a song — a tenor so pure it would break your heart, then a
moment of silence, falling like soft dewdrops and pouring out like a lively stream
amid the grassy steppe. The song arose from the depths and spread itself, like the
wings of a mighty bird, over all the chambers of the palace, reaching higher and
higher. Lipe didn’t move a muscle, but let the sweet song pour into every part of
him. It lifted him up and carried him around like a light feather. He was amazed that
the melody seemed so familiar. Couldn’t he have sworn he’d heard it once in his
own little synagogue?

In its intricate interweaving of nature imagery (dewdrops, stream, steppe) with prayer imagery,
this passage stretches toward the sublime. In doing so, it supports a second, more adult reading
of Lipe’s journey: perhaps the Sabbath respite that he finds is his eternal rest. The most
poetically sophisticated children’s literature (as opposed to the most linguistically elaborate)
is bisemic,37 or intended to be interpreted on different levels by child and adult readers.38 The
aftermath of Lipe’s Sabbath in the forest may be read, à la Peretz’s ‘Bontshe shvayg’ (‘Bontshe
the Silent’) — but with considerably more tenderness and optimism — as a secular meditation
on the Jewish afterlife. Part of the salvage and rehabilitation of classical Jewish textual
sensibilities is the openness and multi-vocality of a text that means something beyond what it
says plainly. Texts that speak variously to children and adults present their own recapitulation
of the magic of Peretz, Shteynbarg and Manger — all of whom managed to be ‘close to the
spirit and tastes of the plain folk’ while remaining, as artists, apart.
Yiddish culture and the invention of childhood
Although some Yiddish children’s texts encoded adult messages, there was commonly assumed
to be an affinity between folklore and youth culture. As Hans-Heino Ewers observes, ‘In terms
of their poetic and literary competence, ‘youth’ and ‘folk’ are on the same level, no matter how
different they may be in other respects’.39 This attitude, the vestige of a time before the
‘invention of childhood’, is equally chauvinistic toward both children and the adult masses. A
more positive spin on the natural kinship between folksiness and children’s literature was
articulated by Boris Levinson, a Bundist educational theorist who maintained that Yiddish
language alone was insufficient as a basis for Yiddish cultural flourishing; Jewish rituals must
be transposed to a secular key. According to Fishman’s account, ‘Levinson argued that the
developmental and psychological needs of Jewish children demanded that they have moments
of elevation and joy, such as the Jewish holidays, to break with the grayness of everyday life.
And as for literature and reading material, young children were attracted to stories of the
mysterious, the fantastic, and the heroic.’40 These elements are on rich display in the wonder
tale and other folk forms.
Yiddish cultural production often seems belated in relation to that of co-territorial nations,
but the time gap with respect to the rise of children’s literature was shorter than usual, since, as
Zohar Shavit reminds us, ‘the whole industry of children’s books began to flourish only in the
second half of the nineteenth century’.41 Only once it was commonly acknowledged that
children occupied a unique set of cognitive and emotional circumstances were they understood
to require — or at least to benefit from — specially designed reading materials.42 Not only did
YCL arise amidst a welter of ideological forces buffeting the Ashkenazic world, but it also
emerged at a moment when the burgeoning field of psychology was prompting a renegotiation
of the meaning of childhood. Families and educators alike partook of new understandings of
maturation and development. Relatively plastic thinkers, children as laboratory specimens
(which they were to pioneering child psychologist Jean Piaget) could offer special insight into
‘development and three themes that predominate in relation to it: rationality, naturalness, and
universality’. Children might be studied almost ethnographically or anthropologically as
specimens from another time and place: ‘Representatives of pre-rational phases, children of
various ages were used to discover the sequential process of the emergent rationality of “the
child”’.43 Colin Heywood describes the developmental focus that prevailed during the early
days of child psychology:
Until the 1960s […] researchers saw the child as an ‘incomplete organism’ which
developed in different directions in response to different stimuli. Again, adulthood
was the critical stage of life from which childhood was merely a preparation. All
the emphasis in anthropology, psychology, psychoanalysis and sociology was on
development and socialization. What mattered was finding ways of turning the
immature, irrational, incompetent, asocial and acultural child into a mature,
rational, competent, social and autonomous adult.44

Development was understood to bridge the biological and the social, so that the passage from
‘savage’ to ‘civilized’ that received so much attention in a colonial world was paralleled by
the passage from childhood to adulthood.
Not only were Jewish educators and educational theorists keenly aware of the fruits of child
psychology, but they actively theorized about how these insights might apply to pedagogy —
and by all the evidence, they applied the theories. Part of the explanation for a departure from
doctrinaire socialism in YCL was surely its fertile pedagogical-theoretical discourse across
several journals. The evidence, according to Moss, points away from the idea of the Jewish
educator as ‘proverbial instiller of national patriotism’. A child was not generally regarded as
a passive vessel waiting to be filled by various nation-building or reformist ideologies ‘but a
budding individuality deserving access to the full range of human experience’.45

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny

Through and beyond the 1920s, the impress of the developmental master narrative was very
strong with respect to the Jewish culture of childhood and the Yiddish literature that it
produced. The Haskalah had envisioned the maturation of the Folk from naivete to
sophistication, which was imagined to correspond to the passage from childhood to adulthood.
Thus there may have been an implicit expectation that each individual had to move from piety
to freethinking as an aspect of his or her process of developmental maturation. Though the
ultimate aspiration might have been toward cosmopolitan universalism, there was nevertheless
a heuristic or pedagogical desideratum to first ‘know your own’ by foregrounding the materials
of Jewish tradition for children, however secularized or modernized. This was the impulse
informing what became the most common method of organization for the school
chrestomathies: to trace an arc from the distinctively and particularly Jewish to the universal.
Going back to Dos yidishe vort, the first major school anthology (Vilna, 1912), ‘The first
volume’s subtitle, and its organizing principle, was The Jewish Shtetl, the Seasons of the Year,
and the Holidays’.46
One speculative theory about the piety evident in the Sabbath tales, despite their
provenance, is that chapbooks intended for home use might range further into a Jewish
religious worldview than the anthologies and chrestomathies authorized for school use.47 The
development from piety to freethinking might in turn be mirrored by the movement from home
to school, thence to community and nation. We might imagine that the format and genre of the
books aligned with the settings in which they were to be read. Perhaps the Yiddish publishing
world was subtly signaling to families that their children might relish a Shabbos tale during
their free time at home, but not in school. However, Fichmann’s inclusion of Pat’s tale ‘The
Rabbi and the Lion’ in his 1912 chrestomathy Far shul un folk would seem to belie this theory.
In his editor’s introduction to that volume, Fichmann bemoans the difficulty of bridging the
demands of shul and folk: that is, ‘regular’ and evening schools. He complains that the
mandate to satisfy both kinds of reader (schoolchild and working class adult) has ‘foreclosed
the possibility of holding fast to a certain program, and set a different stamp’ on the book,
without specifying what he thinks has been lost. The solution he hits upon is aestheticism; he
avers an unyielding commitment to gathering only works of high aesthetic merit, for ‘to educate
children on artistic works means to educate them on true works, for only in authentic (ekht) art
do the deep truths of life, morality, and beauty express themselves’ (Fichmann’s introduction,
pp. 9–10). It would be all too easy, in a moment steeped in folkloric consciousness, to reduce
the corpus of Yiddish children’s literature to a set of ethnographic data points or attestations to
various motifs and patterns. Nevertheless, a recognition of these patterns is a useful place to
begin examining the tales themselves.

The Shabbos tale

In his anatomy of the Russian folktale,48 the folklorist and early structuralist critic Vladimir
Propp discerns a category he calls the wonder tale (volshebnaia skazka). Incorporating motifs
of magic, enchantment, or the fantastic, although not exclusively defined by them, the wonder
tale represents to Propp ‘the most splendid variety of artistic folk prose […] full of high ideals
and elevated aspirations’.49 In Yiddish letters, an analogous place is occupied by what might
be denominated the Shabbos or Sabbath tale, a story with roots in the genre of Hasidic tales,
which itself passed from an original oral form to earnest and faithful redaction in the religious
sphere, and ultimately, to modernist reworking at the hands of secularizing culturists who
wrote ‘in the folk manner’. In the situation that defines this sub-genre, the hero, whether simple
or learned, sees his devotion to keeping the laws of the Sabbath tested by some aspect of the
physical environment. He succeeds in upholding the Sabbath in unusually vulnerable
circumstances through the intervention of supernatural, magical means of unspecified but
presumably divine origin. His humble reward for the good deed is a restoration of the status
quo ante.
Propp’s compositional syntax of motifs and how they function in relation to one another
offers a useful springboard as we attempt a similar analysis of the Sabbath tale. The Russian
wonder tale opens with spatial indeterminacy,50 which corresponds to the temporal
indeterminacies in western European folktale traditions (‘once upon a time’) (p. 151). The
Sabbath tale similarly unfolds in a fuzzy locale: an unnamed and therefore archetypal shtetl or,
more exotically, a midber (desert, wilderness). The homeostasis and well-being of the initial
situation is stressed (p. 152), and the action only begins when a misfortune or privation
compromises this stability. Often, the rupture is associated with a journey, as is the case with
both of the Sabbath tales under consideration. Here the Shabbos tale begins to diverge from the
Russian wonder tale, for in Propp’s model, the absence of the hero from home is associated
with prohibitions, and, ‘The prohibition in folklore is always violated. Otherwise there would
be no plot. Prohibition and violation are a paired function’ (p. 153). Part and parcel of the
Sabbath tale, by contrast, is the faithful upholding of a set of prohibitions: chiefly against
carrying or traveling on the sacred day. Yet other aspects of the tales do run parallel: the
presence of two archetypal kingdoms (matching up with Fichmann’s binary between Jewish
and gentile spaces), the presence of donors or gift givers, including animals, who put
themselves at the hero’s disposal (p. 159), and the defining plot point of test and reward for the
hero. The upholding of the Sabbath corresponds to this function, and the marriage and
crowning typical of the Russian wonder tale are replaced in Fichmann’s tale by a new
appreciation for the ordinary domesticity that the resolution of the conflict restores.

The magic lion

Yankev Pat (1890–1966) is one of those Yiddish cultural figures whose biography remains
spectral in English, but who assumes a fuller presence in Yiddish sources.51 Some of his vita
may be roughly basted together by tracing his appearances in the lives of more prominent
figures and institutions. Primarily an educator, Pat was active as a children’s author and
playwright in Warsaw in the 1920s.52 He was active as a polemicist of the left, contributing to
socialist and communist periodicals that would wage rhetorical war against the anti-
communists (the Zeitlin brothers and Isaac Bashevis Singer) publishing in the literary journal
Globus.53 He also contributed to TSYSHO’s pedagogical theory periodicals. By the late
1930s, he had emigrated to New York,54 where he worked for the Bund and eventually served
as general secretary of the Bund’s Central Association of Yiddish Schools. In this capacity, he
paid visits to Vilna in 1935 and 1938, and to Czestochowa, Poland around 1946. His 1935
visit to a TOZ (Society for Safeguarding the Health of the Jewish Population) summer camp
with poet Avrom Reyzen is documented in a brief but vivid film recorded by travel agent
Gustave Eisner.55 The grainy footage shows the visiting luminaries surrounded by children,
conversing with them, hearing musical performances, and seeing folk dance presentations. The
same year, he collaborated with film director Aleksander Ford and the Polish communist and
educator Wanda Wasilewska to help produce a feature-length film, part documentary and part
narrative, about the Medem Sanatorium, the flagship children’s institution of the Bund.56
‘During the war’, writes Kugelmass, ‘he devoted himself to anti-Nazi activity and rescue
work, and became the Executive Secretary of the Jewish Labor Committee’.57 The Noah
Cotsen Library of Yiddish Children’s Literature records Pat as the author of eight works for
children, including a detailed account of his various family members’ activities during the
Holocaust, with an emphasis on the heroism of his niece, Haneke. Immediately after the war, he
returned to Europe, recording survivors’ narratives and reportage from his own travels in Ash
un fayer: iber di khurvesfun Poyln (Ashes and Fire: Over the Ruins of Poland, New York,
1946). In the fifties, he worked to consolidate and preserve Yiddish culture through compiling
a compendium of profiles on prominent writers whose table of contents reads like a Who’s
Who of early-twentieth-century Yiddish fiction, poetry, and criticism.58
Pat published the story that concerns us, Der vunderlekher leyb (The Magic Lion), with the
Warsaw house of A. Gitlin in 1921 as a free-standing storybook. The tale is set in motion when
a rabbi must undertake a twelve-day journey through the desert wilderness on a matter of life-
or-death importance. Before setting out with an armed caravan, he contracts with one of the
party’s leaders to rest with him over the Sabbath and then, together, to make up the lost time
and rejoin the rest of the group. When that man abandons him, the rabbi decides to spend his
Sabbath in the desert rather than violating the prohibition against travel. After his Sabbath
evening prayers, a lion accosts him; instead of attacking, however, the beast befriends the
rabbi, who includes the creature in his rituals and shares with him his humble Sabbath repasts.
Once the rabbi recites the brief service marking the conclusion of Shabbos, the lion signals to
the rabbi to mount him, and he gallops through the night until they catch up with the caravan.
The lion then disappears into the wilderness, though the thunder of his footsteps lingers.
Yankev Pat was by no means telling an original story. The aggadic collection first published
in 1602 in Basel as Dos mayse bukh includes several tales wherein the protagonists are
rewarded for honouring the Sabbath, but one of these, number 138, appears to be a direct
antecedent.59 Whereas three Jews are traveling together in this tale, only the protagonist
decides to pause and rest at the advent of the Sabbath. He is kept company by a friendly bear,
who devours the pious man’s two feckless companions after the day’s conclusion. Of course,
the wild beast in Pat’s and other more recent retellings is a lion rather than a bear. In medieval
Jewish folklore, the lion motif was associated with themes of repayment and the sequence of
potency-impotency-restored potency.60 For example, Dos mayse bukh itself also includes the
story of Rabbi Shmuel heHasid (number 159), who rescues a lion from a pursuing leopard and
then is invited to mount the beast, which transports him to his destination. It is hardly surprising
that the motif of the beastly Sabbath companion was eventually combined with that of the lion.
In 1802, Eliezer Paver rewrote several of the stories and homilies included in Dos mayse bukh
and published them under the title Sefer hapleyes oder gerimte geshikhte (Book of Wonders,
Or the Famous History); it was reprinted over twenty times throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. The story takes on new life as a Hasidic tale that dates back in written
form at least to an 1896 work published in Krakow and possibly all the way back to Moshe
ben Menahem Mendl Raysher’s 1867 collection Shaare Yerushalayim.61 The sort of collection
in which this story originally appeared in print was part of a publishing spurt in the last decade
of the nineteenth century, a veritable craze for mayses peyles/ploim or wonder tales. In
addition to the volume of Mayses nora’im venifla’im that appeared in Krakow in 1896,
publications with similar titles sprang up in Munkacz, Krakow and Lemberg within a few years
of it.
A more immediate antecedent appears to have been much closer at hand, however. In 1912,
Jacob Fichmann, the same author who wrote the other Sabbath tale to which we shall turn
below, published a chrestomathy intended for use in both ‘regular’ and evening schools. The
third work in his collection, appearing in a section headed ‘beletristik un poezye’ (belles
lettres and poetry), is an unattributed folks-mayse (folktale) called Der rov un der leyb (The
rabbi and the lion). The identical title appears in Pat’s 1921 storybook, not on the title page but
on the following one as a sort of secondary title. Since they shared a publisher (A. Gitlin), it is
difficult to imagine that Pat was not familiar with the version of the story that appeared in
Fichmann’s chrestomathy. Therefore, it becomes useful to juxtapose the two texts in order to
identify Pat’s alterations to the ‘folk’ text and to speculate about the ideological or
philosophical nuances that his departures from the earlier text might have introduced.
Not only does the 1912 folktale already have in place the enframed plot of the rabbi and lion
spending the Sabbath together mutually unharmed, but in fact the narrative frame is significantly
more detailed in the earlier story. Instead of of transpiring in a vague desert locale, the folktale
explains that the Jews of Jerusalem (Sephardim, it specifies) needed to send an emissary to the
Jewish community of Egypt in order to solicit funds for the support of indigents and scholars.
Thus, the rabbi of the tale is given a specific mission, [a] charitable collection, that involves a
specific itinerary through what must be the Sinai desert. In Pat’s retelling, the protagonist
undertakes a task of life-and-death importance (pikuakh nefesh), but its nature is left
unspecified. The caravan of other travelers is made up of Arabs, not generic gentiles, and the
leader of party is identified as a sheikh (shakh). The rabbi’s original arrangement — the one
that must fall through in order to create the conflict — is slightly different as well. In Pat’s
version, he enters into an agreement with one individual member of the caravan to spend the
Sabbath with him, while in the earlier folktale, he pays the sheikh to hold the entire caravan for
him — but when Friday afternoon arrives, the sheikh laughs at him and tells him he cannot hold
up the entire caravan for one man. As he considers whether to travel on with the group or to
rest alone for Shabbos, the emissary in the folktale couches his reasoning in more legalistic
terms than Pat’s rabbi: his coming to harm in the desert is a matter of doubt (sofek), while
violating the Sabbath laws would mean certain renunciation of his heavenly portion (oylem
habe). Certainty overrules doubt in Jewish legal discourse. The folktale also places more
emphasis on the emissary’s interaction with other members of the caravan, who are divided
between those who scoff at him as a madman, and those who shake their heads in pity at his
self-endangerment.
Pat’s version places a stronger emphasis on the companionship that develops between rabbi
and lion. In the unattributed folktale, the emissary eats and drinks all of his provisions himself,
and the lion presents himself only after the traveller has finished his dinner. Pat has the rabbi
share his bread, and the author also slips in the didactic and relatively minute halakhic detail
that in the absence of wine, one might bless the Sabbath over the bread. In Pat’s story, the two
figures ‘pray’ together: the rabbi by reciting the Shabbos liturgy, and the lion by roaring. Pat’s
lion is more anthropomorphic altogether, eating the Sabbath meals, bellowing his leonine
prayers, and even going for a stroll (shpatsir) during the long, idle afternoon. Both versions
feature the lion conveying the rabbi swiftly all through Saturday night, to overtake the caravan,
but the folktale again emphasizes how they are received by the rest of the caravan party, and
this detail presents the single most significant difference between the two versions. Not only
does the sheikh humble himself and beg forgiveness for leaving the rabbi behind, but the
wonderstruck onlookers acknowledge that a man of God is in their midst, and they confer upon
him the moniker ‘Ariel’, or ‘lion of God’. And so, the story tells us in conclusion, ‘In the city
of Hebron, there can be found to this day the Ariel family, which descends from that holy man’
(p. 16). The folktale, at least as it appears in Fichmann’s chrestomathy, is an etiological tale
explaining the surname of the Ariel family and its presence in Hebron (the staging place for the
caravan). As such, and given the geographical specificity, this tale might not be a ‘wonder tale’
at all according to a narrow definition; it might rather be counted as a fable.62 What is
important for our analysis is not to categorize the tale strictly, but to observe that Pat drops the
narrative frame, ending the tale with the traveller’s dismounting from his beastly chariot and
the lion’s swift withdrawal from the scene. Presumably Pat excludes the material about the
origins of the ‘Ariel’ family because his audience is not a Hasidic one, and there is no reason
why that etiology would hold any particular resonance or yield an ‘aha!’ feeling of discovery
at the conclusion. To make the tale more general — by stripping it of spatial and identity
markers — was to render it more mythopoeic. Ironically, removing some of the traces of the
actual folk materials make Pat’s tale seem more stylized and folkloric than its antecedents.

Sabbath in the forest

Jacob Fichmann (1881–1958) was chiefly known as a cultural Zionist.63 Born and educated in
Bessarabia, he made his way as a young man and aspiring poet to the Odessa of Hayim
Nahman Bialik. From 1903 to 1911, when his first collection of Hebrew poetry was published,
Fichmann moved between Odessa and Warsaw. In 1912, the year that his chrestomathy
appeared, he emigrated to Palestine. A return visit in 1914 stranded him in Europe until the end
of the war, when he returned to Palestine. Over the course of his lifetime, he spent long
stretches in Warsaw and in Tel Aviv, finally settling in the latter city until his passing there in
1958. A member of Bialik’s circle, Fichmann is known for his lyric poetry in Hebrew and
Yiddish, his contributions to the nascent body of children’s literature in both languages (though
he was more prolific in Hebrew), and for inventing the Hebrew lullaby. Like Yankev Pat, he is
well described by Moss’s term culturist: active and intentional in his relation to the culture he
was helping to create.
Although Fichmann did not write a great deal for children in Yiddish, a significant degree of
prestige attached itself to that which he did write. In 1924, his story Shabes in vald (A Sabbath
in the Forest) was published in Warsaw by Kultur-lige, a press with high artistic-literary
aspirations and an aestheticist bent whose three pillars were ‘Yiddish popular education,
Yiddish literature, and Jewish art’.64 In Fichmann’s story, an unlearned but pious tailor is
making his way home through the forest on a Friday when he is caught in a blizzard. No sooner
does Lipe the Tailor set down his rucksack and recite the Friday afternoon prayers than a
marble palace arises before his eyes. Candles glowing in the windows beckon him to enter,
and when he does, he moves among luxurious chambers each of which is stocked with all the
accoutrements of the Friday night meal and its attendant rituals. Lipe is utterly alone, until, in
the sixth and final chamber, he is greeted by a congregation of Elders (zkeynim), who hail him
as a welcome guest at their prayers and meals. After spending the Sabbath with them in
harmony and comfort, he listens to the Havdalah ceremony, and poof! the palace disappears,
the blizzard abates, and he is just footsteps from his own shtetl, with his cosy home and
humble shul.
Fichmann’s wonder tale shares many motifs with Hasidic antecedents, although his story
appears to be more of an original creation and less of a straightforward reworking than Pat’s.
Its geographical setting is similarly non-specific, but this time the climate is wintry and Eastern
European rather than exotic and desert-like. If Pat preserved the ‘guts’ of the folktale, while
altering its frame, then Fichmann may be said to have done just the opposite.65 The Zikhron tov,
a collection of Hasidic tales collected by Yitskhok Landau and published in Pietrkow in 1892
includes a story about the Seer of Lublin. One Saturday night, the Lubliner sets out for the
forest in order to enjoy melave malkah, the wistful yet festive meal that accompanies the
departure of the Sabbath Queen, when a storm brings rain and cold. He takes refuge in a well-
lit house in the woods,66 and is revived by the warmth. But while he waits out the storm, he
encounters a beautiful woman there, bent on seduction. The moment he definitively rejects her
advances, the sage immediately sees ‘that it was all imaginary in order to test him’. There is in
fact no forest, no house, and no woman, and the tale concludes with him left standing on the
path to his destination. Fichmann’s story shifts the emphasis to the Sabbath and its observance,
but the important parallels are the enchanted domicile glowing in the stormy forest and its
immediate disappearance after the hero has met the challenge, be it keeping the Sabbath or
resisting seduction.
Broadly speaking, the forest is a liminal place of uncertainty and danger, and this is certainly
true of Jewish folk and high literature. The forest figures in Hasidic tales about apostasy,
attempted rape, and cannibalism, and it is frightening enough to require the composition of an
amulet specifically against ‘fear of the forest’.67 For Mendele Moykher Sforim, the night-time
forest holds out ‘the wildest and most frightening notions’.68 Even for Sholem Aleichem’s
Tevye the Dairyman, the forest is a site of uncertainty, fluid identity, and vulnerability, a stretch
to be traversed — as for Fichmann’s tailor — between opposing certainties. At the same time,
we ought to note that the forest features positively in Hasidic literature as a site for seclusion
in prayer (hisboydedes) and in connection with the recognition of the thirty-six Hidden
Righteous. Even these more positive associations, however, owe to the forest’s capacity for
concealment. In Fichmann’s tale, the space surrounding the forest is marked by stark binarity:
on one side lies his familiar shtetl, and on the other, the non-Jewish peasant villages where he
works as an itinerant tailor and patcher. The divagation between home and away corresponds,
in turn, to those between Shabbos and workaday, protected and exposed, inside and outside, 69
Jewish and gentile. It is telling that Fichmann, a cultural Zionist, was invested as late as 1924
in imagining Jewish existence so dichotomously. A similar starkness obtains with respect to his
conceptualization of Sabbath observance itself. Lipe fears not only being caught in white-out
blizzard conditions, but also that Shabbos will farshtert vern: be disturbed, spoiled, or
thwarted. At the otherwise triumphant conclusion of the tale, his only regret is that his wife’s
Sabbath has been farshtert. The rabbinic protagonist of Pat’s story has similar qualms about
being mekhalel shabes (in violation of the Sabbath), and it is notable that both stories imagine
this possibility in negative terms, rather than as a positive ideal of ophitn shabes (keeping or
upholding the Sabbath).
Fichmann’s punchline at the conclusion of the story enacts a sort of martial arts manoeuvre
on the wonder tale itself, using its own weight to overturn its signification. Lipe spends the
most materially luxurious, ritually fulfilling Sabbath imaginable — only to realize in its
aftermath that the tunes favoured by the holy zkenim in their palace are the same ones he knows
from his ordinary shtibl, and the lavish, magical meal delights him with the same flavours
found in the humble dishes that his wife Nekhame prepares week after week. Thus the
cumulative weight of the enchanted palace — and all the precious vessels and luxurious
furnishings that it contains — is commensurated with, if not subordinated to, the homely rituals
of Lipe’s regular Sabbaths. Who needs a magical palace, Fichmann seems to suggest, when the
properties of the Sabbath itself are so elevating and divinely magical?
The finer points of Sabbath observance as presented in these two tales are certainly a
folkloric patrimony of the Jewish people, but they are something more than that as well — a
touchstone for a uniquely Jewish poetics that critic and theorist Shmuel Niger believed would
nourish and regenerate the Jewish people: ‘For us, it is a treasure, something which we wish to
enjoy in itself. We seek in it not the soul of the people but an additional soul [neshome yesera].
We treasure it according to the artistic pleasure, not the scientific utility, which it brings us.’70
Here again, now in a theoretical vein, is the dialectical tension between religion and secularity
in the quest for an authentic modern yidishkayt. The functionalist, flatly ethnographic interest in
Jewish folklore bespoke, to Niger, the workaday, while the aesthetic interest was, Sabbath-
like, both ornamental and refreshing. An additional soul present only on Shabbos, a treasure to
be valued beyond its instrumental use: obviously the harbingers of the brave, new, secular
world were not entirely ready to dispense with the Sabbath and all that it represented to them.
Notes to Chapter 2
1. ‘Fed by mass emigration, urbanization, and economic upheaval, social revolution and nationalism in both their Jewish and
non-Jewish forms captured the Jewish street. Bundism, territorialism, communism, and liberalism joined Zionism as political
answers to the crisis of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jewish life. All sought salvation in some form of
politics, and all did so in conscious opposition to traditional religion.’ David Biale, Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of
Jewish Secular Thought (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011), p. 11.
2. Gabriela Safran, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010), p. 146.
3. Ibid., p. 191.
4. Kenneth B. Moss Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009), p. 201.
5. Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution, p. 201; David Fishman, The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture
(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), p. 56; Itzik Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation: The Jewish
Folklorists of Poland (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2003), pp. 86–108 (on Shloyme Bastomski); Daniel Blatman, For Our
Freedom and Yours: The Jewish Labour Bund in Poland, 1939–1949 (London and Portland, Ore: Vallentine Mitchell,
2003); Zvi Gitelman, ed., The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics: Bundism and Zionism in Eastern Europe
(Pittsburgh: Pittsburg University Press, 2003); Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism and the
Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Miriam Eisenstein, Jewish
Schools in Poland, 1919–1939 (New York: King’s Crown Press, Columbia University, 1950); YIVO Encyclopedia
articles on ‘Bund’ (Daniel Blatman), ‘TSYSHO’ (Joshua D. Zimmerman); Encyclopedia of the Holocaust,
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, ed. by Robert Rozett and Shmuel Spector (New York: Routledge, 2013).
6. Adina Bar-El, ‘“Grininke Beymelekh”: Ha-Hat´lah: Le-Toldotav shel ‘iton yeladim yidi be-Polin’, Kesher, 27 (May 2000),
99–106; Bar-El, ‘Ha-´inukh ha-´iloni be-yidish be-te´ilat ha-me’ah ha-‘esrim u-mekomo be-hitpat´ut sifrut ha-yeladim’, Dor
le-dor, 23 (2003), 7–16; Bar-El, Ben ha-‘etsim ha-yerakrakim: ‘Itonei yeladim be-‘ivrit ube-yidish be-Polin 1918–
1939 (2006); Shmuel Niger, ‘Vegn yidisher kinder-literatur’, Shul-almanakh (1935), 188–95; Chone Shmeruk, ‘Sholem-
Aleykhem un di onheybn fun der yidisher literatur far kinder’, Di goldene keyt, 112 (1984), 39–53.
7. See Chone Shmeruk, ‘Yiddish Adaptations of Children’s Stories from World Literature’, Studies in Contemporary Jewry,
6 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 186–200. And in Hebrew, see his ‘“Iyunim be-darkhe ha-
kelitah shel sifrut-yeladim l’o-yehudit be-yidish,” in ‘Iyunim be-sifrut: Devarim she-ne’emru be-‘erev li-khevod Dov
Sadan bi-mel’ot lo shemonim ve-´amesh shanah (Jerusalem, 1988), pp. 59–87.
8. Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution, p. 205.
9. Ibid. See also Uncovering the Hidden: The Works and Life of Der Nister, ed. by Gennady Estraikh, Kerstin Hoge and
Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 2014), as well as chapters 6 and 7 in the present volume.
10. ‘In literary publishing for children, where the object was manifestly the direct shaping of the reader, the leading writers,
critics, and publishers of both camps [Hebrew and Yiddish] inclined decisively away from direct strategies of national
subject formation’ — Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution, pp. 204–05.
11. Ibid., p. 78.
12. Biale, Not in the Heavens, p. 2.
13. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: FSG, 1951).
14. David Roskies has elaborated this idea in a series of lectures entitled, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999).
15. This tendency may be contrasted with post-war YCL published in the Americas, which often represented contemporary
children observing the holidays realistically, even in a non-traditional milieu. For an example, see Zina Rabinowitz’s holiday
anthology Der liber yontef (New York: Matones, 1958).
16. Fishman, The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture, p. 106.
17. Ibid, p. x.
18. ‘…the break between traditional Judaism and secular Yiddish nationalism was far from total and was often less dramatic in
practice than in theory’, ibid, p. ix.
19. Ibid, p. 100.
20. As Fishman writes, ‘…folklore was elevated to the status of the Jews’ most precious national treasure, since it was the
truest expression of the folk spirit’ — see his The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture, p. 100.
21. See Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation, p. 125.
22. Dan Miron, ‘Folklore and Antifolklore in the Yiddish Fiction of the Haskala’, in Studies in Jewish Folklore, ed. Frank
Talmage (Cambridge, MA: Association for Jewish Studies, 1980), p. 223.
23. Mark W. Kiel, ‘Vox Populi, Vox Dei: The Centrality of Peretz in Jewish Folkloristics’, Polin, 7 (1992): 88–120.
24. An-sky was in fact quite influenced by Peretz’s 1901 essay ‘Dos yidishe lebn loyt di yidishe folkslider’, YIVO-Bleter,
13, nos. 1–2 (1937): 291–99.
25. Kiel, ‘Vox Populi, Vox Dei’, p. 96.
26. The rhetoric of folklore as Oral Torah is not unique to An-sky. For a treatment of its application by Shmuel Niger to the
work of Y. L. Peretz, see Kiel, p. 99. For the locus classicus in An-sky’s work, see his seminal 1908 essay ‘Evreiskoe
narodnoe tvorchestvo’, Perezhitoe, translated into Yiddish by Zalmen Reyzn and published in the final volume of An-sky’s
Gezamlte shriftn, XV (Warsaw: Farlag An-ski, 1925). For a gloss of this essay, see Gabriella Safran’s Wandering Soul,
pp. 143–47, 187–96. Another incisive treatment of his ethnographic project is Nathaniel Deutsch, The Jewish Dark
Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Finally,
a range of contemporary scholarly treatments appears in Gabriella Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein, The Worlds of S.
Ansky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
27. See Shoshke Ehrlich’s linguistic note in Yidishe shprakh, 33 (1973–74): 51–52.
28. Ibid., p. 51.
29. Ibid., pp. 52–55.
30. Biale, p. 12.
31. ‘As a religious agnostic, Peretz stripped the Bible and rabbinic literature of their status as products of divine revelation and
as codes of binding religious law. But he reenshrined these works as national repositories of wisdom, beauty, and moral-
ethical values.’ Fishman, p. 102.
32. Safran, Wandering Soul, pp. 144–45.
33. A contrast on which rabbinic literature places a heavy emphasis, tracing the dual positive-negative imperatives of Sabbath
observance to the varying terms that appear in the commandment to keep the day as it appears in Exodus (zakhor) and
Deuteronomy (shamor).
34. This text is from the 1873 version of the Collected Works and is my translation.
35. By 1940, the trope of the cloistered (and often pasty-faced) Jewish youth stepping out into the sunshine, would be so
ubiquitous as to be almost tiresome. The instances are too numerous to catalogue, but as representative texts, take the first
chapter of Motl Peysi dem khazns (Motl, the Cantor’s Son) by Sholem Aleichem and the scene in Grine Felder (Green
Fields, Jacob Ben-Ami and Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1937 film version of Peretz Hirschbein’s play) wherein the protagonist Levi
Yitskhok emerges from the dark beyz-medresh into dazzling daylight.
36. Contrast this passage, with its celebratory depiction of solitary (as opposed to communal) prayer, with the end of Y. L.
Peretz’s story ‘Tsvishn tsey berg’ (‘Between Two Mountains’), where the coming sunset requires the assembled to attend
the afternoon prayer service, thus putting an end to the religious and aesthetic sublimity of Hasidic experience as focalized
through Peretz’s lens.
37. Monosemic and bisemic texts are well-established categories in the study of children’s literature. For a clear recent
treatment of the concept, see Hans-Heino Ewers, Fundamental Concepts of Children’s Literature Research: Literary
and Sociological Approaches (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 45–49.
38. YCL affords relatively few examples of thoroughgoing bisemy, but one elegant instance is Moyshe Kulbak’s story Der vint
vos iz geven in kas (‘The Wind that Got Angry’). Eliezer Shteynbarg’s verse fables are thoroughly bisemic, but it is
debatable whether most of them may be considered true children’s literature.
39. Ewers, Fundamental Concepts of Children’s Literature Research, p. 45.
40. Fishman, p. 104.
41. ‘Society is so used to its understanding of what childhood is, as well as to the existence of books for children, that it forgets
that both concepts, childhood and books for children, are relatively new phenomena; that is, society’s present view of
childhood is far removed from that which was held only two centuries ago.…’ ‘[Philippe] Aries argued that until the
seventeenth century children were not considered different from adults. It was assumed that they had no special needs,
and as a result, there was neither an established educational system, nor were there any books for children.’ Zohar Shavit,
Poetics of Children’s Literature (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009), p. 3.
42. Shimon Dubnov was among the earliest observers to formulate this idea with regard to Yiddish literature. In his review of
Sholem Aleichem’s early story ‘Dos meserl’, Dubnov praised the truthfulness and accuracy of the portrayal of the
psychology of a ‘kheder child’ (in his article, signed Kritikus (Semoyn Dubnov), ‘Bednaia evreiskaia belletristika’,
Voskhod, 7–8 (1887), 37. This review encouraged Sholem Aleichem to continue writing in Yiddish.
43. Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, ed. by
Allison James and Alan Prout (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 10–11.
44. Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood, Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), p. 44.
45. Moss, pp. 204–05.
46. Fishman, p. 107.
47. ‘The national-romantic wing of Yiddishism, in theory and in educational practice, exhibited a deep and complex relationship
toward Judaism. Nonetheless, there were clearly drawn lines that were not crossed even by its most traditionalist
members. Foremost of these was the issue of God. Yiddish schools defined themselves as secular. Discussion of God as
creator, master of the universe, or providential force was beyond the pale of acceptable discourse. Consequently, prayer
and religious ritual were likewise anathema’. Fishman, p. 112. This may be a rule proven by the exception of Fichmann’s
 chrestomathy and its inclusion of ‘The Rabbi and the Lion’.
48. Propp developed his account over several works, beginning with his watershed Morphology of the Folktale in 1928,
followed by his Theory and History of Folklore, and continuing with the more recently published synthetic work The
Russian Folktale. To access these works in English, see the following: Morphology of the Folktale: Second Edition,
ed. Louis A. Wagner (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003); Theory and History of Folklore, trans. by Ariadna
Y. Martin and Richard P. Martin, ed. Anatoly Liberman (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); and The
Russian Folktale by Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp, ed. and trans. by Sibelan Forrester (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2012).
49. See Vladimir Y. Propp, The Russian Folktale, ed. and trans. by Sibelan Forrester (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2012), pp.
147–224.
50. This feature also recalls Mikhail Bakhtin’s description of the Greek romance, wherein the hero moves laterally through an
unmarked and unspecified but vast spatial expanse. See his essay ‘Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel’, in The
Dialogic Imagination, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1981), pp. 105–07.
51. See his entry in Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, VIII (New York: World Congress for Jewish Culture, 1961)
pp. 70–74. A gloss is provided by Jack Kugelmass in his 12 March 2013 David W. Belin Lecture in American Jewish
Affairs at the University of Michigan, published as Sifting the Ruins: Émigré Jewish Journalists’ Return Visits to the
Old Country, 1946–1948, XXIII, p. 14. Kugelmass cites a further source: Guide to the Jacob Pat Papers, WAG.127,
Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.
52. YIVO houses a photograph of an actor in costume for In goldenem-land (In a Golden Land) by Yankev Pat, Warsaw, ca.
1920s.
53. See Nathan Cohn, ‘Globus’, The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. by Gershon D. Hundert (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 606.
54. According to Kugelmass, he was already serving as General Secretary of the Bund’s Central Association of Yiddish
Schools in Warsaw and came to the US on a fundraising trip in the autumn of 1938, then remained afterwards (Kugelmass,
Sifting the Ruins, p. 14).
55. <http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/search.aspx?query=patl>.
56. The film is called Mir kumen on (US title: Children Must Laugh) and is described in Gertrud Pickhan, ‘Medem
Sanatorium’, The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. by Gershon D. Hundert (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 1142–1143.
57. Kugelmass, Sifting the Ruins, p. 14.
58. See Pat’s Shmuesn mit yidishe shrayber (New York: Mekhaber, 1954). A version about writers living in Israel followed in
1960.
59. See Ma‘aseh Book: Book of Jewish Tales and Legends, ed. and trans. by Moses Gaster (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society, 1934), I, Tale 138, pp. 252–54. A facsimile of the original Yiddish was annotated and translated into
French, and published as a lavish bilingual edition by Astrid Starck: Un beau livre d’histoires (Basel: Schwabe, 2004), pp.
312–14.
60. Regarding the medieval motif and its contexts and meanings, see Jeremy Dauber’s study In the Demon’s Bedroom:
Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 109–10, 131–34.
61. See Eli Yassif, The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning, trans. Jacqueline S. Teitelbaum (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 371–407; Gedalia Nigal, Leksikon hasipur hahasidi (Jerusalem: Hamakhon leheker
hasifrut hahasidit, 2005), p. 31.
62. Dauber takes great care with the generic distinctions. Pat’s version of this story is a folktale rather than a fable, as its
essential purpose is not to explain some aspect of how the world is.
63. Most biographical material on Fichmann is available only in Hebrew. See ‘Arugot: Kovets le-zikhro shel Ya’akov
Fikhman, various eds., 3 vols (Tel Aviv, 1973, 1976, 1983); Hillel Barzel, ‘Ya‘akov Fi´man: Lirikah epit’, in Shirat ha-te
´iyah: Omane ha-zianer, pp. 452–553 (Tel Aviv, 1997); Nurit Govrin, ed., Ya’akov Fikhman: Miv´ar ma’amre bikoret
‘al yetsirato (Tel Aviv, 1971); Getzel Kressel, ‘Fikhman, Ya‘akov’, in Leksikon ha-sifrut ha-‘ivrit ba-dorot ha-a
´aronitn, ed. by Getzel Kressel, pp. 602–08 (Mer´avyah, 1976); Zvi Luz, Shirat Ya‘akov Fikhman: Monografyah (Tel
Aviv, 1989). In English, see Moss, pp. 177–80, 212–13; Nurit Govrin, ‘Fichmann, Ya’akov’, The YIVO Encyclopedia of
Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. by Gershon D. Hundert (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 511–12.
64. Moss, p. 77. The story Shabes in vald may be accessed electronically through the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish
Library at <archive.org/details/nybc213346>. My translation appears in PaknTreger Special Translation Issue, 2014
(2014), 5774. All translations of the Sabbath tales included in this essay are my own.
65. This is somewhat speculative, for I cannot rule out another antecedent, closer in content to the story about the Lubliner,
recounted below.
66. This is a very ancient motif, whose resonance for many readers or listeners might even be traced back to the birah
doleket, the illuminated house that Abraham sees on his travels (Bereshit Rabba, 39a).
67. Nigal, Leksikon hasipur hahasidi, pp. 76, 168, 239, 244.
68. See Chapter 7 of Fishke the Lame, as it appears in S. Y. Abramovitsh, Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler, ed. by Dan
Miron and Ken Frieden (New York: Schocken, 1996), p. 83.
69. Eli Yassif takes up the significance of the inside-house/outside dichotomy in the traditional Hasidic tale. See The Hebrew
Folktale, pp. 405–06.
70. Shmuel Niger, ‘Folks-shafung’, Kultur un bildung, 26, August 1918, p. 9. I am indebted to Kenneth Moss for keen advice
throughout the writing of this article and, specifically, for calling my attention to this quotation by Niger. As he glossed it in
an email, ‘How’s that for “secular” sabbatism?!’ The English is a slightly modified version of Moss’s translation of the
same passage on p. 74 of Jewish Renaissance.

 CHAPTER 3

Heavenly Father: Portraying the Family in Hasidic

Yiddish Children’s Literature
Asya Vaisman Schulman

Mommy has lit the Sabbath candles,

Both hands on her eyes,
A prayer to Father above.1
Mami hot shabes lekht getsundn
Beyde hent oyf ire oygn
A tkhine tsum tatn oybn.
At the book stores, music stores, and toy stores that serve the Hasidic communities of the
Borough Park and Williamsburg neighbourhoods of Brooklyn, New York, several brightly-
coloured rotating book racks catch the shopper’s eye. They are filled with Yiddish-language
children’s books, easily recognizable by their laminated or cardboard pages, large
illustrations, and distinctive orthography, with nekudes — diacritical markings — beneath the
letters.
Yiddish is the vernacular for most of the Hasidic groups that live in these and other areas,
and the children’s books provide entertaining didactic materials for children growing up in an
insular society. Because of their desire to protect themselves from potentially harmful outside
influences, Hasidim reject texts (in the broad sense of the word) written by non-religious Jews.
Most communities disallow these works not only because they may communicate, as
sociologist George Kranzler notes, ‘values, conduct and trends of the outside world, many of
which are seen to contradict or violate the spirit or laws of the Torah and the Hasidic
tradition’, but also because of the contemporary Hasidic belief that an author’s religious
outlook is conveyed through any product of his or her creative expression, even if it is not
overtly expressed in the composition itself.2
Thus, as other students of Hasidic life have noted, only culturally sanctioned, usually
culture-internal sources are seen as acceptable reading material, particularly for the younger
generation, to protect them against unwanted influences.3 With the rapid growth of Hasidic
communities in New York, Montreal, Jerusalem, London, Antwerp and some other cities —
most families have up to twelve children — the need for these permitted materials is ever
greater, and the quantity and variety of Hasidic children’s books is correspondingly increasing.
Because of the religious proscription against wasting time, or bitul zman, the ultra-Orthodox
children’s books are never purely entertaining — each book contains a moral message, a
lesson about performing mitzvahs (commandments), obeying societal regulations, and trusting
in God.4 These messages are reinforced throughout the text of the book and often spelled out
explicitly in a poem appended to the end of the story, a feature also common in fables. Hasidic
children’s books are thus distinctive not only in their ‘kosher’ content, such as portrayals of
only modestly-dressed females and observant behaviour of characters, but also in their
didactic intent.
In this essay, I would like to look in particular at Yiddish books aimed at young Hasidic
children aged two to seven. There are a number of book series for this age group, each
covering a somewhat different genre, but generally belonging to one of two primary categories:
stories that depict the everyday reality of life for Hasidic children today, teaching them how
best to function in their own society, and stories of tsadikim (righteous men), set in an
imagined pre-war Eastern Europe (books on figures such as the Ba’al Shem Tov, the Seer of
Lublin, Elimelech of Lizhensk and the Ruzhiner Rebbe).5
Very little scholarship currently exists on the topic of Hasidic children’s literature. The few
articles that have been published within the past ten years focus primarily on specifically
educational materials used in Hasidic schools and on texts for older children and young
adults.6 Bruce Mitchell (2002–2003) and Jordan Kutzik (2011) have written about the history
of Hasidic publishing in the United Kingdom and the United States, respectively, with a
specific concentration on children’s books. Hasidic Yiddish texts for children began to emerge
in the 1950s and 1960s with the establishment both in America and Europe of Hasidic schools
that needed materials for their pupils. In the 1980s, independent publishing houses began to
distribute children’s books for a wider audience unaffiliated with any particular school system.
These latter publications cater to diverse Hasidic groups, and their number and variety has
increased dramatically in the past three decades.
In addition to producing new works in Yiddish for children, book publishers are issuing
book series by non-Hasidic religious Jewish authors, translated into Yiddish from English or
Hebrew (such books began to be published in Israel in the 1990s), in order to keep up with
demand. These translated works, while almost identical to Hasidic ones in content and subject
matter, differ in their writing style, often incorporating more detail and complexity than the
Hasidic works, and in their graphic portrayal of religious Jews.
It is often difficult to determine who the authors of the new children’s books are. The
emphasis placed on humility in the Hasidic community proscribes pride in creative
accomplishments.7 Thus, on many of the publications, the full name of the author is not
indicated, and instead only initials are provided, especially when the author is a woman.
Anthropologist Ayala Fader, in writing about Hasidic English publications for children, has
observed that ‘Jewish English fiction is written either by an individual woman or a group of
women, often based in Israel or Brooklyn, and supervised by rabbis who ensure that books are
kosher’.8 It is likely that this is also the case with Hasidic Yiddish children’s books.
The study of children’s literature in Hasidic communities provides valuable insight into the
means that are used to shape the world-view of the next generation of Hasidic Jews. As the
Hasidim are becoming an increasingly significant component of the Jewish population in their
respective countries, a process helped by the low birth and high intermarriage rate among less
observant Jews, it is important to consider their cultural products, especially within the field
of Yiddish, since Hasidic works constitute the majority of Yiddish language material being
created today. In particular, examining the way that family life is portrayed in the children’s
books can shed light on Hasidic views of gender, children’s autonomy and the role of the
divine in everyday life. A deeper understanding of this religious community, furthermore, has
broad implications in identifying patterns of cultural transmission in other religious societies.
The Hasidic nuclear family can best be examined in those series of books set in the
contemporary world. In each story, the child protagonist encounters a difficult ethical situation,
which he or she must resolve by ameliorating a flaw in his or her character or by making the
morally correct choice when faced with a dilemma. The setting of most of the stories is a
romanticized depiction of the archetypal Hasidic home, populated by the protagonist’s
numerous siblings, the kind-hearted and hardworking mother, and a father figure — not the
child’s biological father, but the Heavenly Father. The difficult situation is resolved only after
the child himself realizes that there is a problem and recognizes the importance of remedying
it. His family helps him along the way, but the ultimate solution cannot be found until God
himself intervenes.
It is worth noting that the child’s parents do not immediately discipline him upon noticing his
misdeeds. The importance placed on waiting for the child to manage his own predicament is
emblematic of the value ascribed to children’s independence more generally. With an average
of ten children in each household, the domestic life of a Hasidic family can be quite hectic —
there are many chores to complete, mouths to feed and religious rituals to perform.
In an ideal family as depicted in this literature, the mother, whose primary domain is the
home, is occupied with raising her children to be pious Jews and with creating a festive
atmosphere in the house for the Sabbath day, while the father is engaged in the synagogue or the
study house, striving continually to increase his knowledge of religious texts so that he can
better serve the Creator on his family’s behalf. With both parents busy dealing with their
respective obligations, the children are assigned a high degree of autonomy and are expected to
take care of themselves in many areas of home life. They clean their rooms without being
asked, volunteer to help their mother cook and set the table, and perform bedtime routines
without any assistance.
The children’s books teach, however, that no matter how self-reliant the child is when it
comes to performing everyday tasks, he nevertheless cannot effect significant moral
transformations without the assistance of God. In order to enact change, whether in improving
the behaviour of a wilful child or in ensuring the recovery of a sick person, the family relies on
their tate in himl (Daddy in Heaven), whom they address with the familiar ‘du’ second person
pronoun.
One example of this plot structure demonstrating the family dynamics described above can
be found in the book Shloymele vert guthartsik (Shloymele Becomes Generous). The main
character, Shloymele, starts out as a selfish boy who insists on keeping all of his toys and treats
to himself and prefers to play alone rather than share with other children. Although his greedy
behaviour brings his mother and siblings much grief, the child is incorrigible until he sees the
effects of greed and selfishness in the natural world. On a walk with his family, he observes
how a large duck steals a piece of bread from a group of baby ducklings. Shloymele feels
compassion for the hungry ducklings, and God causes the large duck to drop the piece of bread
back into the water for the ducklings to share. After God’s intervention, Shloymele resolves to
become kind and generous and proceeds to play in a considerate and courteous way with other
children.
Although the principal actors in this story are Shloymele and God, Shloymele’s mother plays
a vital role in the narrative. It is thanks to her prompting that Shloymele is able to derive a life
lesson from his experience with the ducks, and her continual presence in the home, as seen in
the illustrations on nearly every page of the book, sets a positive example for Shloymele of
how a good Jew conducts himself or herself. Shloymele’s father, however, never makes an
appearance and is not even mentioned in this particular text. Such a system of relationships is
typical within this category of Hasidic children’s books. The absence of the father can in part
be explained by the man’s role in Hasidic society. While the mother is looking after the
household, the father’s realm is in the public sphere: he is the gatekeeper of the world outside
the home, where he can be found involved in religious life and mediating interactions with
non-Jews.
In the books, the father usually appears only in extreme situations. As one child says in the
storybook accompanying a Hasidic children’s card game, Ikh fil shpil (I Feel Game), ‘It’s not
often that I get to spend time alone with my father’. Even when the father is present, he is
generally relegated to the periphery of each story; he almost never has any speaking lines, and
he takes part either as a minor and mostly ineffectual character, or he serves one of two
functions: being an intercessor to the non-Hasidic world or an agent of divine will. This essay
will look at several examples of the father’s role in the moralistic stories and will consider
what lessons the children learn about gender roles in Hasidic society from the portrayals.
In the book In zkhus fun tehilim (Merited by the Psalms), a mother goes grocery shopping
with her youngest child, leaving the other kids at home to prepare for the Sabbath.9 When she
has her back turned, the baby reaches for some candy and falls facedown onto the ground. A
Hatsole (volunteer Emergency Medical Service organization serving Jewish communities)
ambulance rushes to the scene, sirens blaring for the entire neighbourhood to hear. Without
knowing who is in the ambulance, the baby’s siblings immediately start to say psalms to pray
for the health of the hurt person upon hearing the sirens.
The father comes home soon thereafter and sees his children hard at work reciting psalms.
Pleased by their piety, he sits down to have a cup of coffee. When the mother, panicking, calls
from the ambulance, the father tells her of the siblings’ virtuous act and reassures her that God
will certainly come to the family’s aid. Realizing that it is his son who is in trouble, the father
then joins the children in reciting psalms. Because of the children’s great good deed, God does
in fact answer their prayers, and their brother returns home in time for the Sabbath with only a
scratch on his forehead.
In this story, the father acts only as a messenger, conveying information between the mother
and the children. He in fact displays less piety than the children, only joining the prayers after
becoming aware of the identity of the victim. The father, rather than setting the example,
follows the children’s lead. The positive outcome is achieved only through the initiative of the
children and the assistance of their Heavenly Father.
In Nakhmen gedenkt shoyn (Nakhmen Remembers Already), the father is similarly
marginal.10 Nakhmen, who enjoys sweets and pastries a little too much, finds his poor diet
affecting his performance in school. His mother tries to help in every way she can — she offers
Nakhmen nutritious food to improve his memory, but he refuses and continues to snack on
unhealthy treats. As a result, he has an even harder time concentrating in class. By the Sabbath
candles, both Nakhmen and his mother are truly distressed by the boy’s troubles and, with tears
in their eyes, beg God to improve their desperate situation. Finally, the mother, feeling great
compassion for Nakhmen’s plight, decides to take matters into her own hands and studies the
alef-beys, Jewish alphabet, with him herself.
Unaware of the extent of Nakhmen’s predicament and the emotional upheaval it has caused,
Nakhmen’s father innocently asks the child to recite one of his simple school lessons at the
Sabbath table. Unable to complete even this task, Nakhmen realizes just how far he has fallen
behind and is motivated to change his ways. He begins eating healthily, and God intervenes to
repair his memory, having seen that Nakhmen has taken the first steps towards self-
improvement.
As in Merited by the Psalms, the father in this text is hardly involved in the resolution of his
child’s problems. The mother both performs her typical function as home-maker, providing
healthy food for her children, and even steps outside the boundaries of tradition by learning
Hebrew with her son, an act more commonly associated with male teachers. The mother does
not turn to her husband for help in this family crisis, but addresses God directly, asking him to
influence Nakhmen’s progress. Though the shame at his inability to answer his earthly father’s
rudimentary question is the final failure that sparks Nakhmen’s decision to reform, it is the
Heavenly Father’s actions that bring closure.
Although the ineffectual father is a common figure in Hasidic children’s literature, other
images of a slightly more active father also appear. In a number of books, the father serves as
an instrument in fulfilling God’s will, carrying out certain acts that aid in the resolution of the
child’s problem. Though still relegated to the sidelines, these fathers are in a way the
embodiment of the divine plan for the child, rewarding self-improvement and ensuring the full
adoption of the moral lesson.
One particularly striking example of this type of father can be found in Moyshele iz mer
nisht mekane (Moyshele is No Longer Jealous).11 The conflict within this story transpires
when Moyshele becomes jealous of his friend Khayim’s new electronic toy bus. His mother
encourages him to share in his friend’s joy rather than coveting his possessions, but Moyshele
cannot seem to control his impulses. When he finds the bus by his door one evening, he throws
it down the steps and breaks it, reasoning that if he can’t have the bus, no one should be able to
benefit from it. The next morning, he discovers that the bus was actually a surprise present
from his mother, identical to Khayim’s, but meant for Moyshele.
The child is devastated, and his mother helps him realize that his envy of others has negative
consequences. The mother consoles Moyshele, saying that if he repents with all his heart, God
will help his father successfully fix the bus. Tears streaming down his face, Moyshele
promises never to be envious again. The reader, however, cannot be certain of the sincerity of
the boy’s intentions. When Moyshele’s father comes home, he sits down to begin the difficult
task of repairing the broken toy. With baited breath, Moyshele takes the toy and finds out that it
indeed does work, confirming Moyshele’s transformation and proving God’s presence in the
world. Although the father in this story has a somewhat more active role in the plot than the
fathers in the previous books, he is nevertheless still peripheral in the life of the child, fixing
the toy, but not interacting with his son directly.
Another book that effectively illustrates the parents’ respective responsibilities is Kalmishl
der nakhes yingl (Kalmishl the Model Boy).12 Kalmishl’s mother is deeply upset by her son’s
cruel and callous behaviour towards other children. Like Nakhmen’s mother, she turns to God
for help, praying and weeping by the Sabbath candles, and begging for God to grant Kalmishl a
soft, compassionate heart. She alone, however, cannot change her son’s ways — he must come
to understand his problems himself, as befits the plot structure of these books.
The sequence of events leading to Kalmishl’s transformation begins to unfold when he
inadvertently records himself yelling at his sister on tape. Thinking the tape is a recording of
stories about a tsadik, Kalmishl brings it to school, and the teacher plays it in front of the
whole class. The boy is humiliated when all his classmates hear his angry argument with his
sister instead of the uplifting stories they were expecting. The teacher points out that Kalmishl
can learn a useful lesson from this mortifying experience and change his heartless ways. He
suggests that the child study Mesiles Yeshorim (Path of the Just), an ethical religious text that
can serve as a guide to improving his behaviour. Kalmishl follows the teacher’s advice and
diligently studies the text every night with his father. By following the guidelines outlined in
Mesiles Yeshorim, Kalmishl demonstrates his dutiful efforts to improve, and God helps him
transform and become a better person.
The Mesiles Yeshorim, written by Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto in 1738, offers instruction
on perfecting one’s character, with explanations detailing the steps that need to be taken to
acquire better traits. Luzzatto’s book is a core text of the Musar movement, which emphasizes
taking responsibility for one’s own actions, a value clearly stressed in the upbringing of
Hasidic children. It is by following the advice presented in this text that Kalmishl becomes the
‘model boy’, not by emulating or being trained by his father. Much like Moyshele’s father, who
is only able to fix his son’s bus after God decides that Moyshele has truly repented, Kalmishl’s
father also functions as a means to an end, helping his child decipher the document that brings
about the resolution of his problem.
The final example of a flesh-and-blood father acting as an agent of the Heavenly Father can
be found in Shabes undzer khoshever gast (Sabbath, Our Honored Guest).13 The book employs
the traditional Hasidic plot structure of telling a story within a story, a device used extensively
by Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, among others. The story in the foreground takes place in a
contemporary Hasidic home and shows a mother and her children preparing for the Sabbath:
cooking and cleaning, making challah, setting the table and lighting candles.
This work aims to teach children not only how to prepare for the Sabbath, but also why it is
important to do so. After all the work has been done and the candles lit, one little girl asks the
mother why it is necessary to work so hard to make everything look nice for the holy Sabbath.
In response, the mother tells an allegorical story about a town that prepares elaborately for the
arrival of its king and is generously rewarded for the efforts. Thus too, the mother concludes, it
is with the Sabbath: Jews who prepare for it suitably are rewarded with blessing in the coming
week.
As soon as the mother finishes her story, the father walks into the house with Sabbath
greetings for the family. Though it is the responsibility of the mother, with the assistance of the
children, to make all of the arrangements for the Sabbath, the celebration cannot begin until the
father arrives. In fact, it can be argued that the father represents the ‘honoured guest’, the
Sabbath itself, appearing in the adorned home just as the king had appeared in the allegorical
town. In an inversion of the traditional perception of the Sabbath (shabes) as female — such as
in the liturgical song ‘Lekho doydi’, where the Sabbath is greeted as a bride — shabes here is
the meylekh, the king, embodied in the form of the father. In this book, the father serves not to
perform actions ordained by God, but as the personification of the spiritual realm, separating
the mundane concerns of the week from the holy festivities of the day of rest.
In all of the books described above, the primary caregiver of the children in the stories is
shown to be the mother, who is intimately involved in both the day-to-day tasks associated
with taking care of a family and in guiding the children through the crises they face in each
book. The father, meanwhile, is either absent entirely or appears as a much less significant
character. This distinction is unsurprising when one considers that most of the stories take
place in the home, the mother’s domain. When the setting extends to other locations, men,
including the father, are more likely to come into view. In a book about the Sabbath, one may
see fathers walking with their children to the synagogue; a story that takes place in the
classroom often features a male teacher; and when a boy falls from a tree in the park, the
illustrations show a male Jewish medic coming to his rescue.
The world of men is best depicted in the series of books about tsadikim, which follow in the
tradition of Hasidic hagiography, a popular genre since the early nineteenth century. Each book
presents a moralistic story in which a Jew runs into trouble, generally with non-Jews, and is
ultimately saved, directly or indirectly, by the tsadik. In addition to providing entertaining
lessons to the children, as the other genres do, the tsadik books also serve to set Hasidic
religious practices in a historical context, legitimizing the authority of contemporary Rebbes by
depicting their miracle-working precedents. As the children read about great wonders worked
by the founding fathers of Hasidism, they learn to take pride in their tradition and its roots.
Notably, these books very rarely feature women or even children — most of the tsadik’s
supplicants are men. This gender divide emphasizes the lesson that men are to be found in the
religious and historical sphere, while the women and children are based in the home. God’s
role in the two categories of books also differs — whereas he enables the child’s
transformation and the resolution of the moral dilemma in the contemporary books, in the
hagiographic books, he is simply the source of the tsadik’s miraculous powers.
The primary intent of Hasidic children’s literature — both the stories of the tsadikim and the
stories featuring child protagonists — is to instil religious values such as faith and trust in
God, to solidify traditional principles such as unconditionally obeying one’s parents, and to
create a self-contained world that provides a shield against the threatening influences of the
outside secular society. Implicit to every story, however, is the significance of the role that
gender plays within Hasidic communities. The children on the pages of the Yiddish books are
surrounded by positive role models: mothers shopping, cooking and lighting Sabbath candles;
fathers praying, studying and negotiating the outside world. The books thus play an important
role in reinforcing familial structures by presenting these romanticized versions of family
members immersed in their respective domains and encouraging the children to strive to
imitate the patterns they repeatedly see in the books.
In perhaps the most vivid example of the mother-at-home, father-in-the-religious-domain
dichotomy, the heroine of Mayn zumer seyder hayoym (My Summer Daily Schedule), Perl,
spends her day in her house helping her mother with various chores and errands.14 Her father
appears to her only at night, in a dream: she hears him study the Gemore (Talmud) with a
beautiful tune. When she recounts her dream to her mother in the morning, the mother declares
that indeed, nothing is more delightful than hearing a father study a holy text. She recalls that
when she was a girl, she would hear the lovely Gemore melody upon going to sleep and upon
waking up, and she tells her child to thank God for granting her such an upright father, too.
Here, as in all of the books mentioned above, God is the ultimate source of all meritorious
actions: even though it is the father who works hard to study, God is credited with creating his
virtues. This dynamic is indicative of so much within Hasidic culture, in which the temporal
world is transitory, as all actions within it only matter to the extent that they hasten or impede
the coming of the Messiah.
Notes to Chapter 3
1. Sh. Hofman, Kinder lider: heyliker shabes (n.d.).
2. George Kranzler, ‘The Women of Williamsburg: A Contemporary Hasidic Community in Brooklyn, New York’, in Ethnic
Women: A Multiple Status Reality, ed. by V. Demos (Dix Hills, NY: General Hall, 1994), p. 73.
3. Miriam Isaacs, ‘Creativity in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish’, in Yiddish Language and Culture Then and Now.
Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Symposium of the Philip M. And Ethel Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization, ed.
by L. J. Greenspoon (Omaha, NE: Creighton University Press, 1998, pp. 165–88 (pp. 169–70); Ayala Fader, ‘Literacy,
Bilingualism and Gender in a Hasidic Community,’ Linguistics and Education, 12/3 (2001), 261–83 (p. 262). Fader writes,
‘Especially in children’s socialization contexts, secular texts are monitored and controlled by parents, rabbis, and teachers’.
4. Among many other sources, see Shulchan Aruch Hilchos Shabbos, 307:16: it states that non-Jewish literature is prohibited
under Moshav Leitzim, a concept that has been interpreted to signify an unproductive activity, one not related to Torah
learning or performing commandments.
5. See, for example, Yaakov Hopkowitz, Der Baal Shem-Tov, trans. by Kh. Hirshman, Or olam, 6 (Jerusalem: Veshinantam
Levanecha, n.d.).
6. Bruce J. Mitchell, ‘Language, Literature and Education: Yiddish among Britain’s Ultra-Orthodox Jews since 1945 — A
View from Within’, in Speaking Jewish — Jewish Speak: Multilingualism in Western Ashkenazic Culture, ed. by
Shlomo Berger et al. (Leuven: Peeters, 2002–2003), pp. 171–93; Jordan Kutzik, American Hasidic Yiddish Pedagogical
Materials: A Sociological and Sociolinguistic Survey (Unpublished Bachelors Thesis, Rutgers University, 2011); Miriam
Isaacs, ‘La literature enfantine en Yiddish dans les communautes hassidiques americaines’, Les cahiers du judaisme, 28
(2010); Ayala Fader, Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 129–30. Isaacs does briefly discuss books for younger children from the Mitzvah
Kinder series, but the main subject of the article is a sociolinguistic analysis of Hasidic children’s books on tape.
7. As Miriam Isaacs observes in ‘Creativity in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish’, p. 178, ‘Conscious artistry for its own sake is
discouraged. Piety, and not artistic virtuosity, is the motivation for music or the shaping of words. Thus “Art” for the glory
of the artist […] is peripheral to cultural norms’. For more about the attitudes toward authorship in Hasidic communities,
see Asya Vaisman, ‘Being Heard: The Singing Voices of Contemporary Hasidic Women’ (Unpublished Doctoral Thesis,
Harvard University, 2009), pp. 84–95.
8. Fader, Mitzvah Girls, p. 229, n. 27.
9. R. B. I., In zkhus fun t’hilim, Leyenen un lernen, 12 (Monroe, NY: Kinder Shpiel, 2007).
10. Sh. Kh. D., Nakhmen gedenkt shoyn, Leyenen un lernen, 14 (Monroe, NY: Kinder Shpiel, 2007).
11. R. B. I., Moyshele iz mer nisht mekane, Leyenen un lernen, 2 (Monroe, NY: Kinder Shpiel, 2011).
12. R. B. I., Kalmishl der nakhes yingl, Leyenen un lernen, 6 (Monroe, NY: Kinder Shpiel, 2012).
13. Sh. Kh. D., Shabes undzer khoshever gast, Leyenen un lernen, 15 (Monroe, NY: Kinder Shpiel, 2007).
14. Mayn zumer seyder hayoym (Brooklyn, NY: Beys Rokhl D’Satmar, n.d.).

 CHAPTER 4

The Design of Books and Lives: Yiddish Children’s Book

Art by Artists from the Kiev Kultur-Lige
Kerstin Hoge

1. Introduction
An appreciation of children’s book art as a separate genre goes hand in hand with a need for a
historical narrative: understanding children’s book illustrations to have their own conventions
of content and/or form requires a story of how and when this art form came about and
developed over time. In the critical literature, the desire to historicize may be linked to
formalist theory, drawing on Bakhtin’s conception of genre as a ‘form-shaping ideology’ that
‘lives in the present but always remembers its past’.1 Alternatively, histories of children’s
book art may reflect simply the wish of practitioners and recipients alike to embed a given
work in a context and tradition, to categorize and thereby add meaning to their artistic
experiences. Whether intended as a contribution to the discussion of genre or a descriptive
overview, studies and coffee-table volumes of children’s book illustrations construct and
present both national and pan-national narratives, documenting influences, interactions and
intercultural exchanges in children’s book art.
A frequent staple of such works is reference to a ‘golden age’ of children’s books and book
illustrations. Various recent publications have located such a period in the Soviet Russia of the
interwar years,2 where, in the context of revolutionary transformation, children’s books and the
artwork in them were elevated to a previously unknown status and creative significance.3
Contemporary interest in the avant-garde further fuels this fascination with post-Revolutionary
Russian children’s books, for in these books appear household Constructivist names like
Vladimir Tatlin and El Lissitzky.4 However, while rightly inviting us to marvel at the
radicalism of, for example, Lissitzky’s The Suprematist Tale of Two Squares (1922), the
‘Russian’ narrative of children’s book art obscures the fact that in this ‘golden’ place and time,
children’s book illustration was neither an exclusively Russian phenomenon nor served a
single agenda. Thus, the majority of Lissitzky’s book illustrations were created for a Yiddish
readership and produced from within the Yiddishist movement, with its stated aim to build a
modern Jewish collective identity from Yiddish secular culture.
This contribution aims to add another narrative to the history of children’s book art,
discussing illustrations in Yiddish children’s books from the circle of Kultur-Lige artists.5 It
develops two arguments. First, the programmatic discussion of what Yiddish children’s book
art should look like that was conducted by the Kultur-Lige’s artists can be shown to mirror the
debate about the nature of modern Yiddish literature which took place amongst Yiddishist
writers and literary critics. The parallels observed in these two different fields of artistic
activity attest to the all-encompassing nature and ambition of the Jewish cultural project in
interwar Eastern Europe. Second, Yiddish children’s book illustrations provide evidence for
communication and exchange of creative ideas beyond the Jewish context, showing not only
that Yiddish children’s book production reflected aesthetics and practices in Russian
children’s book culture, but also that Russian children’s book art was influenced by Yiddish
publications.
Both of these arguments can be found in previous publications.6 What distinguishes this
contribution from the extant literature is that the two arguments are illustrated and given form
by discussing concrete examples of children’s book art. More specifically, four publications by
four different artists are considered here: Joseph Chaikov’s illustrations for Temerl (Little
Tamar, Moscow, 1917), Issachar Ber Ryback’s illustrations for Mayselekh far kleyninke
kinderlekh (Little Stories for Little Children, Petrograd, 1922), El Lissitzky’s illustrations for
Elfandl (The Elephant’s Child, Berlin, 1922), and Meyer Akselrod’s illustrations for Nekhtn
un haynt (Yesterday and Today, Moscow, 1927). The books chosen are original Yiddish works
(Temerl, Mayselekh far kleyninke kinderlekh) as well as translations (Elfandl, Nekhtn un
haynt); they range over different periods and originated in different locations. Some of them
were produced by names that have become part of the international art canon (Chaikov,
Lissitzky), others by artists that are largely unknown to the wider public (Ryback, Akselrod).
Taken together, these works illustrate the diversity and rich creative history of Yiddish
children’s book art, and, what is more, provide a glimpse into the world as seen through the
eyes of a generation of Yiddish-reading children.
The chapter is organized as follows: Section 2 outlines the socio-historical context in which
Yiddish children’s book art arose as a separate art form, and introduces the debate about a
Jewish national art and its concern with the place of traditional folk iconography. Section 3
takes a look at some of the book art produced by two of the protagonists in the ideological
debate about modern Jewish art, namely Joseph Chaikov and Issachar Ber Ryback. Section 4
considers the ‘art of translation’ and the mutual influence of Russian and Yiddish artists on one
another, discussing the illustrations for Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Elephant’s Child’ and Samuil
Marshak’s Yesterday and Today. The chapter concludes in Section 5.

2 The place of Familiar Symbols in a Language of New Artistic Forms

The beginnings of a dedicated Yiddish literature for children are commonly dated to coincide
with the early twentieth-century development of a Yiddish secular school movement, which
brought with it the need for Yiddish-language textbooks and child-appropriate reading.7
Notwithstanding its pedagogical usefulness, there can be little doubt that the fashioning of a
Yiddish children’s literature also served a wider-ranging, ideological role in the context of
what Benjamin Harshav has termed the modern Jewish revolution.8 In Harshav’s conception,
the transformation of Eastern European Jewish society and life involved the negation of the
three deictic axes of the old Jewish existence (‘not here’, ‘not like now’, ‘not as we are’),9
which by its very nature placed children at the forefront of the revolutionary agenda. If
‘children embody the future in the present’,10 children represent the possibility and potential of
change; it is their education and engagement that determine a movement’s success and raison
d’être. Creating the desired commitment of future generations to the Yiddishist cultural project
(which included a continuing attachment to the Yiddish language) therefore had to entail the
dissemination of Yiddishist ideas to the young as well as active concern with how this could
be achieved. Children’s books, then as today, were a means by which children were introduced
and integrated into a culture.
If children’s literature must be understood to be an essential component of the Yiddishist
movement, children’s book art must be understood to be an integral part of children’s
literature. Throughout ages and cultures, we find comments that pictures speak more directly to
young and uneducated readers than text does. One such example is provided by early Yiddish
books: in her study of Renaissance Yiddish book illustrations, Diane Wolfthal cites the preface
to an edition of Tsenerene (Sulzbach, 1692), the ‘woman’s bible’, in which readers are assured
that they ‘will recognize and understand that which is printed on the entire page, even before
reading the book’ thanks to the accompanying images.11 Writing in a very different cultural
context, the Russian Symbolist Alexander Blok claimed that ‘in children words are subordinate
to drawing, they play a secondary role’.12 A similar distinction between primary and secondary
experience is made in modern studies of children’s book illustrations; so, for example, in
Zhihui Fang’s assertion that
[a]s first order symbols, pictures represent relatively concrete, familiar experience,
something young readers can easily identify with. As second-order symbols, words
are more abstract and detached from immediate experience. 13

What unites these statements from the seventeenth to the twentieth century is that visual images
are perceived to perform an ancillary function in the reading process. Illustrations provide
‘mental scaffolds’ for the inexperienced reader,14 facilitating his/her understanding of the text
by explaining, interpreting and expanding the verbally presented information. The received
view is that book illustrations aid linguistic literacy; children’s books that do not provide
illustrations are viewed as less accessible and hence less educationally useful. The nascent
children’s literature in Yiddish then had to offer books with illustrations so as to reach its
readership effectively, but also so as to be able to place itself in the tradition of other
children’s literatures.
In addition to linguistic literacy, children’s book art may be said to foster visual literacy,
developing an aesthetic appreciation of art by introducing children to a cultural context and a
set of artistic conventions. In the case of Yiddish children’s books, the question of what
constituted the cultural context and set of artistic conventions to be transmitted to a new
generation was itself problematic. Yiddish cultural tradition, defined as low culture by its
linguistic medium, did not have established models of visual art — whether to bequeath or
reject. Like other aspects of modern Jewish secular culture, the notion of Jewish art required
bringing to life a new semiotic system. Children’s books not only provided a vehicle for
communicating the new art to children (and their parents), but also, and perhaps more
fundamentally, a way of anchoring a tradition of visual art into national awareness and making
it a source of collective identity.
In the search for a national high art, Jewish artists and critics followed in the footsteps of the
co-territorial cultures, taking inspiration from the Russian and Ukranian rediscovery of
indigenous folk art in the development of national artistic styles. Indeed, the Jewish painter and
sculptor Marek Szwarc (1892–1958) credited the very idea of a Jewish art to the Russian art
historian Vladimir Stasov (1824–1906),15 whose support of folk creativity as a source for
Russian cultural advancement (in combination with Stasov’s liberal-nationalist vision of the
Russian empire) led him to encourage Russian Jews to explore their artistic heritage.16 For
many of the Jewish cultural nationalists of the 1910s and 1920s, it seemed requisite that the
creation of a new Jewish art would involve merging Jewish folkloric tradition with
contemporary art movements. The critic Abram Efros (1888–1954) succinctly expressed this
view when writing in 1918:
Either our aesthetic rebirth will not take place at all, or it will grow from those
same two roots from which contemporary international art stemmed, namely
modernism and folk art.17

For Kenneth Moss, ‘this negotiation between the modern self and pre-modern Jewish
expression has come to seem the paradigmatic move of modern Jewish culture’, understood to
characterize both the literary and visual arts that emerged in the early twentieth century.18
Whether it is the reworking of Yiddish folktales in Isaac Leib Peretz’s (1852–1915)
Folkstimlekhe geshikhtn (1908) or the inclusion of ornamental motifs from synagogues and
tombstones in Nathan Altman’s (1889–1970) drawings in Jüdische Graphik (1923), the
description of a given artwork as both modern and Jewish/Yiddish is commonly taken to imply
‘some sort of fusion between indigenous and pan-European traditions’.19
However, there was far from general consensus that the path to a new Jewish culture and
identity had to be forged from folkloristic sources. For some, the escape from
kleynshtetldikeyt, or Yiddish provincialism, and admittance into the modern era could be
achieved only by a radical and complete departure from the established conventions. In the
field of visual arts, two programmatic essays, written by members of the arts section of the
Kultur-Lige in Kiev, are frequently cited as representing the two sides in the debate: Issachar
Ryback and Boris Aronson’s ‘Di vegn fun der yiddisher moleray’ (‘Paths of Jewish Painting’),
published in 1919 in the Kiev periodical Oyfgang, and Joseph Chaikov’s Skulptur
(Sculpture), which appeared in 1921, published also in Kiev.20
The article by Aronson and Ryback (who in 1916 had travelled with Lissitzky on an
ethnographic expedition along the Dnieper, organized by the Jewish Historical and
Ethnographic Society in St Petersburg) proudly proclaimed that ‘Jewish art is here. It is
awakening!’ The authors base their critical appraisal of various Jewish artists (including
Chagall) on their rating of the artist’s success in having ‘understood, appreciated and partially
recreated, poetically, the Jewish plastic folk-trait’, for ‘when a Jewish artist sets out to reflect
his national material, he must absorb the cultural values of his people amassed over the
generations’.21 Their argument that the creation of a new art cannot arise in a cultural no-man’s
land but must be a product of ‘the accumulated experience’ and reflect the forms of the artist’s
people’s life,22 mirrors Efros’s view that aesthetic rebirth grows from two roots (and evokes
his warning that the Jewish artist, haunted by self-conscious belatedness, ‘may well give up a
precious piece of Aladdin junk in exchange for some fashionable gaudy pot’).23
 Two years later, Chaikov explicitly rejected Ryback and Aronson’s acknowledgement of the
importance of Jewish tradition, writing in the final paragraphs of the introduction to his book
on sculpture:
Mir haltn oykh far nisht rikhtik dem tsugang fun di yunge linke kinstler, vos viln
antsheydn ot di problem loyt di arkhivn fun unzer fargangener geshikhte un folks-
primitiv. Dos firt tsu stilizatsye, un stilizatsye iz estetishkayt, d.h. a lign benegeye
tsum hayntikn tog un a kapriz funem individum, vos arbet tsulib sheynhayt.
We also hold as untrue the approach of the young leftist artist who wishes to resolve
this problem according to our history and folkloric (‘folk-primitive’)
accomplishment. This only leads to stylization and stylization is aestheticism, i.e. a
lie concerning our present day and a caprice of individualism which functions in the
service of beauty.24

In Chaikov’s conception, the ‘problem of Jewish sculpture’ was to be solved by the form
defining the artist and the artist defining the form (‘di form bashtimt dem kinstler un farkert’),25
not by the artist taking inspiration from primitive folk art of times gone by.
By 1921, such views had become prevalent when it came to Yiddish literature, especially in
Soviet Russia. Seth Wolitz dates the turning point as 1919, when Moyshe Litvakov’s review of
the Yiddish avant-garde periodical Eygns, I (Our Own; Kiev, 1918) sparked a harsh debate in
the pages of Bikher-Velt (Book World),26 the literary journal published under the auspices of
the Kultur-Lige.27 The main protagonists in this battle over the function of literature in society
were David Bergelson, one of the main editors of Eygns, I, and Litvakov, the ‘future
commissar of Soviet Yiddish letters’.28 While the former argued in favour of a Yiddish
literature whose role was to give ‘aesthetic definition to national and cultural longings’,29 the
latter placed literature in the service of revolution, ‘reflecting and directing the social/cultural
realities’,30 and thus, in post-Revolutionary Russia, obliged to express the universal rather than
the ethnically and culturally particularist. The Bergelson-Litvakov debate between February
and August 1919 shows the dominant critical discourse to have shifted to a position where ‘far
from valorizing traditional indigenous sources’,31 it considered them an obstacle, if not
downright harmful, for cultural and societal renewal.
At first sight, Jewish visual art appears to have been a latecomer to the debate: in Bikher-
Velt 4–5 (1919) — the same issue which contains Bergelson’s reply to Litvakov — the critic
(and Chaikov’s brother-in-law) Yehezkel Dobrushin (1883–1953) published ‘Yidisher kunst-
primitiv un dos kunst-bukh far kinder’ (‘Jewish primitive art and the illustrated book for
children’).32 In this article, Dobrushin, who shared Litvakov’s reservations about Eygns,33
criticized the Art Nouveau illustrator Ephraim Moses Lilien (1874–1925) for failing to draw
inspiration from the living sources of Jewish folk art, focusing instead on Jewish religious-
nationalist themes.34 Rather than dismissing the products of Eastern European Jewish
traditional culture, Dobrushin thus endorsed the appropriation of Jewish folk iconography,
whose role in modern art he likened to that of fairy tale and myth in literature.35 Like Ryback
and Aronson, he praised Chagall for having ‘absorbed the Jewish artistic primitives, [for the
fact that] he drew from them the form, color and content of his radiant works based on
legends’.36
Notwithstanding the parallels between the articles by the artists in Oyfgang and the critic in
Bikher-Velt, the conclusion that in 1919, folk art was still an uncontroversial vehicle for a new
aesthetic in the visual arts nevertheless appears unjustified because it is the development of
children’s book art, rather than Jewish art more generally, that Dobrushin addresses in his
essay. In Dobrushin’s opinion, folk art, in particular the Jewish version of Russian lubki
(popular prints that are ‘primitive in style but lustily drawn’)37 is the foundation on which to
build the illustrated book for children. The lubok, Dobrushin argues, is ideally suited to the
psychology of the child, who is in essence a collective being, owing to the print’s immediacy
of expression, compositional clarity and non-didactic universality.38
There are two ways of interpreting Dobrushin’s manifesto for the illustrated children’s book.
On the one hand, his endorsement of Jewish folk art, with its trope of the ‘child as primitive’
who experiences reality differently from an adult, seems to affirm that folklore is of lesser
value than European high art. Potentially useful in childhood, where it can provide a means of
engagement and a stepping stone towards other art forms, the crude primitivism of the lubok is
soon outgrown and left behind, unfit to play a more enduring part in the cultural transformation
of adult Jewish life. On the other hand, Dobrushin’s article may be read as evidence for
children’s literature and the art within it providing greater creative freedom than art aimed at
adults. If art and artists in post-Revolutionary Russia were judged by their success in serving
‘an ideology beyond ethnicity and aestheticism’,39 children’s art and literature — no matter that
they were proclaimed to be at the revolutionary frontline — may have found themselves less
consistently in official consciousness since their consumers held no immediate power.40 The
view that children’s literature can provide an area of less interference is corroborated, albeit
for a different period, by comments from the contemporary Russian-born illustrator Vladimir
Korunsky, who states that his attraction to children’s books stemmed from the fact that ‘[i]n
Russia, it was an area of escape and relative creative freedom, free from oppression’.41
The question of which of the two possible interpretations of Dobrushin’s remarks is correct
may be unsolvable and at any rate ignores the compatibility of the two viewpoints. If children’s
literature was deemed to be less important than other art forms in the creation of a new secular
culture, it could have been an appropriate genre in which to incorporate folkloric traditions,
generally judged to be of secondary value, especially if the use of folk art forms was seen as
contributing to the child’s understanding of the written text. In short, Dobrushin’s
recommendations seem to allow a certain degree of pragmatism at the time of heated
theoretical debate: it may have been the effectiveness of the medium that ultimately determined
and justified its use for a young audience, who, although regarded to be central in the
revolutionary endeavour, in actuality occupied only a peripheral position in revolutionary
society.
To the modern reader, it is striking that the discussion of what path a modern Jewish art
should chart — conducted so passionately in early twentieth-century Yiddishist circles — in
many aspects prefigures the debate of whether Jewish art exists as a recognisable (and
definable) art form, a question that continues to occupy art historians and writers today. As
frequently observed,42 definitions of Jewish art can pursue biographical (‘art produced by
Jews’), functional (‘art produced for Jews’), compositional (‘art that incorporates Jewish
material’) and programmatic (‘art inspired by Jewish metaphysical concerns’) approaches.
Yiddish children’s book art easily fits into three of these categories: it was art produced by
Jewish artists for a Jewish audience (as defined by the Yiddish-language medium of the texts in
which the art appeared), inspired by the ‘metaphysical theme of identity’.43 Where opinions
diverged was on whether it should also be compositionally defined as Jewish, by physically
and/or conceptually incorporating the ‘semi-ceremonial folk art […] emanating from the daily
life of Jewish communities’.44 It is perhaps not surprising that only ‘compositional Jewishness’
was negotiable in the creation of a Jewish art of modernity, given that art created as part of a
project of Jewish nation and secular culture building cannot, by its very nature, escape
biographical, functional and programmatic Jewishness. It is only the realm of Jewish material
content that offers room for manoeuvre, as neither decisive rejection nor selective embrace of
previous experience will jeopardize the project as a whole.
The dialectic between the demands on a modern secular art and the role for traditional
products of folk creativity provides the common thread that links the programmatic discussions
of different forms of Yiddish cultural production in interwar Russia. It reflects the more
fundamental opposition between a belief in art ‘renovating the old’ and ‘building anew’,45
between the ethnographic affirmation of Jewish national identity and the striving for universal
modernity. When considering the debates that involved the kultur-treger (‘cultural agents’)
associated with the different sections of the Kiev Kultur-Lige, the observed parallels provide
evidence that the Kultur-Lige fully lived up to its ambition of developing and concerning itself
with all spheres of Jewish cultural activity. That it did so in the face of both apathy and
opposition from the majority of the Jewish electorate, who ‘either rejected modernization or
associated their future hopes with modern culture in Russian and Hebrew’,46 is a feat
indicative of the commitment and single-mindedness of its leading figures.

3. The Janus Face of the Jewish Art Renaissance: Chaikov and Ryback
In the debate about the place of folk art forms as a source for modern Jewish art, Issachar Ber
Ryback (1897–1935) and Yosef Chaikov (1888–1986) occupied opposing positions. Ryback
(writing with Aronson) advocated the recreation of Jewish folk art to reveal ‘living
emotions’,47 whereas Chaikov rejected such ‘caprice of individualism’, arguing that the
relationship between man and the world ‘of electricity, industrial technology, iron and cement
construction’ could be articulated only by means of abstraction.48 As members of the art section
of the Kiev Kultur-Lige (which Ryback co-founded in June 1918 and Chaikov joined at the end
of the same year), both illustrated Yiddish books for children. The question then arises whether
the artists’ different ideological orientations are discernible in their children’s book art.
Two books are considered here: Temerl [a bobe-maysele] (Little Tamar [A Little Old
Wives’ Tale]) by Moyshe Broderzon (1890–1956), published by the Moscow publishing house
Khaver in 1917 as No. 4 in their series ‘Kinder-biblyotek’ (‘Children’s Library’); and the first
volume of Mayses far kleyninke kinderlekh (Little Tales for Little Children) by Miriam
Margolin (1896–1968), published by the Jewish section of the commissariat for people’s
education in Petrograd in 1922, but printed in Berlin (Dr Selle & Co.) as with many other titles
published by the Soviet State publishers in 1922–1923.49 Both books are available in digitized
form: Temerl can be viewed from the Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library website, while Mayses far kleyninke kinderlekh (I) is part of the Center for Jewish
History Digital Collections.50
The earlier book of the two, Temerl, measures 136 × 345mm and contains nine pages, each
of which has a hand-coloured illustration placed at the centre. The front cover is illustrated in
black line. Front cover and title page provide the information that Temerl was published in an
edition of fifty copies, priced at one rouble each.
Broderzon’s story tells the tale of little Tamar, the much-loved daughter of a watchmaker
from a shtetl in Lithuania, who travels to foreign lands, where she finds and marries her
‘basherter’ (‘soulmate’). The tale is framed by a narrative that identifies Temerl’s story as the
title’s bobe-maysele (‘old wives’ tale’), told to the first-person plural narrator by their
grandmother. Indeed the story contains a range of fantastical elements. It starts when Temerl,
reading at home, is visited by exotic animals and asked by a white dove to follow her. The
dove, which is implied to have been sent by Temerl’s basherter, then pulls Temerl in a giant
seashell across the ocean until they reach a land inhabited by ‘wild black people’. Temerl
teaches reading and prayer to the locals, who in return make her their princess, and, as they
learn the skills of civilization from Temerl, turn white. Temerl returns home with the help of
one of the local boys; the couple fall in love and marry, and Temerl gives birth to a daughter
called Nekhame. The story ends after Temerl and her husband Zemerl have died (having lived
120 years), while Nekhame is still alive.
Broderzon’s curious (and for modern sensibilities, uncomfortably prejudiced) fairy tale is in
part reminiscent of Maurice Sendak’s picture book Where the Wild Things Are (1964), in
which a boy, sent to bed without his supper, sails to the land of wild beasts, who anoint him
king, before he returns to his bedroom. Unlike the boy in Sendak’s book, though, Temerl is
neither ill-behaved nor does she return entirely to her own normality. Besides transforming the
lives of the ‘African savages’ through learning, she transforms her own life through her travels,
undergoing the journey from a girl to a bride and a mother. Although brought up in a traditional
family (her father is described as ‘a yid afrumer’, ‘an observant Jew’), she is a modern
Jewish daughter: she knows and is eager to teach others about ‘all there is in the world’. Her
knowledge of how to pray, ‘sing, play and read’ privileges Temerl vis-à-vis the African
natives, who in making her princess recognize her superiority. Broderzon’s story thus
foreshadows what Evgeny Steiner calls the ‘Negro theme’ in Soviet Russian children’s
literature, where the child hero embarks on a mission ‘to love, to help, to save, to civilize’ the
natives in faraway lands, with issues of race frequently equated with class.51 Temerl provides
a humanistic version of this brand of Soviet internationalism, and imparts a message of racial
equality alongside the dichotomy of colonizer and colonized. Not only is Temerl’s basherter
one of the natives (who, in sending the dove for her, is credited with real agency), but the very
notion of ethnicity is presented as a changeable characteristic, such that colour is literally only
skin-deep. This message of equality is however undercut by the natives ‘graduating’ from black
to white, which leaves little doubt who holds the real power in ‘vunderland’ (‘wonderland’).

 FIG. 4.1. Joseph Chaikov, Illustration from Temerl (Moscow, 1917). Image courtesy of
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Chaikov provided highly decorative and colourful illustrations for Temerl with a clear Art
Nouveau flavour. The pictures are characterized by curving lines, writhing forms, and
decorative fill, often involving flower or vine-tendril patterns. They even contain the
‘whiplash line’ (a swirl similar in look to an unfurling whip), the key motif of Art Nouveau,
which is seen, for example, in the portrayal of the white dove hovering over the chuppah under
which Temerl and Zemerl get married (p. 8 and fig. 1). Other swirling patterns include cresting
waves (p. 7) and wing-like ornaments (p. 8). Atlas figures adorn the fireplace that furnishes the
living room of the final illustration in the book (p. 9). Chaikov’s signature of the illustrations,
the Hebrew letter Teth, provides another example of Art Nouveau stylization: rounded rather
than square, it has an onset that is swirled inwards so that the whole form resembles a coiled
snake.
The decorative body lines of Chaikov’s illlustrations stand in stark contrast to the faces of
his figures, which are contoured only sparingly (or hardly at all in the case of the Africans),
with straight and angular strokes, not unlike the mask-like faces found in the work of the
German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938). Chaikov further departs
from pure Art Nouveau in the representation of the trees at Temerl’s home (p. 2), which are
rendered semi-anthropomorphically, their roots like feet grasping the ground, their bodies
turned to Temerl as if to close in on her (p. 2). The illustrations in Temerl then appear to
combine stylistic elements from Art Nouveau and Expressionism, showing evidence of
Chaikov having evolved his style from the art of the Makhmadim group in his Paris years,
which in Wolitz’s appraisal ‘appear as epigones of Lilien’.52
Redolent of Lilien is Chaikov’s use of orientalising effects in Temerl. For example, he
depicts the older, married Temerl and Zemerl in clothes that seem better suited for sixteenth-
century Ottoman Palestine than twentieth-century urban Russia (p. 9). Interestingly, the drawing
of Temerl on the front cover involves a different kind of pictorial orientalization. Here,
Chaikov shows Temerl ‘Africanized’, wearing a crown fashioned out of animal bones and
tusks, and an ethnic necklace strung with large beads and animal teeth. Chaikov’s design of the
insignia of an African princess, imitates primitive art forms, but rather than turning to the folk
iconography of Eastern European Jewry, he alludes to African art, evoking modernist
primitivism and thereby aligning himself with the European cultural elite of the early twentieth
century.
Like the seventeenth-century reader of the Tsene-rene, the reader of Temerl can construct a
narrative from the accompanying illustrations that closely matches the text. Each of Chaikov’s
nine pictures provides a stage-setting frame for the individual scenes of the tale: the
grandmother who tells the story; book-loving Temerl and the speaking dove; Temerl’s parental
home; Temerl reading next to the exotic animals; Temerl sailing the seas; Temerl crowned
princess by the Africans; Temerl’s journey back home; Temerl and Zemerl’s wedding; and,
finally, Temerl and Zemerl with their grown daughter Nekhame. Occasionally, the illustrations
offer an alternative interpretation of the textual events. Thus, Chaikov situates the grandmother
in the living room of an affluent, wallpapered home, with her knitting next to her on the clothed
table, looking straight (and somewhat sternly) at the reader. In the text, the grandmother’s story
engrosses the first-person plural narrator to such an extent that they stop peeling corn kernels,
which suggests a very different surrounding and social situation. Similarly, Temerl’s long sea
voyage is pictorially represented as taking her along a luscious green coastline, whereas the
text thematizes her worries of being on the open sea.
Chaikov’s illustrations are not devoid of motifs of Jewish folk art. First, there is the white
dove, which, occupying a central place in Broderzon’s narrative, appears in seven of
Chaikov’s nine pictures. The sideways placement of the dove in these pictures alludes to the
traditional representation of doves as used in Jewish papercuts,53 but the variety of forms in
which the dove occurs (oriented leftward, rightward, upward or downward, with wings
spread, folded or curled in the whiplash line) very clearly moves the motif from folk art into
Art Nouveau territory. Second, Chaikov appears to borrow from Jewish ritual and semi-ritual
art and decoration in his drawing of Temerl surrounded by the various exotic animals that
come to visit her. Broderzon’s text lists a leopard, a lion, a green snake and birds, and Chaikov
depicts a lion, a green speckled snake, a vulture and a turkey (as well as a green goblin, only
half visible at the right edge of the picture). Along with the leopard mentioned in the text, the
lion and the vulture make up three of the four animals in the saying of Rabbi Judah ben Tema in
Pirkei Avot 5:23 (‘Be bold as the leopard, light as the vulture, fleet as the deer, and strong as
the lion, to do the will of your Father in heaven’),54 whose symbolism ‘was universally
understood in European Jewish communities even if the text was not actually quoted’ or only a
subset of the four animals was represented.55 Chaikov’s illustration here supplements the text.
However, it is arguably Broderzon’s allusion to the aphorism that governs the selection of
animals that appear in the picture. If so, Chaikov’s use of motifs from Jewish folk art may be
regarded simply as a response to the text rather than a conscious attempt to create a particular
Jewish style.
To sum up, while Chaikov had not yet embarked on the path of abstraction that is outlined in
Skulptur, Temerl provides a solid example of the Jewish artist turning outwards, looking to
expressions of contemporary European art-making rather than to traditional Jewish visual
folklore. Wolitz may well be correct in describing Chaikov as ‘living two artistic existences’
in 1919,56 working in, on the one hand, Art Nouveau, and, on the other, Cubo-Futurism, but in
both of these existences, Chaikov revealed himself to be more interested in universalism than
in a specifically Jewish artistic identity.
 The book illustrated by Ryback, Mayses far kleyninke kinderlekh, is around 21×27cm in
size,57 and consists of twenty-three pages. It contains ten one-page stories, which appear on the
recto pages. Facing each story on the verso is a large, black and white Indian-ink drawing;
thus, each story precedes its illustration. The front and back covers are illustrated in colour. As
discovered by Albert Lemmens and Serge-Aljosja Stommels, the title Mayses far kleyninke
kinderlekh unites a series of three books, which were all published in 1922.58 The three books
have the same cover illustrations; they are distinguished only by a small Roman volume
number in the lower right corner.
Margolin’s stories are short, simple narratives of only a couple of lines, which are about
children’s everyday experiences in a shtetl environment. Margolin, who worked as a
kindergarten teacher in the Yishuv,59 describes how children float paper boats after the spring
thaw (‘Shifn oyfn vaser’ ‘Boats on the water’), take in a lost kitten (‘A farblondzhete ketsele’,
‘A lost kitten’), try to catch a bird that has flown in through the school window (‘Di feygele’,
‘The little bird’), torture a butterfly (‘Di zumerfeygele’ ‘The butterfly’), fashion a seesaw from
a board and rocks (‘Di vig’, ‘The seesaw’), or find a bird’s nest fallen from a tree (‘Derpuster
nestele’, ‘The empty nest’). Adults in the stories make dolls for their children (‘Hershele der
stolyer’, ‘Hershele, the carpenter’), buy new plates (‘Di naye telers’, ‘The new plates’), or
chase away an aggressive rooster (‘Der beyzer hon’, ‘The nasty rooster’). Only the last (and
longest) story of the book (‘Ingele-tsingele’ ‘Little boy-little tongue’) introduces the
fantastical: an old, childless couple chance upon a boy, no bigger than a little finger, who
comes to live with them, bringing great joy to their lives.
Ryback’s illustrations match the ‘flatness’ of most of the stories. They lack perspective and
depth, having no horizon line, with the figures seemingly floating in the roughly drawn frame
that encircles them. The humans, animals and objects that populate these pictures look as if
drawn by young children. They appear in their essential or typical form, exemplifying a generic
instance of the representational category in question. 60 Thus, humans are shown with arms and
legs and a head with eyes, nose, mouth and ears, but have no articulated torso and limbs;
houses are drawn with a door, windows, a roof and a chimney, but bear no further
ornamentation. Ryback’s deliberate imitation of the ‘primitiveness’ of children’s art was
motivated by his belief ‘that children must be given drawings that they themselves should be
able to make’. It reportedly pleased him when children recognized the affinity between his
illustrations and their drawings — as the son of the Yiddish writer Dovid Bergelson (1884–
1952) did, remarking to his father, ‘Papa, I, too, can draw like Ryback’.61
The front cover illustration to Mayses far kleyninke kinderlekh (fig. 2) reflects the
centrality of the child in Ryback’s approach to children’s book art. The picture is built from
various images relating to the stories in the book. These images are placed against a red
background and surround the title. The book title itself is written in cursive and set in a
yellow-coloured oval in the centre of the page. The title inset extends from (and is connected
by a dotted border to) the picture of a boy’s head, which is the focal image on the page. The
front cover is thus (quite literally) headed by the image of a child. The boy’s face, which looks
straight at the reader, is half blackened. On one interpretation, the face simply appears sooty
and can be read as emblematic of ‘the arrival of a new era, the coming of the chumazye (“dirty,
[…] swarthy ones”, i.e. lower-class rabble’).62 In another interpretation, the boy’s face is
divided into two halves. Black and white contrasts, which also featured heavily in Chagall’s
illustrations for Der Nister’s A mayselekh inferzn (Stories in Verse, 1917), occur throughout
the book, and Ryback frequently uses them within a single figure. Examples include a cat that
has a black head and a white body (p. 7), boys that wear trousers or shirts with one leg or
sleeve black and the other one white (pp. 5, 11); and a bird that changes from black to white
when dead (p. 15, and fig. 3).
Notwithstanding the simplicity of the depiction, Ryback’s illustrations possess a ‘visual
grammar’. First, they provide the reader with a foregrounded image that, icon-like, serves to
identify the main theme in the story. Second, when read right to left, they make visible how the
narrative unfolds, ‘showing the different stages of the story in the same picture’.63 For example,
‘Di zumerfeygele’ (‘The butterfly’) tells the story of how a boy, Motke, catches and then
tortures a butterfly to death, ignoring his friend Etele’s attempt to intervene. The illustration
(fig. 3) shows the ‘zumerfeygele’ (which Ryback renders as a bird rather than a butterfly, on
which more below) in large size, placed just off-centre. By letting the picture be dominated by
the zumerfeygele, Ryback signposts that the story is about the fate of the animal. Moreover, the
illustration makes it possible for the reader to construct how the zumerfeygele meets its death.
Ryback divides the story into four stages: first, the zumerfeygele is caught by Motke; then Etele
asks Motke to stop torturing the zumerfeygele; next Motke continues pulling the wings of the
zumerfeygele; and, finally, the zumerfeygele dies. Each of these four stages is given its own
image, and a reader who first glances at the largest image on the page and whose eyes then
moves leftward to the bottom left corner (which matches the way in which Motke is oriented)
will perceive the four images in the order in which the scenes they represent occur in the story.

FIG. 4.2. Issachar Ber Ryback, Front Cover Illustration for Maysesfar kleyninke kinderlekh
(Petrograd, 1922). Image courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.


FIG. 4.3. Issachar Ber Ryback, Illustration from Maysesfar kleyninke kinderlekh (Petrograd,
1922). Image courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

The question of why Ryback portrays the zumerfeygele as a bird rather than a butterfly is
intriguing. One suggestion, made by Stommels and Lemmens, is that ‘Ryback seems to have
been not altogether fluent in Yiddish’, mistaking zumerfeygele, literally ‘little summer bird’,
for feygele, ‘little bird’. Given Ryback’s Yiddish-language upbringing in central Ukraine and
the fact that he received a kheyder-education,64 this explanation seems unlikely. A possible
alternative explanation is that Ryback’s illustration refers to an earlier version of Margolin’s
story, and that the bird in the text was changed to a butterfly only later. Yet another possibility
is that Ryback chose to portray a bird so as to establish a clear link between ‘Di zumerfeygele’
and ‘Der puster nestele’ (‘The empty nest’), the penultimate story in the book. ‘Derpuster
nestele’ once again features a boy called Motke, but this time Motke is an animal-lover. He
finds a bird’s nest fallen from a tree, which he puts up under the roof beams of his house, fitted
out with soft feathers and bread crumbs so a bird would feel welcome to nest. If this is the
same Motke, there are two very different sides to him, as unmatched as the black- and white-
coloured legs of his trousers in the illustration for ‘Di zumerfeygele’.
Ryback’s pictures in Mayses far kleyninke kinderlekh could not be more different from
Chaikov’s illustrations in Temerl. Where the former are black and white, crude in their
execution but dynamic in their composition, the latter are colourful, decorative in line and
form, if static. If Chaikov’s work in Temerl could be described as an instance of turning
outwards, away from Jewish tradition, Ryback’s illustrations may be considered a turning
inwards. They provide evidence for him having found inspiration in the ‘lustily drawn’ lubok
with a pictorial narrative distributed within the frame of the illustration. The amulet-like
frames with which Ryback encircled his pictures are themselves suggestive of the curvilinear
folk style that Ryback and Lissitzky encountered in the ornamentation of the synagogues visited
on their ethnographic expedition. And the vase of flowers on the back cover of Mayses far
kleyne kinderlekh is unambiguously a ‘motif copied from Jewish cemeteries’.65 But for
Ryback, the ‘turn to primitivitism’ did not merely involve recourse to elements of Jewish (and
Russian) folk iconography; it also included the borrowing of visual forms characteristic of the
artistic expression of children, who were his intended audience. The picture that emerges is
one of the artist exploring the possibilities of the familiar, rather than of him exploring how to
familiarize his audience with what had become possible, that is, the adoption of European high
art. It then appears that Ryback and Chaikov manifested their ideological differences not only
in their programmatic writings but also in their book illustrations for the Yiddish-reading child.

4. The Art of Translation: Lissitzky and Akselrod

Of the four artists considered here, El Lissitzky (1890–1941), born Lazar Markovich Lisitsky,
is without doubt the one best known to the general public. For the art historian Alexandra
Shatskikh,
Lissitzky’s career is almost a textbook case of the influence of the new ideas about
art and society. An ardent champion of Jewish art, an energetic member of the
Kultur Lige, and the author of splendid books inspired by Jewish literary culture
and avant-garde in spirit, Lazar Lisitsky […] was transformed into the
internationalist El Lissitzky.66

In Shatskikh’s interpretation, Lissitzky’s name change is a signifier of the ‘abrupt and total’
shift from the creation of explicitly Jewish works to the production of abstract, non-ethnic
universalist art.67 The decisive break in Lissitzky’s artistic practice is commonly dated to have
occurred at the end of 1919.68 Wolitz explains Lissitzky’s abandonment of ‘the quest for the
Jewish style’ as a result of the reshaped socio-political structures in post-Revolutionary
Russia.69 Not only did a Jewish background no longer provide an obstacle to the participation
in building a new art, but, by 1919, Jewish art imposed a ‘growing confinement […] both from
within and without’ — ‘from within’ because the consumer of art whom Lissitzky addressed
largely operated and functioned in Russian, and ‘from without’ because Jewish cultural
autonomy waned in the wake of the consolidation of Bolshevik power.70 However, as Wolitz
also notes, Lissitzky continued to illustrate Yiddish books even after 1919. In fact, in
Lissitzky’s autobiography, the period of his Jewish books is given as 1917–1920, which
suggests that his artistic trajectory was perhaps less clearly delineated than the schematic view
of him as ‘comprising two distinct and mutually exclusive entities’ entails.71
Elfandl, the Yiddish translation of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Just So’ story ‘The Elephant’s Child’
(1902), appeared in 1922, published by the Berlin publisher Shveln (‘Thresholds’). The book
is 285×222mm in size and consists of sixteen pages (fourteen of which are numbered). It
contains no information on the translator, giving the author’s name simply as ‘Kipling’ on front
cover and title page. The illustrations are credited to ‘Kraft’ (‘Strength’) on the title page, but
unsigned in the book. In addition to the illustrations on front and back cover, Elfandl contains
ten black-and-white prints which are interspersed with the text, as well as three full-page
illustrations (on pp. 8, 11 and [16]).
Lissitzky settled in Berlin in late 1921,72 possibly sent by the Soviet powers as an
‘unofficial representative of advanced Russian culture in the West’.73 In the years following his
arrival, two other children’s books were published in Berlin with his illustrations: Ukraynishe
folkmayses (Ukrainian Folktales, 1922) and Vaysrushishe folkmayses (White Russian
Folktales, 1923), both translated into Yiddish by Leyb Kvitko and published by the Jewish
section of the commissariat for people’s education. Notwithstanding the publication date, Ruth
Apter-Gabriel argues that ‘judging from both style and content’, the two books are likely to
have been ‘executed in 1919 at the latest’.74 As concerns content, Apter-Gabriel follows the
standard view of Lissitzky’s biography and claims that by the time Lissitzky moved to Berlin,
his work had ‘no connection to anything Jewish’.75 In style, Lissitzky’s illustrations in these
books are unmistakably modernist, with strongly shaded figures and resolutely flat
backgrounds. Moreover, the depiction of ‘cylindrical movement’ in Ukrainian Folktales,
Apter-Gabriel argues, recalls ‘the more fully developed similar turbulence in Had Gadya’, the
1919 volume of Lissitzky’s lithographic illustrations of the traditional Passover song.
When comparing Elfandl to Lissitzky’s folktale illustrations of 1922 and 1923, clear
parallels emerge. In Elfandl too there is Cubist fragmentation of form (see especially the
crocodile in fig. 4), strong shading with rapid passage from dark to light (see the elephant in
fig. 4), and ‘cylindrical movement’, as exemplified by the ostrich whose body appears to be
bent in two directions simultaneously (fig. 5). Lissitzky’s figures are largely two-dimensional,
devoid of background and ornamental detail, with absolutely no visual representation of the
‘banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo river all set about with fever trees’.
The front cover of Elfandl (fig. 6) is the only coloured illustration in the book. Enclosed in a
black and red frame is a sideways depiction of the little elephant, set in a red circle beneath
the title, whose typographical design is also in black and red. The elephant (already in
possession of its trunk) is strutting out to the right as if urging the reader to turn the page. It is
orientated on the diagonal, which not only creates a sense of dynamism but also aligns the
picture with the (Cubo-) Futurist tradition, which is characterized by its prominent use of
diagonal lines and constructions. In the rendering of the artist identified as ‘Strength’, the little
elephant is a vigorous child of the Revolution, marching confidently into the future, its trunk
lifted high.
The red of the cover underscores the dynamism and revolutionary tenor of the design.
Lissitzky, who had produced the propaganda poster ‘Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge’ in
1919 and whose The Suprematist Tale of Two Squares, the story of a struggle in which ‘red
sets itself over black’,76 was published in the same year as Elfandl, was an artist well-versed
in the symbolic use of red. The injection of red on the front cover, then, not only serves to draw
the reader’s eyes to the elephant but can also be interpreted as a political statement. While
entirely faithful to Kipling’s text, Lissitzky’s illustrations create a pictorial subtext that turns the
‘Just So’ story about the elephant’s child ‘full of satiable curiosity’ into a revolutionary tale in
which the young elephant successfully rebels against the established order and thereby brings
about an improved society for all.
Given the revolutionary potential of ‘The Elephant’s Child’, it seems fitting that it should
also have been published as a Russian children’s book in the early years of the Soviet Union.
Like Elfandl, the Russian version of ‘The Elephant’s Child’, Slonenok, appeared in 1922.77 It
contained illustrations by Vladimir Lebedev (1891–1967), which ‘made an enormous aesthetic
impression on Lebedev’s contemporaries as well as generations of critics to come’.78 Indeed,
to this day, Lebedev occupies a prominent place in the critical literature on Soviet book
illustration. Discussing the development of Russian book design, Alla Rosenfeld credits
Lebedev with having ‘created a specific graphic language attuned to children’s visual
perception’ and thereby founded a whole school of Soviet book illustration. Concerning
Lebedev’s illustrations for ‘The Elephant’s Child’, she notes
Lebedev avoids the illusion of depth; instead of using contours, he introduces
masses in subtle gradations of black and grey shades. Lebedev […] employs a style
characterized by two-dimensionality, absence of illusionistic surface, perspective
shrinkage, and light modelling relative to children’s perception. Opposed to
excessive ornamentation, Lebedev shows in his designs no trace of the mannerist
decorativeness of prerevolutionary children’s books.79

 FIGS. 4.4, 4.5. El Lissitzky, Illustrations from Elfandl (Berlin, 1922). Images courtesy of the
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

FIG. 4.6. El Lissitzky, Front Cover Illustration for Elfandl (Berlin, 1922). Image courtesy of the
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

FIG. 4.7. Vladimir Lebedev, Front Cover and Illustration for Slonenok ([Peterburg], 1922).
(See Evgeny Steiner, Stories for Little Comrades (Seattle & London: University of Washington
Press), pp. 44–45.)

The description — with its vocabulary of ‘gradations of black and grey shades’, ‘two-
dimensionality’, and ‘absence of illusionistic surface’ — could just as easily apply to
Lissitzky’s illustrations. Similarly, Rosenfeld’s reference to ‘the architectonic construction’ of
Slonenok calls to mind Lissitzky’s remarks about the need for ‘a book’s architecture […]
programming the whole as well as individual pages’.80 Steiner’s comments on Lebedev’s
illustrations further evoke comparison with Lissitzky, as both artists may be said to employ
Cubist constructions, ‘making the figures look as if they consist of separate segments or parts,
like jointed marionettes’.81
Even to the untrained eye, the similarities between Lissitzky’s and Lebedev’s illustrations
for Kipling’s story are unmistakable. In both books, the front cover illustration (see fig. 6 and
the left image of fig. 7) has the little elephant seen from the side, prancing in the direction in
which the book is to be read (right-to-left in Elfandl and left-to-right in Slonenok). On both
covers, the image of the elephant is set within a circle, either drawn in red (Elfandl), or
composed of different images (Slonenok). For the book title, Lissitzky and Lebedev both use
letters that contrast in colour (black and red, and black and white, respectively) but are
uniform in size. There is overlap even as concerns the ‘architecturalisms’ of the typefaces,
with the dots that Lissitzky places at the end of the strokes and hooks of the Hebrew letters
finding their counterpart in Lebedev’s design of the numbers of the publication date. The
illustrations inside the books show further similarities between Elfandl and Slonenok, as, for
example, in the depiction of the ostrich (see the right image of fig. 7), which in both books is
bent into a cylindrical shape and precariously balanced on one leg. With close parallels in
composition and execution, the similarities between the two sets of illustrations go beyond the
shared Cubist-style schematization of the animal figures. In their respective drawings for ‘The
Elephant’s Child’, Lissitzky and Lebedev use not only a common artistic language but seem to
speak in unison, articulating a common vision.
To summarize, both books were published in 1922. Lebedev’s illustrations were first shown
in the summer of the same year at an exhibition of ‘new trends’ at Petrograd’s Museum of
Artistic Culture, which also included work by Kazimir Malevich. 82 Elfandl was published in
Berlin after Lissitzky had left Russia in late 1921. However, given the stylistic closeness
between Lissitzky’s illustrations for the books Elfandl, Ukraynishe Folkmayses and
Vaysrusishe Folkmayses, Elfandl was plausibly completed before Lissitzky came to Berlin,
possibly as early as 1919, which Apter-Gabriel argues was the date when Lissitzky finished
his work for the two volumes of children’s folktales. In the years between 1919, the date
associated with the end of Lissitzky’s ‘Jewish period’, and 1921, Lissitzky moved from Kiev
to Vitebsk, in order to teach at the Vitebsk Popular Art Institute, where he was joined by
Malevich in September 1919. After the disbandment of the Art Institute in 1921, Lissetzky
arrived in Moscow to teach architecture at VKhUTEMAS, the ‘Russian Bauhaus’. 83
From Lissitzky’s biography, it may be reasonably conjectured that in the period 1919–1921,
he was in close contact with Russian (and Ukrainian) avant-garde artists. Wolitz argues for this
to be the case for Jewish artists more generally, who ‘for the most part moved back and forth
between Russian and Jewish artistic and intellectual circles’. It is then not unfeasible that
Lebedev and Lissitzky (both of whom knew Malevich) were influenced by each other’s work.
If the illustrations for Elfandl were in fact completed by the summer of 1919, it is possible that
Lissitzky’s illustrations of ‘The Elephant’s Child’ are of an earlier date than the ones by
Lebedev, and that Lebedev responded to Lissitzky’s illustrations with a series of pictures that
are similar in technique, structure and style. If so, it suggests that even in his Yiddish
illustration work, in which he affirmed a Jewish artistic identity, Lissitzky sought — and was
recognized — to belong to a wider artistic community that served the revolutionary cause by
building the new world, complete with new child and new book. What is more, if true, the
hypothesis that Lebedev’s illustrations were inspired by Lissitzky’s work would mean that, far
from irrelevant to Soviet culture as a whole, Yiddish book art exerted an influence on graphic
artists who were part of the (linguistically and politically) dominant Russian culture.
An example of influence flowing in the other direction — from Russian to Yiddish artistic
circles — is the translation of Samuil Marshak’s Yesterday and Today. The Russian original,
Vchera í segodnia, illustrated by Lebedev, was published in 1925 by Raduga (‘Rainbow’), a
privately owned publishing house specialising in children’s literature.84 The Yiddish version,
Nekhtn un haynt, translated by (L.) Rozenblum and illustrated by Meyer Akselrod (1902–
1970, the brother of the Yiddish writer Zelik Akselrod), was published two years later by the
Moscow publisher Shul un bukh (‘School and book’). In text, the Yiddish translation is entirely
faithful to the Russian original, and tells the story of yesterday’s kerosene lamp, pen and
inkwell, water bucket and yoke, which are not happy about having been replaced by today’s
light bulb, typewriter and running water, and do not understand the workings of the new
technologies. With respect to the illustrations, however, the two books are markedly different.
Lebedev’s lithographs for the Russian original show the contrast between new and old in
colour and form. The objects that define the old way of life are drawn with ‘thin, limp curves’,
in shades of predominantly brown and black, while the technological achievements of progress
are characterized by ‘solid flat planes’ and ‘powerful blocks of color’.85 The orderly, poster-
like compositions of the new life are juxtaposed with pages describing the old world, which
look cluttered and jumbled. The cover illustration (fig. 8) encapsulates the message: while
yesterday was black, represented by hunched-over figures in fading outline, today is red and
involves sturdy, upright and brightly coloured figures marching to the left.
In Akselrod’s rendering, the contrast between yesterday and today is less stark and less
ideologically charged. Only the front cover is illustrated in colour; the ten illustrations inside
the book are all in black and white. Besides presenting a more uniform appearance, the
illustrations of Akselrod’s design lack Lebedev’s abstraction. In Nekhtn un haynt, none of the
human figures are faceless or, like paper cut-outs, lined up in serial fashion, and there is little
use of geometric forms and punctuation marks, unlike the arrow, question and exclamation
marks found in Vchem í segodnia.
The difference in style is evident already on the front cover (fig. 9). While Akselrod follows
Lebedev’s example in colour-coding yesterday and today, the contrast he draws is not one
between black and red. Yesterday’s objects are set against a blue background, seemingly more
appropriate for the realm of fairy tale than past oppression. The world of yesterday is curved
and cursive; its topsyturviness contrasts with the rectangles and square lettering of today. Yet
both main words of the title are lettered in black, which, unlike Lebedev’s shift from black to
red, implies continuity between present and past.
Akselrod further differs from Lebedev in that he allows elements of the old and new world
— for example, electric lamp and candle — to intermingle in one picture (see pp. 5, 7),
instead of maintaining a strict division between them. In Akselrod’s visual universe, old and
new can co-exist. The total eradication of the old does not appear to be a requisite to the
building of the new world. In fact, it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between the old
and the new in Akselrod’s illustrations. As in the Russian book, the second illustration of
Nekhtn un haynt (p. 3) presents the dinner scene around the table that is wistfully recalled by
the kerosene lamp: ‘But when they used to light me / Each night, the moths all came / Fluttering
through the window / To perish in my flame’.86 While Lebedev’s illustration (fig. 10) shows a
bourgeois couple, clearly identified as such by their attire and corpulence, Akselrod portrays a
family that is not overtly signified as coming from either a bourgeois or an observant Jewish
background. Father and son wear worker’s caps (like the one adopted by Lenin), and the
mother too is dressed plainly, lacking the fine clothes and jewellery donned by the woman in
Lebedev’s picture. If the kerosene lamp is a feature of the pre-Revolutionary world,
Akselrod’s illustration reassures the reader that not every household where it is found belongs
to ‘the internal enemy’.
In summary, the translation of Marshak’s book into Yiddish attests to the popularity and
critical acclaim for Yesterday and Today, but also demonstrates Russian cultural dominance
over the minority national cultures and literatures. As illustrator for the Yiddish version,
Akselrod largely followed the original overall design. His individual illustrations, however,
frequently differ in style and content from Lebedev’s model, presenting a less polarized vision
of the difference between the world of yesterday and today. Whereas the Russian kerosene
lamp is at home with the ‘fat cats’ of the old order, with both soon to be replaced, the Yiddish
kerosene lamp is found in the home of a working family, where it may continue to function for a
while alongside the new invention. In the world of today, the Russian typewriter is imposingly
solid, square and mechanic; in contrast, the Yiddish typewriter is an altogether more heymish
appliance — smaller, curvier and less dominating. If Lebedev highlights the schism that exists
between yesterday and today, Akselrod emphasizes continuity. His reinterpretation of the
original visual and textual narrative may be regarded as a kind of ‘Judaization’ in the sense that
he adapts the Soviet revolutionary tale to fit better with a particular definition of Jewish art. In
his affirmation of continuity, Akselrod creates a set of illustrations that harmonizes with the
concept of a Jewish national art that is rooted in folk tradition rather than advocating a
decisive break with all things past.

 FIG. 4.8. Vladimir Lebedev, Front Cover Illustration for Vchera í segodnia (Moscow, 1925).
Image from the Walter Havighurst Special Collections, Miami University Libraries, Oxford,
Ohio.

FIG. 4.9. Meyer Akselrod, Front Cover Illustration for Nekhtn (Moscow, 1927). Image
courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

FIG. 4.10. Vladimir Lebedev, Illustration from Vchera í segodnia (Moscow, 1925). Image from
the Walter Havighurst Special Collections, Miami University Libraries, Oxford, Ohio.

5. Conclusion
The creation of Yiddish book art for children occurred in the hothouse climate of a theoretical
debate about the parameters of a modern secular Jewish culture, especially as they concerned
the development of the literary and visual arts. The production of visual art, even (or, perhaps,
especially) the art intended for children, meant taking a position in this debate, irrespective of
whether the artist also chose to articulate this position in manifesto-like statements. The
illustrations for the four books discussed in this chapter — Temerl (1917), Maysesfar
kleyninke kinderlekh (1922), Elfandl (1922) and Nekhtn un haynt (1927) — span a period
often years, in which the project of Jewish nation-building faced increasing difficulties in a
shifting sociopolitical landscape. Nevertheless it appears that the issue of ethnographic loyalty
or ‘renovating the old’ versus a shift to universalism or ‘building anew’ remained contentious
throughout, and continued to preoccupy artists involved in the design of children’s books and,
by means of these books, children’s lives. If Chaikov and Lissitzky may be seen as having
turned outwards to European art movements and Russian art circles, Ryback and Akselrod can
be regarded as having turned inwards, seeking to fashion some bond to the world of Jewish
existence before the modern Jewish and the Bolshevik revolutions. What both those who turned
outwards and those who turned inwards had in common is their belief in an artistic project
with the power to create, in the words of Chagall, ‘a world where everything and anything is
possible’.87

FIG. 4.11. Meyer Akselrod, Illustration from Nekhtn (Moscow, 1927).
Notes to Chapter 4
For help and assistance in preparing scanned images of the illustrations used in this article, I am grateful to Moira Fitzgerald,
Head of Access Services at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Dr Lyudmila Sholokhova, Head
Librarian and Acting Chief Archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research; and Masha Stepanova, Coordinator of
Cataloging and Slavic Librarian at Miami University. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their
permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if
notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
1. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 106.
2. See, for example, Martin Salisbury and Morag Styles, Children’s Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling (London:
Lawrence King, 2012), and Inside the Rainbow: Russian Children’s Literature 1920–35: Beautiful Books, Terrible
Times, ed. by Julian Rothenstein and Olga Budashevskaya (London: Redstone Press, 2013).
3. The status and importance given to children’s books can be seen in the fact that in February 1924, the Central Committee
of the Communist Party decreed the development of children’s literature to be one of the Party’s major goals in the realm
of publications, with the result that during the first half of the 1920s, nearly one hundred state publishing houses (in addition
to private ones) printed children’s literature; see Alla Rosenfeld, ‘Figuration versus Abstraction in Soviet Illustrated
Children’s Books, 1920–1930’, in Defining Russian Graphic Arts: From Diaghilev to Stalin, 1898–1934, ed. by Alla
Rosenfeld (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), pp. 166–97 (p. 168).
4. Speculating on the motivation for Western interest in early Soviet art, Evgeny Steiner adds the polemical suggestion that it
serves ‘the psychological need for a good scare’, allowing ‘Westerners who see terrifying pictures of the builders of the
Communist future marching bravely ahead, or scenes of world capitalism’s “final hour”, [to] deal with their own fears’
about the defeat of their capitalist society; see Evgeny Steiner, Stories for Little Comrades (Seattle and London:
University of Washington Press), p. xii.
5. The Kultur-Lige was established in Kiev in January 1918. It sought to create and promote a new Jewish secular culture
based on Yiddish, and, for a while, became the representative organ of Jewish autonomy in Ukraine. For an overview of its
history, see Gennady Estraikh, ‘The Yiddish Kultur-Lige’, in Modernism in Kyiv: Jubilant Experimentation, ed. by Irena
R. Makaryk and Virlana Tkacz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), pp. 197–217. For a discussion of the history
and achievements specifically of the Kultur-Lige’s art section, see Hillel Kazovskii, ‘The Art Section of the Kultur Lige’,
Jews in Eastern Europe, 22 (Winter 1993), pp. 5–22, and Hillel Kazovskii, Khudozhniki Kul’tur-Ligi/The Artists of the
Kultur-Lige (Moscow: Mosty kul’tury; Jerusalem: Gesharim, 2003).
6. For a detailed discussion of the role of indigenous Jewish sources in the development of modern Jewish art, see Seth L.
Wolitz, ‘The Jewish National Art Renaissance in Russia, in Tradition and Revolution: The Jewish Renaissance in
Russian Avant-Garde Art, 1912–1928, ed. by Ruth Apter-Gabriel (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1987), pp. 21–42.
The claim that Russian and Jewish artistic circles influenced each other is similarly found in Wolitz; Estraikh, p. 201, makes
the point for contact between Kiev-based Ukranian and Jewish artists.
7. See, for example, Adina Bar-El, ‘Children’s Literature: Yiddish Literature’, in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern
Europe, ed. by Gershon David Hundert (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 322–26 (p. 322).
8. Benjamin Harshav, The meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), chapter 5.
9. Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), pp. 17–18.
10. Arkady Ippolitov, ‘Imaginationland, USSR’, in Inside the Rainbow, pp. 17–21 (p. 18).
11. Diane Wolfthal, Picturing Yiddish: Gender, Identity, and Memory in the Illustrated Yiddish Books of Renaissance
Italy (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004), p. 174.
12. Cited by Gerald Janacek, The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900–1930 (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 12.
13. Zhihui Fang, ‘Illustrations, Text, and the Child Reader: What are Pictures in Children’s Storybooks for?’, Reading
Horizons, 37.2 (1996), pp. 130–42.
14. Fang, p. 138.
15. Marek Shvarts, ‘The National Element in Jewish Art’, Literarishe Bleter, 48 (3 April 1925), p. 1.
16. ‘Stasov induced the erudite and vastly wealthy Baron David Guenzburg (1857–1910) to help him undertake the artistic
resuscitation of Jewish plastic traditions by collecting, editing, and publishing the old, original works of Jewish manuscript
art’; Wolitz, in Tradition and Revolution, p. 24. Stasov’s portfolio of illuminations from medieval Hebrew manuscripts was
published in 1905; see Christina Lodder, ‘Ideology and Identity: El Lissitzky in Berlin’, in The Russian Jewish Diaspora
and European Culture, 1917–1937, ed. by Jörg Schulte, Olga Tabachnikova and Peter Wagstaff (Leiden and Boston:
Brill), pp. 339–64 (note 28, p. 349).
17. Abram Efros, ‘Lampa Aladina’, in Evreiskii mir, 1 (Moscow, 1918), p. 301; cited by Lodder, p. 354.
18. Kenneth Moss, ‘Not The Dybbuk but Don Quixote: Translation, Deparochialization, and Nationalism in Jewish Culture,
1917–1919’, in Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. by Benjamin Nathans and Gabriella Safran
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), pp. 196–240 (pp. 198–99).
19. Moss, p. 215.
20. See, for example, Inna Goudz, ‘Auf dem Wege zu einer neuen Kultur: Die Kultur-lige’, in Jüdische Illustratoren aus
Osteuropa in Paris und Berlin, ed. by Andrea von Hülsen-Esch und Marion Aptroot (Düsseldorf: Heinrich-Heine-
Universität, Seminar für Kunstgeschichte und Institut für Jüdische Studien, 2008), pp. 19–29 (p. 26).
21. I. Ryback and B. Aronson, ‘Paths of Jewish Painting’, in Tradition and Revolution, ed. by Ruth Apter-Gabriel, p. 229.
22. Ibid., p. 229.
23. Nicoletta Misler, ‘The Future in Search of Its Past: Nation, Ethnos, Tradition and the Avant-Garde in Russian Jewish Art
Criticism’, in Tradition and Revolution, ed. by Ruth Apter-Gabriel, pp. 143–54 (p. 147).
24. Yoysef Tshaykov, Skulptur (Kiev: Melukhe-farlag, 1921), p. 14. (English translation taken from Joseph Tchaikov,
[Excerpts from the book] Sculpture, in Tradition and Revolution, ed. by Ruth Apter-Gabriel, p. 231).
25. Tshaykov, pp. 12–13.
26. Moshe Litvakov, Bikher-velt, 1 (February 1919), pp. 20–25.
27. Wolitz, in Tradition and Revolution, p. 36.
28. Seth Wolitz, ‘The Kiev-Grupe (1918–1920) Debate: The Function of Literature’, Studies in American Jewish Literature,
4.2 (1978), pp. 97–106 (p. 104).
29. Wolitz, ‘The Kiev-Grupe (1918–1920) Debate’, p. 99.
30. Ibid., p. 101.
31. Moss, p. 199.
32. Yekhezkl Dobrushin, ‘Yidisher kunst-primitiv un dos kunst-bukh far kinder’, Bikher-velt, 4–5 (August 1919), pp. 16–23;
reprinted in Yekhezkl Dobrushin, Gedankengang (Kiev: Kooperative farlag Kultur-Lige, 1922), pp. 115–19. Translated by
Batia Baum as ‘L’art primitif juif et le livre d’art pour enfants’, in Futur antérieur: L’avant-garde et le livre Yiddish
(1914–1939), ed. by Nathalie Hazan-Brunet (Paris: Musée d’art et d’histoire du judaïsme and Skira Flammarion, 2009),
pp. 223–25.
33. David Schneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), p. 138.
34. Dobrushin, in Futur antérieur: L’avant-garde et le livre Yiddish (1914–1939), p. 225.
35. Ibid.
36. Dobrushin, ‘Yidisher kunst-primitiv un dos kunst-bukh far kinder’, p. 18; cited by Wolitz, in Tradition and Revolution, p.
36.
37. Janacek, p. 9.
38. Dobrushin, in Futur antérieur: L’avant-garde et le livre Yiddish (1914–1939), p. 223. It is precisely the lubok which
Bergelson singles out in his reply to Litvakov as a symbol of the lack of a sophisticated readership for Yiddish literature,
complaining that the new literature reaches only ‘the uneducated common man, who has not grown to the civilized tradition
and understands only pictures containing primitive lines, or the lubok’; Estraikh, p. 206.
39. Wolitz, ‘The Kiev-Grupe (1918–1920) Debate’, p. 99.
40. This is by no means to suggest that children’s literature existed in a space of free expression in Soviet Russia, as even a
cursory reading of the literature will disconfirm. See, for example, David Goldberg, ‘Itsik Kipnis’s Books for Children’, in
The Field of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Folklore and Literature, V, ed. by David Goldberg (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 153–202, for a discussion of the attitudes of Soviet Yiddish critics towards
fantastic children’s literature between the years 1919 and 1935. On the topic of ideological criticism of the ‘king of the
children’s book’, Vladimir Lebedev, and the artists of his circle, see Rosenfeld, p. 194, and Steiner, pp. 174–75.
41. Salisbury and Styles, p. 105.
42. See, for example, Harold Rosenberg, ‘Is there a Jewish Art?’, Commentary, 42.1 (1966), pp. 57–59 (reprinted in Jewish
Texts on the Visual Arts, ed. with commentary by Vivian B. Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.
149–52), and Aaron Rosen, Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the Masters in Chagall, Guston, and Kitaj
(Oxford: Legenda, 2009).
43. Rosenberg, in Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts, p. 151. For Anthony Julius (Idolizing Pictures: Idolatry, Iconoclasm and
Jewish Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), pp. 41–42), the Second Commandment ‘enlists Jews in a project of idol-
breaking’, mandating (aniconic) art that seeks to abolish the icon, (iconic) art that domesticates the icon, and (iconoclastic)
art that attacks the icon. Understanding the category of Jewish metaphysical concerns to include the Biblical
commandments, Yiddish children’s book art may then also be seen to meet the criterion of ‘programmatic’ Jewish content
by contesting traditional authority as based on religious belief.
44. Rosenberg, in Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts, p. 151.
45. See Wolitz, ‘The Kiev-Grupe (1918–1920) Debate’, p. 101.
46. Estraikh, p. 202.
47. Ryback and Aronson, p. 229.
48. Tshaykov, pp. 13, 14.
49. Serje-Aljosja Stommels and Albert Lemmens, ‘The Graphic Works of Issachar Ber Ryback (1897–1935): An Outstanding
Example of Children’s Book Art’, in The Russian Jewish Diaspora and European Culture, 1917–1937, ed. by Jörg
Schulte, Olga Tabachnikova and Peter Wagstaff (Leiden & Boston: Brill), pp. 279–99 (pp. 286–87).
50. Both sets of illustrations are also printed in the exhibition catalogue, Tradition and Revolution, ed. by Ruth Apter-Gabriel;
see p. 165 for Temerl, and pp. 199–201 for Mayses far kleyninke kinderlekh.
51. Steiner, pp. 104, 109.
52. Wolitz, in Tradition and Revolution, p. 26.
53. See Joseph and Yehudit Shadur, Traditional Jewish Papercuts: An Inner World of Art and Symbol (Hanover, NH:
University Press of New England, 2002), chapter 3, especially pp. 90–105.
54. Cultures of the Jews: A New History, ed. by David Biale (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), p. 683.
55. Shadur and Shadur, p. 97.
56. Wolitz, in Tradition and Revolution, p. 36.
57. The Center for Jewish History Digital Collections catalogue entry provides no size information. In Tradition and
Revolution, ed. by Ruth Apter-Gabriel, Ryback’s illustrations from Mayselekh far kleyninke kinderlekh are listed as
sized 265x350mm (cat. 129), 268x352mm (cat. 130–32), 267x357mm (cat. 133), and 205×270mm (cat. 132). A 2012
auction listing for Mayselekh far kleyninke kinderlekh <http://www.kedem-auctions.com/content/childrens-tales-
%E2%80%93-illustrations-issachar-ber-ryback-1922> (accessed 17 February 2015) gives the size as 21.5×27.5cm.
58. Russian Book Art 1904–2005, ed. by Albert Lemmens & Serge-Aljosja Stommels (Brussels: Fonds Mercator, 2005), cat.
44. See also Stommels and Lemmens, ‘The Graphic Works of Issachar Ber Ryback (1897–1935)’, pp. 287–88.
59. Stommels and Lemmens, p. 288.
60. See M. V. Cox, Drawings of People by the Under-5s (London: Falmer Press, 1997), p. 12.
61. Sonya Ryback, ‘Zayn lebns-veg’, in Yissakhar Ber Ribak, ed. E. Tsherikover (Paris: Komitet tsu fareybikn dem ondenk
fun Yissakhar-Ber Ribak, 1937), p. 19; English translation taken from Stommels and Lemmens, p. 288. (Also mentioned in
chapter 5 of the present volume.)
62. Steiner, p. 52.
63. Stommels and Lemmens, p. 288.
64. Ibid., pp. 279–80.
65. Chimen Abramsky, ‘Yiddish Book Illustrations in Russia: 1916–1923’, in Tradition and Revolution, ed. by Ruth Apter-
Gabriel, pp. 61–70 (p. 66).
66. Alexandra Shatskikh, ‘Jewish Artists in the Russian Avant-Garde’, in Russian Jewish Artists in a Century of Change,
1890–1990, ed. by Susan Tumarkin Goodman (Munich & New York: Prestel, 1995), pp. 71–80 (p. 74).
67. Peter Nisbet, ‘An Introduction to El Lissitzky’, in El Lissitzky 1890–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art
Museums, 1987), p. 17, cited by Lodder, p. 339. See also Ziva Amishai-Maisels, ‘The Jewish Awakening: A Search for
National Identity’, in Russian Jewish Artists in a Century of Change, 1890–1990, ed. by Susan Tumarkin Goodman, pp.
54–70, which discusses Lissitzky’s change in signature (from aleph lamed to lamed yud [li] and lamed lamed [ll]) as a
sign of his seeking a new identity (p. 62).
68. See Wolitz, in Tradition and Revolution, p. 38; Lodder, p. 339.
69. Wolitz, in Tradition and Revolution, p. 38.
70. Ibid.
71. Lodder, p. 340.
72. See Nancy Perloff, ‘The Puzzle of El Lissitzky’s Artistic Identity, Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow, ed. by
Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2003), pp. 1–23 (p. 7).
73. Nisbet, p. 25; cited by Victor Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917–1946
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), note 27, p. 56.
74. Ruth Apter-Gabriel, ‘El Lissitzky’s Jewish Works’, in Tradition and Revolution, ed. by Ruth Apter-Gabriel, pp. 101–24
(p. 120).
75. Apter-Gabriel, p. 121.
76. Steiner, p. 27.
77. Rudyard Kipling, Slonenok, trans. by Korney Chukovsky, with illustrations by Vladimir Lebedev ([Peterburg]: Ėpokha,
1922).
78. Steiner, p. 43.
79. Rosenfeld, p. 172.
80. Rosenfeld, p. 171. Lissitzky’s remarks on the post-Revolutionary achievements in typography and book design appeared in
a guidebook to the All-Union Polygraphic Exhibition in Moscow (1927), cited by Janacek, p. 204.
81. Steiner, p. 43.
82. Steiner, pp. 41–42.
83. See Perloff, p. 7.
84. Rosenfeld, p. 168.
85. Steiner, p. 54.
86. English text quoted from The Circus and Other Stories: Four Books by Samuil Marshak & Vladimir Lebedev, trans.
by Stephen Capus (London: Tate Publishing, 2013), n. pag.
87. Edouard Roditi, ‘Interview with Chagall’, in Dialogues on Art, rev. ed. (Santa Barbara, CA: Ross-Erikson, 1980), pp. 8–
31; reprinted in excerpts in Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts, ed. with commentary by Vivian B. Mann, pp. 147–48 (p.
147).

 CHAPTER 5

Illustrating Yiddish Children’s Literature: Aesthetics and

Utopia in Lissitzky’s Graphics for Mani Leib’s Yingl
Tsingl Khvat
Sabine Koller

1. Tracing Jewish Art and Yiddish Children’s literature

‘The Jewish form is there, it is awakening, it is coming to life!’ With this enthusiastic
exclamation, Boris Aronson and Issakhar Ber Ryback close their 1919 artistic manifesto ‘Di
vegn fun der yidisher moleray’ (‘The Paths of Jewish Paintings’).1 This manifesto, which is at
the same time an impressive course through the history of (Jewish) art, is an important
reflection of the vibrant atmosphere during the Jubilant Experimentation in Kiev, the centre of
the Kultur-Lige, the heart of Jewish cultural autonomy, the laboratory of artistic beliefs, claims
and Isms.2
During the Jewish Cultural Renaissance, Jewish folk art meets cubism, folklore meets
futurism, primitive and archaic forms meet a refined, playful use of avant-garde techniques and
devices. And art meets literature: at the core of the Jewish Cultural Renaissance illustrations
of Jewish books flourish — in general reflecting the dynamic intermedial interactions between
literature and art typical for the (Russian) avant-garde movement.3 Prose classics, modernist
poetry, literary almanacs — they all are equipped with enticing cover images, vignettes,
illustrations, thus catalysing and condensing the aesthetic programme of a group, tendency, or
individual, be it Mendele or Markish, Sholem-Aleichem or Shtrom (Current).
Illustrations for children’s books formed an essential part of this intermedial (re-) invention
of an autonomous east European Jewish identity — a fact that has been ignored by scholars for
a long time. Khone Shmeruk, in 1990, pointed to the fact that neither the body of children’s
literature nor that of the illustrations of children’s books have yet been properly examined.4
And this despite the fact that the first three decades of the twentieth century ‘might be regarded
as the heyday of Yiddish children’s literature’,5 with the years between 1918 and 1925 as the
peak of illustrated Yiddish avant-garde children’s books. Major literary figures were
committed to that project, among them Yitzkhok Leibush Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, David
Bergelson, Der Nister and Leyb Kvitko.6 Leading Russian-Jewish artists such as Marc
Chagall, Eliezer (Lazar’) Lissitzky, Issakhar Ber Ryback, Iosif Tshaykov or Sara Shor shaped
the image of the Yiddish children’s book with avant-garde art trends that welcomed both young
readers and contained the message to celebrate a new-born and independent diasporic Jewish
art and culture by art itself.
The need to develop a secular Yiddish educational system that originated in pre-war times,
and to provide children with books of a high spiritual and ethical standard during the barbaric
times of World War I and the Russian Civil War were two, albeit opposite, driving forces to
compensate for the lack of original children’s literature in Yiddish. In 1912, the Kishinev-
based publishing house Far Undzere Kinder (For our children) launched a series of books
under the same name. In 1914, Boris Kletzkin published in Vilna the first children’s journal,
Grininke beymelekh (Little green trees).7 Yiddish classic and modernist authors contributed
their share. Paradoxically, the misery caused by World War I stimulated the production of
Yiddish children’s literature: though all Yiddish and Hebrew publications were banished in
1915, children’s books were available to provide refugee Jewish children and orphans with at
least a spiritual home. In 1915 and between 1917 and 1921, twenty-five percent of all book
publications in Yiddish were for children.8 At that time, all these Yiddishists and cultural
activists working in the domain of children’s literature could hardly have imagined that the
new government that had initially supported this Jewish revolution within the Great Socialist
Revolution was the real enemy: the Yiddish-Jewish educational system fell prey to
Sovietization, and, subsequently, to liquidation.
In literature, the formation of Yiddish children’s literature and its illustrations grew out of
various and vivid adaptations within Jewishness and across cultural boundaries. The Jewish
religious heritage was adopted and aesthetically transformed (e.g. Lissitzky’s extraordinary
avant-garde illustrations for the traditional Pessach tale Khad Gadye/A Little Goat). Yiddish
high (= adult) literature written by Yitskhok Leybush Peretz or Sholem Aleichem was
‘domesticated’ for the young reader. The same holds true for Russian authors like Lev Tolstoy.9
Adaptations of children’s classics like the collected tales of the Grimm brothers, Wilhelm
Busch or Hans Christian Andersen oscillate between the two opposing tendencies either to
Judaize them or to keep them as they were and follow, as a consequence, the strain of
universalism.10 Chagall, Ryback, Tshaykov and their like combine elements of Jewish folk art
with avant-garde features. Thus, the paradigm of Europeanization and yiddishkayt,
deparochialization and parochialism, universalism and particularism, typical of the entire
Jewish Cultural Renaissance in Eastern Europe reappears in the domain of Yiddish children’s
books.11

2. Traces of Snow — Der Nister, Mani Leib and his Yingl Tsingl Khvat
The desire to create literature for children as a tool for educating future readers (and possible
activists) of the Jewish Cultural Renaissance was accompanied by a vivid interest in folklore
and folk art. The enigmatic Der Nister, aspiring to restore a violated world order in a sort of
aesthetic tikn (redemption), contributes several tales to Yiddish children’s literature, which
partly contain a fascinating blend of Yiddish and Slavic folk motifs. In ‘Vinter’ (‘Winter’) and
‘Der shney-bok’ (‘The Billy Goat’), two of his Kunstmärchen,12 the narrator with lofty verses,
alternate rhymes and in an iambic meter creates a mythical space where the natural and the
supernatural meet. In ‘Vinter’, the narrator-herald of winter tells the story of how a zumer-
malekh, an angel of summer, got caught by frost and cold. Two goyim, non-Jews, find it and
take it to a house in a village. They rub it with incense (‘mit veyreykh shmirn’; p. 22). The
angel of summer awakes and flies back to heaven, leaving snow and winter behind. ‘Der
shney-bok’ is about a mobile goylem-mentsh (golem-man, p. 49) made out of snow by little
children. This hybrid man-animalgolem comes to life thanks to the crow of a bobe-
shprekherin, a sorceress, which bespeaks him. It wanders around until it reaches the centre of
a little town. From now on, all winter through, it returns to the place when the bells strike
midnight and continues its wandering.
Der Nister uses a rich gamut of atmospheres, which covers the luminous-mystic and magic
(‘Vinter’) as well as the dark and uncanny (‘Der shney-bok’). The fantastic anthropomorphic
character of the snow-figure and the re-birth of the angel thanks to a warming fire recalls Hans
Christian Andersen’s tale Snowman in which the eponymous snowman longs for an oven he
can see in the house right in front of him.13 The myth of the golem, which inspired other
(Yiddish) writers like H. Leivick or Gustav Meyrink at the time, along with Der Nister’s use of
a simple, euphonic Yiddish that Bal-Makhshoves praised highly, masterfully counterbalance
the strands of Europeanness.14 A writer like Der Nister, in search of metaphysical harmony,
contributes to this quest through his own linguistic and aesthetic accomplishments.
Following the traces of snow throughout Yiddish children’s literature leads us to an author
who in some respects can be compared to Der Nister: Mani Leib, born in 1883 in Nezhyn, not
far from Kiev, one year before Der Nister sees the light of day in the Chassidic stronghold
Berditshev.15 After participating in the Socialist revolutionary movement, Mani Leib emigrates
to the USA in 1905. He becomes a founding member of the Yiddish literary group Di Yunge
(The Young Ones). In the New World, Mani Leib continues the tradition of Russian Symbolism
and its credo de realibus ad realiora, as did Der Nister. His lyrics are deeply rooted in folk
poetry. Some of his themes, poetic images and linguistic features stem from Yiddish, Ukrainian
and Russian folklore — a cultural network similar to the one Der Nister creates in his rhymed
tales. On different ends of the world, he and Der Nister promoted the huge project of creating a
body of world literature in Yiddish by translating from Russian, English, German and Baltic
languages.16 Like Der Nister, Mani Leib made a vital contribution to children’s literature. His
poetry, ballads and short prose for children were recited and sung in Yiddish schools. The high
achievements of his ‘sound poems’ abounding with figures of repetition like alliteration,
assonances and parallelisms make him a worthy counterpart to Der Nister. Socialism and
Socialist Realism suppressed Der Nister’s poetic system; in the end, he shifted from poetry to
prose, a process that culminated in his unfinished epos Di mishpokhe Mashber (The Family
Mashber, 1939/1948). Mani Leib, the ‘prints fun lid’ (prince of song), as Itsik Manger called
him, continued writing poetry, ballads and — in the footsteps of William Shakespeare —
sonnets.17 In 1950, when Der Nister perished in a Gulag camp, Mani Leib still lamented the
victims of the Holocaust in the poems and sonnets of his last years. He died on October 4,
1953 in New York.
Yingl Tsingl Khvat (The Mischievous Boy), a classic example of Mani Leib’s children’s
poetry, is about a little boy, a yingl, called Tsingl Khvat. The little boy has courage and a sharp
tongue (tsingl). Thus, his name is not only a personal name, but also a reference to his
character: He is a khvat, i.e. a rascal and jack of all trades.18 The title of the poem does not
only characterize the protagonist, but also contains Leib’s entire poetics: It is humorous,
playful and replete with euphonies and emphases.
In sixty-four stanzas with two pair rhymes each, the lyrical subject unfolds the story of the
little boy Tsingl Khvat. The lyrical I introduces himself in the first stanza, immediately creating
an intimacy with his young listeners by using oral speech and emphatic repetition:
Kh’hob a maysele a sheyne,
Far di kinder mayne kleyne.
Zayt zhe, kinder, shtil un sha,
s’iz mayn maysele aza:
[I have a story here to tell / To all my children — you as well. / Hush, dear friends,
be very still — / Hear my story, if you will; p. 1]19

The double use of the possessive pronoun ‘mayn(e)’ makes him the intermediary between the
‘production’, the story, and its reception, the young auditorium. Like in fairy tales, the narrator
locates the story between nowhere and everywhere. Unlike in fairy tales, the narrator does not
simply switch from the real world to the magic world, but enumerates different means of
transportation, which fulfil their task in real life, but fail in Mani Leib’s tale. His imagined
space can only be reached by language, not by horses, nor by train or by ship (p. 1; str. 2–3).
Yet, the place the narrator describes is very much rooted in reality: we are presented with a
little town or a shtetl located on both sides of a little river where Jews and non- Jews, goyim,
live together peacefully (str. 4–5). Summer leaves, winter comes, Jews and non-Jews continue
with their work. For the children, winter is a time of joy. They ride on their sleighs and build a
‘feter shneyer’, a snowman whose Yiddish name is reminiscent of the Russian ‘ded moroz’
(Father Frost; str. 11–14).20 Unlike in Der Nister’s tale, the snowman does not lead an uncanny
double life. At this point in the story, Tsingl Khvat, the protagonist, is introduced. On his way
back home from heder, the Jewish elementary school, on a dark winter night, he has to trudge
through terrible mud. That is where he enters the realm of the fantastic and magic.
Thanks to Sholem Aleichem’s Jews who suffer from the blote, i.e. mud, in his two-part
satire Di royte yidlekh: An oysgedakhte zakh (The Red Jews: An Invented Story, 1900) and
thanks to Mendele’s ‘heroes’ Binyomin and Senderl in Kitser masoes Binyomin ha-shlishi
(The Short Travels of Benjamin the Third, 1878), mud has come to fame in Yiddish literature.21
In Mani Leib’s Yingl Tsingl Khvat it will be conquered with the help of a ‘porets’, a lord or
landowner whom Tsingl encounters in the dark. Impressed by the little boy’s courage, he offers
him a choice between his horse or his magic ring (str. 35–50). Tsingl, who cannot control his
tongue (his tsingl), demands both. Enthusiastic about Tsingl’s chutzpah, the lord offers him the
horse and the magic ring, the latter clearly reminiscent of Mendele’s Dos vuntsh-fingerl (The
Magic Ring, 1865).22 With the magic horse, Tsingl can go anywhere. And the magic ring?
Whenever Tsingl turns the ring seven times, it starts to snow!
With the horse he is able to ride wherever he chooses, free as the wind. The magic ring
gives him the power to change the seasons at will. The mischievous boy wastes no thought on
his mother who fears that her son might get stuck in the snow (like, by the way, Der Nister’s
angel of summer in ‘Vinter’.) Tsingl leaves the confines of his home behind. The narrator
provides the story with a happy, yet inconclusive ending: Tsingl has the magic — or divine —
power to let it snow. The story ends with a kind of magic formula repeated several times
throughout the story that turns Tsingl’s magic acts into poetry:
 Tpru! Der ferd blaybt shteyn, un Tsingl
tut a nem dem kishef-ringl,
tut im zibn mol a drey
un es falt aroys a shney.
[They stop when Tsingl calls out, “Whoa!” / And with the magic ring just so, / He
turns it seven times around, / And snow falls gently to the ground; p. 10]

With the discipline of a classic author, Mani Leib maintains a trochaic meter in every stanza
with eight syllables in the first two verses and seven in verse three and four. All sixty-four
stanzas start with a female rhyme and end with a masculine one. With the sense of humour of a
romanticist (Mani Leib was trained on Pushkin and Lermontov), the author introduces dramatic
elements:23 alliteration, repetitions of words and syntactic units, climaxes, parallelisms and
especially direct speech (of Tsingl, the lord) dynamize the act of storytelling. These rhetoric
features are to be found in all elements of the plot, in the more descriptive entities (Jewish life
in the shtetl, winter), as well as in the adventure story (Tsingl’s courage and his meeting with
the ‘porets’). Mani Leib’s use of monosyllabic words within a mostly paratactic structure
gives a strong drive to the narration. So do internal rhymes which lend great dynamics to the
plot and demonstrate Mani Leib’s masterly skill as a poet for children:
Flit men gikher, fray un zikher
Vi der vilder vint un vikher –
Tol un barg un vald un feld
In der brayter, vayter veld.
[Tsingl and the horse fly fast / Like a whirlwind, rushing past / Mountains, forests,
countryside — / ravelling the whole world wide; p. 9J24

3. Traces of the text — Lissitzky’s Illustrations of Yingl Tsingl Khvat

While reflecting on the vibrant activities of the Kultur-Lige in 1918 and 1919, I wondered why
Lissitzky, unlike Chagall, did not illustrate Der Nister’s tales (in 1923, in Berlin, he illustrated
Der Nister’s translations of Andersen’s tales).25 A look at Mani Leib’s children’s poetry might
provide an answer: Der Nister is epic, elegiac. Even in his children’s tales the atmosphere is
mystic, at times uncanny. The supernatural and the struggle between dark and divine forces turn
his tales into a complex web of hidden symbolic meanings. Often, the atmosphere in his
mystical spaces is static, aspiring to a state of calm and silence. Very often, Der Nister’s tales
are devoid of an ingredient Mani Leib makes ample use of in his Yingl Tsingl Khvat: the
presence of children.

 FIG. 5.1. Lissitzky, Yingl (cover page) Ill. for Khad Gadye (1917/9)

Der Nister’s mystical-religious literary space could hardly have appealed to Lissitzky’s
straightforward and extremely spirited aesthetics and his much more rationalist way of
thinking. Mani Leib’s poetics, on the contrary, with its dynamic structure and content, seems to
be much more to the taste of the multifaceted artist. Mani Leib’s anarchic hero who unwittingly
turns the order of nature upside down becomes the twin of the little Jew in Lissitzky’s Khad
Gadye: young, alert, with big eyes, he appears on the front page as the incarnation of the new
man and the new Jew within the new (revolutionary) order.
In addition to the cover page, which I will discuss later, Lissitzky contributes ten
illustrations to each page of the little booklet.26 What is particular to the edition for the
Kooperative gezelshaft Yidisher folks-farlag (Cooperative Company Yiddish Folk publishing
house, Kiev-Petrograd) of 1919 is that for each page, Lissitzky arranges text and image in a
different manner. The children’s attention is focused either on the upper (pp. 1, 5, 6, 8) or on
the lower part of the page (pp. 2 and 4). On pages 2, 4 and 6, Lissitzky organizes the spatial
conception of the market place and the heder horizontally — both semantic spaces are
dominated by adults. Pages 1, 3 and 9 are conceived in a vertical order. Again, the world of
the adults, i.e. Tsingl’s parents (p. 9), is static while the corporal design of Tsingl and his pals
and the spatial composition are bold and dynamic (pp. 3 and 5).
In this respect, page 3 merits special attention: within the alogical, twodimensional space of
children’s fantastic imagination, which is characteristic of the Russian or Jewish lubok, a
popular woodcut, Lissitzky unfolds his own visual narrative of children playing in the snow.
The top-down composition of houses, fences, and the children — and the way that lines and
empty spaces as well as straight, angular and round lines and planes alternate — create a
fascinating and dynamic visual rhythm equivalent to the content of Mani Leib’s (phonetically
dynamic) verses about children enjoying the winter season to the full. The same holds true for
the porets’ horse: Expressive, contoured cubist lines present the horse with its waving crest
and flying tail as a magic animal, in motion, not subjugated to the logical principles of time and
space, carved out of an empty white space with only one hoof touching the earthly realm of the
shtetl. And indeed, according to the text, it can take Tsingl wherever he wants to go.
Lissitzky alternates interiors with open landscapes. The heder on page 6 is conceived as a
closed space. Its curved frame is reminiscent of Ryback with whom he undertook an expedition
financed by the Jewish Historical and Ethnographical Society to Ukrainian shtetls in 1916,
while the Jew sitting at the table, the clock on the wall and the window cut in cubist triangles
bear a resemblance to some of Chagall’s interiors. Yet Lissitzky with his illustrations of
children’s literature transcends the innovative fusion of folk art and avant-garde of both artists.
His main device is the dynamic dissolution of boundaries (between text and image). For his
illustrations of Der Nister’s tale A mayse mit a hon (A Story with a Rooster) and Dos tsigele
(The Little Goat), Chagall uses different kinds of primitive, folk art-inspired frames. So does
Ryback: the thick lines that frame, for instance, Ber Smoliar’s Kinder-velt (Children’s World,
ca. 1922) or Miryam Margolin’s Mayselekh far kleyninke kinderlekh (Tales for Little
Children, ca. 1922) are typical of Ryback.27 Ryback’s line is erratic, his frames a somber
semantic space with puppet-like animals and children.28 Lissitzky’s handwriting is that of
buoyancy, Ryback’s that of grief. Lissitzky breaks up frames and the erratic separation between
image, letter and image. Images grow out of letters, like in his playful initials: on page 5, one
boytchikl sits on a bank placed on the roof of the letter ‘‫’ה‬, while the other one leans against
this same letter, curiously observing what is going on on its left. The magic horse on p. 7 seems
partly to grow out of the written text.
Lissitzky’s images are more than a mere additional element of the text. They are no
illustrations in the classical sense of the word simply reproducing the content of a script,
something that was unacceptable for the Russian formalist Yuri Tynyanov.29 They form an
integral part of the text, complementing and at some places concretizing it. At times, Lissitzky
elaborates a detail (Tsingl with a lantern, p. 5). In other instances, he synthesizes the content of
several strophes into one illustration (p. 3 the children playing in the snow; str. 11–14).
Lissitzky even adds hidden meanings which he brings from the verbal sub-text to the visual
surface: Mani Leib gives no description of the ‘porets’ offering Tsingl his magic horse and
magic ring, both frequent ingredients of the folktale. On page 7, Lissitzky shows an imposing
bearded Jew with a chassidic streymel and a long black kapote riding on his horse together
with little Tsingl. On page 8, the horse and the ring form an aesthetic unity. The inscription on
the magic ring reveals to whom it owes its magic power to reign over nature: Lissitzky inserts
‘shaday’, one of God’s names meaning ‘God who has the power/the Almighty’ — a detail
which is not mentioned in the text.30

 FIG. 5.2. Mani Leib, Ying Tsingl Khvat, illustrated by Lissitzky, p. 1.

In Yingl Tsingl Khvat, Lissitzky reveals the typographical mastery that he is to develop into
a purely constructivist-suprematist, and over the following years into a cinematographic,
collage-like manner.31 With his typographic design for the pagination and the initials of certain
pages, Lissitzky continues the ancient Jewish tradition of ornamenting Hebrew letters in
manuscripts and varies his own avant-garde experiments, cf. his work for Chaim Nachman
Bialik’s Shlomo ha-Malekh (King Salomon, 1917).32 Lissitzky’s visual representation echoes
the linguistic and poetic rhythm as well as dynamics of Mani Leib’s children’s tales. Yet, in the
light of the Jewish Renaissance, Lissitzky’s typography for Yingl Tsingl Khvat unfolds a
second story, the story about (secular) Yiddish books.
On the first page of the booklet, Lissitzky translates the topography of Mani Leib’s tale into a
visual image: We see a mountain and a river with two riversides: ‘un di goyim un di yidn /
hobn dort gelebt tsufridn’ (Both Goyim and Jews / lived there happily). Lissitzky develops
Mani Leib’s sentence into an avant-garde setting with strong lines, geometrized cubist forms,
and the dynamic contrast of black and white. A Christian church on the right and a beys-
medresh on the left, reminiscent of the wooden synagogues in the paintings, drawings and
watercolours of Lissitzky’s colleague Ryback, symbolize the Jewish-Christian coexistence
mentioned in the text. At the bottom of the page, in a chiastic order, a goat, symbol for the
Jews, at the right, and a pig, symbolizing the Christians, at the left of the page number ‘1’
repeat this cultural framing.33 A larger-than-life figure, a bearded Jew with yarmulke (kippah),
peyes (sidelocks), talis (prayer shawl), and a black kapote (long coat), an arch symbol of
Eastern European Jewry, dominates the text. In a dynamic cubist conception of body and
movement, the Jew emanating from the Christian-Jewish setting appears to be Lissitzky’s
visual representation of the narrator (see Fig. 5.3).
Lissitzky’s drawing repeats the textual gesture of the first stanza that invites the children to
listen (Kh’hob a maysele a sheyne, […]/I have a nice tale […]). It shows the narrator holding
in one hand the book that the children will read (aloud). With his other hand he is pointing to
the place where the story is to unfold. Thus, one hand points to the text, i.e. Mani Leib’s
creation, while the other one refers to the image, designed by Lissitzky. But the artist does not
leave it at that. Lissitzky doubles this intermedial presentation of literature for children by a
witty semiotic play: as a metonymy for the whole story, Lissitzky displays, in the book the Jew
is holding, the first letter of the story, the ‘‫ ’כ‬of the sentence that continues outside of the book
on the left side of the page: ‘Kh’hob a maysele a sheyne’ (I have a nice tale). Thanks to this
device, the pictorial and the verbal are indissolubly bound together. At the same time, Lissitzky
presents simultaneously the signifier, the letter, and the signified, the content of the first
stanzas.
At the end of the book, on page 10, Lissitzky once again dissolves the boundaries between
content and (visual and verbal) representation. With a startling sense of humour he continues
the interpenetration of text and image: Mani Leib’s tale is open-ended. On the left side of page
10, above the page number, Lissitzky shows a rooster. Below, we see a final sequence, hand-
written by Lissitzky, which is semantically as open-ended as the story itself: ‘a sof on an ek’,
an end without an end, is Lissitzky’s ‘conclusion’ — a very sophisticated pun if one considers
the kabbalist yearning for eyn sof (hebr. for ‘without an end’) and a very Lissitzkian one if one
has in mind how intensely the artist dealt with infinity. Again, Lissitzky reflects the content (the
signified) of the story in both ways: by giving both the letters (a sof on an ek) and the pictorial
representation, i.e. a book within the book. On the last page, we see a little boy reading in
Yingl Tsingl Khvat, and, at the same time, riding on the horse as described in the last stanzas!
Again, the signified (Yingl Tsingl Khvat) and the signifier (the book/the letters) merge. Who
appears is the reader — Tsingl himself having emerged from the book about himself, or the
fictional reader thanks to his imagination having been transformed into Tsingl (who has
become almighty, do not forget about that!). Thus, Lissitzky’s humorous and subtle design for
Mani Leib’s children’s tale Yingl Tsingl Khvat, a hymn to an audacious Jewish boy
transgressing the borders between the real and the fantastic as well as human and divine
powers, turns out to be an important aesthetic and philosophical contribution to the Jewish
Cultural Renaissance. Yet, there is a third front page, the last one from 1922, that annihilated
this joyful play with infinity to assert the utopia of a free, full-fledged and aesthetically
accomplished Jewish-Yiddish cultural autonomy.

 FIG. 5.3. Lissitzy’s illustrations for the last page

4. Conclusion: Traces of Utopia — a non-figurative irony

Lissitzky’s title page from 1918 for Yingl Tsing Khvat is a energetic composition of curved
forms and lines. On the top, Lissitzky renders the author and the title of the children’s story. On
the bottom, he melds the landscape dominated by a Ryback-like synagogue with the indication
that he is the author of the illustrations: ‘getseykhnt — Elyezer Lisitski’ (drawings by Eliezer
Lissitzky). The use of Hebrew letters framed by swung lines reminiscent of Torah scrolls is
similar to his Khad Gadye edition from 1917 and 1919 and to the cover page of Leyb B.
Yaffe’s U rek vavilonskikh (By the Rivers of Babylon, 1917). The whole graphic ductus of the
cover refers to the mural paintings of the synagogue of Mohilev, which Lissitzky visited
together with his colleague Issachar Ber Ryback in 1916. Primitive features, thick lines and
two-dimensional compositions open up the space to fantastic imagination. The posture of the
horse with its backward-turned head is reminiscent of animals on mizrakhim, ornamental wall
fixtures indicating East, or on pinkassim. At the same time, Lissitzky’s brave Tsingl
corresponds to the numerous mounted heroes of the Russian fairy tales and the traditional oral
epic bylina which, at the turn of the century, were a source of inspiration for leading Russian
artists like Ivan Bilibin or Viktor Vasnecov. Lissitzky is too much aware of this double cultural
heritage not to use its visual potential. Thus, apart from Mani Leib’s literary origin, Lissitzky’s
Tsingl grows out of a double Slavic-Jewish oral and visual tradition and, simultaneously,
responds to the requirements of modern Jewish art combining avant-garde techniques and
Jewish folk art.34


FIG. 5.4. Viktor Vasnecov, Bogatyrski skok Ivan Bilibin, Koshchej bessmertnyj (leap of a
‘bogatyr’), 1914. Solomon Yudovin, copy of a Pinkas of Loubar (1912–1914, Futur
antérieur, p. 81)

FIG. 5.5. Yingl Tsingl Khvat, cover, 1922 Skaz pro dva kvadrata, cover, 1922

For the 1922 Warsaw reprint of Mani Leib’s tale with a copy run of 4000, Lissitzky adds a
second title page. Lissitzky leaves his cubist transformation of Jewish folk art behind — in
favour of Suprematism and Constructivism. A devoted follower of Kasimir Malevich,
Lissitzky ‘hides’ white squares, a black rhombus, a black rectangle and little black squares in
the title of the tale. Notwithstanding its soberly constructivist lines and its non-figurative
character, it is reminiscent of the first, cubist folk style title page (see Fig. 5.4). The upthrusting
line echoes its figurative predecessor that shows Tsingl on his horse.35 It is also a clear
reference to another of Lissitzky’s children’s books in Russian, his suprematist Pro dva
kvadrata. Suprematicheskii skaz v 6-ti postroikakh (Of Two Squares: A Suprematist Tale in
Six Constructions), which appeared the same year in Berlin (publishing house Skify/Skyths).
The traces of Malevich’s squares and Lissitzky’s suprematist illustrations are more than an
aesthetic echo: they visualize the crossroads for Jewish arts between figurative (folk art
oriented) Jewish particularism and abstract universalism. Lissitzky opted for the latter, at odds
with an aesthetic rootedness in the past which, ironically, he criticizes in his Yiddish
Milgrom/Rimonim publication Vegn der Mohliver shul: zikhroynes (The Mohilev Synagogue:
Reminiscences) while singing the praises of its mural paintings.
If would-be artists pick up this once genuine folk expression and take to stylizing it,
and powdering it, and splitting it up into bits and pieces, and then present this
hotchpotch as new art and culture — then it were better to do without such culture.
It is not necessary. What is called art is only created when one is least conscious of
creating it. Only then does it remain a monument of culture. Today it is being
created by those who fight against it.36

Suprematism became Lissitzky’s new religion — with far-reaching consequences for Yiddish
(children’s) book illustrations. After 1923, Lissitzky, one of the most innovative illustrators
and typographers, stopped contributing to the project of Jewish Renaissance through designing
children’s books.37 At about the same time, Chagall departed for world literature by illustrating
Gogol, Lafontaine, and the Bible, Tshaykov continued his artistic occupation with sculptures,
and Ryback with theatre and realist depictions of the Soviet Jews’ agricultural achievements in
Crimean kolkhozes.
The closer the (aesthetic) Jewish utopia and universal utopias became, the wider grew the
gap that divided them. In Lissitzky’s case, notwithstanding his ‘fluid identity’ (Christina
Lodder), at the end of cultural and aesthetic merging, combining and co-existing stood an
erratic either-or, deeply affecting the creation of Yiddish children’s books. At a certain
moment in Lissitzky’s aesthetic and ideological evolution, the archaic and mythical depths of
Jewish folklore were less attractive to him than the new myths of modern Soviet society. He
abandoned the Yiddishist project of a Jewish Renaissance — with Mani Leib’s mischievous
Tsingl as the new Jew — in favour of the birth of the a-national Soviet ‘new man’, the novyi
chelovek.38
At the core of his change in aesthetics and utopia lies a paradox I want to call the irony of
messianisms: in the field of Yiddish children’s literature, Lissitzky was the artist to radically
experiment with the dynamic interplay between image and text. More than anyone else,
Lissitzky explored the visual potential of the Hebrew letter and folk art praised as a key to new
Jewish art.39 Hebrew letters became one source of figurative avant-garde book design: the
realization of the utopia of the modern Jewish Cultural Renaissance was entirely iconodulic.
With his shift to the more universal, suprematist camp, Lissitzky left this Jewish utopia behind
in favour of non- figurative suprematism. As Igor Dukhan convincingly demonstrated,
Malevich’s utopian concept of art with its dissolution of spatial and temporal boundaries
corresponded to Jewish messianic thinking.40 That is why it was highly appealing to Lissitzky
who in his article Suprematizm mirostroitel’stva (The Suprematism of World Construction,
1920) called it the ‘fourth Testament’.41 Yet it was iconoclastic through and through.
Lissitzky’s revolutionary cubist-cum-folk-art contribution of Yingl Tsingl Khvat ended with the
denial of figurative representation — something which is in complete contradiction to
illustrating children’s books.42
I wonder if Lissitzky ever spoke Yiddish with his son Boris (Yen), born in 1930. Or whether
he read to him from Mani Leib’s Yingl Tsingl Khvat which he had so ingeniously illustrated.
Notes to Chapter 5
1. Published in the Kiev almanac Oyfgang, 1 (1919), 99–123.
2. See Hillel Kazovsky, The Artists of the Kultur-Lige/Khudozhniki Kul’tur-Ligi (Moscow and Jerusalem: Mosty
kul’tury/Gesharim, 2003), and Modernism in Kyiv: Jubilant Experimentation, ed. by Irena R. Makaryk and Virlana
Tkacz (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2010), especially Gennady Estraikh’s article ‘The Kultur-Lige’ in the latter
volume, pp. 197–217.
3. See Tradition and Revolution. The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art 1912–1928, ed. by Ruth Apter-
Gabriel (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1988), Futur antérieur. L’avant-garde et le livre Yiddish (1914–1939), ed. by
Nathalie Hazan-Brunet (Paris: Skira Flammarion, 2009), and Russian Jewish Artists and Book Design 1919–1928:
Berlin as a Showcase of the Old and the New Russia (Portsmouth: Portsmouth University, 2009); for intermediality in
Russian culture see Aage Hansen-Löve, ‘Intermedialität und Intertextualität. Probleme der Korrelation von Wort- und
Bildkunst — Am Beispiel der russischen Moderne’, in Dialog der Texte. Hamburger Kolloquium zur Intertextualität,
ed. by Wolf Schmid and Wolf-Dieter Stempel (Wien: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 1982), pp. 291–361, and the
exhibition catalogue The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910–1934, ed. by Margit Rowell and Deborah Wye (New York:
Museum of Modern Art in association with Harry N. Abrams, 2002).
4. Khone Shmeruk, ‘Yiddish Adaptations of Children’s Stories from World Literature’, in Art and Its Uses: The Visual
Image and Modern Jewish Society, ed. by Ezra Mendelsohn and Richard I. Cohen (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990), pp. 186–200.
5. Ibid., p. 186, and p. 197, n. 4.
6. See Yitzkhok Leybush Peretz’s Kinder-lider (Children’s songs, 1915), Sholem Aleichem’s Mayses far yidishe kinder
(Children’s tales, 1900), Mendele Moykher Sforim’s Dos kelbele (The Calf, published 1919 with illustrations by Joseph
Chaikov), and Der Nister’s Mayselekh in ferzn (Rhymed Fairy Tales; several editions from 1917–1923). Der Nister’s
two-fold contribution to children’s literature as an author and a translator (for example of Hans Christian Andersen) is of
enormous importance; see Kerstin Hoge’s and my article in Der Nister: Discovering the Hidden World of Pinkhes
Kaganovitsh, ed. by Gennady Estraikh, Kerstin Hoge and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 2014). Thanks to numerous
translations of his children’s rhyme into Russian, Leyb Kvitko became the most prominent Jewish-Soviet children’s author.
However, one should keep in mind that this officially created image overshadowed his much more differentiated poetry and
literary activities.
7. Khone Shmeruk, ‘Nokhem Shtif, Mark Shagal un di yidishe kinder-literatur in Vilner Kletskin farlag 1916–1917’, Di pen,
26 (1996), 1–19 (esp. 1–3).
8. Gennady Estraikh, In Harness. Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press,
2005), p. 41.
9. Der Nister adopted Sholem Aleichem’s Kinder-dertseylungen (Children’s Stories), published in 1935 in Kharkov, and
various animal stories by Lev Tolstoy, published in Odessa (n. d.); see Daniela Mantovan, ‘Der Nister (Pinkhas
Khanaovitch [Pinkhes Kahanovitsh]), in Dictionary of Literary Biography, CCCXXXIII: Writers in Yiddish, ed. by
Joseph Sherman (Detroit: Gale, 2007), pp. 219–27 (p. 220).
10. For (non-)Judaized textual and literary adaptations especially of Wilhelm Busch’s Max and Moritz (Max und Moritz), see
Shmeruk, ‘Yiddish Adaptations of Children’s Stories from World Literature’, pp. 186–200.
11. See Ruth Apter-Gabriel, ‘Un passé qui renaît, un futur qui s’évanouit. Les sources de l’art populaire dans le nouvel art juif
russe’, in Futur antérieur. Lavant-garde et le livre Yiddish (1914–939), ed. by Nathalie Hazan-Brunet (Paris: Skira
Flammarion 2009), pp. 52–69 (p. 69), and, for a general survey, Kenneth Moss’s excellent study Jewish Renaissance in
the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2009).
12. The two tales were published in the 1921 Warsaw edition of Der Nister’s Mayzelekh in ferzn.
13. Among many others of Andersen’s tales, Der Nister translated The Queen of Snow. It appeared as Di shney-malke
(Warsaw: Kultur Lige, 1921/22).
14. ‘Thanks to Nister’s own language, whose main characteristic is its simplicity, a simplicity bordering on primitivism, Nister
became an eminent language reformer who had a noticeable influence on contemporary poetry […]’; Bal-Makhshoves,
‘Dos doyrem-rusishe yidntum un di yidishe literatur in 19tn yorhundert’, in Geklibene verk (Nyu York: CYCO, 1953), p.
110.
15. Mani Leib himself denies a genealogy in Yiddish poetry: see Khaim Bez, Mani Leyb. Monografye (Tel Aviv: Ha-
Menorah, 1978), p. 27. On the other hand, Itsik Manger detects a certain ‘yidishpoetishe traditsye’ (Yiddish poetic
tradition) in Mani Leib’s oeuvre: see Mani Leib, Lider un baladn (Tel-Aviv: Y. L. Peretz, 1977), pp. 7–9 (p. 8).
16. Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye, 4 vols (Vilne: Boris Kletskin, 1926–1929), II
(1927), 306–10 (p. 309), and Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, 8 vols (New York: Marstin Press, 1956–1981),
V (1963), 450–57.
17. Itsik Manger, ‘Mani Leyb der liriker’, in Mani Leyb, lider un baladn (Tel Aviv: Y. L. Peretz, 1977), p. 7; in her Little
 Love in Big Manhattan: Two Yiddish Poets (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1988), Ruth Wisse gives a
comprehensive overview of Mani Leib’s life (esp. pp. 21–44, 144–67, and 204–37) and his ‘wonderland of poetry’ (p. 149).
18. ‘Khvat’ is a loan translation from the Russian adjective ‘khvatkii’, which means ‘grasping’; ‘tenacious’; ‘skilful’.
19. English translation by Jeffrey Shandler (New York: Moyer Bell, 1986).
20. Further examples of his ‘snow poetry’ (for children) are: ‘Shneyele’ (Little Snow), ‘Der feter shneyele’ (The Snowman),
see Mani Leib, Kinderlider (1918, New York: Ferlag Inzel), pp. 10 and 13.
21. See also Mani Leib’s autobiographical ‘A mayse vegn zikh’, in Vunder iber vunder (New York: Arbeter farlag, 1930), pp.
5–12. I am grateful to Holger Nath for this reference.
22. According to Vladimir Propp’s functions of the fairy tale, he acts as a ‘helper’: see Morphology of the Folk Tale, revised
and edited with a preface by Alan Dundes, 2nd edn (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), p. 21.
23. See Khaim Bez, Mani Leyb. Monografye, pp. 22–27, and Reyzen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un
filologye, p. 307.
24. Another example of Mani Leib’s use of internal rhymes and euphonies is the moment where Tsingl appears in the story for
the first time: ‘shteyt a yingl bay dem toyer, / raybt dem oyer: feter shneyer / zolst azoy biz peysekh shteyn / biz men darf
in kheder geyn.’ (With a nose and mouth and eyes. / And the snowman, good and wise, / Watches one boy rub his ear /
And whisper, “Stay till spring this year” ’; p. 3).
25. In 1915 and 1916, when Marc Chagall was living in Petrograd, he provided Der Nister’s Mayse mit a hon (A Story with a
Rooster) with five and Dos tsigele (The Little Goat) with three illustrations in India ink and opaque white on paper. They
were published in Petrograd in 1917 (Farlag Boris Kletskin).
26. For reproductions see Kul’tur-Liga. Khudozhniy Avangard 1910–1920-kh rokov/Kultur-Lige. Artistic Avant-Garde of
the 1910 th and the 1920 th, ed. by Hillel Kazovsky (Kiev: Dukh i litera, 2007), pp. 122–23, and Futur antérieur, p. 135.
The constructivist cover page is dated 1918. This might refer to the year when Lissitzky made his illustrations.
27. Ryback’s children’s illustrations are discussed in Hillel Kazovsky, ‘Issachar Ber Ryback: “Children’s drawings” ’, in
Issachar Ber Ryback: Original Illustrations for Children Tales, ed. by Hillel Kazovsky (Tel Aviv: Minotaure Gallery,
2008), pp. 4–12, and Serge-Aljosja Stommels and Albert Lemmens, ‘The Graphic Work of Issachar Ber Ryback (1897–
1935): An Outstanding Example of Children’s Book Art’, in The Russian Jewish Diaspora and European Culture,
1917–1937, ed. by Jörg Schulte, Olga Tabachnikova, Peter Wagstaff, IJS Studies in Judaica, XIII (Leiden/Boston: Brill,
2012), pp. 279–99.
28. His wife Sonye recalls Ryback’s principle ‘that children should be given drawings that they themselves ought to be able to
make’; Sonye Ryback, ‘Zayn lebns-veg‘, in Yisokher Ber Ribak, ed. by Elye Tsherikover (Paris: Funem komitet tsu
fareybikn dem ondek fun Yisokher Ber Ribak, 1937), pp. 7–28 (p. 19). That children accepted his drawings as their own
was confirmed by David Bergelson’s son Leyvik who once said: ‘Papa, I, too, can draw like Ryback’ (ibid) (as quoted in
chapter 4 of the present volume). Sonye Ryback comes to a tender conclusion about Ryback’s relationship to children:
‘Children understood him in art and loved him in life’ (ibid.).
29. See his article ‘Illiustratsii’ in: Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), p. 310–18.
30. With his use of the white horse or the combination of the rooster and the number 10 (cf. the ten sefirot), Lissitzky alludes
to the mystical tradition of the Kabala (see below).
31. Unlike the illustrations, its cover is produced — like Khad Gadye — as a zincography, see Futur antérieur, p. 255.
Another technique Lissitzky frequently uses is ink de chine.
32. See Apter-Gabriel, ‘Un passé qui renaît, un futur qui s’évanouit’, p. 64.
33. See also the short description by Ruth Apter-Gabriel in Futur antérieur, p. 135. Goats and pigs are frequent guests in Yuri
Pen’s, Marc Chagall’s and Issachar Ber Ryback’s paintings. What is more, animals are a part of Lissitzky’s pictures or the
ornamentation of page numbers. Thus, whereas Mani Leib’s text mentions only the magic horse, Lissitzky includes other
animals like a cat, a goose, a rabbit, or a rooster. Animals have a special place in children’s imagination, that of their
anthropomorphized friends. They also hold a special place in folk art. They crowd the interior of synagogues, mizrakhim,
pinkasim, or shvueslekh, traditional paper cuttings made on the occasion of Shavuot. Here, Lissitzky like many of his
colleagues, makes ample use of his own Jewish cultural traditions; cf. Chaikov’s illustrations for Dergalaganer hon (The
Boastful Rooster) by Peretz Markish in 1922.
34. So far, I have not been able to find out whether Mani Leib and Lisickij exchanged opinions about how to illustrate Yingl
Tsingl Khvat.
35. See Lodder, ‘Ideology and Identity: El Lissitzky in Berlin’, pp. 339–64, and Futur antérieur, p. 135.
36. El Lissitzky, ‘Vegn der Mohliver shul: zikhroynes’, Milgroim, 3 (1923), 9–13; English translation as ‘The Mohilev
Synagogue: Reminiscences’, in El Lissitzky 1890–1941. Catalogue for an exhibition of selected works from North
American collections, the Sprengel Museum Hanover, and the Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Art Museums, 1987), pp. 55–58, and in Tradition and Revolution. The Jewish Renaissance in
Russian Avant-Garde Art 1912–1928, pp. 233–34 (translated by Setz L. Wolitz). Under the influence of Lissitzky,
Henryk Berlewi’s art underwent a similar development from Jewish expressionism to abstract constructivism.
37. His last book projects in Yiddish, all in 1922, were Elfandl, a translation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Elephant’s Child,
 Ukrainishe folk-mayses (Ukrainian Folk Tales) and Vaysrusishe mayses (Belorussian Folk Tales).
38. See Evgeni Steiner, Stories for little comrades. Revolutionary artists and the making of early Soviet children’s books
(Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1991), and Avangard i postroenie novogo cheloveka. Iskusstvo
sovetskoi detskoi knigi 1920 godov (Moskva: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2002).
39. Yekhezkl Dobrushin, ‘Kunst-primitiv un kunst-bukh far kinder’, in his Gedankengang (Kiev: Kultur-Lige, 1922), p. 115–
19.
40. See Leonid Kacis, ‘“Chernyi kvadrat” Kazimir Malevicha i “Skaz pro dva kvadrata” El’- Lisickogo v iudeiskoi
perspektive’, in Russkaia eskhatologiia i russkaia literatura, ed. by Leonid Kacis (Moskva: OGI, 2000), pp. 132–39,
and Igor Dukhan, ‘El Lissitzky and the Search for New Jewish Art (Vitebsk — Moscow — Berlin)’, in Jewish Artists
and Central-Eastern Europe, ed. by Jerzy Malinowski (Warschau: Wydawnictwo ‘DiG’, 2010), pp. 291–98; Lissitzky‘s
architectonical Prouns consequently demonstrate the dominance of the category of space in his art.
41. See Malevitch o sebe. Sovremenniki o Malevitche, II, ed. by I. A. Vakar and T. N. Michienko (Moscow: RA, 2004), p.
214, and Aleksandra Shatskich, Vitebsk. Zhizn’ iskusstva 1917–1922 (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2001), pp. 44–85
(esp. p. 85).
42. Lissitzky’s suprematist tale opens with the imperative ‘Ne chitaite!’ (Do not read), cutting short the infinite act of reading
he proposed in Yingl Tsingl Khvat. Children should no longer read, but construct their own new world out of cubes and
(wooden) blocks. As John E. Bowlt convincingly argues, the new book was in fact an anti-book attacking the sacrosanct
role of the book in Russian Symbolism — and Judaism, one might add; Jown E. Bowlt, ‘Schreibt nichts! Lest nichts! Sagt
nichts! Druckt nichts!’, in Aus vollem Halse. Russische Buchillustration und Typographie 1900–1930: aus den
Sammlungen der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek, ed. by John E. Bowlt and Béatrice Hernad (Munich and New York:
Prestel, 1993), pp. 11–38.

 CHAPTER 6

Reading Soviet-Yiddish Poetry for Children: Der Nister’s

Mayselekh inferzn 1917–39
Daniela Mantovan

In Scienza Nuova (New Science), Giambattista Vico’s magnum opus, the early eighteenth-
century Italian philosopher placed myth at the centre of mankind’s history, postulating
imagination as the foundation and core of human development. Myth, he noted, is the form in
which mankind expresses itself in its earliest history — in its childhood, as it were.1 For Vico,
myth is the primary form in which imagination casts human emotions and feelings. If
imagination is the starting point of human history, and myth lies at the beginning of our literary
history, then fairy tales, rhymes and songs stand at the very outset of social life. The oral
transmission of tales and rhymes is invested with a formative function, its memory lingering
into adulthood and the realm of adult imagination.
Transposing these concepts into modern literary terms, we find imagination and its need to
find creative outlets emerging repeatedly in intensified form at different periods of literary
history. Examples are apparent in symbolist works, particularly those produced by the poets of
nineteenth-century France. Framed as a kind of unconscious outpouring in experimental writing
at the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly in French avant-garde literary movements
such as Dadaism, imagination was discussed at length by artists, writers and literary critics.
Conspicuously among them was the Russian philosopher and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who in
his late essays elaborated his conception of imaginative language and its multilayered
connection to both verbal and written communication.2 Tropes such as metaphor, metonymy,
synecdoche and symbolism recur not only in writing, but also orally, in everyday language.
Although these figures of speech seem to conceal what is being communicated both in
children’s tales and in daily discourse, they operate within well-known frames of references,
and are ultimately unambiguous.
The literary work of the Soviet Yiddish author Pinkhes Kahanovitsh (1884–1950), better
known by his pseudonym Der Nister, ‘the Hidden One’, embodies some of these issues. A
symbolist writer known in the Yiddish literary milieu of his time as the creator of mayselekh
‘little stories’, a phrase that conventionally designated children tales, he was steeped in
traditional religious lore and remained throughout his life obsessed with literature, which he
conceived of and practised as a highly cryptic form of imagination. His pseudonym, ‘the
Hidden One’, was a mask that defined and ultimately determined his identity. Respected for his
unquestioned stylistic bravura, he was often misunderstood and at times rejected. He remained
essentially an outsider in every literary group to which he gravitated.3
Der Nister entered the Yiddish literary tradition as visionary writer of enigmatic short
stories at a time when imaginative writing, especially in symbolist mode, was neglected and
largely disparaged by practitioners and critics of a dominant realist strain.
The ‘strangeness’ of Der Nister’s themes and style, together with his apparent disconnection
from any ‘tradition’ or ‘influence’, is clearly one of the reasons why contemporary Yiddish
literary critics never bothered to analyse his symbolist writings, preferring instead to relegate
his work to the better-known and more readily classified area of ‘spiritual’ and ‘kabbalistic’
writing. His mysterious personality, concealed behind a pseudonym that evoked the Jewish
mystical tradition and its legends, reinforced this perception of eccentricity, which critics
confronted and dismissed with the generally accepted, though ambivalent, formulation that Der
Nister was simply ‘a writer of mayselekh’. As a result, his tales for children, a genre he
developed and continued to practise alongside his other writings for at least two decades,
were never examined in relation to his major symbolist work.

Some considerations on children literature

As soon as we define a certain kind of fiction ‘children’s literature’, we enter the domain of
free imagination, in which the constraints of credibility and veracity imposed on fiction in
modern times not always apply. In this sense it is the freest of all literary genres, even though it
is traditionally among the most ritualized. The term ‘children’s literature’, or with a more apt
formulation, ‘literature for children’, denotes a complex aggregate of tales, songs, rhymes and
lullabies, orally transmitted and elaborated over centuries before being written down,
elaborated, revised or amended, often by anonymous hands. Contemporary strata also include
authored tales, a modern variant of the traditional narrative. Yiddish culture, rooted in a long
and richly articulated religious history, could draw upon a rich repertoire of such traditional
tales. On this fertile soil there developed a literature which lay very close to oral speech.
Yiddish had for centuries been the primary language of uneducated women and children, of the
household and the marketplace and of everyday life in all its manifestations. As a literary
language, emerging modern Yiddish might have been inadequate to express refined emotions
and thoughts, as Y.L. Peretz4 maintained in 1888, but it certainly proved a perfect medium for
rhymes, lullabies, songs and stories for children.
Modern Yiddish literature, from the mid-nineteenth century on, was directed both towards
adult readers and to a certain extent also towards children. If most nineteenth-century writers
often felt uneasy writing for adults in Yiddish, they had no such difficulty composing texts for
children. The difference lay not in the readership they addressed but in the language and the use
to which it was put. Yiddish was a natural vehicle to use when writing or speaking to children,
as it was not when the aim was to create sophisticated ‘literature’. In addressing children,
authors could slip comfortably into spoken Yiddish, steering clear of problems relating to the
nature of ‘literary’ Yiddish, and thus evading any ambiguity attaching to their status as writers
in a despised zhargon who simultaneously demanded to be taken seriously. Predictably,
children’s literature in Yiddish flowered, in particular in the first two decades of the twentieth
century when new pedagogical theories and practice made the need for books for children even
more urgent. As yet, however, we have only few studies of this rich production.5
Modern children’s literature in Yiddish displays two basic features. First, it makes use of
language which was not ‘refined’ in the terms Peretz had in mind, which is to say that it was
not formalized by a centuries-old writing tradition centred on canonized genres developed in a
high register. Yiddish was a language of quotidian needs, and it continued to fulfil this function
into modern times. The need to ‘cleanse’ the Yiddish language of perceived impurities and to
render it ‘literary’ grew ever more pressing as the twentieth century wore on. But this need,
most evident in poetry, was less apparent in, if not absent from, fiction written for children,
which demands a colloquial, everyday register. Orality simulates direct contact between
listener and teller and, most importantly for my argument — requires the use of language free
from literary constraints. Second, in terms of content, modern children’s tales are characterized
by a high degree of conceptual freedom in which imagery plays a prominent role and
imagination and fancy6 are two main ingredients.

Der nister ‘Mayzelekh in ferzn’

As we know from the scanty details of Der Nister’s biography, he mainly lived from 1905 to
the outbreak of the First World War in Zhitomir, but also worked for a time as a teacher in a
Jewish girls’ school in Holte. This employment, combined with his frequent contact with
children — his own daughter Hodel was born in Zhitomir in 1913 — perhaps motivated his
interest in children’s literature. Der Nister soon acquired a great interest in the work of the
Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, a selection of whose works he translated into Yiddish
in 1919.7 Der Nister’s first two tales for children, published together in 1917 by the Kletskin
farlag, based in Petrograd during World War I, ‘A mayse mit a hon’ (A tale with a rooster) and
‘Dos tsigele’ (The little goat), were well received. The slim volume, only 31 pages in length,
was followed in the same year by a slightly augmented collection of 48 pages, with the title
Mayselekh in ferzn (Little tales in rhymes), published by the Kiever farlag. This went through
four editions, the second appearing in 1919, the third (of 60 pages) in Warsaw in 1921 (also
with Chagall’s illustrations), and the fourth in Berlin in 1923. Mayselekh in ferzn in its last
edition includes twelve tales, written, like all Der Nister’s stories for children, in rhyme. At
roughly the same time, he was writing some of his most intriguing symbolist short stories. He
published his collected symbolist writings for the first time in a two-volume edition entitled
Gedakht (Thought) in Berlin in 1922- 23.
Der Nister’s production for children ceased between 1921 and 1934 when his personal life
was unsettled. After Moscow and Moscow’s suburb of Malakhovka in 1920–21, he lived
briefly in Kovno and then in Berlin — where his son Josef was born — until 1924. He then
worked in Hamburg until 1925 when he returned to the Soviet Union and settled in Kharkov.
Mayselekh inferzn, which in later editions also included his first two tales, was his only
collection to be reviewed in the press. Khaym-Shloyme Kazdan, author of one of the book’s
only two reviews,8 noted: ‘Like all great works for children, Mayselekh inferzn is also for
adults.’9 Nister’s slim volume was indeed popular among adults, but the fact that it was also
deliberately directed towards them is much more to the point than Kazdan probably was
aware.
Der Nister’s tales for children are part of the Jewish folk tradition both written and oral, but
are also connected to Slavic and German folklore, with which their author was familiar. His
world of animals drew on the ancient vein of storytelling that stretched from Aesop to
Phaedrus and La Fontaine, mostly centred on the social behaviour of animals. Following this
tradition, his creatures are more allegories than portraits, at times plainly humans in disguise,
and occasionally fantastic, imaginary beings. Kazdan noticed that Der Nister’s choice of
animals was typical of established Jewish folk tales, as though the author had combed through
both the religious and the literary tradition to select specifically ‘Jewish fauna’. In Kazdan’s
enthusiastic words, Der Nister is truly the author of ‘the first [Jewish] national animal epic’.
His compendium of animal protagonists includes some of the best-known and most beloved
characters of Russian tales, like the bear and the raven, and less pleasant creatures like the flea
and the louse. But his selection might better be described as a bestiarium, replete with animals
dear both to Jewish tradition, such as the goat, horse, cat, mouse and cockerel, and the world
of childhood, including kittens, puppies, dolphins, snails and swans. What is peculiar in Der
Nister’s tales is the appearance of a number of fanciful creatures, produced by a fertile
imagination working with both profane and sacred images. His assorted demonic figures,
including rukhes, shedim, ruakhlekh, shretlekh (demons, devils, ghosts, dwarves), as well as
odd creatures such as kroyt-keplekh (little cabbage heads) or shney-goylems (snow-golems)
are his bizarre literary trade-mark. Apart from the oddity of such characters, his tales have
undoubtedly a familiar quality. As Kazdan pointed out, one has the impression of reading, or
more accurately of hearing, old tales with well-known motifs and familiar characters, while
repeatedly discovering new aspects and details, as if an old texture has been reworked and
taken to another level.
Thematically, Der Nister’s children’s tales explore animated and animistic nature, the
coexistence and opposition of Christian and Jewish concerns and the presence of the demonic,
together with aspects of the normal physical development of children like recovering from an
illness, or losing a tooth. Some characters, like the King of the Winds, and the tiny child (in
‘Dos tsigele’) are clearly derived from the work of Hans Christian Andersen. Der Nister’s
style is characterized by repetition and the use of diminutive forms common to everyday
speech, and of formulaic beginnings or endings typical of traditional tales, as in alte tsaytn iz
a mol geven (‘once upon a time’), ven er hot tint un feder, volt zayn lebn dort bashribn (‘if he
had pen and ink he would have written down the story of his life’), in afeldl tsi in a veldl
shteyt afhinerfis a hayzl (‘in a little field, in a little wood, stands a little house on chicken
legs’).10
It might therefore seem that the innovative character of Der Nister’s mayselekh lies in their
formal stylistic choices, in their author’s use of language and characterization. But closer
scrutiny reveals other features less easy to define. In his review Kazdan touched fleetingly on
some of their emotive aspects. He mentions, for instance, ‘di yidishe goles-neshome’ (the
Jewish-diaspora soul) and its ‘feelings of love and tenderness for animals and birds’. Kazdan,
however, did not probe the point more deeply, or speak of what is commonly called the
‘content’ of the tales, their plot or the progression of events. Yet this, in my view, is worth
commenting on, for it raises questions about the readers for whom Der Nister intended his
mayselekh, and his purpose in writing them. Several of the early tales seem to be written for
children of pre-school age, although most are directed to pre-adolescent school-goers. Their
themes cover a wide range. In the tale ‘Vinter’ (Winter), for instance, images of water and
snow at the season’s turn are interwoven with a variation on the traditional motif of a bird
migrating to a warmer climate during the winter and returning in spring. In Der Nister’s tale,
not a bird but a fallen ‘summer- angel’ is found in a field by peasants (goyim) who shelter the
expiring creature in a little house. Revived, the little angel unfurls his wings to fly back to
heaven. In ‘Dos tsigele’, the healing motif is woven through a narrative texture drawn from
both traditional and literary tale. A white goat goes to a palace in the woods in which the King
of the Winds and his family live, and there he cures the king’s tiny child of insomnia. In
‘Shretlekh’ (Dwarves), Der Nister’s diminutive demons figures, act like trolls in northern
legends, possessing gold and silver, living underground, in mouse holes and emerging at night.
A human lucky enough to spot one and grab his cap would be rewarded with riches for the rest
of his life in exchange for returning the cap to its owner.
One can imagine tales like these, built on themes close to traditional folk tales, being read or
sung to children.
The tale ‘A khurve’ (A ruin) with its macabre night-time atmosphere, recalls one of those
old lullabies, characterized by violence and cruelty.11 This kind of lullaby which belongs to a
widespread genre, describes two ghosts sitting in a deserted ruin with a newborn baby whom
they have stolen, discussing what to do with it:
Tsi mir trogn es avek
Ergets vayt un in a hek,
af a feld, tsi in a vald,
dortn shteyt a shtibl alt.
un in shtibl dortn voynt
ber, der meylekh, iz gekroynt
af tsigayners un af undz
un afshvartser sheydim-kunts…12
[Should we carry it away,
somewhere distant and remote
to a field or to a wood,
where there stands a small old house
and in that house right over there
lives the bear, by certain right
king of gipsies and of us,
and of all black magic’s secret arts…]
The ghosts cannot decide whether to kill the baby, give it to demons to play with, bring it to the
Bear-King or simply return it. Two other tales in this collection, ‘Der shney-bock’ (The snow-
goat) and ‘a mayse mit a hon’ (A tale with a rooster), are almost devoid of plot. In the first, the
traditional theme of the golem13 has undergone a transformation: the golem creature is a snow-
buck (he-goat) made by children, which at night wanders through the streets of the village. This
tale is rich in cold, and luminous detail, notably the beautiful scene of the shney-mentsh
(snow-creature) standing alone in the moon light, a black raven on his head. There is no story
to tell, only a picture to look at. Der Nister’s tales indeed often make their impact by means of
visualization. In ‘A mayse mit a hon’ a bobele (little granny), takes care of a cockerel for many
years until she falls ill, whereupon the rooster keeps watch at her deathbed and later prays for
her soul. In its humble piety this story echoes Hasidic motifs.

FIG. 6.1. ‘A mayse mit a ber’ (A story with a bear) from Dray mayselekh, illustrated with
woodcuts by M. Fradkin and B. Blank (Kiev: Kinder -farlag 1934), p. 13.

Most tales in the collection Mayselekh inferzn centre on death or illness. In ‘A mayse mit a
ber’ (A tale with a bear) a goy or peasant fells a tree in the forest which, as it falls, rouses a
sleeping bear. As the peasant flees, the bear leaps on to the peasant’s horse-drawn sledge, and
the horse gallops off wildly, rushing through the woods and past a hill on which stands a cross:
hot er oysgeshtrekt a lape
un a nem geton dem tseylem,
iz er foyl geven un untn,
iz er mitgegan mit oylem:
mitnferd un mitn shlitn
un mit ber arumgenumen
vi shoyn lang af im gevart hot
un atsind iz er gekumen,
im fun dortn tsu tsunemen
fun farvitkeyt un fun shneyen,
r’zol in fel aleyn nisht blaybn
un in elent dort nit shteyen.
un fun demolt on, dertseylt men,
 shoyn fun kame-kame yorn,
tomid vinter in difelder
zet men ber mit tseylem forn.14
[He [the bear] stretched out a paw
and snatched away the cross
which, rotten at its very base,
went freely off with all of them,
with the horse and with the sledge;
it hugged the bear with heartfelt warmth,
as though awaiting his arrival long
who now had just appeared
to carry him away from there,
from heavy weather and from snow,
so he might no longer in the field
stand friendless in his solitude.
And from thenceforth, the tale is told,
for long, long years by now,
throughout the winter in the fields
the bear strides onwards with the cross.]
The tale’s frenzied action should not distract from the significance of its narrative elements.
The felling of the healthy tree is described as it is its slow death: hot derzen der boym —
gekumen iz zayn tsayt shoyn tsu shtarbn, ‘the tree saw that the time had come for him to die’,
and in so doing, it utters a barely audible whisper of agony. The narrative voice relates that the
cross was lonely, weather-worn and bent, having waited a painfully long time until the bear
finally arrives. As for the peasant:
fregn kinder, viln visn:
‘un der goy, vu z’ingekumen?’
entfert men zey: ‘mitn friling,
mitn vaser iz farshvumen.’
[Children ask, they want to know,
‘What happened to the peasant?’
And they are answered: ‘In springtime
he came floating with the water.’]

 FIG. 6.2. ‘A mayse mit a ber’ (A story with a bear) from Dray mayselekh, illustrated with
woodcuts by M. Fradkin and B. Blank (Kiev: Kinder -farlag 1934), p. 15.

At least three moments in which sadness and death linger are evident in this short tale.
If the agony of the tree reflects a pantheistic conception of nature to which Der Nister
certainly responded deeply,15 the cross is the most striking symbol of human suffering in
Western literature, widely used by Yiddish writers and artists during the early 1920s. The
death of the peasant, in itself not commented on in the poem, is actually not even part of the
narrative stricto sensu, but is mentioned only in answer to a question raised by the children; as
such it is thus deprived of significance: in springtime, when nature comes to life again, the
remains of the peasant’s corpse, casually denoted merely with the pronoun ‘he’, comes floating
by with the newly unfrozen water, like any other piece of winter debris. Behind this casualness
it is difficult not to suspect almost a sense of elation at the death of the peasant who caused the
death of the tree.
Although traditional tales do not shy away from pain, loss or fear, they tend to have happy
endings. This is usually not the case with Der Nister, who in a few instances passes on to his
reader a grim morality, as in the last tale of his first collection to which he gave the childlike
title ‘Dos hintl’ (The little dog). Here the protagonist is a little dog troubled by a flea in his fur.
In order to get rid of this, the dog bites himself, tearing at his fur and hide, which he rips off
and sells to the ‘dog-striker’. At this point
iz hintele aroys on fel
on hoyt un opgeshundn,
vund-fleyshikeyt arosygezehn
ful blutig-hoyle vundn.16
[Furless, the little dog emerged,
 his skin stripped off and torn,
his bare flesh visible to all,
scarred with great bleeding wounds.]

FIG. 6.3. ‘A mayse mit a ber’ (A story with a bear) from Dray mayselekh, illustrated with
woodcuts by M. Fradkin and B. Blank (Kiev: Kinder -farlag 1934), pp. 16–17.
He runs to a hut where dogs customarily gather. There, other dogs begin sniffing at the new
arrival: they lick him and draw closer and closer, crowding around him, until one of them bites
him:
in gikhenish, in aylenish,
un khapndik zikh khapn,
a bisn oykhfun hintele
in groys-gedrang dertapn.
dertapn un avek mit bis,
un ergets zikh farklaybn
n’a vinkele bahaltn zikh
aleyn mit zikh nor blaybn
un shtil un shtil un lang azoy
un hintish zikh fargesn —
hobn hint azoy dos hintele
ingantsn oyfgegesen.17
[rushing madly, in a frenzy
blindly seizing each the other,
in the tussling free-for-all they bit
a chunk out of the little dog.
And having grabbed, they drew away,
and skulking came together
to hide themselves away from sight
and huddle on their own.
 And silently, and for long hours,
forgetting themselves as all dogs do —
in this way, these dogs
ate up the little dog entirely.]
Then the ‘dog-striker’, who has a little drum hanging from his neck, passes by. He enters the
hut and, standing in its centre, begins beating his drum, which is made of dog-skin, demanding
that all the dogs around should listen.
un lang, un lang gepoykt azoy
un hint hot ayngeladn
dem hintels ale brider-hint,
khaveyrim, kameradn
[And long and long he beat his drum
and all the dogs he summoned,
the dog-brothers of the little dog,
his comrades and confederates.]
Insisting that he wants to say something about the little dog, he reveals that he himself made the
drum with its fur, and that when he first began to beat it, he heard it laughing, urging him to go
to its dog-brothers to tell his tale and to give them his greetings:
aykh alemen, vos ir zayt do
far mir tsunoyfgeklibn,
a kleyninke tsavoele
dos hintl hot geshribn.
es shraybt zihk in tsavoele,
dos hintl lozt aykh visn,
dos floyele hot emes dem
in felekhl gebisn.
dokh hint zaynen keyn brider nisht,
nor hint, vi ir, azoyne,
oykh eygn-fel z’keyn miskher nisht
un hint-shleger— keyn koyne.18
[To all of you who’ve gathered here,
assembled here before me,
a final little testament
the little dog has written.
In this last will it’s written thus:
the little dog informs you
that yes, the flea did truly bite him,
deep in his little fur.
Yet dogs are certainly no brothers,
 but dogs they are, like you,
and one’s own fur is not sale stock,
nor is the striker purchaser.]
This tale, beginning with an apparently commonplace nuisance — a flea in a dog’s fur —
steadily assumes such monstrous dimensions that by its denouement one doubts who exactly the
tale as a whole is intended to address. To escape from the flea, the little dog strips off his hide,
makes himself vulnerable to further attack, and is finally devoured by other dogs. His testament
reviews his mistakes: do not trade with your own skin, dogs are not brothers, the dog-striker is
no well-intentioned purchaser.
Today’s reader would probably perceive Der Nister’s tale ‘Dos hintl’ as a lesson in
pragmatic ethics in that it points out and defines a certain behaviour as harmful for its
protagonist, and, unambiguously, for the reader him or herself. Published in 1921, this tale,
which reflects the social context and the hard times in which it was written, is a transparent
parable with a dog as its protagonist.
Dogs turn up, in fact, again and again, unexpectedly and in a somewhat bizarre fashion in
Der Nister’s symbolist work. Often they are the bearers of moral laws, or of plain common
sense; they also figure as an alter ego of and a guiding presence for the protagonist. In his
symbolist short story by the self-explanatory title ‘Muser’ (Moral Instruction)19 of 1923, for
instance, a little porcelain dog is the wise narrator who relates how wolves were domesticated
in ancient times and who draws a shrewd moral from their experience: ‘True freedom is the
desire to be free, and sometimes taking a yoke upon oneself is actually the greatest rebellion…
and that’s why I’ve recounted the tale about the wolf’. This somewhat stoic vision of personal
freedom grounded in a relentless, lucid evaluation of reality is also perceptible in Der Nister’s
later symbolist story ‘Shiker’ (Drunk).20 There, a dog plays the role of a moral example and an
alter ego of the protagonist. Der Nister reworked this motif for the last time in the story ‘A
mayse mit a lets, mit a moyz un mit dem Nister aleyn’ (A story with a demon, with a mouse,
and with Der Nister himself)21, which appeared in his second and last collection of symbolist
short stories, Fun mayne giter (From my Estates), in 1929, the year in which he was
particularly fiercely attacked for his symbolism and reduced to years of near silence. Here the
Darwinian view of life presented in the tale ‘Dos hintl’ with its crude and revealing truths —
dogs, like humans, are no brothers but cannibals ready to devour you; never risk your own skin;
and recall that whoever purchases your skin is an evildoer — is expressed in even more
extreme terms.
In this story, which begins like ‘Dos hintl’ with a fur with a flea in it, the fur, sold by a
leytsim-shleger (a demon-striker) to Der Nister in person, is the main narrator. The story told
is that of a ‘rat-catcher’, a figure modelled on the Pied Piper of Hamelin, which evolves in the
course of the narrative into a ‘demon-striker’ remarkably similar to the hint-shleger of the
earlier tale. Eventually the demons end up devouring each other in a cannibalistic cupio
dissolvi.
The similarities between this late symbolist story and the previous tale for children ‘Dos
hintl’ go beyond single, accessory elements of the story to point, most disturbingly, to the
unstable divide between humans and animals, or even demons. Humans and animals are, in
fact, interchangeable as is hinted at by terms such as khaveyrim, kameradn (‘comrades’) by
which the little dog’s brothers are called in the tale, or even by the term hint-shleger (dog-
striker), a neologism created to mark the difference between one who trashes dogs and the
concrete and real hitsel — in Yiddish one who catches dogs. Der Nister, it seems, points in his
narrative to a different, if hidden, level of discourse.

FIG. 6.4. ‘Der toyt fun a kinezer’ (The death of a Chinese man) from Dray mayselekh,
illustrated with woodcuts by M. Fradkin and B. Blank (Kiev: Kinder-farlag 1934), p. 7.
Der Nister’s new tales for children appeared again in Kharkov in 1934, and five years later
(for the last time) in Kiev. In these two, only partially new, slim collections, entitled simply
‘Dray mayselekh’ (Three little tales), a 32-page booklet issued by the Kinder Farlag, and
‘Zeks mayselekh’ (Six little tales) a 47-page booklet published in Kiev by the Melukhe-Farlag
in 1939, the themes of cannibalism and death becomes pervasive. Unsurprisingly it is not only
animals that devour one another. People are also arbitrarily put to death without hearing or
trial. In ‘Der toyt fun a kinezer’ (The Death of a Chinese Man) of 1934, a Chinese worker is
arrested by the secret police for having illegally printed leaflets and is quickly beheaded.
Since the action, which takes place in China, is viewed from the point of view of one writing
in a different place, a distance is established which permits the expression of some open
criticism, as in the following lines:
Un a tsayt, mayne libe,
a tsayt aza itst,
ven s’vildevet terror
un soyne’s shverd blitst…
in a tsayt aza, veyst ir,
s’iz klor dokh, gevis,
ven an arbiter pakt zikh
nit gut iz, iz mies…
 bazunders nokh dortn,
bifrat ot-o der,
ven s’klore bavayzn,
vos darf men den mer?22
[At such a time, my dears,
such a time as now,
when terror holds sway
and the enemy’s sword gleams…
At such a time, you know,
It is clear and perfectly certain,
when a worker hold back and is idle
it is really not good but so ugly…
Especially so in such a case
especially so of such a one
when the proofs are all quite clear,
what more does one need?]
Der Nister focuses in this tale not only on the Chinese worker, and on his revolutionary call:
shteyt uf zshe, ihr brider,
hot dos bletl gezogt
die eygene sonim un fremde faryogt
faryogt, traybt aroys. Farnikhtet biz shpent
[Stand up you brothers,
said the leaflet,
chase away your own enemies and strangers
chase them away, drive them out, crush them completely]
He focuses also on the passers-by, who, noticing the arrested worker followed by a secret
service agent and by a dog, turn their heads:
un ver se derzet zey
dem kop dreyt er oys.
dreyt oys un bakukt zey
un stilerheyt zet,
az einer fun beidn
zayn letstn gang geyt er…
[And the one who sees them,
his head he turns.
He turns it and looks over at them
and he silently notices
that one of the two
is walking his last stretch…]
The moral of the tale ‘Dos hintl’ of 1921 resounds again in this tale of 1934. Thirteen years
later, however, the picture is slightly different, and a man followed by a secret service agent
was in the Soviet Union something which did not need any commentary.
In his last collection Zeks mayselekh of 1939, the tale ‘Kozekl royt’ (Little Red Cossack)
stands out for its rather uncommon theme in a booklet of tales for children: the mock murder of
a Trotskyite in a puppet show. Told from the perspective of a spectator who is looking at the
show together with the children, the tale begins with the narrator’s voice rejoicing at the
arrival of the one-man puppet theatre, ‘in our courtyard’, as he says, where children wait
eagerly for the show to begin. As the show begins, the first puppet to enter the scene is the
Little Red Cossack who asks the children many questions, the last one being ‘if they had been
in the war or had already seen a battle against the enemy?’. Thereafter the ‘enemy’ is embodied
by a second puppet, appearing on stage and looking like a ‘muddy ghost’, dressed in black and
with a stick in his hand. Again, the little Cossack asks the children: ‘ver iz er, vi meynt ir,/ der
blotiker man?’ (Who do you think the muddy man is?) The children don’t know, so the little
Red Cossack asks the puppet:

FIG. 6.5. ‘Kozekl royt’ (Little Red Cossack) from the collection Zeks mayselekh (Kiev,
Melukhe-farlag, 1939) illustrated with woodcuts by M. Fradkin.
un ver hot geshickt dikh?
un aleyn du ver bistu?
un s’flatert dos rukhl
un shtamlt: ‘trotskist…’
[…]
un m’hot mir geheysn,
oy, kozekl royt
i dikh mit di kinder
dershlogn tsum toyt!
[…]
vos kumt aza eynem.
vos kumt ot-o-dem
far zakhn azoyne?
a kukhn mit krem?23
[And who is it who sent you?
And who might you be?
And the fiendish one trembles
and stammers out: ‘Trotsky’…
 […]
And, dear me, they bade me —
Oh, Little Red Cossack! —
to beat you to death
both you and the children!
[…]
and what does one merit
what does one deserve
for this kind of thing?
A fine cake with cream?]

FIG. 6.6. ‘Der toyt fun a kinezer’ (The death of a Chinese man) from Dray mayselekh,
illustrated with woodcuts by M. Fradkin and B. Blank (Kiev: Kinder–farlag 1934), p. 7.
And the children joyfully shout:
‘neyn, s’kumt derfar toyt!’
[‘No, he deserves putting to death!’]
Traditionally, puppet shows for children are centred on the dichotomy between good and evil,
allowing the ‘good guy’, hence good, to win over evil at the conclusion of the story. In this
little farce the hero is evidently the Red Cossack — a metonym for the Soviet State — and the
‘bad guy’ is the Trotskyite. Thus far, nothing uncommon or strange in the Soviet Union of 1939
in the midst of a ‘battle against the enemies of the revolution’. Trotsky was indeed murdered in
August 1940.
 FIG. 6.7. ‘Kozekl royt’ (Little Red Cossack) from the collection Zeks mayselekh (Kiev,
Melukhe-farlag, 1939), illustrated with woodcuts by M. Fradkin.
But what is peculiar about this tale is the fact that it deals with the little Red Cossack and the
evil Trotskyite only on the fringe, as it were. The staging of the show, with all its factual
details including the dynamics between the public and the puppeteer, take centre stage instead.
Thus the narrator/spectator depicts for us how the puppeteer arrived in ‘our’ courtyard with his
boards, how he assembled his little theatre booth, how he waited for some minutes behind his
boards to heighten the public’s expectation, how he skilfully enticed the children to participate
in the show and to answer his questions, how they reacted, how he played his little story of the
good little Red Cossack beating the evil Trotskyite to death, how the Trotskyite (his death not
mourned by anyone)24 is taken by his feet and thrown into a hole, and finally how the puppeteer
crawled out of his booth, dismounted his little theatre and went to the next courtyard, followed
by the children, to play it all over again.
The prominence of all these details shifts the reader’s attention from the story to the way the
show was conducted by the puppeteer and to the public it was directed to. Even the three
illustrations of the noted artist Moisei Fradkin seem to reinforce this impression.25 Indeed,
Fradkin chose the two puppets only for the headline of the title story, while in his main
illustration he concentrated on the public of children and adults grimly looking at the final
scene of the show, the death of the Trotskyite. The last illustration is a cameo of the puppeteer
moving forward, his boards under his arm.
The reader cannot avoid the impression that Der Nister’s tale, beside hinting at not-too-
subtle propaganda, was in fact pointing to the man behind the boards, the puppeteer, with his
manipulative way of re-telling the story (and history) and his threatening message: ‘for this
kind ofthing one deserves death’. Der Nister’s hardly innocent rhymes seem to be part of a
textual strategy meant to expose but not to say, to look like propaganda and be the contrary of
it. Der Nister cultivated this ‘art’ over a number of years. His cryptic criticism — most evident
in the last three tales mentioned, ‘Dos hintl’ of 1921, ‘Der toyt fun a kinezer’ of 1934 and
‘Kozekl royt’ of 1939 — developed from the level of an ethical warning to that of a political
protest, even if it is in disguise. These tales, ‘smuggled’ into a literary genre which is usually
alien to polemic, seem to me to continue Der Nister’s criticism of the Soviet regime encoded
in his last symbolist stories of 1929.
Der Nister’s characters, in the guise of animals, demons, but also of Chinese workers and of
Little Red Cossacks, tell us much about the fragile borders between outer and inner worlds,
and even more than that, they reveal the dangerous thinness separating nightmare from reality.
This essay is a revised version of my lecture Transgressing the Boundaries of Genre: The
Children’s Stories of the Soviet Yiddish Writer Der Nister 1884–1950), delivered at the
Fifteenth Annual A.N. Stencl Lecture in Yiddish Studies at Yarnton Manor in May 2007.
Published in the Report of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (Academic Year
2006–2007), this lecture was the departure for further research on this topic.
Notes to Chapter 6
1. Giambattista Vico (1688–1744) published his works in Naples in three different editions of five volumes. Cinque libri di
G.B.Vico de’ principi d’una scienza nuova d’intorno alla commune natura delle nazioni first appeared in 1725, was
republished in 1733 and again posthumously in 1745. In the first of his three phases of human history Vico argued for
imagination as the source of language and poetry, from which derives his re-evaluation of myth and specifically of Homer’s
poetry. The connection he made between language, poetry and myth was later introduced into modern literary criticism and
discussed by Mikhail Bakhtin.
2. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Essays, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1986).
3. See notably Uncovering the Hidden: The Works and Life of Der Nister, ed. by Gennady Estraikh, Kerstin Hoge and
Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 2014).
4. Y. L. Peretz, Monish. For this poem’s first publication in the Folks-biblyotek in 1888 as well as his poem on the Yiddish
language, see Mayne muze (My muse) (1891), in Ale verkfun Y. L. Peretz, I (New York: CYCO, 1947), p. 28.
5. The history of the Yiddish folktale has been widely researched (see Yiddish Folktales, ed. by Beatrice Silverman
Weinreich (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), which contains a modern, detailed and annotated bibliography on the
subject). Yiddish literary tales have not yet been researched to the same extent. Although there is no comprehensive work
on the subject, single studies on individual Yiddish authors have been published. See, for instance, David Goldberg,
Fantasy, Realism, and National Identity in Soviet Yiddish Juvenile Literature: Itsik Kipnis’s Books for Children, in
The Field of Yiddish, Fifth Collection, ed. by David Goldberg (New York: Northwestern University Press and YIVO,
1993), pp. 153–95, which also lists articles on and reviews of Yiddish children’s literature published in the Soviet Union in
the 1920s. See also Adina Bar-El, ‘Children’s Literature: Yiddish Literature,’ YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern
Europe, <http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Childrens_Literature/Yiddish_Literature> [accessed 10 October
2014], as well as the essays collected in this volume.
6. ‘Since the late eighteenth century the tendency has been to make imagination and fancy antithetical. Imagination is
often used to designate the power of representing the real (or that which gives an illusion of reality) in its entirety and
organic unity, and also, usually in its ideal or universal character; fancy the power of inventing the novel and unreal by
recombining the elements found in reality. So interpreted, imagination represents men not only in their outward but in their
inward life, and produces a Hamlet; fancy presents them in alien surroundings, or essentially changed in their natural
physical and mental constitution, and produces centaurs and Brobdingnagians.’ So far Webster’s useful differentiation. See
Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, second edition unabridged (Springfield MA: G.C.
Merriam Company, 1949) p. 917. In the case I am making, the two concepts are not antithetical but, rather,
complementary.
7. On Der Nister’s reading as a young man, see Yankev Lvovsky, ‘Der Nister in zayne yugnt-yorn’, Sovetish heymland, 3
(1963), 106–09. On earlier Yiddish translations of Andersen, see Jeffrey Veid-linger, Jewish Public Culture in the Late
Russian Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), pp. 110–12.
8. The second review, by Nakhman Mayzel, dating from 1919 and entitled ‘Religieze un veltlekhe folks-mayses (Peretses
“folkshtimlikhe geshikhtn” un Nisters “Mayselekh in ferzn”)’, was republished in Mayzel’s Noente un vayte (Vilna:
Kletskin farlag, 1927), pp. 162–69.
9. Khaym Shloyme Kazdan, ‘Der Nister’s “Mayselekh in ferzn” ‘, Bikhervelt: kritish bibliografisher zshurnal, 4–5
(August 1919), 92.
10. Der Nister, ‘Mizele-mayzele’, in Mayselekh in ferzn (Warsaw: Farlag kultur-lige, 1921), p. 46. The expression, ‘a little
house on chicken legs’, is clearly calqued on the izbushka na kur’ikh nozhkakh, ‘cabin on chicken legs’, the witch Baba
Yaga’s home in Russian folk tales, with which Der Nister was evidently familiar. The first major collection of Russian folk
tales, Narodnye russkie skazki, was assembled and published by Alexander Nikolayevich Afanasyev (1826–71) in an
eight-volume edition between 1855 and 1864. Der Nister had almost certainly also read Vaysrusishe folksmayses
(Belorussian folk tales), the anthology edited and translated into Yiddish by his close friend Leyb Kvitko (Berlin: Yidishe
sektsye baym komisaryat far folkbildung, 1923).
11. This supernatural element of the Jewish tradition has been explored by Beatrice Silverman Weinreich in her Yiddish
Folktales; see particularly Part 7. The unsettling character of many lullabies, at times linked to historic events preserved in
nursery rhymes, is often bound up with the appearance of witches and ghosts. Violence is frequently involved in English
and other nursery rhymes. For example see The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, ed. by Jona and Peter Opie
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952).
12. Der Nister, Mayselekh inferzn (Berlin: Farlag shveln, 1923), p. 10.
13. A golem, literally ‘unfinished being’, is most familiar from the legend of the Golem of Prague. In this a creature is made of
clay and infused with the spirit of life by the magical incantations of Rabbi Judah Löw (the Maharal of Prague), to help the
Jews of his city defend themselves against false blood libels. This legend was first published in 1847 by Wolf Pascheles,
 giving rise to a number of golem figures in both German Romantic literature and Expressionist cinema. The Golem image is
Talmudic; see Moshe Idel, Golem (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), or Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing
House Jerusalem, 1971), VII, p. 753. Shnayer Z. Leiman has traced the link with the Maharal to Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg in
the late nineteenth century; see his article ‘The Adventure of the Maharal of Prague in London: R. Yudl Rosenberg and
the Golem of Prague’, Tradition, 36 (1) (2002), 26–58.
14. Der Nister, Mayselekh in ferzn, p. 6
15. Der Nister’s symbolist short stories as well as his tales for children are characterized by a striking perception of nature that
often borders on animism or pantheism. Nature is alive and sentient in the stories: animals and celestial bodies speak and
feel, and all of them are often the bearers of a superior, hidden truth.
16. Mayselekh in ferzn, p. 33.
17. Mayselekh in ferzn, p. 35.
18. Mayselekh in ferzn, pp. 36–37.
19. Der Nister’s symbolist story ‘Muser’ was published first in the New York Yiddish periodical Di tsukunft, 1 (January
1923), 53–56, and again in the second volume of the collection Gedakht (Berlin: Literarisher Farlag, 1923). Given its
publication date, it was written presumably no later than 1922. An English translation by Joseph Sherman appeared as
‘Moral Instruction’, Midstream, 51:4 (July/August 2005), 36–40.
20. Der Nister’s story ‘Shiker’ was published in the Kiev journal Ukraine: literarisher almanakh, 1 (1926), and later
included in the collection Fun mayne giter.
21. First published in Fun mayne giter (Kharkov: Melukhe farlag fun Ukraine, 1929), a collection of short stories ready for
publication in 1928, to judge by the permit issued by the Soviet censor.
22. Der Nister, Dray mayselekh (Kharkov: Kinder farlag, 1934), p. 6.
23. Der Nister, Zeks mayselekh (Kiev: Melukhe-farlag, 1939), pp. 26–27.
24. ‘un keyner baveynt im,/ zayn toyt keynem art, / m’shteyt un m’kukt nor, / m’shvaygt un m’vart…’ (And nobody
mourns him, / his death is of no concern / people stand there, they look / people wait, in silence…) Ibid., p. 28.
25. See Elena P. Kotliar, ‘Obrazy shtetla v grafike Moiseiia Fradkina’, Visnyk Kharkivskoi derzhavnoi akademii dyzainu i
vystetstv, 9 (2008), 168–77.

 CHAPTER 7

An End to Fairy Tales: The 1930s in the mayselekh of

Der Nister and Leyb Kvitko1
Mikhail Krutikov

Literature for children, original and translated, occupied an important position on the agenda of
the modernist revival of Yiddish (as well as Hebrew) culture. Its most original and creative
period coincides with the short interlude between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the
consolidation of the Communist regime in the early 1920s. Its creative centre was the Kiev-
based Yiddishist organization Kultur-Lige, which set a new model of children’s books as
works of modernist art where the text is organically integrated with the image.2 Experimental
in both form and content, these books occupy today a prominent place in the history of the
European avant-garde. While the so-called ‘Bolshevization’ of the Kultur-Lige in 1920 had
severely curtailed its creative freedom and pushed its leading members into emigration, the
children’s literature branch retained a great deal of its creative energy and continued to
flourish well into the 1930s. In comparison to the earlier period, Soviet literary production for
children during the 1930s was more conventional in style, conservative in content, and
ideologically restricted. But the books were produced more lavishly and, arguably, found
greater popularity with their target audience. From the early 1930s on, Yiddish literature for
children, especially poetry, became increasingly available in translation into Russian,
Ukrainian and other languages of the Soviet Union. These translations appeared in print runs
that by far exceeded the original Yiddish publications.
The dominant figure in that field was the poet Leyb Kvitko (between 1890 and 1895–1952),
whose poetry was familiar to virtually every Russian-speaking child in the Soviet Union.
Kvitko wrote for children from the very beginning of his literary career in around 1917, but
until 1934 he was also active in other, ‘adult’ genres.3. His spectacular transformation from a
‘minority’ author scarcely known outside Yiddish literature into a leading Soviet poet during
the 1930s still awaits proper investigation, and here I can venture only a few observations
which question some of the widespread assumptions about the place and role of Yiddish in the
Soviet cultural system. Following Kvitko’s return from Germany in 1925, his successful career
in Kharkiv, the then capital of the Soviet Ukraine, took a dent in the fateful year of 1929.4
Along with many other prominent Soviet writers, such as Der Nister, David Hofshteyn and
Peretz Markish, Kvitko was subjected to severe criticism by the Communist vigilantes. In his
case, however, the campaign had more to do with personal than ideological issues. Kvitko was
chastised for his ad hominem attack of Moyshe Litvakov, the powerful editor of the central
Soviet Yiddish newspaper Der Emes. In the sharp satirical poem (sharzh), Litvakov was
portrayed as shtink-foygl Moyli (stinking bird), which fouls everything that is good in Yiddish
culture. The fact that this transparent and rather nasty allegory could be published at all in
Kvitko’s first major collection Gerangl provides an intriguing piece of evidence for an
internal struggle in the Soviet Yiddish literary establishment, an attempted ‘plot’ to remove
Litvakov from his leading position. The plot failed and Kvitko was punished for his
misdemeanour. However, as early as September 1930, his poetry appeared in print again.5 Yet,
as his wife Betti relates cautiously in her brief biography of Kvitko, ‘in 1931, which was a
difficult year for him, Lev Moiseevich considered it necessary to seek work at a factory. He
applied for the position of apprentice lathe operator at the Kharkiv Tractor Factory, hiding the
fact that he was a well-known poet.’6 He quit after a few months, producing the poem In tsekh
(1932, In a Workshop) based on his work experience. It was written in a radically different
style from Kvitko’s pre-1929 works. Gone was the neo-romantic exaltation of the revolution
and folkloric symbolist obscurity. Kvitko’s new poetic hero was a humble uneducated labourer
awed by the grandiosity of the socialist construction and its new proletarian heroes. In In tsekh
Kvitko tried to adhere to the conventions of the proletarian realism by representing the ‘naked
facts’; nevertheless, the poem did not find critics’ approval for it did not show the leading role
of the Communist Party.7 Of interest today mainly from a historical point of view, this poem
reveals Kvitko’s struggle with the new rules of the literary game. The replacement of the
stylistic stringency of dogmatic proletarian realism by the more inclusive concept of socialist
realism alleviated the situation. Around 1934, when the process of organizational unification
of Soviet literature was complete, Kvitko was accorded a modest but respectable place in the
new state-controlled hierarchical structure of the Union of Soviet Writers. His 1934 omnibus
Rayzes un poemes (Travels and Poems) included both new and old poetry, with the cycles
Roytarmeish, In tsekh, A rayze in mizrekh, as well as Daytshland and In altoner shenken, in
which he revisited his émigré experience in Berlin and Hamburg during 1921–26. Rayzes un
poemes was to remain Kvitko’s last major ‘adult’ book.
Although Kvitko had published dozens of books, the vast majority for children, very little of
his work was available in translation.8 The breakthrough came in the early 1930s, when
Kvitko’s poetry was discovered by his neighbour in Kharkiv, the leading Ukrainian poet Pavlo
Tychina. One of the few survivors of the purges of the early 1930s, which hit the Ukrainian
writers much more harshly than their Yiddish colleagues, and wiped out almost the entire
generation of the Ukrainian modernist ‘renaissance’, Tychina managed to make a successful
transition from national romanticism to socialist realism. A polyglot who acquired oral fluency
in idiomatic Yiddish thanks to Kvitko’s lessons, Tychina was fascinated by the ‘folk’ character
of Kvitko’s poetry, which he found close to Ukrainian, and translated it using transliterated
texts. Tychina’s Ukrainian renditions of Kvitko’s poems came to the attention of Kornei
Chukovskii, by that time the doyen of Soviet children’s literature. It is possible that Kvitko’s
poetry appealed to Chukovskii’s taste because it fit his concept of ‘authentic’ Jewish literature,
which he outlined in his 1908 polemical essay ‘Jews and Russian Literature’. Back then
Chukovskii criticized Russian Jewish writers such as Semion Iushkevich for their artificial,
unidiomatic Russian, contrasting them to the genuine Jewish writers who wrote in their native
Yiddish, such as Sholem Asch. It is hard to say to what extent Chukovskii (who himself was an
illegitimate son of a Jewish middle-class father and a Ukrainian kitchen maid) retained this
attitude during the 1930s, but he evidently appreciated Kvitko’s poetry as good material for
translation. With Chukovskii’s support and mediation, Kvitko’s children’s poems were
translated by leading Russian (both Jewish and non-Jewish) poets, such as Samuil Marshak,
Agnia Barto, Elena Blaginina (who also translated Bergelson’s Nokh alemen) and Nikolai
Zabolotskii.9
By 1934, literature for children became an established branch of Soviet literature, which
entailed an organizational and institutional infrastructure of its own, with publishing houses,
journals and a special section in the Union of Soviet Writers.10 For some writers with a
problematic pre-revolutionary history of political and cultural activity, such as Chukovskii,
children’s literature became a safe haven in the stormy sea of Soviet cultural politics. Apart
from practical benefits, it also offered a certain degree of aesthetic autonomy. The Russian
literary historian Marietta Chudakova argues that writing for children provided ‘freedom from
the regulations that were developed for the big form such as the “adult” novel, and offered a
possibility of a relatively free movement of the characters in the literary space’.11 In children’s
books it was easier to comply with the basic tenets of socialist realism, such as the
requirements of simplicity, clarity and ‘folkishness’ (narodnost’/ folkstimlekhkeyt), without
sensing guilt for ‘betraying’ a former commitment to modernist aesthetics.12 It was this
remarkable synergy of objective and subjective factors that led to the unprecedented
flourishing of children’s literature during the 1930s, which culminated, according to
Chudakova, on the eve of the war. It is easy to see how Kvitko could use this new opportunity
to reinvent himself as a children’s poet, although, apparently, he did not fully abandon his
ambition to leave a mark in ‘adult’ poetry. In 1936, he began working on a novel in verse,
titled Yoyne, a revolutionary epic based on the life of the prominent Red Army commander
Yonah Yakir. When Yakir, along with other Red Army top brass, was arrested in 1937, this
project had to be shelved. Kvitko revised and rewrote the poem as an autobiographical
account. Now entitled Yunge yorn (The Years of Youth), it did not appear in print until more
than ten years after Kvitko’s execution. The episode demonstrates the high risks involved in
writing for adults compared to children’s literature.
Kvitko was able to adjust to the new situation of the 1930s relatively easily and, despite
some set-backs early on, managed to reinvent himself as a prominent children’s writer, well-
known outside Yiddish literature. The experience of his close friend Der Nister was more
painful and complicated, but the end result of his struggle for a new literary position was also
successful. Like Kvitko, Der Nister returned from Germany and lived in Kharkiv. He was
subject to an ideological critical attack in 1929, which incurred a less severe punishment than
that meted out to Kvitko.13 Der Nister survived, sometimes starving, by doing routine literary
work such as editing, translation and occasional journalism, but he was not able to publish his
original fiction till 1935. Perhaps inspired by Kvitko’s comeback as a children’s writer, Der
Nister made a similar attempt, although with less success. During the 1930s he published three
collections of poetic fairy tales (mayselekh), which altogether contained thirteen poems with
illustrations by the leading illustrators of Yiddish children’s books, Moshe Fradkin and Ber
Blank.14 None of the poems was translated into Russian or Ukrainian.
The ample corpus of Soviet Yiddish children’s poetry still awaits proper scholarly analysis.
The following remarks focus on the representations of animal characters in Kvitko’s and Der
Nister’s poetic mayselekh, and their transformation under the impact of increasing ideological
pressure. In many ways those cute domestic and wild animals — pigs, cows, dogs, hares,
squirrels, foxes and bears — underwent the same fate as ordinary Soviet citizens. They were
either domesticated and put under full control by humans, or isolated, tortured and eventually
killed. The lyric persona of most of Kvitko’s children’s poems belongs to a precocious boy, of
pre-pubescent age, whose prototype is the paradigmatic hero of Sholem Aleichem’s classic
series of short stories, Motl the Cantor’s Son. Eager to discover the world around him, he
develops friendly and productive relationships with other children, adults and animals. We
often meet this child among domestic animals, such as piglets, in a rural environment, as, for
example, in one of the best known poems, ‘Khazerlekh’. On the surface, this poem, constructed
as a dialogue between a group of children led by the protective forewoman Ana-Vana brigadir
(who has a markedly non-Jewish patronymic), is an obvious challenge to the strictest
prohibition of the kashrut. However, despite their insistent pleas, the children are never
allowed to see, let alone touch or eat, the ritually unclean animals.
The portrayed relationships between child and domestic animal, such as cow or horse, are
typically idyllic, reflecting the educational agenda of the Soviet policy which sought to
productivize shtetl Jews by turning them from individualist petty traders into collectivized
farmers. But there are some peculiar distortions of that harmony, as in the story of the dog
Bertshik, who is a loyal friend of the young narrator.15 Despite proving his usefulness by
alerting the family to thieves (a rather rare intrusion of dark forces into the otherwise idyllic
world of Kvitko’s childhood), Bertshik is not allowed by the adults to stay at home during the
winter. The winter cold makes Bertshik mad, and he stops obeying his owner and begins to
attack people. One of the adults pronounces the verdict: ‘Akh, a shod aza min hintl —/ Zogt der
shnayder Shame-sher, —/ Shver dem hunt der ershter vinter, /Hot nit oysgehaltn, Ber!’16 (Ah,
what a pity, such a dog! / Says the tailor Shame-the-scissors, / The first winter was hard for the
dog, / Ber couldn’t stand it). As the dog is put to death by a crowd of Jews, its owner finds
himself in a precarious position, chasing Bertshik with the rest of the crowd: ‘Un mir lozn zikh
nokh Bertshik / Ikh — ikh oykhet mit a prent / Kh’shray, ikh veyn /un loyf nokh ale,/ Vi
tsepatsht, in klem farklemt! / Kh’vil er zol shoyn gikher shtarbn,/ R’loyft in feld, mir loyfn
nokh’17 (And we run after Bertshik /I — myself, too, with a stick / I scream, I cry/ And I run
with everybody. / As if crushed, squeezed by pliers! / I want him to die as quick as possible, /
He runs into the field, we run after him). The ending suddenly changes the mood: ‘Dos feld hot
ru dem hunt gegebn/ Un tseblit mit veyts dernokh’.18 (The field gave peace to the dog / And
then blooms with corn). This rather unexpected ‘philosophical’ meditation on Bertshik’s
violent death as the foundation of new life leads to the conclusion: ‘Un nokh blien geyt dos
shnaydn, / Nokhn onheyb geyt der sof! / Nokhdem zeyt men, shnaydt men vider, /Shlof zhe,
fraynd, mit zisn shlof!’19 (And bloom is followed by harvest. / The beginning is followed by
the end! / And then one sows, harvests again, / Sleep my friend, have a sweet sleep!). The
terrifying story of a cruel murder of a mad dog ends as a sweet lullaby, incorporating an act of
violence into the natural cycle of agricultural production.
Given the publication date of 1937, it may be tempting to interpret this poem as an
allegorical critique of the collective psychosis of Stalinist terror, with its ritualistic rhetorical
demands to exterminate the ‘enemies of the people’ like ‘mad dogs’. It is certainly not typical
for Kvitko’s generally rosy portrayals of the idyllic world of children and animals. What is
unclear in this line of interpretation is the meaning of this allegory. Was it a hidden warning to
children not to join the murderous crowd, or was it a pessimistic acquiescence of the
inevitability of violence as part of the ‘natural’ cycle of life and death? And how was this
message meant to be interpreted by the intended audience of the poem? In any event, peace
seems to be restored at the end, and the dead dog is integrated into the normal chain of events.
While domestic animals mostly lived in peaceful subordination to humans and, if needed,
could be pacified by the collective of ordinary people, wild animals were potentially more
dangerous. Some of them could be controlled only by the intervention of a higher authority.
This message is exemplarily conveyed by the lullaby ‘A viglid’ (1939) which became one of
Kvitko’s most popular poems of that time.20 It was published as a separate booklet in a Russian
translation by Elena Blaginina, with colourful pictures by the leading illustrator of children’s
books, Vladimir Konashevich. Moreover, it was issued as a set of slides which accompanied a
record. As the historian of Soviet culture Dmitrii Bogdanov argues, by the end of the 1930s,
the genre of the lullaby became an important vehicle of totalitarian propaganda.21 The intended
listener of such lullabies was not a child but the entire Soviet people.22 Indeed, in Kvitko’s
lullaby, the traditional roles are reversed: it is sung not by a mother to her child but by a child
to his mother. The song tells a wondrous tale: ‘Mamele mayn, mamele mayn / shlof shoyn ayn,
shlof shoyn ayn, / ikh vel dir dertseyln a maysele bald, / vi ikh bin, dayn zunu, gegangen in
vald.’23 (Mommy dear, mommy dear / Don’t sleep, don’t sleep. / I will now tell you a little
story / how I, your son, went to the forest). The son goes into the forest to cut down trees and
build a boat, from which to kill evil sharks and catch golden fish. He first encounters a hare
that tries to frighten him away, by boasting: ‘ikh bin inem vald der shreklekher keyser — /du
zolst mayne velder nit hakn, — / ikh fres dikh af beyde por bakn!’24 (I am the terrible emperor
in the forest, / you should not cut my trees / I’ll eat you up at once!) Challenged by the boy, the
hare quickly runs away. The boy disposes of a fox in a similar way, but when it comes to
wolves and bears, the boy gets truly scared: ‘me bilt un me brilt — meshuge tsu vern!’ (They
bark and roar — one can lose his mind!’)25 Salvation comes from an unexpected source: ‘Hot
Stalin derhert, vos tut zikh in vald / hot Stalin a tank aroysgeshikt bald / der tank hot di khayes
tseshlogn / un mikh tsu der mamen getrogn…’26 (Stalin heard what is happening in the forest, /
And Stalin sent a tank immediately / The tank destroyed the animals / And brought me back to
my mommy.)
In the second part of the poem, the situation recurs, with a slight variation, at sea. Rather
than the lobster (rakl-kabakl) or the whale encountered by the child, it is the stormy waves that
endanger the child’s life. Once again, rescue comes from the same source: ‘Hot Stalin derhert,
vos es tut zikh in yam — / hot Stalin geshikt aza hidroplan, / er hot yenem shturem tseshlogn —
/ un mikh inem kreml getrogn’.27 (Stalin heard about what was happening on the sea — / Stalin
sent a hydroplane, / It calmed [literally destroyed] the storm / And brought me to the Kremlin.)
The final stanza is addressed directly to the mother and, through her, to all readers and
listeners, that is, potentially, to the entire Soviet people: ‘Mamele mayn, oy mamele mayn, / me
efnt di tir, un ver kumt arayn?/ un heybt mikh aruf tsu zikh af di hent, / tsu zikh ot azoy, vi papa
mikh nemt, / un fregt mikh alts oys, vos tut zikh in yam. / Nu tref, ver dos iz? Du veyst shoyn
mistam.’28 (Mommy dear, mommy dear, / the door opens, and who comes in? / And who lifts
me up on his hands, / To himself, like the daddy takes me, / And asks me about everything that
happens on the see / Well, guess who that is? You probably know already.) This seemingly
naïve poem brings together three discourses: those of childish fantasy, militaristic
modernization, and the semi-religious cult of the divine father/leader figure. Meeting Stalin in
person renders the boy unable even to utter the name of that god-like figure. Interestingly, the
next poem in the book, titled ‘Der shenster nomen’ (The most beautiful name), proclaims at the
end: ‘Az der nomen der shenster iz Lenin.’ (The most beautiful name is Lenin.) The sea
episode also brings to mind the biblical story of Jonah, a connection made evident by
Konashevich’s picture. The hidden biblical parallel also helps to solidify the image of Stalin
as a divine figure. One may be tempted to suggest that the association of Jonah might indirectly
comment on the tragic fate of Kvitko’s friend, the prominent Red Army commander Yonah
Yakir, who was not saved from execution by his last desperate appeal to Stalin.
The appearance of Stalin in a lullaby or a dream was not unusual in Soviet culture. Stalin
was often represented as the guarding father figure, who protects the peaceful sleep of women
and children and never sleeps himself. Bogdanov links this poetic figure with the theory of
‘controlled dreams’, which was developed by the famous Soviet physiologist Pavlov.
According to this theory, certain dreams could be induced as ‘conditional reflexes’ if the
relevant images repeatedly appeared in real life.29 Trying to soften Kvitko’s Stalinism, the
literary historian Miron Petrovskii argued that Kvitko sincerely portrayed Stalin as a benign
and protective father figure (rather than a cruel and merciless tyrant), because it reflected his
conviction of that time. Nevertheless, Kvitko’s lullaby fits perfectly into the totalitarian
discourse, which sought to instil into all Soviet citizens, young and old, a blind faith in Stalin.
The evolution of animal images in Der Nister’s work followed a different trajectory, but the
impact of the totalitarian discourse on his works for children was no less powerful. Unlike his
friend Kvitko, Der Nister was not successful as a children’s writer, and today his work in that
branch of literature is largely forgotten. His first experiment in the genre of children’s fairy
tales was a collection entitled Mayselekh in ferzn (Fairy Tales in Verse). This book,
illustrated by Marc Chagall, appeared in four editions and became an iconic example of the
Kultur-Lige modernist style.30 Der Nister’s three publications of the 1930s present a stark
contrast with his first book, which exemplifies the difficulties he had adjusting to the new
ideological regime. The 1934 Dray mayselekh (Three Fairy Tales) contains three poems that
demonstrate different attempts at producing a Soviet-style maysele. The first one is an
abridged version of the ‘Mayse mit a ber’ (A Story about a Bear) from the first collection,
from which Der Nister (or perhaps the editor) simply cut out the core part while keeping the
opening and the close. The presumed narrator, simply called a goy in the earlier version,
becomes a mentsh (man) in this new incarnation, evidently because the word goy was banned
from Soviet Yiddish discourse as politically incorrect.31 By felling a tree in a winter forest, the
man accidentally wakes up a bear who frightens the man away and jumps on to his sleigh. The
terrified horse darts away into the empty snow-covered fields, from which an old, abandoned
tseylem (cross, with a connotation of idol) can be seen on a hill. As the horse passes the cross,
the bear decides that he can get off the moving sleigh by grasping the cross — but the plan
fails, and instead, he holds the rotten cross in his paw with the sleigh running on, ‘un fun demlt
on, dersteylt men / shoyn fun kame-kame yorn, / Tomed vinter in di felder / zet men ber mit
tseylem forn’32 (and from that time on, as people tell, / already for many years, / always in the
winter in the fields / one can see the bear ride with the cross). Curious children will ask about
the fate of the man, but not much is known about him: he remains alone in the forest, unable to
describe his story: ‘ven er hot a tint un feder, / volt zayn lebn dort bashribn.’ (Had he have ink
and a pen, / he would have described his life there.)33 The key event of the tale, the bear
snatching the cross and turning into a haunting ghost, is absent in the 1934 version, effectively
removing the core of the story and leaving only its frame. This editorial transformation of the
‘Mayse mit a ber’ is a good example of the ideological ‘domestication’ of fairy-tale animals by
removing eerie and haunting elements and making them dull and predictable. The uncanny
image of pakhed-baytsh (fear-whip) that drove the bear forward in the earlier version is
replaced by plain whips, taking agency away from fear and turning it into a mere instrument.
The second mayse in the 1934 collection represents an altogether different attempt at
composing a response to the current political events in the form of a children’s fairy tale. ‘Der
toyt fun a khinezer’ (Death of a Chinese Man) tells the sad story of a Chinese man who was
arrested and shot by the secret police for spreading leaflets with communist propaganda. This
rough and violent story has no happy ending in sight. The third poem, ‘Der fuks un der ber’
(The Fox and the Bear), described as a ‘joke story’, is perhaps the most bizarre one. It
introduces a pair of animals who will reappear in later books. The fox challenges other
animals to wrestle with the bear, warning them that if they lose, they will be cut in two halves,
one of which will be cooked as a meal for the bear and the other let go. In the absence of
volunteers, the desperately hungry bear devours the entire fox raw: ‘fun fel un tsum fleysh, / fun
fleysh un tsum beyn, / un gegesn pamelekh / on zanft un on khreyn.’34 (From the fur down to the
flesh, / from the flesh down to the bone / and he has eaten it up slowly / without sauce and
without horseradish.)
This macabre and rather meaningless poem forms a transition between the old and the new
way of representing animals in Der Nister’s fairy tales. Animals are still the main actors in a
fairy tale world where there are no human beings, but they turn self-destructive and
unreasonably cruel. In the following two books, the animals are pushed back into their natural
habitat, which is now fully controlled by the humans. Animals are driven to humans by hunger
or illness, but they are not welcome and lucky if they can escape back to their habitat alive.
Like Kvitko, Der Nister divides animals into the harmless small ones, such as the hare and
squirrel, and the dangerous bigger beasts, such as the fox, wolf, and bear. In contrast to Kvitko,
Der Nister never uses a child as the narrator or even a character in his mayselekh. Instead, the
stories are narrated by an adult voice which occasionally betrays anxiety, fear, or irony. In one
or two instances the narrator even admits that he is too lazy to tell the story in full detail.
In the collections of 1936 and 1939, the human world has clear signs of Soviet society: it is
tightly organized, strictly controlled, and suspicious of any stranger. Some of the mayselekh are
straightforward political allegories in which the predatory animals personify the enemy who
tries to pass for an innocent character but is unmasked by vigilant citizens. An example is the
wolf who puts on a sheepskin to steal sheep while the shepherds and guard dogs are asleep, till
the sheep themselves manage to wake up the dogs and the wolf is shot by the guards. The fox
who got used to stealing chickens from a shed is also shot when the denizens of a collective
farm stop being negligent and put their barn back in order, installing a proper security system.
What is somewhat confusing in these otherwise straightforward stories is the attitude of the
narrator and his concluding message. For example: ‘Vos geven iz amol,/ Iz shoyn haynt, iz
shoyn nit. / Nito, shoyn nito, / Fun der mode aroys, / oykh mayses mit fuksn / geendikt un oys.’35
(What once was / Today is no more, / Out of fashion, / stories about foxes / are also finished.’)
Read allegorically, this stanza might suggest that the new regime puts an end not only to the
freedom represented by the wild animals but even to the stories about them. The cultural
paradigm has changed, and the author has to turn to reality instead of fantasy, which is exactly
what Der Nister was doing at that time by abandoning symbolism and learning the art of the
realist novel.
The mayses about smaller animals are less cruel. To protect himself from the marten, the
squirrel tries to bribe the hunter by buying him new boots and a gun. Having earned some
money by selling nuts, the squirrel buys the equipment, but, ridiculously, is unable to carry the
big and heavy gun and the boots back to the forest. In the end he decides to stay in the forest
where he belongs, ‘un geblibn iz veverik / vos veverik iz’36 (and the squirrel remained / what
the squirrel is), never to come to town again. Instead of nuts, he sends children his greetings,
the exact meaning of which remains unclear. In another mayse, toothache forces the hare to
seek help from people in town. Overcoming his natural fear, he comes to the dentist at night,
but is terrified by the drill and runs back to his cabbage field. Again, the ending is confusing:
‘khi-khi-khi un kha-kha-kha! / Hostu gehert a zakh aza! / az a hozl zol mit tseyn / gor tsum
dokter veln geyn? / — Neyn!’37 (Khi-khi-khi and kha-kha-kha! / Have you heard such a thing! /
That a hare with toothache / should go to a dentist? / No!’) Like the story about the fox, this
story concludes with the resolute negation of the very possibility of the fairy tale genre.
Der Nister’s only mayse with an overtly political content is ‘Kozekl-royt’ (A Little Red
Cossack) which appeared in 1939. It opens with a Stalinist puppet show coming to ‘our
courtyard’ — ‘der lialke-teater / bay undz iz in hoyf!.. / Oy, kinder, a tuml, / a groys ayngeloyf’
(A puppet theatre / in our courtyard!… / Listen, children! a tumult, / a great commotion).38 The
actor enters the booth with his puppets, and his shadow is visible through the veiled bottom.
After prolonged silence, there appears on the stage a little puppet in patent leather boots, satin
trousers, red jacket and a hat, ‘an ekhter kozak’ (a genuine Cossack), who asks children if they
have ever been at war and seen a battle against an enemy. Following the negative response
from the audience, another character comes on to the stage. He has a stick in his hand, but
‘tsitert far shrek’ (is trembling from fear): ‘s’volt ergets antlofn, / nor s’shtern di vent’. (He
would like to run away, / but the walls don’t let him.)39 The children dislike him at first sight,
‘vayl s’zet oys dos rukhl / fun blote aroys, / un ongeton iz es / in shvartsn nor bloyz’ (because
he looks like a devil who came from dirt, and he is dressed entirely in black).40 Interestingly,
this is the only occasion in the Soviet mayses where Der Nister, known for his mystical
symbolism, uses a word from the sphere of the supernatural, viz. rukhl (here — little devil),
which in this context has a clearly negative meaning. The Cossack asks the audience who is
this ‘blotiker man’ (dirty man), but the children have no answer. Then he turns to the rukhl:
‘ver hot geshikt dikh? / un ver du bist?’ (Who sent you? / And who are you?),41 to which the
terrified rukhl responds, stuttering: ‘trotskist…’ (Trotskyist). He further confesses that he had
been paid to cross the border illegally, ‘un m’hot mir geheysn / oy, kozekl-royt / i dikh mit di
kinder / dershlogn tsum toyt. (And I was told, / oh, the Little Red Cossack, / to murder you
together with the children).42 The Cossack asks the audience again: ‘vos kumt aza eynem / […]
a kukhn mit krem? / tsi gor martsipanes? / tsi puter mit broyt? / un s’entfern kinder: / “neyn,
s’kumt derfar — toyt!”’ (What does such a person deserve? […] / A biscuit with cream? / Or
maybe marzipan? / Or bread with butter? / And the children respond: / ‘No, he deserves
death!’)43 Having heard the verdict, the Cossack takes the stick from the trotskistl’s hand and
beats him to death, ‘biz yener dos kepl / farvarft shoyn aruf’ (till he jerks up his head).44
Again, the most intriguing part of this macabre story is its confusing ending. When the
peyger (derogatory for corpse) of the trotskistl is disposed of in a lokh (hole) and the
performance ends, the actor who played both roles quietly comes out from behind his booth,
packs up his theatre, and leaves for the next courtyard. The children run after him, eager to see
what will happen there, ‘vi er kumt fargrimirt / undz af royb un af mord. / Un vi kozekl-royt /
vet im toytn oykh dort’ (how he comes, his face made up, / to plunder and murder us. / And
how the Little Red Cossack / will kill him there).45 This ending also calls into question the
validity of the story, albeit in a different way from the animal mayselekh, opening a range of
possible interpretations. One may be tempted to read it as a hidden critique of Stalinist terror,
portraying the ritual of the show trial as a puppet show which is performed by one actor who
plays both accuser and accused. In certain respects this maysele resembles Der Nister’s last
symbolist story ‘Unter a ployt’ (1929), where the show trial motif is also prominent, except
that in that story the accused victim was the narrator himself rather than the dehumanized
trotskist.46 The mechanical and manipulative trial is routinely performed before senseless
approving spectators who ritualistically demand a death sentence after hearing an obviously
forced confession of the miserable, dehumanized defendant. Yet this line of interpretation
raises the question of whether most of the (presumably) simple-minded readers of this maysele
would not read it as an open approval rather than a hidden critique of the terror. Why would
the presumably more sophisticated Soviet censor or editor not catch the trick? And why did
Der Nister choose to write a blatantly political poem, which has no parallel in his mayselekh
of that period? Chudakova’s insights may, however, help us understand Kvitko’s escape into
the imaginary bucolic, happy and fear-free space of childhood from an adult reality saturated
by terror and anxiety. Kvitko filtered the Stalinist discourse through a sieve of strict stylistic
norms and conventions, creating a quasi-religious myth of the benevolent divine father under
whose watchful eye animals, children and adults can roam freely, blissfully unaware of the
grates of their cage.
The world of Der Nister’s mayselekh is very different. His world of humans is tightly
organized and strictly controlled. Any form of ‘otherness’, such as the one embodied by wild
animals, is no longer tolerated here. The animals, the masters of the universe in the early
mayselekh, are pushed back into the woods where they belong. The borders are clearly
demarcated, and if animals venture, driven by hunger or pain, into the world of humans, they
risk being killed as enemies. Smaller, and, presumably, cleverer, animals, such as the squirrel
and the hare, learn the rules of the game and retire back to their natural habitat voluntarily,
while bigger predators, such as the fox, the wolf and the bear, are mercilessly killed like the
‘enemies of the people’. But Der Nister does not rebel against this order. Instead, he simply
announces the death of creative fantasy, which was central to his creativity until 1929. Coming
back to the question of the intended reader and the message of his bizarre self-negating poems,
one can hypothesize that Der Nister was addressing first himself and, second, perhaps, a small
circle of his devoted admirers. Choosing the deliberately ‘naïve’ form and the illustrated
children book as a vehicle, Der Nister could have been reflecting on his own position as a
‘wild animal’ in the new, strictly disciplined Soviet society. Yet it would be too simplistic to
cast him as a defender of artistic freedom and a critic of totalitarianism. Rather, his creative
voice speaks for both accuser and accused, perpetrator and victim, like the actor in the puppet
trial show. As an artist, he had a profound understanding of the destructive nature of Stalinist
totalitarianism, where one and the same person could be the victim, perpetrator and spectator,
performing a ritual of self-destruction over and over again.
Notes to Chapter 7
1. I am grateful to Ms Vera Knorring of the Russian National Library in St Petersburg for providing me with rare copies of
Der Nister’s book.
2. The role and significance of children literature in the aesthetics and ideology of Yiddish and Hebrew modernism has
recently received a great deal of scholarly attention in the studies by Kenneth Moss, Hillel Kazovsky, Sabine Koller and
others who examine this phenomenon from historical, literary and artistic points of view.
3. As late as 1931 Kvitko was still perceived largely as an ‘adult’ poet. In the entry by Aron Gurshtein on Kvitko in the
Literaturnaia entsiklopediia, V (Moscow: Kommunisticheskaia akademiia, 1931), p. 169, children’s poetry is mentioned
only in one sentence.
4. On the significance of this year for Jewish history in general and for Soviet Yiddish culture in particular, see 1929: A Year
in Jewish History, ed. by Hasia Diner and Gennady Estraikh (New York: New York University Press, 2013).
5. This episode is discussed in more detail in Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), pp. 131’32, and idem, Evreiskaia literaturnaia zhizn’ Moskvy,
1917’1991 (St Petersburg: Evreiskii Universitet, 2015), pp. 145’49.
6. B[etti] Kvitko, ‘Tvorit’ dobro — bylo sushchnost’iu ego zhizni’, in Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo L’va Kvitko, ed. by B[etti] Kvitko
and M[iron] Petrovskii (Moscow: Detskaia literature, 1976), p.
7. See Estraikh, Evreiskaia literaturnaia zhizn’ Moskvy, 1917’1991, p. 149.
8. For more detail, see Miron Petrovskii, ‘Vy iz Kieva plyvete…’, Politk.UA, <http://polit.ua/analitika/2012/09/05/kvitko.html>
[accessed 20 June 2014].
9. Miron Petrovskii, ‘Vy iz Kieva plyvete…’, Politk.UA, <http://polit.ua/analitika/2012/09/05/kvitko.html> [accessed 2 June
2015]. In 1936 Kvitko wrote to the literary scholar Aron Gurshtein referring to Chukovskii’s and Marshak’s translations:
‘[T]hese two great writers place their bets on me like a winning card’, adding worryingly: ‘I am afraid of failure.’ ‘Zhizn’
byla by velikolepna… Pis’ma L’va Kvitko M. Khashchevatskomu i A. Gurshteinu’, Yehupets, 8–9 (2001), 297.
10. For more detail on the creation of the ‘industry of children culture’, see Andrei Fateev, Stalinizm i detskaia literatura v
politike nomenklatury SSSR (1930e-1950e gody) (Moscow: MAKS, 2007), pp. 53–59.
11. Marietta Chudakova, Izbrannye raboty. Literatura sovetskogo proshlogo (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2001), p.
347.
12. Ibid., pp. 347–50.
13. On Der Nister’s life and work during that period, see Uncovering the Hidden: The Works and Life of Der Nister, ed.
by Gennady Estraikh, Kerstin Hoge and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 2014).
14. On Fradkin, see Elena Kotliar, ‘Obrazy shtetla v grafike Moiseia Fradkina’, Visnyk KhDADM, 9 (2008), 168’77.
15. Leyb Kvitko, Tsen mayses (Moscow: Emes, 1937), pp. 10–20.
16. Ibid., p. 16.
17. Ibid., p. 19.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 20.
20. Leyb Kvitko, Lebedik un freylekh, (lider-zamlung far kinder) (Moscow: Der emes, 1939), pp. 93–98
21. Konstantin Bogdanov, Vox populi: fol’klornye zhanry sovetskoy kul’tury (Moscow: NLO, 2009), p. 178.
22. Ibid., 190.
23. Kvitko, Lebedik unfreylekh, p. 93.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., p. 94.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 98.
28. Ibid.
29. On the image of Stalin in the Soviet lullabies of the 1930s see Bogdanov, Vox populi, pp. 185–86.
30. This book received comprehensive scholarly attention which is summarized in Daniela Manto-van, ‘Transgressing the
Boundaries of Genre: The Children’s Stories of the Soviet Yiddish Writer Der Nister (1884’1950)’, Report of the Oxford
Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (2006–2007), pp. 25–48.
31. Interestingly, a goy together with a shiksl (derogatory for a Gentile girl) appear as a character as late as 1929 in the poem
‘Vint’ by the exemplary Soviet poet Itsik Fefer, published in the collection with the same title. Itsik Fefer, Mayselekh
inferzn (Minsk: Vaysruslendisher melukhe farlag, 1929), pp. 14–17. Fefer was known for his hostile attitude to Der Nister.
32. Der Nister, Mayselekh in ferzn (Warsaw: Klutur-lige, 1921), p. 6.
33. Ibid., p. 7.
34. Der Nister, Dray mayselekh (Odessa: Kinder-farlag, 1934), p. 28.
35. Der Nister, Mayselekh (Kinder-farlag, Odessa), p. 34.
36. Ibid., p. 12.
37. Ibid., p. 43.
38. Der Nister, Zeks mayselekh (Kiev: Ukrmelukhenatsmindfarlag, 1939), p. 21.
39. Ibid., p. 24–25.
40. Ibid., p. 25.
41. Ibid., p. 26.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., pp. 27–28.
44. Ibid., p. 28.
45. Ibid., p. 30.
46. On various interpretations of that story, see Mikhail Krutikov, ‘Desire, Destiny and Death: Fantasy and Reality in Soviet
Yiddish Literature around 1929,’ in 1929: Mapping the Jewish World, ed. by Hasia Diner and Gennady Estraikh (New
York: New York University Press), pp. 217–33.

 CHAPTER 8

The Upside-Down World of Baym Dnyepr: Penek

Harriet Murav

We meet Penek, the hero of the first volume of David Bergelson’s autobiographical novel
Baym Dnyepr (At the Dnieper), as a little boy of seven with his father:
Penek, az er derzet lebn zikh dem tatn, mit di farbrokhn-oysgetsoygene fregndike
hent, blaybt er shteyn tsetumlt tsvishn di fil ibergekerte shtuln un fusbenklekh, af
velkhe er iz norvos do, in zumerdik-kiln, a bisl tunkeln es-tsimer, arumgeforn
raytndik — mit pilderdikn nyoken un vyoken, mit shturmishe geshreyen gerukt zayn
gezes fun eyn shtul afn andern. In der ershter rege khapt im on a groys rakhmones
tsum tatns farkrimtn halb-yontevdikn, halb-vokhedikn ponem, tsu zayne trukn-
veynendike oygn, vos veysn nit, vi gut iz tsu tupn, tantsn un iberkern veltn fun groys
freyd.1
[Penek was startled to see his father — whose hands, clasped together, seemed to
be asking something — among all the turned over chairs and footstools, on which he
had just now been horsing around in the summertime coolness and darkness of the
dining room. He had been galloping and giddyupping, sliding his bottom from one
chair to the next with wild shrieks. In the first moment great pity came over him for
his father’s bewildered, half-festive, half-workday face, for his sorrowful eyes that
did not know how good it was to stamp and dance and overturn worlds from great
joy.]

Set in the 1880s–1890s Penek tells the story of its title character, the youngest and least-loved
child of the wealthy Levin family. As Susan Slotnick argues, the first volume is a
Bildungsroman.2 A 1936 review of the Russian translation of the novel makes a similar point.
At the Dnieper is the ‘multisided and consequential depiction of the child Penek’s
consciousness’.3 We follow the development of the child from ages seven to thirteen as his
ideological awareness of economic and social inequality deepens, together with his artistic
sensibility and powers of observation. By the end of the novel, Penek understands that his
father’s wealth depends on the poverty and suffering of others. He no longer feels pity for his
father, as in the passage quoted earlier, but for those his father exploits. His father’s death
liberates him from any remaining sense of obligation to his own family, and his acceptance by
the proletarian children of the hintergeslekh (back-streets) mark a new stage in his
development. Bergelson’s novel, in tune with Soviet Marxist thought, makes the past
accessible and meaningful as the bad old days, which the Bolshevik revolution will destroy,
leading in turn to the Soviet bright future. Isaac Bashevis Singer put it this way: the first
volume of At the Dnieper provides the ‘psychological genesis’ of the hero as a future
revolutionary.4 As Slotnick points out, Penek, as a Bildungsroman, assumes a path of linear
progression: the little boy becomes a young man, changing and growing as he does so. The
forward motion of the hero’s growth emerges all the more clearly against the backdrop of the
cyclically recurring Jewish holidays as they are celebrated in the wealthy Levin household.
Slotnick explains that readers can trace Penek’s changing attitude toward Judaism and Jewish
customs by comparing his response from one holiday to the next.5 For example, he cries when
he does not receive new clothes for the Jewish New Year in the fall and is forced to wear his
brother’s castoffs, but by the spring holiday of Passover, he has a new suit made for himself at
the local tailor as a way of satisfying his own desires and monitoring the labour situation
among the workmen.
At the Dnieper is both a Soviet revolutionary Bildungsroman and a portrait of the artist as a
young man. However, there are clusters of images and scenes that disturb the continuity and
implied belief in progress central to this genre, especially in its Soviet Marxist incarnation.
These have to do with Penek’s love for the world turned upside down — a motif that by
Slotnick’s own account is important to the boy’s characterization. The upside-down world has
a playful side, to be sure, as in the scene I quoted earlier, when we first meet Penek, who turns
chairs upside down so as to leap from one to the other. It also has a less joyous side, as I will
show.
This paper explores the significance of the upside-down world in the first volume of At the
Dnieper: including not only the inversion of order, but also scenes of the lower body, play,
parody, moments of inexplicable fear and images of mass death.6 Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of
carnival will play a role in my analysis. Bergelson wrote and published the first volume of At
the Dnieper in the late 1920s and early 1930s; Bakhtin wrote his book on Rabelais in the mid
to late 1930s, but it was not published until 1965.7 The publication of Bergelson’s novel
coincides with the beginning of the Stalin terror; Bakhtin’s study, with its peak. Less well-
known, but of equal or greater scholarly importance for the theorization of laughter culture, is
Dmitrii Likhachev and Alexander Panchenko’s study of the culture of folly in early modern
Russia, The World of Laughter in Old Russia.8 Likhachev and Panchenko paint a far darker
picture of laughter than Bakhtin.
These works on laughter serve as valuable tools by which to assess the upside-down world
in At the Dnieper. I do not claim that Bergelson knew Bakhtin’s work. Likhachev and
Panchenko’s volume was published more than twenty years after Bergelson’s death. What is of
interest is the subsequent interpretation scholars have given to these two studies of laughter
culture. Mikhail Ryklin and Alexander Etkind argue that these works respond to the Stalinist
period, even though their subject matter is ostensibly Rabelais, for Bakhtin, and early modern
Russia, for Likhachev. I will say more about this shortly. I am making a similar claim about
Bergelson’s historical novel, set in the nineteenth century. I am arguing that the upside-down
world in Penek registers its grim historical context, albeit in an indirect form. The 1920s and
early 1930s saw well-publicized show trials carried out by the new Soviet regime: the trial of
the Socialist Revolutionaries in 1922, the trial of the Shakhty in 1928, and the Prompartiia, or,
Industrial Party, trial of 1931. All of these received wide coverage in the Soviet Union and
beyond.9 Historians have characterized the period of the first Five-Year plan, 1928–1932, as
one of the peak periods of arrests and executions.10 Bergelson was certainly aware of the 1922
trial; a major plotline in Mides-hadin (Strict Justice), published in 1929, while the author still
lived in Berlin, is the arrest of a group of Socialist Revolutionaries. While this work is set in
the early 1920s, its title indicates the prevailing conditions of the late 1920s, when political
repression in the Soviet Union was at a high point. The alleged plot of the Industrial party
involved fantastical elements: the defendants were accused of plans to drain the swamps
outside Moscow, thereby supposedly facilitating the invasion of Russia by foreign countries.11
The government cultivated an atmosphere of suspicion and the expectation of catastrophe on
the part of the population, and the newspaper campaign demanding the harshest possible
punishment of the ‘traitors’ fed this atmosphere.12 The horrific consequences of Stalin’s 1929
declaration of the ‘liquidation of the kulaks as a class’ — including arrests, deportations and
the famines in Ukraine of 1930–1933 — were also well-known, regardless of news
blackouts.13 The American Yiddish newspaper in which Bergelson published before 1926,
Forverts (Forward), covered the famine in a series of articles by Harry Lang.14

The World of Laughter

In Rabelais and His World Bakhtin defined carnival as the inversion of the ordinary world, the
overcoming of hierarchy and the breakdown of the boundary separating the spectacle from its
spectators. It is the ‘second world’ and the people’s ‘second life’ outside the norms and
strictures of officialdom.15 The carnival, or, grotesque body, in contrast to the classical body, is
open to the world; in it the lower stratum is emphasized, the stratum that unites digestion, birth,
and death. ‘All that is sacred is rethought on the level of the material bodily stratum.’16 The
mouth, bowels and genitals form a single plane. Instead of atomized, individual bodies, what
emerges is ‘superindividual bodily life […] the ever-regenerated body of the people’.17 The
individual body, transformed into a part of the people’s mass body, ceases to be itself. In the
realm of carnival, the fear of death, ‘cosmic terror’ and ‘eschatological expectations’ are
replaced by a sense of perpetual renewal.
In an article first published in Russian in 1991, Mikhail Ryklin argues that Bakhtin’s vision
of carnival reflected his own guilty position as a member of the intelligentsia witnessing the
physical destruction of millions of individuals during the height of the Stalin terror.18 The
Rabelais book was a form of auto-therapy that only incompletely addressed the trauma suffered
by the witnesses and survivors of that experience. Positing the eternal renewal of the people’s
mass body is a way of disavowing knowledge of the deaths of countless individuals due to
collectivization and the camp system. Ryklin draws attention to the parallel between the
writing of Pantagruel and the writing of Rabelais and His World: the historical conditions in
each case ‘are congruous’.19 Bakhtin argues that Pantagruel was a ‘merry rejoinder’ to the
natural calamities that took place in France in 1532; Bakhtin’s study, Ryklin argues, is a
similarly ‘merry rejoinder’ to the state-orchestrated calamities of collectivization that took
place four centuries later in 1932 in Soviet Russia. My claim about the first volume of
Bergelson’s At the Dnieper is similar. The Yiddish author uses the upside-down world in
order to respond to the historical calamities of his time, which, of course, overlapped with
Bakhtin’s. The upside-down world that he created is not, however, as joyful and full of
laughter as that of the Russian critic.
Alexander Etkind makes a comparable argument about Dmitrii Likhachev and Alexander
Panchenko’s 1976 The World of Laughter in Ancient Russia and the world of the gulag.
According to Etkind, Likhachev’s vision of the upside-world was not a disavowal of terror,
but rather, reflected the scholar’s experience in the White Sea monastery prison of Solovki in
the early 1920s.20 The grotesque nihilism that Likhachev attributes to the laughter culture of
medieval Russia belongs, according to Etkind, to the world of the gulag. My emphasis here is
on the difference between Likhachev and Bakhtin: for the former, there is no renewal born of
the death of the individual. The ‘world of laughter’ is decidedly not funny but, rather, ‘hellish;’
the fool, according to Likhachev, ‘reveals his own nakedness and the nakedness of the
world’.21 In this ‘ghastly’ (kromeshnyii) anti-world, things lose their normal appearance and
assume an ‘alien, absurd meaning’.22
Bakhtin and Likhachev provide a way of understanding the emergence of the upside-down
world in At the Dnieper, beyond the simple joy of child’s play. This upside-down world
functions in opposition to the strictures of Jewish tradition, and to the hierarchy that places his
father on top and others on the bottom, but also in opposition to the premises of continuity and
rationality that undergird the Bildungsroman. By analysing the upside-down world in At the
Dnieper we gain a more complex picture of its genre and its relation to politics and history. In
the ‘psychological genesis’ of the future revolutionary, love of disorder, rebellion and
misadventure is to be expected. However, the upside-down world in At the Dnieper does not
function simply as a template for the future just order. Penek imagines, for example, that his
mother will become a servant, and the servants will become masters. Other elements of a
carnivalized, or, inverted world that appear in the novel, include, for example, the legend that a
cat hanged itself from hunger, and the parody of the blessing said after using the toilet that is
recited in the poorer section of the synagogue during the Rosh Hashana service. However, the
upside-down world in the first volume of At the Dnieper indicates something beyond the
simple inversion of social hierarchy. It indicates an irrational and all-powerful counter-reality
that is not susceptible to the rational improvement promised by either Bildung or Marxism.

The Mother
Penek’s very existence and his physical appearance suggest an association with the lower
stratum and the grotesque body as described by Bakhtin. His mother was in love with someone
else before she married Mikhoel Levin, and to distract herself from her sinful desires, she
wants to give birth to many children, and does, but most of them die in the first months of their
life. Her desire is never sated; her ‘belly is a belly which, as if in great hunger, could not sate
itself in pouring children from itself, pouring them out unceasingly’ (‘boykh — a boykh, vos hot
vi in groysn hunger, zikh nit gekont zetikn mit shitn fun zikh kinder, shitn on an ufher’, p. 15).
Bergelson’s use of synecdoche emphasizes the element of the grotesque in the image of the
mother.23 It is as if her pregnant womb is a separate organ, with its own desires. According to
Bakhtin, one of the features most characteristic of the grotesque body is the capacity of its
organs to ‘lead independent lives’.24
Penek’s mother believes that the child’s birth is a punishment for her adulterous wishes. His
appearance, furthermore, suggests another link to the grotesque body. His lips are thick and
protruding, which, according to his mother, conjures up the image of a pig, an unkosher animal,
associated with filth.

Penek
Penek comes to the conclusion that he belongs to the kitchen and the back-streets more than to
the wealthy household of the Levin family. He sleeps in the room where his siblings’ chamber
pots are kept. He runs to the back-streets of the town, to see what is happening there, and once,
he thrusts himself in the midst of a fight between two women, because the curses that ‘spring
from women’s mouths in the middle of the tumult’ are so interesting to him (p. 33). From an
early age, he loves everything that jars against established order (‘a shtendike mesukene hanoe
fun alerley zakhn, vos tseshtern dem geveynlekhn seyder in lebn’, p. 52). Any hint of
disobedience and rebellion — even including horses that refuse to obey their masters — gives
him pleasure. He hopes for an inversion in the order of things: he wants to see darkness in the
daytime and light at night. And at night, he dreams of the upside-down world:
tomer zet er banakht in kholem kimat alts, vos er hot gezen batog, nor unter an ander
farb un mit an ander seyder — mitn kop arop un mit di fis aruf, vi er hot lib (p. 78).
[He always dreamt of practically everything that he had seen in the daytime, but in a
different light and in a different order — with head down and feet up, the way he
loved things to be.]

Sometimes, however, Penek’s dreams do not fulfil his wishes, but instead, terrify him. After the
death of his sister’s husband, Penek has a nightmare in which the corpse, which remains
shrouded and on the floor of her house for years, suddenly bestirs itself and with a ‘cockle-
doodle-doo voice’ (mit a kukureku kol) demands a Sabbath treat for the boy (p. 84). Penek
screams until he finally wakes up.
During the same long night, Penek tries to understand what it means to die by holding his
breath for so long that
er hot shoyn nit gefilt arum zikh gornit, tsuzamen mit im hern uf tsu ‘zayn’ ale un
alts — der tate, dos ‘hoyz’, di shtot, di vayte shtrekes mit ale shtet un ale mentshn.
Er hot zikh dershrokn, nit gevolt, nit gekont ibertrogn:
—— Azoy fil toytn!!! (p. 87)
[he no longer felt anything nearby, together with him everyone and everything
ceased existing — his father, the house, the city, the distant roads with all the cities
and all the people. He frightened himself, he did not want to, could not bear it:
—— So many deaths!!!]

The scene begins with the little boy’s fear and anxiety caused by the death of someone he
knows. As it continues, however, the child’s normal reaction changes into something more
extreme. He imagines and senses not only one death, Khaym’s death, but death on a vast scale,
the annihilation of hundreds, thousands of people, and his mind revolts at the thought. This new
awareness of the possibility of the end of ‘everyone and everything’ causes no pleasure for the
young hero. This is more than the world upside down, more than the disruption of routine. This
is an image of the destruction of the entire world. There is nothing in the story that would
justify or explain Penek’s sudden terror. While there is no one-to-one correspondence between
this episode and any specific trial or newspaper campaign taking place in the Soviet Union that
would account for it, there is an emotional correspondence between the general tenor of life in
Soviet Russia in the late 1920s and early 1930s and this moment in the novel, set before the
Soviet Union came into existence.
Bergelson interweaves the motif of destruction on a mass scale in his account of Penek’s
experience of Yom Kippur. On this particular Yom Kippur eve, a peasant, unaware of the
Jewish calendar, comes to town. Penek begins to see the customs of the holiday through the
eyes of the non-Jew, and concludes that the latter must think the Jews are ‘crazy’. Yom Kippur
becomes a part of the upside-down world that intrudes into the realist narrative of the novel.
Penek’s growing detachment from religious observance and ultra-pious Jews like his father
and his sister — the Bildungsroman plot — unfolds, together with his irrational fear of what is
taking place around him. His secret reading of Hebrew books plays a role in his emotions.
Penek discovers a cache of Hebrew books among the dead Khaym’s belongings, and reads
about the Spanish Inquisition, including a scene where a family is about to burned at the stake.
Bergelson comes back to the motif of fiery destruction in his description of the Yom Kippur
eve custom of lighting candles. Again, Penek experiences this scene through the perspective of
the non-Jew:
Der ‘goy’ in mark iz farglivert gevorn.
Fun umetum hobn tsu im geflosn umgehayere vaybershe yeloles, gevirkt mit groyl,
akurat vi in yeder shtub iz a mageyfe — dray-fir meysim lign af der erd, un mentshn,
un ongetsundene likht baveynen zey (pp. 360–61).
[The non-Jew at the market came to a standstill.
He was overcome by the sound of unheard of female lamentations, heart-
stopping, as if in each house there had been a fire and three, four corpses were lying
on the ground, and both the people and the lit candles mourned for them.]

Penek’s reading, and his strange, vicarious experience of dread, come together at the Kol
Nidre service:
Di geklangen fun kolnidre hobn im peyniklekh gegroylt, zikh geplontert mit di
masyes fun der inkvizitsye, vos er hot geleyent ba zayn shvester Tsirlen inem sheyn-
ayngebundenem bikhele — mit der shayn fun vaksene likht, vi me baloykht toyte,
hobn di gezangen baloykhtn yene inkvizitsye-mayses — mayses-meysim (p. 362).
[The sounds of Kol Nidre painfully terrified him, intermixing with the stories of the
Inquisition — which he had read at his sister Tsirl’s in a little book, handsomely
bound — and intermingled with the light from wax candles, like the candles lit for
the dead; the chant illuminated the Inquisition stories — stories of corpses.]
In the original Yiddish, the word for stories, ‘mayses’, echoes the word for ‘corpses’,
‘meysim’. The acoustical mirroring creates an unexpected semantic link: what do ‘stories’
have to do with ‘corpses’? Are all stories ghost stories, or, do all stories end in death?
Bergelson does not clarify; however, the sound-mirroring of ‘mayses’ and ‘meysim’ serves to
underscore Penek’s confused state of mind. Another unusual feature of this passage is the use of
synasthesia, one sense indicating another. Here, the sounds of the Kol Nidre chant illuminate
the stories of the Inquisition that Penek rehearses in his imagination, based on his reading. This
is a visual and acoustical fantasy of death and persecution in which the history and Penek’s
own artistic inventiveness powerfully unite in a single extended scene.
Bashevis’s complaint against Bergelson that his portrait of the young boy omitted all
instances of fear and bad dreams is inaccurate.25 Penek’s confusion, fear and speculation about
the destruction of entire areas — ‘so many deaths!’ constitutes a significant thread in the novel.
Penek’s Kol Nidre fantasy of multiple deaths, like his nightmare, strangely echo what was
taking place in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, as I have already discussed — the lethal
collectivization and industrialization carried out at that time. There are, in addition, other
moments that seem out of place in a novel set in the late nineteenth century, and which seem
more indicative of the twentieth. Penek notes the odour of fasting that comes from the mouths of
those who cannot buy food (p. 131). One of Nakhmen’s children dies of starvation, his belly
swollen and hard, and his arms and legs like sticks. Later in the novel, Nakhmen loses his
mind. Another character articulates the frightening possibility of the deaths of multitudes of
children: ‘the earth could open her mouth and swallow them, all of them, all of them’ (di erd
volt gemegt efenen a moyl un zey aynshlingen … ale! ale!) [ellipsis in original] (p. 385).
Penek’s position and character also have a bearing on the early phase of the Stalin terror. As
a punishment for his failure to attend school, Penek must spend the whole winter studying under
Shloyme-Dovid, who is promised 100 roubles for making a ‘person’ out of Penek. On the first
day of his studies, Shloyme-Dovid beats his student and forces him to remove his shoes, so that
he cannot run away. Penek feels like an ‘arrested person’ (p. 376). Penek’s class status as the
child of a wealthy man makes him a suspect in the Soviet social order. At the same time, he is
endowed with the omniscience characteristic of conventional realist narrative — and the all-
watchful gaze of the Soviet state. Bergelson reiterates Penek’s powers of observation: ‘he sees
everyone and no one sees him’ (er zet alemen, un im zet keyner nit); ‘he sees what others do
not’ (er zet, vos andere zeen nit); ‘he is all eyes’ (p. 133; 309).
Bergelson displaces his hero’s curiosity onto the lower bodily stratum. He describes
Penek’s all-consuming interest in scandals, disruptions, curious scenes and colourful figures as
an appetite: ‘Alts iz vikhtik, yeder khush ba Penekn iz biz-gor fasharft, hot a zikorn un fodert,
me zol im onfiln, vi a leydikn mogn ba a freserl’ (Everything was important, each of his sense
organs was sharpened to the utmost, each had a memory, and demanded that it be filled, like the
empty stomach of a glutton) (p. 153). Instead of being ‘all eyes’, as in the passage I quoted
above, it is more accurate to say that Penek is ‘all stomach’. Penek’s hunger for stimulation
from the surrounding world also changes his experience of his father’s death, as I will show in
the next section.

The Father
In the opening of the novel, Penek loves his father dearly, and feels his love ‘with his whole
body’ (fun Penek’s gantsn kerper) (p. 54). His growing realization of the realities of the world
— sexual, economic, and social — changes his image of his father, who (as Penek says) makes
himself out to be an angel, but in reality is an ordinary human being.
At the same time that Penek comes to see his father as a mere mortal, he also begins to
discern otherworldly, ghostly features in him. In the passage I quoted in the opening of this
paper, Bergelson uses his longstanding device of synecdoche to describe the conflicting sides
of Mikhoel Levin’s character: the half-festive and half-workaday face. After a trip abroad for
his health, Mikhoel Levin’s beard is only grey and workaday, and Penek is frightened to see
that his father’s beard looks younger, as if it had ‘returned from the other world’ (umgekert fun
yener-velt) (p. 236). Penek has begun to feel that his father is already ‘a dead man’ (a toyter)
and ‘saw something otherworldly in his face, and in his eyes, in his every movement, you could
feel something alien’ (gezen epes yenerveltikt in zayn ponem un in zayne oygn, in yedn rir,
derhert epes fremde) (p. 236). Bergelson’s description of Mikhoel Levin’s increasingly serious
illness from Penek’s perspective allows for the emphasis on what is alien and ghostly, not of
this world. As the novel continues, and Levin becomes increasingly sick, he looks more and
more as if he were already dead:
Mit tseshrokene oygn hot Penek gekukt af im fun antkengdikn vinkl, gezen bloyz
teyln fun foters halb-geshtorbenem breytn ponem — loykhndike oygn, a tsevorfene
shtoybik-groye bord vinkt tsu yenervelt-tsu (p. 356).
[From the opposite corner, Penek looked at him in shock, seeing only parts of his
father’s broad half-dead face — luminous eyes, but a dishevelled beard that winked
at the world to come.]

Mikhoel Levin gradually transforms into a mere body, and especially, the lower part of his
body. When he becomes ill, the unseemly words ‘urine, catheter and drainage’ begin to be used
in the house. He is dying from a disease that has to do with ‘the most shameful organ’ (mitn
same shenlekhstn tvishn di glider, p. 439). This specific feature of his illness is comparable to
what Bakhtin describes as carni-valesque debasement. He becomes a ‘clump of skin and bones
that no longer had the strength to bear terrible pain’ (dem foter — dem klumek fun hoyt un
beyner — hobn shoyn nit geklekt di koykhes af aribertsutrogn di umgehayere veytikn, p. 531).
After his death, all that remains of Mikhoel Levin is his beard, or, so it seems to Penek: ‘on the
bed, supported by a lot of pillows, lies a dead, dirty-gray beard — above the beard a mouth
closed in death’ (afn bet, untergeshpert mit a sakh kishns, ligt a toyte, shtoybik-groye bord —
hekher der bord — a toyt-geshlosene moyl, P. 559). This is synecdoche taken to its grotesque
but logical conclusion. The part that stands for the whole dies its own death, separately from
the person to whom the part belongs.
Penek, the future artist and revolutionary, has little emotional connection to the death of his
father. The narrator describes his curiosity as a curse that makes him forget that he too lives in
this world:
Onshtot tsu trogn ineyenem mit shvester-un-brider di groyse yesurim, vos der
 foter, nebekh, ranglt zikh mitn toyt, iz er gor shtark basheftikt mit nit aroyslozn arum
zikh keynem funem blik, zoygt ayn in di oygn in yederns ponem, halt ot-ot bam
dergeyn dem sod:
— Vos filn, mentshn, ven zeyer an eygener heybt shoyn on take mamesh tsu
shtarbn? (p. 533).
[Instead of bearing together with his sister and brother the great suffering that
their father, poor thing, was battling with as he lay dying, [Penek] was completely
preoccupied with not letting anyone around him escape his gaze; he sucked in their
faces, just on the verge of learning the secret:
— What do people feel when someone very close to them starts to die, in actual
fact?]

Penek is abstracted and separated from the suffering of others; his powers of empathy are
underdeveloped, while his desire for knowledge — even at the expense of someone else —
and his powers of observation are overdeveloped.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, Penek has a new suit made for him in order to
have an excuse to visit the tailor’s house as often as he likes, to monitor the strike and provide
support. On the one hand, the episode of the suit is a part of the Bildungsroman plot, a sign that
the young boy has developed class awareness and taken action to help workers. On the other
hand, however, the way Bergelson develops this episode has more to do with the upside-down
world and less with political maturation; the bit of business about the clothes fights against the
Bildungsroman. To order the new suit, Penek lies to the tailor and says that his parents want it
for him as soon as possible.
Iz fun tog tsu tog gevaksn Peneks garniturl.
Nit keyn garniturl — a lebedik bashefenish, dertsu nokh — epes zeyer nit keyn
koshers, vi a mamzer … vorem gekumen af der velt iz er durkh a lign. Iz ober inem
lign arayn di brokhe, un der garnitur vakst take af an emes, vert fun tog tsu tog mer
mamoshes, bet zikh:
— Gib mir abisele harts … Vilst nit?
Vart … Ikh vel nokh shener vern (p. 508).
[From day to day Penek’s suit grew.
It was not a suit, but rather, a living creature, and not a kosher one, to boot, more
a bastard, because it came into the world by means of a lie.
The lie had a silver lining, because the suit truly grew, and took on more solidity
every day, and begged:
Give me a little heart…
You don’t want to?
Wait … I’m going to be even finer looking.]

The closer Mikhoel Levin, Penek’s father, comes to death, the closer Penek’s treyf (unkosher)
suit comes to life, as if the latter were the substitute for the former. The suit takes on a separate
life, like Gogol’s ‘Nose’. It makes demands and is vain about its appearance.
The Masses
Both Bashevis, in his 1932 Yiddish language review of the first volume of At the Dnieper, and
Hersh Remenik, in his 1934 Russian review of the Russian translation of the novel, point out
that Bergelson had trouble portraying the ‘masses’. Both fundamentally agree that Bergelson
was a skilled portraitist — Remenik emphasizes that his impressionistic style was particularly
suitable for depicting the pre-revolutionary travails of bourgeois individuals. But when it came
to the new type of revolutionary collectivity, Bergelson’s talents made it difficult for him, to
use Bashevis’s words, to portray the ‘faceless’ masses. Both characterizations of Bergelson
are correct, but both neglect the crowd scenes in the first volume of At the Dnieper. As I have
already shown, the author’s use of synecdoche strips away the personality of individuals whom
he depicts; for example, Mikhoel Levin, who starts out as a half-festive and half workaday
face, is reduced to nothing more than his beard, the part having overtaken the whole. The same
holds true for Bergelson’s portraits of groups of people. The facelessness of the crowd
underscores the unredeemable quality of the inverted world.
There are two key episodes featuring the ‘masses’. The first occurs during one of Penek’s
trips to the distillery, which his oldest sister owns. It is during these expeditions that Penek
fully realizes the extent of the misery that his father causes. The odour of alcohol streams out of
the enormous building, as if from the huge mouth of a drunkard. Inside, ‘amidst the entangled
entrails of the structure’, drops of liquid runoff from the fermentation stream down the walls,
irritating the eyes. Dozens of workers, ‘half naked and almost entirely naked’, inebriated from
the fumes, exhausted and dying of thirst, dart here and there, ‘seemingly without anyone’s
order’, turn huge taps and insert gauges into vats full of boiling liquid. Neither the men nor the
women show any interest in each other’s naked bodies; all they want is to be able to sit down
‘near a boiling vat and scratch their own flesh’ (loyzn di eygene leyber, p. 450). The gigantic,
oozing distillery building amid whose guts the anonymous labourers work suggests a certain
resemblance to Bakhtin’s image of the grotesque body. However, there is no hint of new life in
this collective body, and no joy. It is difficult to imagine that these workers could ever have
their consciousness raised, since they have been reduced to mere labouring bodies and as such
are incapable of redemption in any form, including the transformation into productive
proletarians. These men and women have lost every desire except to scratch themselves.
Instead of new life emerging from the old, Bergelson’s image of the distillery suggests bare
life, life below the threshold of humanity.
In his 1995 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Georgio Agamben argues that
political life depends on what it places on its boundary, mere biological life, or, ‘bare life’.
Bare life means human life as nothing more than a mere instrument that performs labour and, as
Agamben says, can be killed, but not sacrificed. The concentration camp inmate, stripped of all
rights, outside of all law, and reduced to a status of a ‘living corpse’, is the exemplar of bare
life for Agamben.26 To be sure, in At the Dnieper the image of bare life at the distillery is
supposed to represent the evils of capitalism, but it also could be read as an indictment of the
punitive industrialization and collectivization that was taking place under the new Soviet
order. It is true that Bergelson began to affirm his love for the Soviet system in 1926, and of
course, returned there in 1934.27 His novel nonetheless reveals a layer of ambivalence.
At the end of the novel, Penek’s dream of an upside-down world comes true, if only
temporarily. The poor and diseased inhabitants of the town gather around the dying man’s
house, waiting to see the team of doctors who are attending him. The narrator describes their
presence outside the house as follows:
Gekumen krume fis, gekumen yoterndik tsefoylte noz, gekumen vund-fleysh arum
blind-verndike oygn, brekhenish in beyner, gekumen alter, shoenlanger yadeshliver
hust, gekumen eyner fun di shmidn mit zayn vayb, vos shrekt ale skheynim mit ir
onufherlekhn griltsndikn shlukerts — di hintergeslekh hobn arumgeklept dos
gvirishe hoyz mit husteray, mit kharkeray, mit make-geshtank, mit alerley minim
tsoresn (p. 550).
[There arrived crooked legs, suppurating decayed noses, raw flesh around eyes that
had gone blind, broken bones, ancient asthmatic coughs that lasted for hours; one of
the blacksmiths came with his wife, who frightened the neighbours with her
penetrating hiccoughs — the back streets encircled the rich man’s house with
coughing, hacking, the odour of disease, with every kind of grief.]

Here Bergelson takes synecdoche to an absurd extreme. The parts have taken over the whole,
acting in their place and thereby transforming the scene into a grotesque farce. It is not a group
of individuals who assembles outside the Levin house, but rather, a dehumanized and
collective mass of symptoms, injuries and abnormalities. The emphasis is on the repulsive
sounds, smells and visual spectacle that this crowd presents. This is not the first time in
Yiddish literature that the image of the decaying human body served as a trope for the
oppression and injustice of bourgeois shtetl life. To give one example, Peretz Markish used a
similar technique in his depiction of shtetl life in the screenplay for Nosn Bekkerfort aheym
(Nosn Bekker returns home), and then later for the novel Eyns af eyns (One by one).28
Bakthin’s theory of carnival valorizes the lower bodily stratum, in which death and birth are
united. Actual death and actual birth are less important than the abstract notion of an ever-dying
and ever-regenerating mass body. As an individual joins the carnival crowd, he loses his sense
of individuality and becomes aware of his union with the mass. Individuals may die, but the
people’s mass body, pregnant with new life, is immortal. At the end of the first volume of At
the Dnieper the crowd storms the Levin house, driven by their intense desire to see what a
dying rich man looks like; all of the orifices of the structure are thrown open, and the crowd
eventually penetrates through to the dying man’s bedroom, ‘as if the rich man’s death meant that
death in all the poor parts of the town would die and from today forward would be gone — the
world would be redeemed’ (akurat vi mitn nogids toyt shtarbt avek di toyt in ale oreme teyln
shtot un fun haynt on un vayter iz oys-oys — es kumt a derleyzung af der velt, p. 562). The hint
at the redemption that the rich man’s death will bring does not square with Bakhtin’s notion of
the ever-dying, ever-renewing mass body. Nor does it conform to emerging notions of socialist
realism of the time, which emphasized the revolution, party-mindedness, and Marxist
consciousness. Bergelson’s language suggests the pointlessness of hopes for salvation.

Conclusion
The greatest of David Bergelson’s early works, Nokh alemen (The End of Everything),
published in 1913, is imbued with a sense of belatedness. It is too late: too late for the
heroine’s engagement to save her father and too late to derive meaning and purpose from the
past, which is dead, and no longer accessible. In contrast, At the Dniepr: Penek, published
nearly twenty years later, seems to re-establish the link to a bygone era. However, the shift to a
dark and grotesque upside-down world suspends the implicit premise of the Bildungsroman,
creating moments of temporal rupture and discontinuity. There is a significant difference
between this novel and its discontinuities, and early works such as The End of Everything
which offers an image of a time that comes after the end: the end of what, exactly, remains a
mystery. We do not know what happened to Mirl Hurvits, what ruined her life even before she
was born. The emphasis is not on the what, the event, or the injury, but the sense of futility and
belatedness that besets the heroine afterwards. Not knowing is crucial to the sense of
catastrophe: if we knew what the problem was, there would be hope of remedying it. In
contrast, knowledge is not the problem in At the Dnieper. We know everything and we know,
furthermore, what it takes to accumulate this knowledge: the apparatus of the omniscient
narrative, or, the omniscient state, for that matter, is laid bare. Penek is all eyes; he manages to
see without being seen — a point that Bergelson emphasizes repeatedly. The only thing that
disturbs this excess of clarity and transparency is the upside-down world. This upside-down
world which periodically erupts in the novel serves as a counter-narrative, providing an
indirect but nonetheless significant register for the sense of unreality created by the trials,
arrests, deportations and starvation of the late twenties and early thirties.
During one of his trips to the distillery, Penek meets a half-blind boy who drives the horses
round and round in the mill. He has a good look at the boy’s
tsvey farsheydene oygn-veltn — a blinde velt, a finstere, a broygeze un a hele velt,
a kluge, a shtralendik-gute. (p. 455)
[two different eyes, two different orbs — a blind world, dark and angry, and a
bright world, clever, and good like the beams of the sun.]

Adjacent to and contiguous with the ‘bright world’ — the world of the Soviet bright future —
is the alternative realm, the dark world, which is senseless and grotesque. The latter haunts the
former. A comparison to another of Bergelson’s Soviet era works illustrates the point. In the
1936 story ‘Barf-aruf’ (‘Uphill’), a new pair of American settlers arrives in Birobidzhan
during a snowstorm. Their escort shows them various points of interest, indicating the post
office ‘as if someone had frightened them with, “it’s the end of the world, a wasteland”’. The
disembodied voice has no real existence; it is only ‘as if’ someone had shouted ‘it’s the end of
the world’. The disembodied voice exerts a ghostly influence on the otherwise happy scene of
a new beginning in Birobidzhan. In a similar fashion, the upside-down world of At the Dnieper
troubles the bright new future that it promises.
Notes to Chapter 8
1. David Bergelson, Baym Dnyeper: Penek. 2 vols (Moscow: Der Emes, 1932), I, p. 7. Henceforward, all references will be
to this edition (cited in parentheses in the text) and, unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
2. See Susan Slotnick, ‘The Novel Form in the Works of David Bergelson’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Columbia University,
1978).
3. D. Mirskii, ‘U Dnepra’, Izvestiia, 12 May 1936.
4. Yitshok Bashevis, ‘Vegn Dovid Bergelsons Bam Dnyepr (ershter teyl: Penek)’, Globus, 5 (1932), 56–65. For a positive
appraisal of his assessment of Bergelson’s novel, see Seth Wolitz, ‘Bergelson’s “Yordim”’ and I. B. Singer’s Prooftexts, 2
(3) (1982), 313–21.
5. Slotnik, ‘The Novel Form in the Works of David Bergelson’, p. 345.
6. Bergelson was hardly unique in using this imagery. Der Nister’s Mishpokhe Mashber also evokes scenes in which the
entire world is turned on its head, so that corpses in the cemetery fall out of their graves.
7. Mikhail Ryklin gives 1935–1936 for the composition of the Rabelais book. See Ryklin, ‘Bodies of Terror: Theses Toward a
Logic of Violence’, New Literary History, 24 (1993), 52. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson give ‘the late 30s and
early 40s’ in Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990),
p. 90.
8. D. S. Likhachev and A. M. Panchenko, ‘Smekhovoi mir’ drevnei Rusi (Leningrad: Nauka, 1976).
9. For a discussion of the publicity and theatrical staging of the early show trials, see Julie A. Cassiday, ‘Marble Columns and
Jupiter Lights: Theatrical and Cinematic Modeling of Soviet Show Trials in the 1920s’, Slavic and East European
Journal, 42. 4 (1998), 640–60.
10. Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, ed. by J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), p. 12.
11. Elizabeth Wood describes the 1928 Shakhty trial as ‘fiction that had become indistinguishable from reality’, in Wood,
Performing Justice: Agitation Trials in Early Soviet Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 192–207. For a
discussion of the trial in the context of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Arkhipelag Gulag, see Harriet Murav, Russia’s Legal
Fictions (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), pp. 166–68.
12. An article published in Izvestiia in 1928 described the ‘necessary minimum of suspicion’ that workers should have with
regard to mining production plans. See Central Committee of the Miners’ Union, ‘Raskrytie kontrrevoliutsionnogo zagovora
v shakhtakh’, Izvestiia, 14 March 1928.
13. For the Stalin statement, see Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 117. This work provides an overview of the events in Ukraine. For a
documentary history, see The War Against the Peasantry, 1927–1930, ed. by Lynn Viola, V. P. Danilov, N. A. Ivnitskii,
and Denis Kozlov (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
14. The current state of my research does not permit me to say definitively what Bergelson knew and when he knew it.
Newspaper coverage of the famine in 1932 in the Western European and American press varied. There were Ukrainian
aid committees in Berlin and other cities, which were potentially another source of information. Food shortages affected
areas in which Bergelson lived, including, for example, Kiev. Even though Harry Lang’s articles were published after Baym
Dnyepr, they demonstrate awareness of the events in the Yiddish-speaking world. See, for example, Harry Lang, ‘Gezen
un gehert in di derfer fun Ukrayne’, Forverts, 27 December 1933. For a discussion of Lang, see Gennady Estraikh, ‘Harry
Langs shpur in der geshikhte’, Forverts, 2007. For a collection of materials on Holodomor, see The Holodomor Reader:
A Sourcebook on the Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, ed. by Bohdan Klid and Alexander Motyl (Edmonton, Toronto:
Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2012). For a recent collection of essays, see After the Holodomor: The
Enduring Impact of the Great Famine on Ukraine, ed. by Andrea Graziosi, Lubomyr Hajda A. and Halyna Hryn
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Papers in Ukrainian Studies, 2013).
15. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by H. Iswolsky (Cambridge: M. I. T. Press, 1965), p. 7.
16. Ibid., p. 371.
17. Ibid., p. 226.
18. See Ryklin, ‘Tela terrora (tezisy k logike nasiliia)’, Bakhtinskii sbornik, 1 (1990), 60–76; for the English translation, see:
‘Theses Toward a Logic of Violence’, New Literary History (1993) 24 (1), 51–74.
19. Ryklin, ‘Bodies of Terror’, p. 53.
20. See Alexander Etkind, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied, ed. by M. Bal and H.
de Vries, Cultural memory in the present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), pp. 63–70.
21. Likhachev and Panchenko, p. 19.
22. Ibid.
23. For a discussion of Penek’s own use of synecdoche as an aid to his memory, see Slotnick, ‘The Novel Form in the Works
of David Bergelson’, p. 389.
24. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 317 .
25. Bashevis, ‘Vegn Dovid Bergelsons Bam Dnyepr’, p. 61.
26. The concentration camp inmate, stripped of all rights, outside of all law, and reduced to a status of a ‘living corpse’, is the
exemplar of bare life for Agamben. See his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by D. Heller-Roazen,
ed. by W. Hamacher and D. Wellbery, Meridian: Crossing Identities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). For a
discussion of this work, see Andrew Norris, ‘Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead’, Diacritics, 30 (4)
(2000), 38–58.
27. For a detailed discussion, see Gennady Estraikh, ‘Bergelson in and on America’, in David Bergelson: From Modernism
to Socialist Realism, ed. by Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh (Oxford: Legenda, 2007), pp. 205–21.
28. ‘The denizens of waste-heaps’ will become productive members of the new socialist society. See Harriet Murav, ‘Peretz
Markish in the 1930s: Socialist Construction and the Return of the Luftmensh’, in A Captive of the Dawn: The Life and
Work of Peretz Markish (1895–1952), ed. by Joseph Sherman, Gennady Estraikh, Jordan Finkin and David Shneer
(Oxford: Legenda, 2011), pp. 114–26.

 CHAPTER 9

Jewish Wards of the Soviet State: Fayvl Sito’s These Are

Us
Gennady Estraikh

The First World War and Civil War had left millions of children orphaned and homeless,
roaming the streets in the former Imperial Russian areas which would constitute the Soviet
Union in the early 1920s. Among this war-caused flotsam were tens of thousands of Jewish
children who had lost their parents or lived in families who were unable to provide them with
the basic necessities. The Jewish Public Committee to Aid Victims of War, Pogroms and
Natural Disasters — known as Idgezkom, or Yidgezkom (Evobshchestkom in Russian) — was
one of the most significant, if short-lived (from 1920 to 1924) and little-researched, Jewish
organizations in the early Soviet state. It was an open secret that ‘the so-called Jewish Public
Committee’ was ‘only public in name’, because it was ‘composed of persons […] directly
connected with the [Soviet] Government’.1 In any case, the Idgezkom had an office in New
York and generally served as a link between Soviet governmental structures and foreign relief
organizations, most notably the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC),
established soon after the outbreak of World War I. Work with children constituted one of the
main areas of activities of the Idgezkom and its foreign counterparts.
According to a report preserved in the JDC archive, ‘Towards the end of 1921 the Idgezkom
maintained or subsidized 1069 children’s institutions (besides schools and medical
institutions) with 93,156 children’. The same report mentions Yiddish as the language used in
all these institutions.2 Two years later, the number of Jewish children under the patronage of
Idgezkom was 50,000.3 The Jewish children’s home Third International in Malakhovka (a
Moscow suburb) and the Jewish Children’s Home in Leningrad are the institutions of this kind
most often mentioned. The Malakhovka orphanage’s faculty included such figures as the (not
yet famous) artist Marc Chagall and the Yiddish writer Der Nister, while the influential
educator and folklorist Zinovy Kisselgoff headed the Leningrad children’s home, with memoirs
of some of its pupils appearing in the 1931 book Desiat’ vagonov (Ten Wagons) by Doyvber
Levin.4
Aron Kushnirov, best known as a member of the pre-1917 Kiev Yiddish literary circle and
later as a leading Soviet Yiddish poet, turned to the topic of Jewish children’s homes as early
as 1925, when his short story ‘Kinder fun eyn folk’ (Children of one nation) came out in the
collection Oktyabr (October), issued as a publication of the Moscow Association of
Proletarian Writers. In 1928, this story gave the name to Kushnirov’s collection of children’s
stories, released under the imprint of the Moscow Yiddish publishing house Shul un bukh
(School and Book). In the same year, the Shul un bukh brought out his children’s poem entitled
Havrik. The protagonist of this long poem, Havrik, is tired of fighting for survival in the
Moscow streets and eventually settles happily at an orphanage.
Writing about children’s homelessness remained an episode in Kushnirov’s literary career,
while this theme became the trademark of his younger colleague, Fayvl Sito (1909–45), who
himself experienced homelessness as a child. Sito never occupied a particularly visible place
in the crowded Soviet Yiddish literary landscape, though in addition to his stories for children
and on children he worked successfully in the genre of literary parodies. He died young, aged
35, and later was rarely mentioned in works of literary or historical interest, especially as he
did not belong to the victims of Stalinist purges whose life and oeuvre tended to be better
researched or, at least, more often referred to.
This chapter focuses on Sito’s coming-of-age narrative Ot dos zaynen mir (These Are Us),
set in a Jewish children’s home. These Are Us came out in 1932, one year before the
appearance of Anton Makarenko’s Pedagogicheskaia poema (Pedagogical Poem), and was
clearly modelled on the 1927 book Respublika Shkid (Republic Shkid) by Grigorii Belykh and
Leonid Panteleev. Makarenko’s landmark work has been translated into many languages,
including Hebrew (by Avraham Shlonsky), and the author’s name is present in street names in a
number of countries, such as Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Germany, while Republic Shkid
is still relatively well known in the former Soviet Union, mainly thanks to its 1966 screen
adaptation.
Sito’s book came out in a revised edition in 1940 and was twice published in Russian under
the title Nachinalas’ zhizn’ (At the Beginning of Life, 1938 and 1958).5 It well reflected the
idea that the Soviet Union formed an environment for happy childhood, achievable even in for
orphans and children without parental support. Still, neither the Yiddish nor the Russian
versions of These Are Us have drawn any significant critical or academic attention.
* * * * *
Sito’s poems and stories began to appear in Soviet Yiddish literary periodicals as early as
1927, when the author had only turned 17. It was young, but not exceptional — editors
encouraged young authors to test their literary wings. In Kharkov, where Sito lived in the years
of his maturing, the editorial office of the weekly Yunge gvardye (Young Guard) and the Jewish
workers’ club Third International formed a literary crèche for Sito and several other Yiddish
writers of the new crop, in or barely out of their teens, including Emanuel Kazakevich (who
after World War II went on to become a prominent Russian-language novelist) and Joseph
Kotlyar. In 1927–28, Yunge gvardye, a periodical of Young Communist League, or Komsomol,
occasionally published a supplement, Yunger boy-klang (Young Sound of Construction),
created mainly as a forum for literary attempts. Sito was one of the ‘finds’ of this short-lived
outlet. In all likelihood, Sito attended gatherings at the literary salon held by Emanuel
Kazakevich’s father, Henekh Kazakevich, who headed the Yiddish department at the local
branch of the Central Publishing House of Soviet Peoples.6

 FIG. 9.1. Fayvl Sito’s photograph appearing in a page of the journal Yunger boy-klang (no. 3,
1927)

Sito increasingly focused on portraying children who like himself had experienced the
trauma of homeless life. Significantly, writings based directly on personal experience were
notably present in the Soviet literary output of that time.7 Reprints of Sito’s early works formed
his 1930 book Dertseylungen (Stories). Earlier, in 1929, his very first book came out, entitled
Kinderhoyz num. 40 (Children’s Home No. 40), which was a short sketch of what would take
shape in These Are Us, with some sections of Children’s Home No. 40 reproduced verbatim in
the later versions. As is clear from the acknowledgement in Children’s Home No. 40, several
people helped Sito make early steps in literature: Henekh Kazakevich (mentioned above); the
leader of Jewish Komsomol activists in Kharkov and editor of the newspaper Yunge gvardye,
Efraim Portnoy; the journalist Oskar Strelits; the educator Avrom Makagon; and the editor of
the Moscow Yiddish daily Der Emes (Truth), Moyshe Litvakov. One of the stories in his 1930
collection is dedicated to Itsik Fefer, the leading proletarian poet in Ukraine.
In his These Are Us, Sito (who in the 1920s spent several years as a pupil at Kharkov-based
children’s home No. 40) tells how former waifs (besprizorniki in Russian) developed —
thanks to their committed teachers — into honest Soviet people. Significantly, Sito’s story of
‘rehabilitation-through-work-and-education’ does not romanticize street life as does, for
instance, the first Soviet ‘talkie’ Putevka v zhizn’ (A Ticket to Life), released in 1931.
These Are Us represents an unashamedly autobiographical narrative, in which Sito appears
under his own name, and where, though he is not the main character, some details of his (or his
eponymous literary hero’s) childhood surface (pp. 30–35).8 Sito’s father died when he was six,
and two years later his brother was killed in action during World War I. When the war engulfed
Volhynia, including Sito’s home town of Rovno (Rivne in Ukrainian), his family left their place
of residence and ended up in the Russian town of Kursk. It is not clear what exactly impelled
them to flee — whether they evacuated voluntarily or whether it was the concurrent expulsion
of Jews that turned them into refugees. The Russian Army, whose generals suspected Jews of
pro-German sentiment, conducted such expulsions in the areas near the theatre of the war. For
some reason, Kursk, a city outside the Pale of Jewish Settlement (effectively almost abolished
during World War I), and the region around the city, had been chosen as the area for replanting
thousands of Jewish refugees from Volhynia.9 In the new place, Russian-speaking boys began to
call him Pavel, and Sito would often use this rendering of his name in his later life.
Once in Kursk, Hasia, his mother, attempted to give her son some traditional education and,
looking for a cheap way of doing this, she paid a shames (synagogue sexton) to teach Fayvl to
say Kaddish, the prayer he was supposed to recite as the closest male mourner of his father.
However, the boy could not make any progress after memorizing the first words, ‘yisgadl
veyiskadesh shmay rabo’, and the shames ultimately gave up, coming to the conclusion that
Hasia’s ‘mazik’, rascal, was ‘a goyisher kop, a meshumed’, a person with non-Jewish brains,
an apostate. After that, Hasia sent her son to a talmud torah, a community-run tuition-free
elementary religious school, which he attended only for as long as the school provided its
pupils with a hot breakfast.
When Fayvl’s mother became ill and died, his sister deposited him at a reception centre for
orphaned children — from which he soon ran away, joining other homeless boys who
permeated markets and train stations, particularly in big urban centres. Finally, he found
himself at the Jewish orphanage in Kharkov, whose director appears both in Children’s Home
no. 40 and There Are Us under the name of Israel Shraga, portrayed as a somewhat eccentric
teacher ‘with big warm eyes’ (p. 58), a knight of charity, inspired by the revolution and fully
devoted to his work of creating a comfortable and stimulating environment for his
impoverished pupils.
Written in an idiomatic Yiddish, Sito’s book contains material for studying the Yiddish street
lingo of the 1920s. Some of the words and expressions are explained in footnotes. For instance
(p. 121): me darf ba dem burzhuk epes fardinen — one has to steal something from this
bourgeois; ikh vel ufheybn a khay — I’ll make noise; lomir fardinen bam yold a tovl pekh fun
der memole — let’s steal the wallet with money from this moron’s pocket; kh’vel dir kapen in
shpigl — I’ll publicly denounce you.
* * * * *
The published text of a speech delivered by the educator Israel Shrayer in 1924, with
numerous details coinciding with Sito’s narrative, reveals him as the prototype of Shraga, the
protagonist of These Are Us.10 Sito did not feel it important to inform his readers about the pre-
Kharkov period of Israel Shraga and his wife Rachel’s life, apart from mentioning that they
were a young childless couple and that they previously lived in a shtetl. As for Shrayer, it is
known that he studied the Grodno-based Jewish Pedagogical Courses which opened in 1907
under the sponsorship of the St Petersburg-centred Jewish Enlightenment Society, and that he
was devoted to Yiddish-language schooling.11 Presumably, Rachel Shrayer also received some
kind of formal education, perhaps at a secondary school, or gymnasium. Still, owing to the
scarcity of biographical information about Shrayer, it is hard to compare his real life story with
that of the book.
In the very beginning of the book, whose thread begins to unravel in the autumn of 1920,
Shraga left the shtetl of his residence. He appeared to be raring to go, because ‘he felt cooped
up, as if he lived in ajar of water’ (p. 8). Therefore he leapt at the chance to an invitation or
summons from the Department of Education of the Kharkov province. His wife joined him
later. It was a perilous journey through the country devastated by the civil war. Benjamin
Pepper, a representative of JDC, wrote in his 1923 report:
On my arrival in Charkov (sic), it became necessary to pass through the main
waiting room of the railway station, which is a room about half the size of the main
floor of Grand Central Station. The floor of this room was literally strewn with
people, old and young — men, women, children, infants — all starving, and a
number already dead. At least thirty dead bodies were being removed daily from
this station.12

Shraga, too, fell ill during the journey and had to spend some time at a hospital, hovering
between life and death. In fact, his illness caused the change in his job assignment: the
Department of Education initially meant to dispatch him to the Asov Sea port town of
Mariupol, but by the time of his discharge he received a different assignment, namely that of
establishing a new children’s home in Kharkov.
In the Soviet Union, shtetls functioned as almost virtual reality locales, since settlements
stopped being categorized as mestechko, or shtetl, in the official territorial structure of the
country. The socialist country of workers and peasants did not have a place for market towns.
Meanwhile, the Soviet press, belles-lettres and scholarship continued to use this notion as a
label for the traditional east European Jewish lifestyle and the places where it continued to
endure. Traits of the shtetl environment would be disparaged as mestechkovost’ (in Russian)
or kleynshtetldikayt (in Yiddish), which meant something pre-modern and not really Soviet.
By the time of Sito’s book publication, Soviet ideologists turned ‘with the face to shtetl’ and
offered a chance of renewal to this retrograde environment caught in a backwash of the
revolutionary transformations.13 Nonetheless, the shtetl certainly remained far away from the
avant-garde sites of socialist constructions, such as Moscow, Kharkov and Minsk. So, the
moving from a shtetl to Kharkov embodied a passage from quasi-medieval parochiality to
Soviet modernity.
Sito avoids specifying the name of the city where Shraga had arrived, but various details,
including the name of the local river, Lopan, unquestionably ‘disclose’ the setting of the story:
Kharkov, or Kharkiv in Ukrainian, the capital of Soviet Ukraine until 1934, which functioned
as an important centre of Yiddish culture during that time.14 In the autumn of 1923, the city,
whose over seventy-four thousand Jews made up about 24% of the population, had
[…] 5 Jewish children’s homes attending to 273 children. […]
With JDC’s assistance all children’s homes have been repaired and a large three-
storey building for 150 persons has been fully equipped. [Presumably, precisely
this building became the setting for Children’s Home No. 40 — G.E.] This house
has been provided with furniture, dishes, underwear, clothes, etc. In addition to this
all children’s houses received and continue to receive additional food rations. […]
Summer time all children were moved from cities to country places. [This finds
reflection in Sito’s narrative — G.E.] In winter the homes were well provided with
fuel.15

In his journey from an unspecified ‘shtetl’ to the ‘city’ specified through hints, Shraga lost his
luggage, including a book by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), the Swiss pioneer in
the care of deprived children:
Ven der tsug hot zikh shoyn gerirt, hot men zayn klumekl tseribn in a proshek.
Fun Pestalotsis ideyen hobn zikh nor kleyntshinke papir gevalgert in der
gedikhter blote, vi shitere shneyelekh infriling (pp. 8–9).
[No sooner had the train started moving, his little shoulder bag was grated into
powder [in the crowd’s squeeze]. Tiny pieces of paper were scattered in the thick
mud like remnants of Pestalozzi’s ideas, akin to rare snowflakes in spring.]
Thus, Pestalozzi had been symbolically jettisoned, because Soviet ideologists tended to shun
pre-revolutionary pedagogical theories. Anton Makarenko admitted once: ‘Nobody in my life
has required education from me. During the 16 years of my pedagogical work Soviet society
has been demanding that I should bring up and re-bring up. I am invoked by the country, by the
people — to revamp the natures [of children]’.16
Pioneering visionaries of Soviet pedagogy declared its cardinal distinctness from bourgeois
systems of education, emphasizing that Soviet teachers first and foremost focused on
overcoming the inherited differences of class society and creating conditions for formation of
the ideal member of the new socialist community. Even the term pedagogy was replaced with
pedology, the science that developed methods of transforming human nature during childhood.
Pedology, which emerged at the turn of the twentieth century as a field of research pursued
mainly by people trained in psychoanalysis, found enthusiastic supporters in the highest Soviet
political circles as well as among practising educators.17 Israel Yakhinson, one of the
enthusiasts, authored the Yiddish book Praktishe pedologye (Practical Pedology), published in
Kiev in 1929. Like Israel Shrayer, Israel Yakhinson and Henekh Kazakevich studied on the
Grodno Jewish Pedagogical Courses, which during the war were evacuated to Kharkov,
playing a significant role there in developing local Jewish schools.18
Soviet educators and publicists often considered former delinquents, raised and educated
communally under control of the state, as the perfect human material for Soviet citizenry. In
words of Svetlana Boym,
in the mid-1920s the pedagogical ideal was a reformed orphan, the former
homeless hooligan-besprizornik, a child of the Civil War turned into an exemplary
builder of communism. The orphanage or camp, of besprizorniks, a confined space
with full-time instruction and paramilitary discipline as described in the Soviet
collective Bildungsroman Republic Shkid, or later in Pedagogical Poem, turns into
a model socialist republic.19

Indeed, Sito clearly states the purpose of his book:

Ikh shrayb a bukh. Ikh hob zikh avekgeshtelt dem tsil bavayzn, viazoy di
oktyaber-revolyutsye hot gekent fun azelkhe shnekes, vi mir, makhn layt, boyer
funem nayem shteyger, funem nayem binyen, vos heyst sotsyalizm. Un oyb kh’vel
es dergreykhn, vet zayn gruba [oysgetseykhnt]! (p. 45, emphasis in original)
[I am writing a book. I have formulated for myself the objective to show how the
October revolution could turn such urchins as we were into respected people,
builders of the new life, of the new edifice whose name is Socialism. It’ll be great
if I succeed in doing it!]

Theories of communal child-rearing found their application in various ideological

environments. Thus, it prevailed also in the collective Zionist communities. The American
Yiddish writer Peretz Hirschbein, who visited Palestine in 1927, admired the kibbutzim, in
particular ‘the children’s homes at the communes, where the children were brought up to be at
home only in the atmosphere of a collective’.20 Indeed, since the earliest days of the kibbutz
movement, its activists had seen communal child-rearing as a major task for the whole
commune, reflecting the hope that properly raised children were the source of future success
and strength.21
In Sito’s book, numerous examples illustrate the difficult but, ultimately, invariably
successful transformation of a disobedient and unruly teenager into a committed Soviet citizen.
The author pays special attention to three pupils among the intake: Gera, Berl and Beylka.
Gera, characterized by Shraga as a ‘psychopathological individual’, does not in fact turn out to
be a particularly difficult case, because he soon reveals a talent for music (beginning to attend
lessons at the conservatory), and generally becomes a rather compliant pupil. In other words,
his success confirms the ideas circulating in early Soviet pedagogy that all children, including
deprived ones, have natural potential for creativity, and their talents can blossom under the
guidance of encouraging and supportive educators.22
Berl, on the other hand, typifies the idea, also in fashion in the 1920s, that even a hardened
child thief is essentially innocent. Thanks to Israel Shraga’s stoic patience, Berl, a former
delinquent, overcomes the kleptomania symptoms he developed when he was a waif. His
transformation becomes clearly visible when he does not want to be called a thief any more.
The chapter ‘Er veynt farn vort “ganev”’ (‘He cries when he hears the word “thief”’) describes
this formative moment in Berl’s transition into a proper young Soviet citizen (pp. 91–97).
Berl’s crisis contains an element of suffering: he has imposed on himself a three-week
abstinence from condensed milk and biscuits. This is his repentance for stealing the
corresponding quantities of provisions. An obstreperous boy who initially shirked collective
work and stole food at the children’s home, Berl finally turns into a deeply responsible
member of the collective and starts behaving in agreement with the slogan: ‘One for all, and all
for one’ (p. 58) — the formula of Soviet comradeship (recycled in the 1961 Moral Code of the
Builders of Communism), which stems from the motto of Alexandre Dumas’s three musketeers
rather than from Marx’s or Lenin’s treatises.
The children’s home gets condensed milk and biscuits from the American Relief
Administration (in the early 1920s, the JDC worked in Russia under the ARA’s auspices),
whose representative appears in the book as a comical figure. Berl calls him ‘der yold in a
kapelyush’, the moron with a hat.
Er iz gegangen ongeton in breyte gekestlte hoyzn biz di kni, in a kurts pidzhakl
mit farkaylekhdikte randn. Er hot getrogn a breyte hut un fun unter der hut hobn
aroysgekukt tsvey groyse beynerdike holoblyes fun briln. (p. 91–92)
[He sported broad knee-length checked trousers and a short jacket with round
lapels. He wore a broad-brimmed hat, from under which two big bone-made shafts
carried his glasses.]

Boys of the children’s home also got American suits — broad trousers similar to Ukrainian
sharovary, and short jackets with round lapels, akin to the jacket of the ARA’s men — which
looked outlandish in the streets of Kharkov (p. 93). A foreignly dressed person generally
caught the eye, compared with the general crowd who were outfitted rather pell-mell.
* * * * *
One day, when Shraga finds out that Gera had suggested to Berl they share the bed together, he
convenes a general meeting of all pupils to discuss this incident. It turns out that ‘di kinder
veysn shoyn fun a sakh zakhn, vos zey voltn nit gedarft visn’ (‘the children already know about
many things which they would better not know’, p. 59). The sexual ripening of the pupils piles
more pressure on Shraga and other teachers. Shraga’s prototype, Shrayer, summarized his and
his wife’s two-year experience at the Kharkov Children’s Home No. 40 in the paper ‘Sexual
Education in Children’s Home’, published in the third issue after the launch, in 1924, of the
Moscow monthly journal Af di vegn tsu der nayer shul (On the Ways to the New School). Both
Shrayer’s paper and Sito’s book contain descriptions of methods of sexual education based on
examples from flora and fauna. Children were particularly interested in the relationship that
developed before their eyes between two dogs whom they named Buket and Damka.
Many pupils at the children’s home had witnessed or experienced sexual harassment and
exploitation during their life on the street, therefore Shrayer/Shraga and other teachers had to
react to often cynical and even aggressive behaviour, particularly of teenage boys towards
girls. In Sito’s narrative, many pages are devoted to Berl, who became erotically attracted to
Beylka, an early-developed girl who dreamed to dance like Isadora Duncan, the American
wife of the Soviet Russian poet Sergei Esenin. (An early version of Beylka’s story came out in
the Kharkov journal Prolit with a dedication to ‘my friend and teacher Rachel Shrayer’.)23
Beylka initially rejected Berl’s advances outright, but changed her attitude somewhat when he
brought to their children’s home his non-Jewish protégé, Aksiusha — though Berl and
Aksiusha were not particularly keen on each other (pp. 127–31); rather, Berl simply wanted to
help the girl get away from her violent family.
In his paper, Shrayer focused on his and his colleagues’ attempts to fight the girls’ desire to
wear jewellery, ribbons and other adornments. The teachers explained to their pupils that all
these embellishments were associated with the behavioural ills, which had emerged in wild
tribes and continued to be cultivated in later periods of humankind’s development, notably in
the decaying bourgeois society, where women still thought it necessary to titivate their faces.
However, in the Soviet Union, with its gender equality, such things turned into redundant and
even harmful atavism.
The Soviet press of that time described style-conscious girls as reprobate members of
socialist society.24 Women’s appearance should be less important than who these women were.
David Bergelson, the foremost Soviet Yiddish writer, summed up the results of Soviet ‘women
building’, conducted in the 1920s: ‘Apart from its taste, each historical class dictates to the
surrounding [population] the meaning of beauty of its type of women. While the ruling classes
of feudal and capitalist societies tended to borrow the women cult from the ancient Greek or
Roman cultures, the working class does not need such a cult; it creates its own [standards].’25
According to the Soviet Yiddish poet Moyshe Pintshevski:
Di froy, VOS ir sheynkayt tut regn,
Oyb zi iz a faynd fun mayn shtrebn —
Ikh vel ir nit shenken keyn rege
Fun eyfer, fun libe, fun lebn!26
[The woman’s beauty may work wonders
[literally: cause rains],
But if she is a foe of my aspirations —
I’ll never spare a moment for her,
A moment of my jealousy, love or life!]
Gender equality served as the main platform to build the sexual education of younger children.
Shrayer spoke about one of the slogans of this education: ‘War on shame of the naked body!’
Until the age of 11 to 12, boys and girls slept in the same dormitory rooms and had baths
together. They were told to see themselves as brothers and sisters rather than boys and girls.27
In his book, Sito mentions the same methods of education (p. 116f). In the 1920s, Soviet
psychologists and educators generally actively discussed the problems of psychosexual
development of children and its associated sexual education.28 The idea of having the same
dormitory rooms for children had been most probably borrowed from the experience the
Malakhovka colony. Moyshe Taytsh, the veteran Yiddish author who after the revolution
actively participated in the proletarian literary movement, wrote (in the newspaper Pravda) in
praise of the Malakhovka colony’s tradition, according to which boys and girls aged up to 11
to 12 shared the same bedrooms. Older pupils would move, on their own initiative, to gender-
separate rooms. ‘It has been going this way since the establishment of the colony [in 1919] and
never coursed any complications in this respect’.29
* * * * *
The language (Yiddish), the personal names of the characters, and the special attention
bestowed on them by Soviet and foreign Jewish organizations are the main — if not the only —
distinguishing Jewish features of the Kharkov children’s home. Shraga aims at providing each
child with a square meal, but there is no mention of kosher food. Nor there is any allusion to
Jewish holidays or rituals. It seems that boys and girls have arrived at the children’s home
already completely separated from Jewish traditions. In any case, Sito’s narrative does not
touch on religious feelings or practice of his characters. To all appearances, Sito himself was
very distant from any forms of ‘outdated’ Jewish life. As the Yiddish literary historian Max
Erik, an immigrant to the Soviet Union from Poland, mordantly commented: ‘Far dem
bokherets hot dos yidishe folk biz der oktober-revolutsye bikhlal nisht ekzistirt’ (‘For this
young man, the Jews simply did not exist before the October revolution’).30 In fact, Sito did
recall the past in one of his early poems, but his recollections sounded rather nightmarish:
In bloyer ovntiker ru
dermonen zikh antrunene shoyn yorn.
Ot shvimt adurkh der nekhtn in an orn
un shtelt zikh op ba groyer shul…
Un s’shvimen durkh farlofene shoyn teg
farfoylte un farshimlte fun doyres
un s’shvimen durkh geshtaltn on an ek
un yogn on af mir a beyze moyre…31
[In blue evening’s quiet hour,
memories of bygone years appear.
Yesterday pops up, gliding in a casket,
and comes to rest at a grey synagogue…
In my mind, I see floating images of days long gone,
rotten and decayed many years ago,
an endless string of figures haunt
and fill me with horrible fear…]
Togetherness rather than ethnic-cum-religious apartness formed one of the most important
ingredients in the recipe of Soviet education. Shraga allows the non-Jewish girl Aksiusha, who
suffers from her stepmother’s ill-treatment, to stay at the children’s home, although she does not
know Yiddish, the main language used by the pupils and instructors. A non-Jewish pupil —
German boy — also appears in the Kushnirov’s 1925 story. It seems that some real, non-
fictional Jewish orphanages did have non-Jewish pupils. When the American prose writer
Joseph Opatoshu came to the Soviet Union in 1928, he visited Jewish orphanages where he
saw several Kazakh and Russian children, brought there from the Volga region; in the
environment of Jewish orphanages, they had turned into fluent Yiddish-speakers.32 Aksiusha,
too, assimilates the language very quickly.
Teachers such as the Shragas belonged to the small minority of pedagogues who worked at
children’s homes and did not become embittered by their extremely difficult pupils.33 Sito
describes a clash between two approaches to bringing up institutionalized children: Israel
Shraga and his wife Rachel (whom children call ‘Mother Rachel’, most probably without any
reference to the biblical mother Rachel) believe that they must attempt to replace them their
parents, whereas Hinda Murovana, a Civil War-seasoned communist who came to work as an
instructor after her demobilization from the Red Army, does not agree with their soft methods.
She ponders in her mind:
Di lererke Rokhl iz a muter, nit keyn dertsiern, un di kinder hobn zikh tsugevoynt
take tsu ir, vi tsu a muter, un Hinde Murovane vil keyn muter nit zayn. Vos zhe
blaybt? Farlozn dos kinderhoyz? Neyn, zi vet zikh onheybn krign mit der lererke
Rokhl un mitn lerer Yisroel, kemfn kegn di mishpokhe-zitn, velkhe dos porfolk vil
do aynfirn in kinderhoyz. […] Ba hundert kinder darf men nit zayn keyn tate-
mame, nor komandirn. Yo! Komandirn? […] Neyn, nit dos! Me darf zayn
khaveyrim, eltere khaveyrim. Nor dos aleyn? Veln zey dir dokh onheybn krikhn
afn kop! Zey veln dikh shpeter hern, vi dem koter! Darf men konen zayn i a mame,
i a komandir, i an elterer khaver. (p. 74)
…der lerer Shrage iz a modner mentsh! Alts kon er makhn […] Eyn zakh felt im
— shtrengkayt, menerishe shtrengkayt. (p. 76)
[Teacher Rachel is a mother rather than an educator, and the children had really
gotten used to her as to a mother, whereas Hinda Murovana does not want to act as
their mother. What is the way out for her? Should she leave the children’s home?
No, she will start quarrelling with teacher Rachel and teacher Israel, she will fight
against the family atmosphere which this couple strive to instil in the children’s
home. […] To deal with a hundred children one has to be a commander rather than
a father and mother. Yes, a commander. Really? […] No, this is not right! It is
important to be comrades, senior comrades. And that is all? They will take
advantage of you! They will pay no heed to you! Therefore one must be a mother, a
commander and a senior comrade at the same time.
… teacher Shraga is a strange person! He is able to do everything […] He lacks
only one thing — strictness, man’s strictness.]

Although the two teachers shared the Zeitgeist’s belief in educating a generation of builders of
Communism, they had grown up on very different cultural material, and quarrelled on
numerous occasions, each of them advocating fundamentally different approaches to organizing
children’s homes: Hinda clearly belonged to the school of such educators as Makarenko, who
paid special attention to military obedience and hard work, while Rachel’s free-spirit way
appears in Belykh and Panteleev’s book.34 In 1928, Makarenko made a widely publicized
break with the educational authorities and switched over to the State Political Directorate
(GPU), the secret police, which also played an important role in the sphere of institutions for
homeless children, but preferred stern methods of upbringing.35 In Sito’s narrative, the free-
spirit methods ultimately deliver the same result as the military ones: the children’s home has
successfully suppressed its pupils’ individualism and educated completely reliable members
of Soviet collectivist society.
One of the conflicts between Hinda and Rachel is triggered by a caricature in a children’s
journal brought by Yudka Grak, another ideologically charged instructor. The drawing showed
a Red Army soldier carrying a punched through body of a pot-bellied bourgeois on the bayonet
of his rifle (p. 77). While Hinda likes this caricature, Rachel is appalled that images of this
kind are being shown to children, arguing that such lurid pictures might provoke murderous
feelings in them. Hinda, however, thinks differently: ‘And why could it not provoke class
feelings?’ And she adds that ethic norms are irrelevant ‘at the time of class struggle battles’.
Still, Rachel holds her ground: she believes in other ways of explaining class struggle to little
children (p. 78).
The average percentage of party members among workers in children’s homes was higher
than in ordinary schools. This had to do with the fact that children’s homes were, as a rule,
new institutions and therefore had a lower number of pre-revolutionary teachers.36 The Shragas
belonged to the old cadre of educators and, as such, played only a minor (if any) role in the
communist education of the children. It was Yudka Grak, an active member of the Young
Communist League, who discussed with the pupils political problems and encouraged them to
join the Spartak (Spartacus) Young Pioneers Organization. Yudka explained that the name,
Spartacus, only indirectly related to the Roman gladiators’ uprising. Rather, it referred to the
Spartacus League (Spartakusbund), established during World War I by Karl Liebknecht and
Rosa Luxemburg.37 Yudka also told his wards that one day a member of their organization
might be dispatched to Berlin or Paris with an assignment to deliver, for example, a red banner
to young foreign communists. This triggered Berl’s fantasy, imagining himself as a
representative of his Spartacus comrades on a dangerous mission to Berlin (pp. 105–06).
Ultimately, in three years after the establishment of the children’s home, the Shragas had to
leave it. Sito cites from Shraga’s diary:
Di teg hot mikh Levman a freg geton:
‘Shrage, far vos zayt ir nit keyn komunist?’
‘Vos den?’
‘Mir hobn nit lang geshmuest mit Murovane vegn aykh in partey-komitet.’
* * *
[…] Shver zikh tsesheydn mitn kinderhoyz… (p. 141)
[The other day, Levman [an official at the Department of Education] asked me
suddenly:
‘Shraga, why are you not a member of the [Communist] party?’
 ‘Why are you asking me?’
‘We recently spoke with Mirovana about you at [a meeting] of the party
committee’.
* * *
[…] It’s hard to part with the children’s home…]

It is clear that Shraga’s work has been well appreciated by the Department of Education and
even by the indomitable, ideologically besotted Hinda Murovana. Still, it is not clear if he
agrees to apply for party membership. A letter from the Department instructs him to find job
placements for senior pupils and to dispatch junior pupils to a children’s colony. With that,
Shraga’s mission has been accomplished and a new job is waiting for him and his wife (p.
137).
In the final part of the book the Shragas are inundated with letters from their former pupils,
many of them addressing the Shragas as their father and mother. One of the former pupils
writes about the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre and that she liked their performance:
Yo, ikh hob gezen dem lebedikn artist, vos shpilt dem Hotsmakh. Mikhoels heyst
er, un khotsh er iz a nideritshker, a mieser, mit a startshendiker untershter lip un
platshiker noz, mit a groysn lisn shtern, nor vayl er iz aza kolozaler artist, volt
ikh mayn gants lebn ayngeshteltfar im. (169)
Yes, I saw the actor performing on the stage Hotsmakh [in Abraham Goldfaden’s
The Sorceress]. Mikhoels is his name. He is certainly shortish in height, ugly, with a
pouting lower lip and a wide and flat nose, with a big bald forehead, but he is such
a colossal actor that I would give up my life for him.

The longest letter arrives from Berl, who works at a factory, where he and his friend, also a
former delinquent, invent a new, more rational system for producing cloth. Meanwhile, his and
Beylka’s love story moves to a happy end. And, most importantly, he becomes a member of the
Communist party. Sito himself joined the party in 1940; from 1939, members of intelligentsia
had a better chance of acquiring Party membership, while previously the Party was
predisposed to take in real toilers.38
* * * * *
In comparison with Kinderhoyz 40, the novel These Are Us contains more ‘ideologically
correct’ details purported to ‘explain’ the success of the children’s home headed by Shraga.
For instance, in the extended version a significant role is allocated to (predominantly non-
Jewish) workers of a local factory who take the children’s home under their patronage. Berl
ultimately joins the proletarian collective of this Soviet enterprise that could be, for instance,
the Tiniakov Clothes Factory, established in Kharkov in 1920 on the basis of workshops,
which produced military uniforms during World War I and employed hundreds of Jewish
refugees from the front zone. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, this factory even published its
own Yiddish newspaper, Shtolene nodl (Steel Needle), with a print-run of 1500.39
The 1940 edition of These Are Us is shorter than the 1932 version, mainly because it lacks
all the sections related to sex education, which by that time had vanished from Soviet schools
and been deemed worthless or even harmful within the family. In general, family values began
to be praised by the Soviet media, whereas free love relations, rather common in the early
Soviet period, were discouraged. Soviet writers, including Yiddish ones, did not miss the
opportunity to criticize such disorganized forms of relations, in particular blaming them for
increasing the number of children deserted by their parents.40 All in all, Soviet ideologists
turned to conservative values, praising sexual modesty and stable, ideologically sound
families, able to raise their offspring in a proper manner. In July 1936, the Communist Party’s
Central Committee issued a directive exonerating pedagogy and defining pedology as a harmful
pseudo-science, which paid too much attention to children’s social and genealogical history.41
’The city has just recovered from the strange typhus illness’ — this is how the first chapter,
‘Autumn’, starts in the 1932 edition. Eight years on, new paragraphs precede this phrase:
Heymland-ratnmakht!
Vi sheyn zaynen dayne vinter-nekht! […]
Vi sheyn zaynen dayne zumer-nekht, ratnmakht-heymland! Der veykher yuni
loyft arum iber dayne breyte urkainishe stepes. Der flamiker yuli shpilt zikh in
dayn ongeglitn azye-zamd, shpiglt zikh in dayne vaser, fun bargikn Terek un kaltn
Neva-taykh un farnakht farbloyt er dayne himlen mit a durkhzikhtik-nepldikn
shlayer…
[Homeland — Soviet State!
How beautiful your winter nights are! […]
How beautiful your summer nights, Soviet State — Homeland! Mild June runs
around your wide Ukrainian steppes. Flaming July plays in your scorching Asian
sands, gazes at itself in your waters, from the mountainous Terek River to the cold
Neva River, and in the evening covers your skies with a translucent, misty veil,
colouring them blue…]

The style of this addition clearly echoes Nikolai Gogol’s poetic lines: ‘Lovely is the Dnieper
in tranquil weather when, freely and smoothly, its waters glide through forests and
mountains’.42 (Like many former Soviet people of my generation, I still remember some parts
of this text, from Gogol’s Evenings on a Farmstead near Dikanka, which we had to memorize
as an assignment for Russian literature classes.) It did not mean, however, that by the end of the
1930s a writer such as Sito could forget one of the tenets advanced by Soviet critics in the
1920s: literary descriptions of landscape and climate should serve the revolution.43 Indeed,
Sito’s patriotic landscape description served the revolution. ‘Patriotism’, a taboo word till the
mid-1930s in the country of the international proletarian solidarity, became a buzzword in
Soviet public discourse.
The 1940 edition of Cito’s book came out when Jewish children’s homes became obsolete
in the Soviet Union. Moreover, Jewish (Yiddish-language) educational institutions had been
phased out in the European part of the country in 1938, enduring only in the Jewish
Autonomous Region (Birobidzhan). Numerous schools did, though, emerge in 1939 and 1940
in the territories gained by the Soviet Union following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The
children’s newspaper Zay greyt (Be Ready), launched in Kharkov in 1928, appeared for a
decade three times a month, but finally was closed down. In August 1939, the first issue of the
monthly journal Zay greyt came out in Kiev, edited by Sito. Previously, from 1935 he edited
the monthly Oktyaberl (Child of October), but it closed in 1939. It is known that during World
War II Sito served in the army press and then as a staff writer at Eynikayt (Unity), the
newspaper of the Moscow-based Jewish Antifascist Committee.
On 6 July 1944, Eynikayt published an obituary of Israel Shrayer, who died aged 62 in
Karaganda, Kazakhstan. The obituary note emphasized that Shrayer began to work in Yiddish
schools before the revolution and that the Children’s Home No. 40, established and headed by
him, turned into one of the exemplary institutions of this kind in Ukraine. The note was signed
by a score of Yiddish writers, critics and scholars, including David Bergelson, Leyb Kvitko,
Peretz Markish, Itsik Fefer, Joseph Kotlyar and Fayvl Sito. A year later, on 22 September
1945, Eynikayt published an obituary of Fayvl Sito.
Sito’s book These Are Us is a relic of Soviet Yiddish literature. It is hard to pigeonhole it as
a book for adolescents or on adolescents; cleansing of sex-related segments in the second
edition apparently made the book better suitable for younger children. In any case, one can
presume that it had various readers, depending on the period and on the language of its
publication. The copy of the 1932 edition, which I loaned for this research from the University
of Oxford’s Taylorian Library, previously belonged to the Whitechapel Library in London, and
still carries a date due slip inside it, with numerous stamps reflecting its popularity among the
library patrons in the 1950s and 1960s. It seems that the book represented a good read for
Yiddish-speaking Londoners, presumably not teenagers. Yet (middlebrow) literary qualities of
this book aside, it contains revealing material on child-rearing theories and practice of the
1920s and 1930s, when the Soviet Union boasted hundreds of Yiddish educational institutions,
including the Kharkov children’s home portrayed by Sito.
Notes to Chapter 9
1. ‘Report on Kharkov, 5 September 1923’, JDC Archives, item 356242, p. 2.
2. ‘Jewish Children Care in Russia, 12 December 1922’, JDC Archives, item 353947.
3. ‘Vystavka “Evobshchestkoma”’, Izvestiia, 2 August 1923, 5.
4. See, e.g., Borekh Shvartsman, ‘Tsvey yor arbet in Malakhovker kinder-kolonye’, Der emes, 5 April 1922, 2; Horodoker
[Tsodek Dolgopolski], ‘Malakhovker kinder-kolektiv’, Der emes, 21 October 1922, 2; B. M. ‘D. Levin, “Desiat’ vagonov”’,
Literaturnaia gazeta, 28 February 1934, 3; Evgeni Binevich, ‘A lebediker denkmol’, Sovetish heymland, 5 (1978), 148–
54; Daniela Mantovan, ‘Pedagogia e rivoluzione. La “Republica dei Ragazz” di Malakhovka (1919–1939)’, Quaderni di
Palazzo Serra, 24 (2014), 279–308.
5. Fayvl Sito, Ot dos zaynen mir (Kharkov and Kiev: Melukhe-farlag far di natsyonale minderhaytn in ussr, 1932); idem,
Nachinalas’ zhizn’; Sen’ka Gorobets, moi luchshii priiatel’ (Kiev: Derzhvidav, 1938); idem, Ot dos zaynen mir (Kiev:
Melukhe-farlag far di natsyonale minderhaytn in ussr, 1940); idem, Nachinalas’ zhizn’: povesti i rasskazy (Moscow:
Sovetskii pisatel’, 1958).
6. Hersh Smolyar, Fun ineveynik: zikhroynes vegn der ‘Yevsektsye’ (Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz, 1978), PP. 155, 177; Tevie
Gen, ‘Ego liubili’, in Vospominaniia o Em. Kazakeviche (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1985), p. 39.
7. Galina A. Ostrovatikova, ‘Svoeobrazie real’nogo i khudozhestvennogo v povesti G. Belykh i L. Panteleeva “Respublika
Shkid”’, in Russkaia literatura v sovremennom prostranstve (Tomsk: Tomsk State Pedagogical University, 2007), II, pp.
45–49.
8. Here and further on references to Sito, Ot dos zaynen mir, 1932.
9. ‘European War: Expulsions’, American Jewish Year Book, 18 (1916), 194–95.
10. Israel (Yisroel) Shrayer, ‘Seksuele dertsiung in kinderhoyz’, Af di vegn tsu der nayer shul, 3 (1924), 37–40.
11. ‘Yisroel Shrayer’ (obituary), Eynikayt, 6 July 1944, p. 4.
12. Benjamin Pepper, ‘The Miracle of Ekaterinoslav, December 1923’, JDC Archives, item 357293, p. 41.
13. Deborah Hope Yalen, ‘Red Kasrilevke: Ethnographies of Economic Transformation of the Soviet Shtetl, 1917–1939’
(unpublished doctoral thesis, University of California, 2007), pp. 76–124.
14. Gennady Estraikh, ‘The Kharkiv Yiddish Literary World, 1920s-Mid-1930s’, East European Jewish Affairs, 32 (2) (2002),
70–89.
15. ‘Report on Kharkov, 5 September 1923’, pp. 2–3.
16. Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova and Pavel Romanov, ‘Institutional Child Care in Soviet Russia: Everyday Life in the Children’s
Home “Krasnyi Gorodok” in Saratov, 1920s–1940s’, in Need and Care: Glimpses into the Beginnings of Eastern
Europe’s Professional Welfare, ed. by Kurt Schilde and Dagmar Schulte (Opladen and Bloomfield Hills: Barbara Budrich
Publishers, 2005), pp. 91–122.
17. Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997),
p. 5.
18. Abraham Golomb, A halber yorhundert yidishe dertsiung (Rio de Janeiro: Monte Skopus, 1957), p. 52.
19. Svetlana Boym, Common Places. Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MT, and London: Harvard
University Press, 1994), p. 91. See also Vladimir Zemzinov, Deserted: The Story of the Children Abandoned in Soviet
Russia (Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1975), pp. 33–34.
20. Peretz Hirschbein, Shvartsbrukh: tsen khadoshim mit di yidishe ibervanderer in ratnfarband (Vilna: Vilner farlag fun
B. Kletzkin, 1930), pp. 239–41.
21. Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi and Albert I. Rabin, ‘The Kibbutz as a Social Experiment and as a Child-Rearing Laboratory’,
American Psychologist, 32 (7) (1977), 533.
22. Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing up in Russia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 140.
23. Fayvl Sito, ‘Isidore-Beylke Dunkan’, Prolit, 8–9 (1928), 5–11.
24. See Olga Gurova, ‘Veshchi v sovetskoi kul’ture’, in Liudi i veshchi v sovetskoi i postsovetskoi kul’ture, ed. by Olga G.
Echevskaia et al. (Novosibirsk: Novosibirsk State University, 2005), pp. 7–11.
25. David Bergelson, ‘Khaverte Bronye’, Shtern, 2 (1933), 12.
26. Moyshe Pintshevsky, Fun friling biz friling (Kiev: Ukrmelukhenatsmind, 1936), p. 84.
27. Cf. with a similar trend among Zionist educators: David Biale, ‘Zionism as an Erotic Revolution’, in People of the Body:
Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective, ed. by Howard Elberg-Schwartz (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1992), p. 301.
28. Igor S. Kon, The Sexual Revolution in Russia: From the Age of the Czars to Today (New York: The Free Press, 1995),
pp. 75–76; A. M. Pushkarev, ‘Tema polovogo prosveshcheniia v diskurse pedagogicheskoi i didakticheski-vospotatel’noi
literatury 1920-kh gg.’, Nauchnye vedomosti Belgorodskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta: Istoriia. Politologiia.
Ekonomika. Informatika, 1 (2007), 80–86; O. B. Petrenko, ‘Vira Shmidt i seksual’ne vykhovannia ditei v Radians’kii
Rossii’, Sotsial’na pedahohika: teoriia ta praktyka, 4 (2011), 100–07.
29. Moyshe Taytsh, ‘B. Shvartsman (evreiskaia detskaia koloniia v Malakhovke)’, Pravda, 23 May 1923, 4.
30. Esther Rosenthal-Shneiderman, Oyf vegn un umvegn (Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz, 1978), II, p. 212.
31. Fayvl Sito, ‘In bloyer ovntiker ru…’, Yunger boy-klang, 3 (1927), 31.
32. Gennady Estraikh, ‘Soviet Dreams of a Cultural Exile’, in Joseph Opatoshu: A Yiddish Writer between Europe and
America (Oxford: Legenda, 2013), p. 42.
33. Cf. Ekaterina Kuskova, ‘Besprizornaia Rus’, Otechestvennye zapiski, 40 (1929), 533–34.
34. Marina Balina, ‘“It’s Grand to be An Orphan!”: Crafting Happy Citizens in Soviet Children’s Literature of the 1920s’, in
Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style, ed. by Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko (London and New York: Anthem
Press, 2011), pp. 99–100.
35. Margaret K. Stolee, ‘Homeless Children in the USSR, 1917–1957’, Soviet Studies, 40 (1) (1988), 73.
36. Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (London: Routledge
Falmer, 2001), pp. 52–53.
37. In 1924, all the Spartak groups were united under the name of Vladimir Lenin Pioneer Organization.
38. Oleg V. Zolotaryov, ‘Intelligentsiia: sovetskie gody’, Intelligentsiia i mir, 4 (2012), 44–56.
39. Gennady Estraikh, Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1996), p. 74.
40. Gennady Estraikh, ‘Khana Levin’s Verdict to Free Love’, in Yiddish Poets and the Soviet Union, ed. by Daniela
Mantovan (Heidelberg: Winter, 2012), pp. 87–94; see also Zemzinov, Deserted, p. 83.
41. ‘Razoblachenie pedologicheskoi lzhenauki’, Pravda, 5 July 1936, 1.
42. The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), I, p. 160.
43. Valerii V’iugin, ‘“Kakaia byla pogoda v epokhu Grazhdanskoi voiny?”: klimaticheskaia metafora v sotsrealizme’, Novoe
literaturnoe obozrenie, 108 (2011), 59.

 CHAPTER 10

‘A Language Is Like a Garden’: Shloyme Davidman and

the Yiddish Communist School Movement in the United
States
Jennifer Young

In a short story published in the Yiddish monthly Der funk (Spark), Shloyme Davidman tells
the story of a young boy named Motl at the communist summer camp, Kinderland (Children’s
Camp). Motl catches a bird and keeps it in a cage, but he forgets to put a blanket on the cage
one cold night, and the bird dies. However, the counsellor turns Motl’s mistake into a larger
learning opportunity, telling him, ‘Motl, pioneers, workers and children don’t cry. We are
carrying out a struggle, and when we lead the world, all will be free, a soviet world, where
we will make warm houses for all of the birds … ‘.1 The highly didactic tone of Davidman’s
story was typical of Yiddish communist pedagogy at the time. In Davidman’s stories, children
learned important moral messages, imparted by adult authority figures, which represented a
rigid social reality and a firm teleology: children, like adults, struggled under their current
conditions, but, if they worked together, children and adults together could have a brighter
future, like those in the Soviet Union.
As Julia Mickenberg has noted in her book Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature,
the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States, many radicals saw children as the
logical outlet for their utopian vision, and therefore chose to write books and stories with a left
wing bent, specifically for them. Leftists often turned to children as their last hope, especially
as the leftists became disillusioned with political organizations like the Communist Party. Left-
wing authors saw children’s literature as a way to link generations and to sustain cultural and
political sensibilities; they harnessed the potency of imagination, idealism, a sense of wonder,
and a commitment to justice within their writing so as to inculcate in children these
sensibilities. While children’s literature is traditionally understood as a force supporting the
dominant, bourgeois status quo, an entire corpus of left-wing children’s literature, in many
languages, emerged in the US during the Cold War era.2 This literature in Yiddish remains
largely unexplored, despite its extensive volume. Left-wing Yiddish children’s literature
comprises dozens of journals, hundreds of books and stories, and, beyond the printed page, the
performance history of the thousands of plays, musicals, and pageants performed in afternoon
schools and summer camps. These materials reveal important aspects of Yiddish communist
culture, not the least of which is the way that it shaped several generations of American Jews,
orienting them towards specific value systems, loyalties, and projects that would influence
their future life choices and trajectories.
 While he is almost entirely unknown today, Shloyme Davidman (1900–1974) was a prolific
author of stories for children, adolescents and adults learning Yiddish. Many of his stories are
framed as anecdotes from his years as a teacher in the shules, or afternoon schools, of the
Jewish left; some are sketches of daily life featuring children, workers and working-class
heroes such as the pioneers of Birobidzhan or ‘Comrade Lenin’. By examining Shloyme
Davidman’s prose in the context of his life history — his politics, challenges, ambitions and
colleagues — we gain a better understanding of his role in the production of communist
Yiddish culture; of the role that communist Yiddish culture played in post-war political
movements; and of the complicated dynamics of cultural and political transmission, as Yiddish
transformed from a vernacular language to a post-vernacular culture.
Shloyme Davidman was born in 1900 in Mogilev-Podolsk, in the Bessarabian region of the
Russian empire. His father, Yisroel, was a dayan, or rabbinic judge, and a book merchant, but
the meagre income from both jobs was not enough to support his family of eight. Davidman
received a traditional education, attending kheyder until the age of 13. He also learned Talmud
with his father, and studied modern Hebrew and Russian at a state school. Shloyme’s father
would read Yiddish literature to his children when they were sick, and young Shloyme
developed an early appreciation for modern Yiddish literature.3
In 1914, Shloyme joined his first workers’ organization, becoming secretary of a youth
group called Bney Tsion, the Sons of Zion. This group cultivated its Yiddishist inclinations by
stocking a Yiddish library and set themselves in opposition to two other youth groups, Bnoys-
Tsion (Daughters of Zion) and Hatikvah (the Hope), both of which functioned in Hebrew and
Russian and repudiated Yiddish. In 1916, Shloyme moved to Odessa to work in a factory, and
soon got involved in the revolutionary activities sweeping the city, briefly joining the Labour
Zionists. In 1919, Davidman volunteered for the Red Army and served for nine months in the
International Division, working to defend Jewish communities against pogroms in Ukraine.4 He
later told his daughter that one of the most important things he learned from this experience was
the idea that ‘goyim (non-Jews) are workers too’; for the first time, Davidman realized that not
only Jews fought oppressive conditions.5 Thus, the way to change conditions for the better for
Jews was to change the entire system for everyone.
Davidman began writing in his late teens; in 1918, he published his first book of poetry,
Benkenish (Longing). He kept a diary during his time in the Army, portions of which he later
published in New York. In 1920, Davidman immigrated to the United States, along with most
of his family. In a familiar chain migration pattern, family members already in the US paved the
way for others to join them, helping those seeking better prospects after years of economic and
political upheaval. Although he had creative ambitions, Davidman was compelled to work at a
series of jobs to make ends meet; he initially worked at a grocery store, and later pressed
shirts in a laundry. He adapted his political consciousness to his new environment, becoming
an active member of Local 280 of the Shirt Pressers Union. In 1921–22, he published several
poems and children’s stories in Di yidisher velt (Jewish World), a Philadelphia Yiddish
newspaper, while working at a chicken slaughterhouse and studying English at night school in
New York. He later recalled that this was a period of impatience for him — after having
witnessed the revolution while still living in Russia, he was restless and not content to merely
sit back and accept the soulless drudgery of the American workforce under capitalism.6
 In 1922, the left-wing pro-Soviet Yiddish daily Frayhayt (Freedom) was launched, co-
edited by Moyshe Olgin (1878–1939), a veteran Russian revolutionary, teacher and writer who
was considered the intellectual guiding light of the American Yiddish Communist circles.
Davidman had venerated Olgin since his youth and was elated when, after submitting his first
story to Frayhayt, he received a handwritten acceptance letter from Olgin himself. Under
Olgin’s influence, Davidman began to develop his own, particular style. Olgin later praised
Davidman’s prose as ‘belletristic reportage’, noting that he was one of the first to cultivate that
style of proletarian literature, and, perhaps dryly, observed that Davidman’s language was
‘clear, although not very rich’.7 Davidman did not define himself primarily as a writer, but as a
proletarian cultural activist — an arbeter-shrayber-lerer (worker-writer-teacher) and kultur-
tuer (cultural activist). His colleague Ber Grin characterized his activities as shrayberish-
lererish-gezelshaftlekhe tetikayt (‘writerly-teacherly-social activity’); in keeping with his
political commitments, writing was not an isolated art form, but an instrument of social,
cultural and political transformation.8
In 1924, Davidman co-founded the Yung Arbeter-Shrayber Fareyn (Young Worker-Writer’s
Union), and its journal Yung-kuznye (Young Smith). At the same time, he joined the Communist
Party.9 Contrasting themselves with ‘professional’ writers, Davidman and his colleagues
sought to establish a new identity for American Yiddish proletarian literature. Their manifesto
in Yung-kuznye identifies the main aspects of this new literature: although the Yiddish literary
press in the US concentrated on the question of the relationship between the writer and the
reader, mainstream Yiddish authors could not engage with the tens of thousands of young
Jewish workers recently arrived from Europe. These workers did not read the journals
published in New York, as those publications did not accurately reflect their reality as
workers. Yung-kuznye would be different from existing journals, the authors claimed, since the
journal would reflect the experiences of war, revolution and pogroms as these experiences
affected the psychic realities of young workers in America. The writers of Yung-Kuznye were
not professional literati with ready-made clichés, but flesh and blood labourers, who worked
all day and quenched their creative thirst by writing at night.10
Davidman’s work from his first decade in the United States, from Ershte trit (First Steps,
1925) and Motele fun dorf ‘IKOR’ un khaver Lenin (Motele from IKOR Village and Comrade
Lenin, 1927), to a collection of stories he published with Max Perlow, Geknipte ritlekh
(Knotted Twigs, 1928), all contain political themes he would maintain in his later writings: the
community that develops among close political associates; dedication to a cause; criticism of
capitalism; and optimism for a socialist future. It was at this time, however, that a significant
portion of his work began to focus on children and proletarian constructions of childhood.
Davidman’s dedication to producing work for children grew out of two factors: in 1927, he
married Anna Ruff, who subsequently gave birth to his two children, Yisroel (often referred to
by his nicknames, Srulik or ‘Blackie’), and Bernice (also known as Khayke), who would often
serve as characters or framing devices in his stories. At the same time, Davidman began a
course of study through the Jewish labour and fraternal organization Workmen’s Circle
(Arbeter Ring in Yiddish) to gain certification as a Yiddish teacher, while continuing to work
in shops and at manual labour. From this point on, Davidman devoted himself to his work as a
shule (secular Jewish school) teacher and children’s writer, placing education at the centre of
his cultural and political work.
After receiving his teaching certificate in 1926, Davidman joined the left-wing faction of
Workmen’s Circle when it split off later that year to form the Umparteyishe Kindershuln (Non-
Partisan Children’s Schools). This group considered Workmen’s Circle to have betrayed
working-class Jews by focusing insufficiently on both workers’ rights and proletarian Yiddish
culture; they wished to model the revolutionary example of the Soviet Union and the American
Communist Party. Davidman taught in the Umparteyishe Kindershuln for the rest of the 1920s.
In addition to the Umparteyishe schools, the left-wing faction of Workmen’s Circle also
established Camp Kinderland in Sylvan Lake, New York, where Davidman would work for
many years. The desire for a left wing children’s camp came from the parents themselves, who
sought not only a healthy place away from the city for their children to spend the summer, but
wished for a politically salubrious environment to continue shule education — as the motto at
the time proclaimed, ‘From shule to camp and from camp to shule’.11 They sought to build a
network of institutions that could mutually reinforce, support and insulate their political
experiment.
Kinderland was the centre of Davidman’s cultural and pedagogical universe — the source of
unlimited creative inspiration, and simultaneously the ultimate market for his products, where
he himself achieved a measure of celebrity. Davidman’s reportedly most popular book was his
collection of stories about life amongst fifteen campers at Kinderland, Bongelo no. 25,
inspired by Fayvl Sito’s work about children in an orphanage in Soviet Russia.12 Originally
published as a series in Der funk in 1931, the stories were then published as a book in 1937.
These stories are fundamentally didactic, and are clearly marked by the pervasive ideological
tone of 1930s political content, especially in its focus on Leninist Marxism. Davidman
introduces the reader to each boy in his bunk, and tells an anecdote characterizing his
background, outlook and relationship to the camp. One trenchant example of the moralizing
tone of these stories is that story of Mori: Mori must study in a Talmud-Torah (a religious
school), because he has no father and his grandmother looks after him. Mocking his fellow
Talmud-Torah pupils praying (davenen), Mori rolls his eyes and rocks from side to side
(shokln), in the manner of a religious man praying. The narrator intervenes to remark to the
reader: ‘What, children, you don’t know what davenen is? There are Jews who believe that in
the sky there sits a God who controls the world. People pray to him. They rock and say: God,
please be good to us! And they really think, such fools, that he helps. But we already know that
there is no God in heaven. We must overthrow the bad people, the capitalists, who now rule us,
like they did in the Soviet Union.’13 This overt critique of religion continues in a following
story, that of ‘Pee Wee’, who left his hat at home: ‘Mister Khaver (Mr. Comrade), I forgot to
bring my hat from home, so how will I daven every day?’, the child asks. ‘We don’t daven
here’, the counsellor informs him. ‘We don’t?’ the student asks. ‘Yay, gut!’ he exclaims
joyfully. The counsellor follows up this conversation by holding a bunk meeting with the
campers that night, explaining that the bosses want the workers to believe in a god in heaven,
so that they shouldn’t see clearly what happens on earth.14 Intending to counter religious
influences in the home, Davidman’s material worked in tandem with Kinderland’s overarching
goals of replacing religious Jewish life with a communist, national Jewish life. The ideal
reader of these stories, one that Davidman tried to mould though both literature and pedagogy,
had already been exposed to the notion that religion and capitalism were wrong and that a
workers’ revolution was right; it was nevertheless a message to be reinforced and
communicated socially throughout the camps and shules, in order to take hold firmly.
In March 1930, the Umparteyishe Kindershuln and Kinderland leaders, as well as a number
of prominent Communists, came together to form a new organization, the International Workers
Order (IWO). The IWO would occupy the same role in Jewish life as Workmen’s Circle: as a
fraternal organization, it offered low-cost health, life and burial insurance. It also promoted
radical, secular, Yiddish culture. Although founded initially as a purely Jewish organization,
the IWO sought to maximize its reach by amalgamating with other left-wing immigrant groups
— a Hungarian fraternal order joined first, in 1931, followed by Slovaks, Russians, Italians,
Puerto Ricans, Finns and others. The IWO eventually grew to encompass fourteen different
ethnic and racial sections, although its Jewish section, later named the Jewish People’s
Fraternal Order (JPFO), remained the largest, with about 50,000 members at its peak in 1947.
The IWO reached a peak membership of almost 200,000 at this time, making it the largest left-
wing fraternal group in the United States.15
The IWO encouraged ethnic identification among its members, not only among the foreign-
born, but among second and third generation Americans as well. They levelled a critique of
capitalism as forcing assimilation on immigrants and working-class people as the price for
citizenship and integration into American society. At the same time, they sponsored dances,
spaghetti dinners, pageants, youth clubs, folk dance troupes and mandolin orchestras for local
lodges and neighbourhood committees, promoting a populist message of proletarian solidarity.
They also bitterly fought the role of religion in public life, especially parochial schools.
Owing to their internecine battles with Workmen’s Circle, they also strenuously criticized
socialism.
In order to compete with Workmen’s Circle shules and promote their own brand of radical
pedagogy, the IWO’s Jewish section (JPFO) leaders worked strenuously to build a national
network of Yiddish schools. By 1935, the JPFO operated 144 children’s schools. The majority
of them ran as afternoon schools, which met two afternoons a week after the end of the public
school day, and for the majority of one day over the weekend. There were up to fifty schools in
New York City; twelve in Chicago; twelve in Philadelphia; ten in Boston; seven in Detroit; six
in Los Angeles; and others in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Baltimore. When the
shules opened, the initial enrolment across all schools was approximately one thousand; at its
peak in the late 1930s to mid 1940s, the schools claimed nationwide enrolment of about 6,000
students.16 Davidman became an active educator and travelling lecturer within this school
movement.
In their work as JPFO shule educators, Davidman and his colleagues followed a strict
pedagogical model that sought to correct the educational problems that they felt would result
from the education provided by public schools, civic associations and popular culture, which,
though supposedly secular and non-partisan, in the opinion of Davidman and his cohort,
nevertheless supported the capitalist system and its religious holidays and symbols. The IWO’s
school curriculum plan for the early 1930s stated that parents who sent their children to
yeshivas and other nationalistic schools poisoned their children with religion, oppression,
national hate and racial segregation.17 The Boy Scouts were also singled out for
disapprobation for their militarism, which was to the mind of Davidman and his colleagues
rooted in American patriotic chauvinism. Furthermore, American popular culture itself was
suspect, as its cheap movies and yellow journalism inculcated the false notion of the
‘American dream’ of hard work and opportunity resulting in success and material comfort.18
The JPFO’s pedagogues argued that only the JPFO shules could prepare working-class
children to take a strong, active role in the working class and could unite working-class
children with working class parents. Working-class immigrants, coping with their own losses
of home, country and culture, feared losing their children to the values of the ruling class —
exploitation, oppression and chauvinism. By stressing the unity of the working class, especially
across generations, JPFO leaders believed they could transmit their strongly held values to
their children and thereby do their own part to build a revolutionary movement — the dream of
a ‘Soviet America’.
The JPFO’s proletarian pedagogy is clearly laid out in the textbook published in 1930 for
use in their schools. Kinder — farn tsveytn lernyor (Children — For Second Grade),
compiled by Bezalel Friedman and Devoyre Tarant, is representative of the movement’s
Yiddish curriculum at this time, and of an idealized version of working-class culture that
strives to unite children and parents in the struggle for class solidarity. The first story in the
book narrates the various boys’ activities over the summer holidays: Leybl went to visit his
uncle, a farmer in the Catskills, while Yankl was able to spend the whole summer at Camp
Kinderland. Arn and Motl, however, had to stay in the city, since their fathers were
unemployed. They entertained themselves by bathing in the water from fire hydrants, a rare
pleasure in the hot sun, especially since Arn and Motl had no showers in their homes. The
textbook also includes a number of items related to education on Soviet themes, including a
poem about the merits of the hammer and the sickle, and several short articles on the
anniversary of the October Revolution, the Five Year Plan, and the Red Army. The book’s only
explicitly Jewish content are several articles describing Birobidzhan, the Jewish territory in
the Far East of Russia (from 1934 — Jewish Autonomous Region) and fundraising efforts on
its behalf in the US. In a section comparing the comparatively high quality of life in the Soviet
Union with the lower quality of life attained in United States, the textbook contains articles
such as ‘When a Worker Becomes Old’, and stories relating to the hardships faced by parents
who were unemployed or were on strike. The article ‘For Whom Will Father Vote?’ describes
a child who is asked by his public school teacher which party his father would vote for,
Democrats or Republicans. The father replies to his son’s question that, as a worker, he would
vote for the Communist Party. The textbook concludes with a section devoted to non-Jewish
American working-class heroes, from the Haymarket martyrs to Eugene Victor Debs, Sacco
and Vanzetti, and Ella Mae Wiggins. Struggling to free children from the false mythology of
Judaism, and pledging to rid them of chauvinism and prejudice, textbooks and other JPFO
shule materials from this time clearly intend to create a new set of icons and orthodoxies — in
order to raise the consciousness of the worker and working-class children, in order to build a
revolutionary movement that will fulfil the dream in one of the textbook’s stories: ‘Hurray! No
More Bosses in America.’19
In January 1935, the JPFO founded its own Yiddish pedagogical journal, Proletarishe
dertsiung (Proletarian Education). Proclaiming their adherence to Lenin’s dictum that ‘there is
no such thing as apolitical education’,20 the journal proclaimed its pedagogical aims: teaching
not only knowledge and language, but also shaping the consciousness of the child so that he
would become an active agent in the struggle of his class. In subsequent issues, the journal
tackled the question of the role of Yiddish for the Jewish worker. Attacking ‘Yiddishists’ for
their advocacy of culture for its own sake, rather than as an instrument of class struggle, one
author argued that Yiddish proletarian culture must serve as the Jewish contribution to
international solidarity, following the 1930s Soviet motto, ‘nationalist in form, socialist in
content’: ‘Yiddish in the hands of the working class is a weapon to fight the bourgeois
influence within the Jewish masses, to awaken their class consciousness. Yiddish serves to
disseminate and develop among the Jewish workers the feeling of international worker
solidarity. The struggle in the field of Yiddish language and culture is an expression of class
struggle.’21 This focus on working class unity would be short-lived, however, as the Soviet
response to the growth of fascist movements in Europe led to an abrupt change of policy that
would have profound influences on the Communist movement in the United States, and a
marked effect on left-wing Yiddish pedagogy. The introduction of this policy immediately
initiated sweeping changes in how the JPFO defined Jewish culture, the Jewish working class
and Jewish children.
At the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, the world Soviet organization, in
July of 1935, it was declared that combating fascism was now the international Communist
movement’s top priority. Communists would now have to dedicate themselves to a ‘united
front’, working within social democracy, alongside farmers, intelligentsia and other bourgeois
elements, speaking the language of the masses in order to save democracy in the face of
fascism. As a direct result of this shift in priorities and policy, Proletarishe dertsiung virtually
eliminated the use of the term arbeter masn, working class, replacing it with yidishe masn,
Jewish class, and yidishe folk, Jewish people. This signified a concomitant, larger shift within
the JPFO’s curriculum towards an emphasis on Jewish traditions, introducing modern literary
sources such as Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz, and constructing new visions of children
and childhood. In textbooks, working-class Jewish children like Motl and Arn would no longer
be portrayed as vessels to be filled with correct knowledge, but instead began to act like
normal children — playing, fighting, imagining and questioning grown-ups. A direct result of
this shift in global policy can be determined in the changes to JPFO shule pedagogy and
curriculum after 1935. In textbooks from the later 1930s, children were portrayed as a distinct,
special group, rather than as small adults. For the first time, children’s activities and
perspectives, such as roller-skating, modelling airplanes and experiencing the four seasons
were featured in poems. Retaining some Soviet content, the textbook also contained letters to
the children of Birobidzhan and a poem on the hammer and sickle, interspersed with short
comic materials from modern Yiddish literary authors.
In 1939, further signifying a shift away from proletarian pedagogy and towards a more
populist view of education, childhood and family, Proletarishe dertsiung changed its name to
Heym un dertsiung (Home and Education). Davidman, previously a contributor, joined the
masthead of this revitalized publication. Heym un dertsiung also began publishing a short
English section. Irving Garbati, a 1927 graduate of the Umparteyishe shuln (non-partisan
schools) who later became a teacher in the JPFO schools, argued in Heym un dertsiung’s first
English column that there were two principle motives for parents to send their children to
JPFO schools: the desire of the Jewish people to teach their American-born children the
traditions and language of Judaism, and the history and literature of their parents, and to ‘imbue
their children with the ideals of progressive humanity’. Garbati exclaimed:
The Jewish people saw their children being torn away from them spiritually and
emotionally by the ‘melting pot’. They saw their children being subtly inculcated
with the sneering attitude towards ‘foreigners’. To some of the more far-sighted
parents it was a question of group perpetuation, of a struggle for existence; true, an
ideological and cultural struggle, but a struggle nevertheless. And can we deny to a
people the desire to safeguard their culture and their language? Can we dare to say
to a people: ‘In America only one language and culture are permitted. You have
been allowed to come here by the grace of those who have emigrated here before
you, and when you die there will be no living trace left of your language, your
tradition, your literature, your culture?’22

These ideas were not radically different from the focus on the relationship between children
and parents, and the political education of children, in Proletarishe dertsiung, but in Garbati’s
treatment, there is a distinctly new sensibility of Jewish peoplehood, and of Jewish culture
under threat in the United States.
This critique of the melting pot threaded into much of the JPFO’s wartime and post-war
rhetoric, in some ways as an outgrowth of the leaders’ critique of the monolithic nature of
fascism (which had come to replace their critique of the exploitations of the ruling class). Itche
Goldberg, the JPFO’s director of education, became a significant presence in Davidman’s life,
providing mentorship as a senior colleague within the editorial board of Heym un dertsiung,
and publishing Davidman’s stories in the JPFO’s children’s magazine, Yungvarg (Youth). Like
Olgin, Goldberg believed that the shules were the essential loci of Yiddish culture, the prime
location where Jews would take responsibility for national culture and identity. The melting
pot approach, Goldberg frequently declared, was the hallmark of the ruling class, who relied
on the suppression of cultural and ethnic values to better condense their hegemonic purchase on
the masses.23 Goldberg reasoned that the same powerful forces that oppressed Jewish cultural
difference also worked to stifle other cultures as well — the vulnerability of one group meant
the vulnerability of all. Thus, he argued that the JPFO’s school movement should take an active
role in building a true cultural democracy in the United States.
Davidman most likely modelled himself to some extent on Goldberg’s model, carving out a
niche for himself as a kultur-tuer. Besides teaching in the JPFO shule system, Davidman
worked as a teacher on Yiddish courses for adults in history, political economy, and other
subjects. He was also active in various unions, workers’ clubs, the Frayhayt Gezang Fareyn
(Freedom Song Society), IKOR (Idishe kolonizatsie organizatsie in Rusland, or Jewish
Colonization Society in Russia), Party cells, and worked as a lecturer on ‘Cultural-Economic-
Political Questions’, travelling and working in New York, Passaic, Patterson, Detroit, Toledo,
Windsor, Philadelphia and Chicago. He was also a loyal member of the Lenin Branch 96 of the
JPFO in the Bronx (and later the Varshever Branch 309, in Brighton Beach). In 1939, his wife
passed away, and he spent a few years struggling to raise his children with the help of extended
family. He met his second wife, Anna Strauss, at Camp Kinderland in the 1940s, where he
worked each summer as a counsellor and teacher.24
The impact of the destruction of European Jewry, and the shifting class, cultural and
linguistic dynamics of American Jewry prompted Goldberg, as the movement’s principal
pedagogue and public intellectual, to respond by outlining his view of the future role of
Yiddish culture in the United States. In an article published in 1947, ‘The Yiddish School and
Yiddish Culture in America’, Goldberg outlined a working definition for Jewish culture after
the war and offered a critique of cultural assimilation based on loosely adapted versions of the
theory of cultural pluralism. His overarching theme was the idea that the United States never
had been, and did not have to be, a monolingual country, since it contained the freedom and
promise to build national culture on strong, deep foundations of cultural democracy. Goldberg
excoriated the false promise of emancipation, where Jews would exchange their group
autonomy for individual freedom: ‘[…] We cast aside assimilation, and with it the so-called
promise of liberation [inherent in] the Jewish Question. There is no liberation through
assimilation — there is only imprisonment.’25 The rest of the essay builds upon this theme —
that all assimilation is profound cultural loss, or outright theft, and that the mission of left-wing
(‘progressive’) Jews in America is to complete the unfulfilled project of American democracy
by deepening their own cultural awareness, and by engaging in the struggle to allow others to
do so as well.
Goldberg continued by offering a definition of modern Jewish culture as distinctly secular,
historic, multi-lingual and left wing. He described it as a ‘continuity and an outgrowth from
everything which could be considered progressive and freedom-giving in the generations of
Jewish culture, created in many languages’.26 He then contrasted this substantive definition of
national culture against the culture of the United States, which, he argued, by definition was
unfixed, open and synthetic: ‘American culture is an amalgam, a composite from the various
cultures of the different nationalities here. The culture was founded from all national groups
here, which come together to form the great, multi-national American nation.’ Thus, Goldberg
concluded, ‘we can deduce that the development and the nourishment of the cultures of the
national groups is in full agreement with the democratic principles of our land, which must
allow and help each national group to develop its own unique character, in order to make the
whole even richer’. Goldberg suggested that this true promise of America, this unfulfilled
ideal, had come closer than ever to fruition under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s
guidance, which had given rise to ‘a more widespread and freer application of the true
principles of the American democracy’, allowing for an awakening of the American people of
various backgrounds.27
By the end of the 1940s, Kinderland and the shules faced the increasing reality that the
majority of their students did not come from Yiddish-speaking homes. The movement struggled
to adapt to the increasing use of English over Yiddish. The JPFO published a new Yiddish
textbook for adult learners and offered free Yiddish classes for adults. Goldberg and others
encouraged parents of shule students to learn, and thereby speak, Yiddish at home with their
children, but it was clear that linguistic change was outpacing cultural values. In a 1949
article, Davidman lamented that only a minority of members of his Brighton Beach JPFO
branch actually attended cultural events there; although people liked the idea of having a
cultural community and supporting it, he noted, there was a disconnect between the ideal and
the reality, which required frequently attending cultural meetings, buying and reading Yiddish
books and newspapers, speaking Yiddish in the home and sending children to Yiddish
schools.28
Davidman’s personal response to this crisis was an essay, ‘A shprakh iz vi a gortn’ (‘A
Language Is Like a Garden’), first published in the ‘Tribune’, the special section of the Morgn-
Frayhayt (formerly, until June 1929, Frayhayt) dedicated to JPFO matters, in October 1949,
and then published as part of a short story anthology in 1952. Written in the first person,
Davidman muses on the question of why his teenage daughter’s friends make fun of her for
speaking Yiddish: ‘Khaykele speaks, reads and enjoys Yiddish, but she encounters some
difficulties with Yiddish with her friends at the high school, in the streets, and between
neighbours. Her friends ask: Vos toyg dir yidish? Vos toyg dir di yidishe shul? (What’s the
good of Yiddish and the Yiddish shul?) She tells her father she doesn’t understand why her
friends “understand nothing” ‘.29
Khaykele observes that, while her friends’ parents speak Yiddish often at home, and the
children understand a lot of Yiddish words, ‘it’s a strange thing, because all the Yiddish words
that they know are something cynical or comic. […] don’t these parents read a Yiddish
newspaper, or books?’ Davidman explained to his readers that, in order to address his
daughter, he had to compose a metaphor: a language is like a garden, he contended; ‘where you
sow the seeds, there it will grow into life. Among stones, nothing can grow; if the rains don’t
come, one brings water, and removes the weeds.’30
Davidman contended that language itself is not inherently nationalistic — after all, German
was used by both the Nazis and the anti-Fascists that fought them; English was the language of
Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but it also was used every day in the
American reactionary press. Language, like literature, needed to be cultivated, Davidman
concluded. ‘As in all languages, among all peoples, so in the Yiddish language, in our garden’:
In America there are many grown-ups who laugh at the Yiddish garden. They don’t
know from ‘Motl Peysi’ [Sholem Aleichem’s Motl Peysi the Cantor’s Son] —
(they don’t know from Tom Sawyer either). They don’t want to know from beauty,
they would rather be at the horse races. The wild grass on the Jewish street doesn’t
let the fruit grow… As you see, daughter, a language is sown into a garden. The
Yiddish language is the Jewish garden. And if we want it to bear beautiful fruit, we
must toil indeed…31

Davidman ended his essay by having Khaykele proclaim, ‘I will also become a gardener!’32
Real life, however, was not as straightforward as a Yiddish parable. As Davidman’s children
grew up, they chose careers and life paths that took them farther from Yiddish as the nexus of
their familial and cultural networks. Davidman’s output rarely slackened later in life, but the
opportunities to build culture and community became severely curtailed.
In the late 1940s, the JPFO purchased a historic manor house in Ridgefield, Connecticut. It
was to become the crown jewel of the Yiddish communist movement — an old age home
where Yiddish writers, workers, poets and friends could gather and live out their final days,
reaping the rewards of the long years they had spent building the movement together. Davidman
avidly looked forward to this possibility, but it was not to be. Accused of operating as a
Communist organization, the I WO lost its insurance charter, and all of its vast assets,
amounting to millions of dollars, were liquidated by New York State in 1953.
Davidman ran a knish bakery in Brooklyn until it closed down from lack of business in the
later 1960s. He entered his retirement years in poverty, but remained optimistic. Profiled in a
New York Times series interviewing elderly people who were the first recipients of
Supplementary Security Income (SSI), the article details Davidman’s cheerful, busy life,
despite a monthly income of $182, with rent taking up $143 of that amount. Receiving SSI
raised Davidman’s income to $227, and covered his Medicaid payments, providing him with a
tiny yet crucial buffer that kept him afloat.33 His daughter remembers him sitting in the kitchen
at his Yiddish typewriter, with a glass of whiskey in his hand, writing, translating, reading and
talking to friends, with the radio playing classical music in the background, till 2 a.m. each
night.34 He smoked three packs of cigarettes a day. After his second wife died in the late 1960s,
he lived alone, but remained close to his two children. ‘I’m not looking for money’, he was
quoted as saying. ‘What I’m interested in is that people should know my work as a teacher’.35
The Yiddish progressive movement provided a seamless ‘totality of experience’;36 even as
the Yiddish communist movement faced the loss of the JPFO, and as the majority backed away
from formal affiliation with the Communist Party, several generations of men and women still
lived, worked and socialized together in tight groups. They lived together in concentrated
neighbourhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx; read and wrote for the Morgn-Frayhayt and
related English-languages magazines; and organized and attended meetings of the Jewish
Cultural Clubs and Societies and the Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Clubs
(post-JPFO organizations). As their children and grandchildren moved away from New York
City, they translated aspects of their upbringing into the political and social movements
transforming the American landscape.
What could not be transmitted in the 1960s, however, was a certain impetus deriving from
immigrant and working-class Jews, who saw Yiddish as the essential vehicle of their cultural
creativity and of their political integrity. For Jews involved in progressive Yiddish culture,
Jewish nationalism was fundamentally Yiddish; their political project was intrinsically tied to
a rejection of assimilation as it served as an essential function of capitalist exploitation.
Yiddish, Davidman and his cohort believed, was an ultimate form of resistance. American
radical subcultures transformed in the 1960s, however, from being fundamentally ethnic or
racial in character, to emerging from American social models, from Catholic social justice to
the Women’s Rights Movement. While the labour movement still continued to recognize
ethnicity as a powerful organizing factor, the organizing force of a multiethnic labour
movement could not be sustained.
In late 1969, Davidman wrote a column for the Morgn-Frayhayt, reflecting on the struggle
to end the war in Vietnam from his perspective of fifty years as a progressive writer and
twenty years as teacher in progressive children’s schools. Davidman expressed pride that his
children and grandchildren were actively taking part in the struggle, his struggle, for a more
just world, by protesting against the war. Parents’ political engagement was no automatic
guarantee of their children’s activism, he argued; but thanks to institutions like the shules and
Camp Kinderland, his son and daughter had passed on the message of standing up to injustice
they had learned within the progressive Yiddish movement: ‘[…] The spirit of shule and camp
is deep in [their] blood and bones, and no power will be able to chase it out.’37 Davidman’s
children and grandchildren may have followed in his footsteps by protesting against the war in
Vietnam, but they did not adhere to a similar vision of progressive yidishkayt; while
Davidman’s family shared his politics, they did not consider Yiddish, or Jewish culture, to be
at the centre of their lives or their political work. After decades of work as a Yiddish teacher
and writer, Davidman spent his final years translating his work into English, in the hope that it
would be read by future generations.
I would like to thank Gennady Estraikh for our ongoing conversation regarding the complex
transformation and transmission of Yiddish political and cultural values. I would also like to
thank Shloyme Davidman’s daughter, Bernice Davidman Greenberg, for generously sharing her
memories and personal documents relating to her father. Special thanks as well to Hershl
Hartman and to Mickey and Richard Flacks for long conversations that further helped to frame
this paper.
Notes to Chapter 10
1. Shloyme Davidman, Bongelo numer 25 [Bungalow Number 25] (Chicago, IL: The Jay Press, 1937), p. 28.
2. Julia Mickenberg, Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United
States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 6.
3. Shloyme Davidman, ‘Biografishe notitsn’ in his Heldn fun undzer tsayt (Chicago: Stern Printing Co., 1936), unpaginated
introduction.
4. Ibid.
5. Phone interview with Bernice Davidman Greenberg, Davidman’s daughter, 9 May, 2013.
6. Shloyme Davidman, A gezang tsu yidish, self-published, 1974. p. 124.
7. Ibid., p. 133.
8. Ber Grin, Fun dor tsu dor, Quoted in Shloyme Davidman, A gezang tsu yidish, p. 121.
9. Davidman, Biografishe notitsn.
10. For the history of Yung-kuznye, see Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism
(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), pp. 72–76.
11. ‘A Brief History of Camp Kinderland’, by Monie Itzkowitz. Document in the possession of the author.
12. Personal correspondence with Hershl Hartman, a former Camp Kinderland camper and counsellor, 13 November 2012.
For Fayvl Sito, see Gennady Estraikh’s essay in this volume.
13. Bongelo numer 25, p. 19.
14. Ibid., p. 23.
15. ‘Fact Sheet on the Order’, Box 19, Folder 6. International Workers Order Records, 1927–1956. 5276. Kheel Center for
Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University Library.
16. Minutes of National School and Culture Committee, 1949–50. Folder 37, Box 6. International Workers Order Records,
1927–1956. 5276. Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University Library.
17. ‘Konspekt fun di yidishe kinder shuln baym internatsiyonaln arbeter ordn’. International Workers Order papers, RG 117
(U.S. Territorial Collection), Box 80, File 79.4. Collection of the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
18. Ibid.
19. Kinder — farn tsveytn lernyor, compiled by Bezalel Friedman and Devoyre Tarant (New York: Arbet, 1930).
20. Vladimir I. Lenin, ‘Political Education Workers of Gubernia and Uyezd’, in Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th English Edition
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), XXXI, pp. 340–61 <http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/nov/03.htm>
[accessed 2 June 2015].
21. A. Bergman, ‘Yidish oder Yidishkayt’, [Yiddish or Yiddishness] Proletarishe dertsiung [Proletarian Education], May
1935, p. 9.
22. Irving Garbati, ‘The Story of the I.W.O Jewish School’, Heym un dertsiung, January 1939, 24.
23. Itche Goldberg, ‘Di yidishe kultur un di yidishe shuln in Amerike’, in In dinst fun folk: almanakh fun yidishn folks-ordn
(New York: Jewish Peoples Fraternal Order, 1947), p. 70.
24. Phone interview with Bernice Davidman Greenberg, Davidman’s daughter, 9 May 2013.
25. Goldberg, p. 68.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Shloyme Davidman, Vegn kultur arbet in di ordn brentshes (New York: JPFO Book League, 1949). Unpaginated.
29. Shloyme Davidman, A shprakh iz vi a gortn: shul geshiktes (New York: n.p., 1952), p. 6. First published in Tribune, 6
October 1949.
30. Davidman, A shprakh iz vi a gortn, pp. 6–7.
31. Ibid., p. 8.
32. Ibid., p. 10.
33. Deirdre Carmody, ‘Courage and Dignity of Elderly Poor Surface During Project to Aid Them; Quiet Courage and Dignity
of the Elderly Poor Surface During a Project to Assist Them’. The New York Times, 25 February 1974.
34. Phone interview with Bernice Davidman Greenberg, Davidman’s daughter, 9 May, 2013.
35. Carmody, ‘Courage and Dignity of Elderly Poor Surface During Project to Aid Them, New York Times, Monday 25
February 1974.
36. Personal interview with Richard Flacks, San Diego, CA, 6 August 2012.
37. Shloyme Davidman, ‘Kinder un eyniklekh in marshn far sholem,’ Morgn-Frayhayt, 25 December 1969, 6. Quotation is
from English translation made by Shloime Davidman for Bernice Davidman Greenberg, in the possession of the author.

 CHAPTER 11

Soviet Propaganda in Illustrated Yiddish Children’s

Books: From the Collections of the YIVO Library, New
York
Lyudmila Sholokhova

Yiddish children’s book publishing was a relatively short-lived phenomenon in the Soviet
Union, with a time-frame mostly limited to the period from the early 1920s to the late 1930s.
Despite strict ideological demands often applied to children’s books published in the Soviet
Union during that period, numerous writers, poets and artists took an active part in producing
Yiddish literature for younger generations. The development of children’s literature in the
country aspired to build a ‘bright socialist future’, and was an ambivalent and complicated
process with its own evolutionary stages: from the great romantic expectations of the first post-
revolutionary years to the symbolic clichés of the 1930s. This essay aims to explore how
visual signs of Soviet propaganda were entering the pages of children’s books, increasingly
occupying youngsters’ minds, and how visual artists interpreted these symbols.
The introduction and maturation of Soviet children’s publishing was preceded by relatively
new traditions (at that time still taking shape) of secular educational reading in Yiddish. It is a
fact that secular children’s literature in Yiddish hardly even existed till the beginning of the
twentieth century: before that time Jewish children’s reading in Yiddish was mainly limited to
easy Yiddish adaptations of legends and stories from the religious texts. Only as late as the
1900s to the 1920s did the success of Yiddish children’s publishing become apparent in
Europe, most notably in Warsaw, Vilna, Kiev and Berlin.
In 1905, children’s short stories by Sholem Aleichem and other Yiddish writers began to
appear under the Warsaw imprint Bikher far ale (Books for Everyone). From the 1910s to the
1930s, the publishing houses B. A. Kletskin, Grininke beymelekh (Little Green Trees) and
Naye Yidish folksshul (New Yiddish Primary School) in Vilna and Yudish (Yiddish) in
Warsaw actively promoted Jewish classics, as well as translations of world literary
masterpieces for children. Among the most popular were stories and adaptations of stories by
I. L. Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, Der Nister, Daniel Charney, Solomon Bastomski,
Eliezer Shindler, as well as Yiddish translations of fairy tales by H. C. Andersen, Brothers
Grimm, Wilhelm Hauff, stories by Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, poetry by Aleksandr
Pushkin. Some of the editions were strikingly and innovatively illustrated by the leading
Jewish avant-garde artists, such as Marc Chagall (1887–1985), El Lissitzky (1890–1941) and
Joseph Chaikov (1888–1979). Beautiful editions for children were also published in Berlin in
early 1920s by Shveln (Thresholds), Yudisher farlag (Jewish Publishing House) and under
other imprints.
In 1918, El Lissitzky, Joseph Chaikov, Issachar Ber Ryback (1897–1935), Mark Epstein
(1897–1949) and some other artists formed the art section of the Kultur-Lige cultural
organization in Kiev, under the rule of the Central Rada (Central Council of Ukraine), which
declared Ukrainian independence in the same year.1 Activists of Kultur-Lige belonged to
various Jewish left-wing movements, most notably Territorialists, Labour Zionists, Bundists
and Folkists. As for the artists, who worked in the league, their modernistic, experimental
aspirations to create ‘new Jewish culture’, ‘new Jewish literature’, ‘new Jewish art’ were
deeply rooted in the traditions of Jewish folk art, sparked with childish naivety and energy of
self-expression that, as they believed, constituted a driving force of a newly born society. The
art of Yiddish children’s literature greatly benefitted from this match. A few real masterpieces
appeared in 1919–1920, among them the famous, unusually innovative book Khad gadya by El
Lissitzky.2
By 1920, the Soviet regime had been secured in Kiev which led to a dramatic change in
Kultur-Lige’s fortune: the organization was taken over by the Jewish Sections of the
Communist Party and its publications slowly, almost reluctantly, started to adjust to a new
ideological climate. Ultimately, the league was phased out in 1925, though the publishing house
under the same name still existed until 1930. A group of leading figures made an attempt to
replant the league in Warsaw, which resulted in establishing a new Kultur-Lige publishing
house there; it operated till the beginning of World War II.3 By its historical role, from the point
of view of our research, Kultur-Lige served as liaison between pre-revolutionary efforts in
secular progressive Yiddish children’s education and post-revolutionary dynamic and
experimental attempts to unite modern, avant-garde book design with Jewish folklore and
religious motives.
El Lissitzky’s masterpiece, an artistic interpretation of the Aramaic Passover song Khad
Gadya, published by Kultur-Lige in Kiev in 1919, was a great example of such coherence. It
stood out by its highly sophisticated Cubo-futuristic graphics that used elements of traditional
synagogue architecture, such as arches and large Hebrew characters carved in stone, and a
limited number of bright colours (black, red, yellow and green). Lissitzky’s approach made
this work much more than just a children’s book or art book — it was the artist’s revolutionary
manifesto that epitomized his vision of how the Jewish past and future could be linked. Evgeny
Steiner, researcher of illustrated children’s books in the Soviet Union, saw this book as a
monumental tribute to the Jewish past,4 while the scholars Haia Friedberg and Arnold Band
interpreted Lissitzky’s images as the symbolic liberation and redemption of the Jews after the
October Revolution of 1917.5 The last illustration in the book represents the symbolic image of
God as a huge all-knowing eye in red outline (colour of revolution), with — outstretched
through the eye — a strong fist holding a red sword. God’s sword is killing malkhamoves (the
Angel of Death), who wears an imperial crown on its head. In Lissitzky’s rendition, the image
of God metaphorically equates to revolution (see Figure 11.1).

 FIG. 11.1.

Overall, the early children’s editions published in Kiev following the October Revolution of
1917 — in the midst of the Russian Civil War — in the years preceding or immediately
following the official establishing of the Soviet Union in 1922, do not yet carry any
stereotypical images. They rather lovingly reproduce the magical world of little children, using
the traditional iconography of Jewish folk art (little goats, cats, chickens), family characters
(father, mother, baby) in innovative, constructivist ways that echo the artists’ aspiration to
create an image of a muscular and strong ‘new Jew’ ready to integrate into a new, liberated
society.
Another example of incorporating early ‘red’ symbolism into children’s books is the first
and only issue of the periodical Shretelakh (Little dwarfs) beautifully crafted in black and
white by artists Joseph Chaikov and Alexandr Tyshler. It was published in Kiev in 1919 by the
All-Ukrainian Publishing House of the Central Executive Committee of Workers, Peasants and
Red Army’s Deputies. The periodical had an elegantly simple cover, usually in black and
white, with only a title, a central element of the vignette, and a line at the bottom in red. The
simple contrast of the black and red colours against the white was typical for the leftist art of
the time, and Shretelakh was, possibly, one of the earliest examples of such contrast applied to
children’s editions in Yiddish. The magazine contained poetry and stories by Leyb Kvitko,
David Hofshteyn and Rudyard Kipling, as well as more politically engaged articles about
children’s involvement in the Paris Commune of 1871, and several briefs on the improvement
of children’s life in Kiev. However, only politically neutral, optimistic literary works by
Kvitko, Kipling and some other authors were illustrated, while socially important articles
were presented in plain text. The magazine contained two sections: Far kleynvarg (For
younger children) and Far gresere kinder (For older children), each of which opened with
Joseph Chaikov’s illustrations. The images did not yet carry any symbols of communist
propaganda. Instead, Chaikov’s pictures were simple and naive, featuring a little goat, a horse
and a rooster playing peacefully on the hilly background with river and meadow.
The same avant-garde yet still apolitical approach was also typical for the later Kultur-lige
edition, H. Polyak’s Fun di kleyne kinders vegn: alefbeys far shuln un kinder hayzer (For the
little children’s sake: alphabet for schools and children’s homes) published in Kiev in 1923
with illustrations by Mark Epstein. Images in this book featured a mother and child, a king and
queen, a baby’s pram, a little goat and many other simple recognizable symbols crafted in the
cubo-futuristic manner. But in around 1922 to 1923, representation of the world in Yiddish
children’s books began to change. The Yiddish periodical for teenagers Freyd (Joy) (Kiev,
1922–1925), with cover and illustrations by Mark Epstein, could be reviewed as a good
example of this development.
The suprematist cover of the magazine featured a variety of geometrical shapes. The
Hebrew letters of the title Freyd were also transformed into a combination of shapes in the
cubo-futurist manner. The letter shapes are placed in the centre of the composition, as though
they are joyfully walking up the unfinished circle line. A sharp red line crosses the entire
image from the upper right-hand corner to the left, and then jumps up again to the right, adding
to the dynamic of the image (see Figure 11.2). In issue no. 1 for 1922, craftily illustrated by
Mark Epstein, the very first article was dedicated to the fifth anniversary of the October
Revolution and displayed Lenin’s portrait. The rest of the periodical’s content in this issue
features David Hofshteyn’s and Leyb Kvitko’s poetry, stories by Maxim Gorki and Itsik
Kipnis, popular articles on science, as well as puzzles and riddles. In the following issues,
images demonstrated a tendency to become more politically oriented. One of the most
distinguished illustrations to the article about International Labor Day, 1 May, published in nos.
5–6, for April-May 1923, occupied two full pages facing each other. Epstein’s picture
resembled a huge political map celebrating victory of the proletarian revolution and solidarity
of workers around the world. Two big circles on the opposite pages bring to mind the two
hemispheres of the earth. The symbolic map is criss-crossed numerous times with lines
showing marching labourers and armies carrying red banners, electric wires, roads and
bridges. This is an impressive cubo-futuristic poster that openly pronounces an appeal in
Yiddish: ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’ It also carries the names of some of the regions
involved in the revolutionary movement: Russia, America, Asia and Africa (see Figure 11.3).
In 1925–193 0, Mark Epstein also designed covers for the Kultur-Lige series ‘Shul un pionern-
bibliotek’ (School and pioneers’ library) that published popular educational reading materials
for students.

 FIG. 11.2.

FIG. 11.3.

The early 1920s witnessed an increase in Yiddish children’s book publishing in the Soviet
Union. It was a result of intensive development of school education and major efforts to
eliminate illiteracy in the country in general. In addition, education in the mother tongue
became mandatory in Ukraine and Belorussia in 1924, which resulted in (at least theoretically)
obligatory enrolment of Yiddish-speaking children in Yiddish schools. In Ukraine these
numbered 268 in 1924 and 1,096 in 1931; in Belorussia 175 in 1926 and 339 in 1933, and in
Russia no in 1931.6 Those measures were often introduced forcefully, despite the fact that
many parents would prefer to send their children to Russian-speaking schools.
The new Yiddish schools needed new textbooks and new reading materials. Thus, in the
1920s, Moscow, Kharkov, Minsk, Kiev and Odessa became major centres for Yiddish
children’s book publishing. Here is a list of publishing houses that produced Yiddish
children’s books in the 1920s to the 1930s:
• Kharkov: Melukhe-farlag fun Ukrayne (State Publishing House of Ukraine)
• Kharkov-Kiev: Melukhe-farlag far di natsyonale-minderhaytn in USRR (State
Publishing House for the National Minorities of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist
Republic)
• Kharkov-Kiev: Tsentrfarlag, Alukrainishe opteylung (Central Publishing House,
All-Ukrainian Department)
• Kiev: Kultur-Lige
• Kiev: Yidisher folks-farlag (Jewish People’s Publishing House)
• Kiev: Kiyever farlag (Kiev Publishing House)
• Kiev: Onhoyb (Beginning)
• Kiev: Kinder-farlag (Publishing House for Children)
• Minsk: Melukhe-farlag fun Vaysrusland, or Vaysruslendisher melukhe-farlag (State
Publishing House of Belorussia)
• Moskve: Emes (Truth)
• Moskve: Shul un bukh (School and Book)
• Moskve-Kharkov-Minsk: Tsentraler felker farlag fun FSSR (Central People’s
Publishing House of the Soviet Union)
• Odessa, or Odessa-Kharkov: Kinder-farlag bam. Ts. k. l. k. yu. f. u. (Publishing
House for Children at the Central Committee of the Leninist Young Communist
League of Ukraine

Along with the texts, illustrations to children’s books appeared to be an essential tool that
helped to shape youngsters’ minds, and many gifted artists contributed their talent to the
children’s literature.
Evgeny Steiner, an expert and scholar of Soviet early children’s books, explained artists’
attraction to children’s literature with the following reasons:
— many artists sincerely shared ideas of building a ‘new society’ and were willing to design a
new life and create a face for it;
— they were socially committed to applying their talent in the publishing sphere, since it
would greatly extend the audience for their art and its social impact;
— artists were also motivated by other, more pragmatic reasons, such as the absence of a real
art market in the Soviet Union and the increased censorial control imposed on the arts;
illustrators’ work was relatively well paid, interesting, and involved potentially less
censorship.7
 In the 1920s, illustrators of children’s books still adhered to the principles of innovative
design that were developed in the earlier decades by the pioneering avant-garde artists. They
still applied the potential of avant-garde art to explain, simply and clearly, ideas of scientific
and technological progress, the advantages of this new society, and to glorify an optimistic
future that awaited the young builders of the new, free world. Yet Yiddish books for children
published in the 1920s rarely contained openly propagandist symbols, such as Lenin’s
portraits, banners, marching pioneers, sickles and hammers, which became much more frequent
and bold in the 1930s. For the most part, Yiddish editions for children from the 1920s onward
were engaging, attractive, balanced and charming. In fact, leafing through books published at
that time, I had some difficulty finding appropriate materials for the research, whereas I found
plenty of political clichés in the editions circa 1930s.
Books illustrated by Issachar Ber Ryback stood out among the other books published in
1920s thanks to their engaging, naive, but dynamic design, where the artist purposely applied
the style of children’s drawings. Among his most famous creations were illustrations to poems
by Leyb Kvitko, who in the 1930s became known as one of the most popular and well-
published children’s authors in the Soviet Union. The beauty, simplicity and charming humour
of Kvitko’s poetry were much in tune with Ryback’s own style. The book Pionern-bikhl
(Pioneers’ little book), published in Kharkov in 1920s, features an adorable result of the
author-artist collaboration, not too heavily politicized. The cover of the book was designed in
the amusing style of a pictorial puzzle, where every letter resembles objects from the
surrounding world: hammer and saw, factory pipes, little banner, ear of wheat, etc., with the
figure of the little pioneer playing the trumpet. Red dominates this composition (see Figure
11.4). One of the illustrations inside the book featured pioneers holding little banners, while
standing on top of the factory pipes and roofs of the buildings, or marching in the streets.8
It is worth noting that as early as the 1920s, certain publishing houses seemed to be more
advanced than the others in promoting bold Soviet propaganda and pleasing the Soviet
authorities. For example, the children’s books produced in Minsk carried considerably more
pro-Communist propaganda content and illustrative material than even the Moscow editions of
that time. This fact could possibly be explained by the activism of the local government and
political leaders, and administrators of the publishing houses.
The decorative potential of Hebrew letters in the bold poster style, in black, red and white,
is applied on the cover of Itsik Fefer’s collection of poems Mayselekh inferzn (Fairy Tales in
Rhymes) (Minsk, 1929). In the poem ‘Reb Alter un Reb Got’ (Mister Alter and Mister God),
which is about an observant grandfather and his young grandchildren who dream of joining the
pioneers. Elements of Hebrew micrography used in the image of the old shtetl remind us of
woodcuts by Solomon Iudovin, but are meant to give a satirical, caricatural effect.9 Elements
of sharp satire are also obvious on the cover of Itsik Kipnis’s children’s play S’kert zikh a velt
(The world is turning upside down) (Minsk, 1929) where symbols of the past, such as
synagogues and churches, are turned on their heads, while images of the new world, such as a
happy Jewish worker and the hammer and sickle, are visibly dominating (see Figure 11.5).10
Slowly but surely, images of the past, symbols of the Jewish tradition, were completely
disappearing from the pages of Yiddish books for children. In the 1930s, they could be found
only in anti-clerical propaganda books.


FIG. 11.4.

FIG. 11.5.

 FIG. 11.6.

The emerging new world was a dynamic reality changing at accelerating speed. It glorified
technological progress, science and industrial construction and made them a symbol of a new
time. Consequently, many so-called children’s ‘production’ books in Yiddish reflected on this
theme as well. In the 1920s, one of the bold examples in this genre was a strikingly illustrated
book Ver loyft gikher (Faster and faster) by Lucy Sprague Mitchell, illustrated by Alexander
Barshch (Moscow, 1928). It discusses benefits of contemporary means of transport over
traditional ones: cars, trams, locomotives, planes versus horses and ox etc. Illustrations feature
a great variety of contemporary vehicles with Soviet symbolism.
The 1930s brought even more diversity in the Yiddish ‘production’ book. Lovely toy-like
engines are depicted on the cover of Leyb Kvitko’s book Yontev (Holiday) (Moscow, 1935),
illustrated by Grigory (Hersh) Inger, a student of the avant-garde artist and Kultur-Lige activist
Mark Epshteyn: see Figure 11.6.11 The images reflect the energy of the poem itself:
Eroplanen flien
In hoykhn droysn!
Kinderlekh firt men
in avtos in groysn!
Andere geyen
Af dr’erd zeyer gang.
Fonen,
plakatn,
Roykh un gezang.
— Kinderlekh, zogt,
 Vos vilt ir zayn?
Aeroplanes are flying in the high skies! Kids ride in big cars! Others are walking on
the streets. Banners, posters, noise and singing. Children, say, who you want to
become?

The same optimistic power is present in the Yiddish translation of Samuil Marshak’s Di potsht
(The mail) (Odessa, 1934), where illustrations by M. Kotlyarevski follow on from each other
almost with the speed of movie-like shots (Figure 11.7). Many ‘production’ books featured
industrial progress, factory pipes and unusual, modern engines. Some of these symbols featured
in Umetumgeyer (Go anywhere vehicle) by M. Ilyin (pseudonym of Ilya Marshak, Samuil
Marshak’s brother) (Kharkov, 1933), the songs’ collection Far yugnt (For Youth) by composer
Samuel Polonskii (Moskow-Kharkov-Minsk, 1931), Ivan Mikitenko’s Kadren (Personnel)
(Kiev-Kharkov, 1932; artist B. Kryukov), as well as on the cover of the book Dnyeperboy
(Construction of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station) by Y. Rosh (Kiev-Kharkov, 1932); Figure
11.8.
The hard work of Soviet workers and their unlimited commitment were intended to
encourage young people to follow their example. The determined, stern faces of workers, often
with no individual features, set against an industrial background brought out the message about
the importance of collective work over individual (example: Avrom Abtshuk. Baryshevs
brigade. Kharkov, Kiev, 1933; Figure 11.9).
Overall, the early 1930s are characterized by a sharp move away from avant-garde,
romantic and experimental tendencies in illustrated children’s books typical in the 1920s to
pseudo-realistic clichés, packed with heavy Communist propaganda, which Evgeny Steiner
characterized as ‘sacralization of the present’.12 In the 1930s, avant-garde trends of the 1920s
were officially declared anachronistic, and the new rules for book design were becoming more
and more aggressive and direct, demanding a full toeing of the party line. As a result, the
subjects of Yiddish children’s books were focusing more on glorifying Lenin, on happy Soviet
childhoods, the idolization of other Soviet leaders, and on the militarization of children’s
minds. Other books admired by children — such as stories about nature, animals, some
adaptations of Sholem Aleichem’s short stories, poetry by I. L. Peretz, translations of works by
Kornei Chukovskii and Lev Kassil — were approved by the censorship. Yet ideologically
loaded writings dominated book production for children, even at elementary school level.
Many of them were lavishly and beautifully illustrated. Even in the most ‘harmless’ books,
children quite often seem to wear their pioneer ties, including on their days off from school and
in their spare time (examples: Natalia Zabila, Der vald-tseyler (The Forest Counting Rhyme,
Odessa, 1934); Y. Kotlyar, Ay, agortn (Ah, a Garden, Odessa, 1935); Leyb Kvitko, A freylekh
yor (A Joyful Year, Minsk, 1935). Soviet Jewish children were also exposed to great
developing sense of discipline and healthy habits, as we can see from Leyb Kvitko’s book
Sankom (Hygiene Committee, Moscow, 1934).

 FIG. 11.7.

FIG. 11.8.

 FIG. 11.9.

FIG. 11.10.

Feelings of fraternity extended to struggling and poor children around the world (but
especially in Africa and China) were also very much in tune with the Party line, and resonated
with the activities of the Communist International, or Comintern. A little poem by Agniia Barto,
in the genre of a new Soviet lullaby, Bratishki (Little brothers), was translated into many
languages, including Yiddish, and called for compassion and action, while emphasizing the
role of ‘big brother’ assigned to Soviet kids. One cover and back-page of the Yiddish edition,
Briderlekh (Minsk, 1935), feature children of a variety of racial backgrounds led by a little
Russian boy (see fig. 11.10); the boy holds a red ribbon that encircles the entire world. The
book also depicts kids and their mothers singing lullabies, children carrying out hard physical
labour, and a little pioneer and his father striding with resolute steps the streets of a big city.
The sharp satire of Samuil Marshak’s poem Mister Tvister about an American capitalist
visiting the Soviet Union was also reflected in the Yiddish translation of the work, published in
Minsk in 1936, while the memoirs of the American pioneer Harry Eisman, Khausorn
(Hawthorne [Reformatory], Kiev-Kharkov, 1934) praised American Communists’ support of
the Soviet Union.13
Glorification and sacralization of Lenin and Stalin was another very visible trend in the
children’s literature of that time. Lenin and Stalin had constant presence in children’s daily
lives. Portraits of Lenin and Stalin decorated classrooms and homes, peering at them from the
pages of their alphabet books, and from newspapers and magazines, thus reinforcing in young
minds such slogans as Lenin iz afirer (Lenin is a leader) and Serp mit hamer (Hammer and
sickle). One of the earliest examples of this glorifying approach was the book Ershte trit:
freyd; hilf-bukhfar der nul-grupe (First steps: Joy; supplementary book for nursery school) by
E. Aleksandrova and T. Bentsman (Moscow-Kharkov-Minsk, 1930). From this book,
youngsters were expected to learn the vocabulary of the fundamental things in their lives,
which included Lenin, firer (leader), pioner (pioneer), fone (banner) and poyer (peasant).
Soviet children also learned the importance of defending their country and joining the Red
Army. In Leyb Kvitko’s adorably illustrated book Akh, az ikh vel oysvaksn (Ah, when I will
grow up), published in Odessa in 1937 and illustrated by Y. Dayts, a little boy dreams about
joining the Voroshilov military unit (Figure 11.11). The other book by Kvitko, “Royte armey”
(Red Army), produced in Moscow in 1938, features the stern faces of Soviet soldiers, pilots
and mariners, holding the red banner and ready to defend. Sacralization of the Communist
leaders and militarization of children’s minds in 1930s-1940s were among the leading themes
of several Yiddish periodicals, such as Zay greyt (Be ready), published in Kharkov in 1928–
1937 and then Kiev in 1939–1941, and Pioner (Pioneer), published in Moscow in 1925–1928.
They reflect on the Soviet people’s preparedness for war, and the children’s infinite
commitment to their country and its leaders.

 FIG. 11.11.

FIG. 11.12.

With the start of the Soviet-German phase of World War II, Yiddish publishing for children
in the Soviet Union became almost completely cut off. Only several books were published and
they called to action. One of those rare wartime books was Kvitko’s Kinder-hertser
(Children’s hearts) published in Moscow in 1943 (Figure 11.12).
 All in all, the illustrative world of Yiddish children’s literature in the Soviet Union went
through an amazing evolution during a relatively short period, from the late 1910s through to
the early 1940s. It reflected historical changes in the history of the entire country and the
artistic trends of that time. The innovative 1920s brought new energy and new, modernistic
design into the children’s literature. Talented Jewish avant-garde artists were attracted to this
genre, and, seeking to combine Jewish folk art traditions with modernity, raised the genre to an
entirely new level. In the 1930s, progressive tendencies of the 1920s were abruptly cut off and
declared unnecessary and reactionary. Socialist Realism was entering the world of the Yiddish
children’s book, bringing along new standards and clichés, almost lacking any national
features. In 1941 that process was interrupted by the war and came to a complete end in the
late 1940s, when Yiddish publishing was liquidated in the Soviet Union.
Notes to Chapter 11
1. The Kultur-lige (Culture League), established in Kiev in 1918, developed into a network of secular Yiddish organizations
promoting Yiddish culture through a variety of activities, with an emphasis on literature, art and education. See e.g. Hillel
Kazovsky, ‘The Art Section of the “Kultur-Lige”’, Jews in Eastern Europe, 3 (22) (1993), 5–22; Gennady Estraikh, ‘The
Yiddish Kultur-Lige’, in Modernism in Kyiv: Jubilant Experimentation, ed. by Irena Makaryk and Virlana Tkacz
(Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2010), pp. 197–217.
2. ‘Khad gadya’ (One little goat) is a cumulative song in the Aramaic language usually performed at the end of Passover
Seder.
3. See e.g. Gennady Estraikh, ‘The Kultur-Lige in Warsaw: A Stopover in the Yiddishists’ Journey between Kiev and Paris’,
in Warsaw. The Jewish Metropolis: Essays in Honor of the 75 th Birthday of Professor Antony Polonsky, ed. by
Glenn Dynner and François Guesnet (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), pp. 323–46.
4. Evgeny Steiner, Stories for Little Comrades: Revolutionary Artists and the Making of Early Soviet Children’s Books
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), p. 24.
5. Haia Friedberg, ‘Lissitzky’s Had Gadia’, Journal of Jewish Art, 12–13 (1986–87), 292–303; Had gadya: The Only Kid
(Facsimile of El Lissitzky’s Edition of 1919), ed. by Arnold J. Band with an introduction by Nancy Perloff (Los Angeles:
Getty Research Institute, 2004).
6. Arkadi Zeltser, ‘Soviet Yiddish-Language Schools’, The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. by Gershon
D. Hundert (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 1790–1791.
7. Stories for Little Comrades, pp. 5–6.
8. It is interesting to note that an experiment with graphic design using the Yiddish alphabet can also be found in American
communist books for children, where Lenin’s figure was widely glorified. An image from Fayvel Feltser’s book Kinder-
lider (Poems for Children) (New York, 1928) depicts Lenin’s portrait, a labourer, the hammer and sickle, where Lamed —
the initial character of Lenin’s name — is transformed into a factory chimney.
9. Solomon Iudovin (1892–1954) was an outstanding Jewish artist, a pupil of Yehuda Pen, famous for the realistic style of his
woodcuts and linocuts that mostly reflected on the symbolism and life of the traditional Jewish shtetl.
10. Names of the artists were not usually mentioned in the Minsk children’s publications.
11. See Alexander Filtser, Evreiskie khudozhniki v Sovetskom Soiuze, 1939–1991 (Moscow: Museum of Contemporary
Jewish Art, 2008), p. 111.
12. Stories for Little Comrades, p. 170.
13. See Harry Eisman, An American Boy in the Soviet Union (New York: Youth Publishers, 1934); Yuri Leving, ‘Mr.
Twister in the Land of the Bolsheviks: Sketching Laughter in Marshak’s Poem’, Slavic Review 70 (2) (2011), 279–306.


INDEX

Abtshuk, Avrom 177
Aesop 96
Africa 57–58, 173, 180
Agamben, Georgio 133, 136 n. 26
Agudah 21
Ahad Haam 24
Akselrod, Meyer 4, 50, 63, 68–72
Akselrod, Zelik 68
Altman, Nathan 52
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) 137, 141–42, 144, 151 n. 1, 152 n. 12
American Relief Administration 144
Amsterdam 11–12, 15, 17 n. 5, n. 11, 18 n. 24
Andersen, Hans Christian 21, 78, 79, 81, 90 n. 6, n. 13, 95, 96, 109 n. 7, 169
An-sky, S. (Rappoport, Shloyme Zanvl) 20, 24, 25, 36 n. 24, 37 n. 26
Antwerp 13, 40
Apter-Gabriel, Ruth 63–64, 67, 73 n. 6, 76 n. 74, 90 n. 11, 91 n. 32, n. 33
Aronson, Boris 52–54, 56, 77
Art Nouveau 54, 57–59
Asch, Sholem 113, 169

Ba’al Shem Tov 41, 48 n. 5
Bakhtin, Mikhail 38 n. 50, 49, 93, 109 n. 1, 124–27, 130, 132, 134
Bal-Makhshoves 79
Baltimore 159
Band, Arnold 169
Bar-El, Adina 3, 36 n. 6, 73 n. 7, 109 n. 5
Barto, Agnia 113, 180
Bastomski, Solomon 36 n. 5, 169
Belykh, Grigorii 138, 148, 152 n. 7
Bergelson, David (Dovid) 5, 53, 60, 74 n. 38, 77, 91 n. 28, 113, 123–36, 145, 151
Berlin, 50, 56, 63, 67, 73 n. 16, 81, 88, 85, 95, 95, 112, 125, 135, 148, 168, 169
Biale, David 22, 25
Bialik, Hayim Nahman 33, 84
Bilibin, Ivan 87, 88
Birobidzhan 135, 151, 155, 160, 161
Blank, Ber 98, 100, 101, 104, 107, 114
Blok, Alexander 51
Blaginina, Elena 113, 115
Bogdanov, Dmitrii 115, 116
Boston 159
Broderzon, Moyshe 56–59
Bund 21, 27, 30, 35 n. 1, 36 n. 5, 38 n. 54, 169
Busch, Wilhelm 78, 90 n. 10

Camp Kinderland 154, 157–59, 162–63, 165, 166 n. 11, n. 12
Cats, Jacob 12, 13, 16, 18 n. 26
Cervantes, Miguel de 4, 12, 13, 16, 18 n. 30, n. 32
Chagall, Marc 2, 4, 53, 54, 60, 72, 74 n. 42, 76 n. 87, 77, 78, 81, 83, 88, 91 n. 25, n. 33, 95, 117, 137, 169
Chaikov, Yosef (Joseph) also Tshaykov, Iosif 2, 4, 50, 52–54, 56–59, 71, 74 n. 24, 77, 78, 88, 90 n. 6, 91 n. 33, 169, 171
Charney, Daniel 169
Chicago 159, 162
China 104, 180
Chudakova, Marietta 113, 120
Chukovskii, Kornei 76 n. 77, 113, 21 n. 9, 180
Cincinnati 159
civil war, in Russia 6, 78, 137, 141, 143, 147, 170
Cleveland 159
Cold War 154
Communism 6, 35 n. 1, 143, 144, 148
Communist International (Comintern) 150, 180
Communist Party, in:
Soviet Union 72 n. 3, 112, 149, 150, 169
United States 154, 156, 157, 160, 165
Crimea 88
Cubo-Futurism 59
Częstochowa 30

Davidman, Shloyme 6, 154–59, 161–67
Dayts, Y. 180
Debs, Eugene Victor 160
Der Nister 2, 5, 21, 60, 77–83, 90–91, 93–98, 100, 103–05, 108–10, 111–14, 117–22, 135 n. 6, 137, 169
Detroit 159, 162
Dik, Ayzik Meyer 24
Dobrushin, Yehezkel 54–55, 74
Druker, Hayyim 11–12, 17 n. 4, 18 n. 21, n. 24
Dubnov, Shimen 24, 37 n. 42
Dukhan, Igor 89, 92 n. 40
Dumas, Alexandre 144
Duncan, Isadora 145

Efros, Abram 52, 53
Egypt 32
Eisner, Gustave 30
Elimelech of Lizhensk 41
Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Clubs 165
Epstein (also Epshteyn), Mark 169, 171, 173, 177
Erasmus 13
Erik, Max 18 n. 41, 146
Erlich, Shoshke 24
Esenin, Sergei 145
Etkind, Alexander 124, 126
Expressionism 58, 92 n. 36

Fader, Ayala 41, 47–48 n. 3, n. 6
Fang, Zhihui 51
Fefer, Itsik 122 n. 31, 140, 151, 174
Feltser, Fayvel 183 n. 8
Fichmann, Yaakov 4, 21–23, 26, 29–35, 38 n. 47, 39 n. 63
Fishman, David 23, 27, 36 n. 20
Five Year Plans 125, 160
folklore 5, 23–24, 27, 30, 31, 35, 36 n. 20, 37 n. 26, 54, 59, 77–79, 89, 96, 169
folktale 4, 12, 14–16, 18 n. 40, 20, 21, 29, 32–34, 38 n. 48, 39 n. 62, 52, 63, 64, 67, 84, 109 n. 5
Forcione, Alban 13, 18 n. 32
Ford, Aleksander 30
Fradkin, Moshe also Moisei 98, 100, 101, 104, 106, 107, 108, 110 n. 25, 114, 121 n. 14
Freedom Song Society 162
Friedberg, Haia 169, 182 n. 5
Friedman, Bezalel 159, 166 n. 19

Garbati, Irving 161, 166 n. 22
Gitlin, A. 31, 32
Gogol, Nikolai 88, 132, 150, 153 n. 42
Goldfaden, Abraham 149
Gorki, Maxim 171
Grimm, brothers Jacob and Wilhelm 21, 78, 169
Grin, Ber 156, 166 n. 8
Gulag 80, 126, 135 n. 11

Hamburg 96, 112
Harkavy, Alexander 25
Harshav, Benjamin 51, 61, 73 n. 8, n. 9
Hasidim 40, 42
Haskalah 28, 36 n. 22
Hauff, Wilhelm 169
Haymarket martyrs 160
Heywood, Colin 28, 38 n. 44
Heschel, Abraham Joshua 22, 36 n. 13
heyder see kheyder
Hirschbein, Peretz 37 n. 35, 143, 152 n. 20
Hofstheyn, David 112, 171
Holocaust 30, 36 n. 5, 80

Ilyin, M. (Ilya Marshak) 177
Inger, Grigory (Hersh) 177
International Workers Order (IWO) 158–59, 166 n. 15–17
Isaac ben Eliakum of Poznan 11, 17 n. 16

Jerusalem 32, 40
Jewish Antifascist Committee 151
Jewish Colonization Society in Russia 162
Jewish People’s Fraternal Order 158–65, 166 n. 23
Jewish Public Committee to Aid Victims of War, Pogroms and Natural Disasters 137
‘Judaization’ (of literary texts) 21, 69, 78, 90 n. 10

Kassil, Lev 180
Kazakevich, Emanuel 138, 140, 152 n. 6
Kazakevich, Henekh 140, 143
Kazdan, Khaym-Shloyme 96–97, 109 n. 9
Kharkiv (Kharkov) 6, 21, 90 n. 9, 96, 104, 110, 111–12, 114, 138, 140–46, 149, 151–52, 173, 174, 177, 180, 182
khe(y)der 2, 11, 17 n. 16, 18 n. 20, 37 n. 42, 62, 80, 83, 91 n. 24, 155
Kiel, Mark W. 24, 36 n. 23, 37 n. 25, n. 26
Kiev 2,3, 4, 21, 49, 52, 53, 55, 56, 67, 73 n. 6, 74, 75 n. 45, 77, 79, 82, 89 n. 1, 91 n. 26, 92 n. 39, 95, 98, 100, 101, 104, 106, 107,
110 n. 20, 111, 121 n. 8, n. 9, 122 n. 18, 136 n. 14, 137, 143, 151, 168, 169–71, 173, 177, 180, 182
Kipling, Rudyard 50, 63, 64, 67, 76 n. 77, 92, 169, 171
Kipnis, Itsik 74 n. 84, 109 n. 5, 171, 176
Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 58
Kishinev 78
Kisselgoff, Zinovy 137
Kletskin (Kletzkin), Boris 78, 90 n. 7, n. 16, 91 n. 25, 95, 109 n. 8, 152 n. 20, 168
Konashevich, Vladimir 115, 116
Korunsky, Vladimir 54
Kotlyar, Joseph 138, 151, 180
Kotlyarevski, M. 177
Kovno (Kaunas) 96
Krakow 31
Kryukov, B. 177
Kugelmass, Jack 30, 38
Kultur-Lige 2, 3, 4, 19 n. 41, 21, 33, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, 73 n. 5, 74 n. 20, n. 32, 77, 81, 89 n. 2, 91 n. 26, 92 n. 39, 109 n. 10,
111,, 117, 169, 171, 173, 177, 182 n. 1, n. 3
Kursk 140
Kushnirov, Aron 137, 138, 147
Kutzik, Jordan 41, 48
Kvitko, Leyb 2, 5, 63, 77, 90 n. 6, 110 n. 10, 111–18, 120, 121, 151, 171, 174, 177, 180, 182

Labour Zionism 155, 169
La Fontaine, also Lafointaine, Jean de 88, 96
Landau, Yitskhok 34
Lebedev, Vladimir 64, 66–71, 74 n. 40, 76 n. 77, n. 80
Leivick H. 79
Lemberg (Lviv) 31
Lemmens, Albert 59, 62, 75, 91 n. 27
Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich 69, 116, 144, 153 n. 37, 155, 156, 157, 160, 162, 166 n. 20, 171, 173, 174, 177, 180, 182–83 n. 8
Leningrad see also St. Petersburg, Leningrad 137
Lermontov, Mikhail 81
Liebknecht, Karl 148
Likhachev, Dmitrii 124, 126, 135 n. 8, 136 n. 21
Lincoln, Abraham 164
Levinson, Boris 27
Lilien, Ephraim Moses 54, 58
Lissitzky, Eliezer (El) 2, 4, 5, 49, 50, 52, 62–68, 71, 73 n. 16, 75 n. 67, 76, 77–78, 81–86, 88–89, 90–92, 169–70, 182 n. 5
Litvakov, Moyshe 53–54, 74, 112, 140
London 40, 110 n. 13, 151
Los Angeles 73, 159
lullabies 33, 94, 97, 110 n. 11, 115–16, 122 n. 29, 180
Luxemburg, Rosa 148
Luzzatto, Rabbi Moshe Chaim, 45

Madrid, 13, 14, 18 n. 27
Makhmadim group 58
Malakhovka 96, 137, 146, 151 n. 4
Malevich, Kazimir 67–68, 88–89, 92 n. 40
Mani Leib 2, 5, 78, 81–85, 88–89, 90–91
Meyrink, Gustav 79
Makagon, Avrom 140
Makarenko, Anton 138, 143, 148
Manger, Itsik 24, 27, 79, 90 n. 15, n. 17
Margolin, Miriam 56, 59, 62, 83
Markish, Peretz 77, 91 n. 33, 112, 133, 136 n. 28, 151sha
Marshak, Samuil 50, 68, 69, 76 n. 86, 113, 121 n. 9, 177, 180, 183 n. 13
Medem Sanatorium 30, 38 n. 56
Mendele Moykher Sforim (S. Y Abramovitsh) 2, 24, 25, 26, 34, 39 n. 68, 77, 80, 81, 90 n. 6
Mickenberg, Julia 154, 166 n. 2
Mikhoels, Solomon 149
Mikitenko, Ivan 177
Minsk 142, 173, 174, 176, 180, 183 n. 10
Mitchell, Bruce 41, 48 n. 6
Mohilev 86, 88, 91 n. 36
Montalván, Juan Pérez de 13
Montreal 40
Moscow 2, 21, 50, 56, 57, 68, 70–72, 76 n. 80, 96, 125, 137, 138, 140, 142, 145, 151, 173, 174, 180, 182
Moscow State Yiddish Theatre 149
Moss, Kenneth 1, 7 n. 4, 22, 28, 33, 35 n. 4, 36, 38 n. 45, 39, 52, 73, 74, 90 n. 11, 121 n. 2
Munkacz 31

Nachman of Bratslav, Rabbi 46
New York 6, 21, 30, 40, 80, 110 n. 19, 137, 155–57, 159, 162, 164, 165, 168
Niger, Shmuel 2, 3, 7 n. 5, 35, 36 n. 6, 37 n. 26, 39 n. 70
Nodelman, Perry 10, 17 n. 9, n. 10
Non-Partisan Children’s Schools 157, 161

Odessa 2, 33, 90 n. 9, 155, 173, 180
Olgin, Moyshe 156, 162
Opatoshu, Joseph 147, 153 n. 32
orphanages 6, 137, 138, 141, 143, 147, 157

Palestine 33, 58, 143
Panchenko, Alexander 124, 126, 135 n. 8, 136 n. 21
Panteleev, Leonid 138, 148, 152 n. 7
Paris 58, 74 n. 20, 75 n. 61, 148, 171, 182 n. 3
Passover 64, 124, 169, 182 n. 2
Pat, Yankev 4, 21–23, 26, 29, 30–35, 38, 39
Paver, Eliezer 31
Pedagogy 6, 28, 143, 144, 150, 154, 158–61
Pedology 143, 150
Pepper, Benjamin 141, 152 n. 12
Peretz, Yitskhok Leibush, also Isaac Leib 24, 25, 27, 36, 37, 52, 77, 78, 89 n. 6, 94, 95, 109 n. 4, 161, 168, 180
Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich 142–43
Petrograd, see also St. Petersburg, Leningrad 2, 56, 61, 67, 82, 91 n. 25, 95
Petrovskii, Miron 116, 121
Phaedrus 96
Philadelphia 156, 159, 162
Pietrkow 34
Pintshevski, Moyshe 145
Pittsburgh 159
Po‘ale Zion see also Labour Zionism 21
Poland 20, 30, 31, 36 n. 5, 146
Polonskii, Samuel 177
Portnoy, Efraim 140
Propp, Vladimir 18 n. 40, 29, 30, 38 n. 48, n. 49, 90 n. 22
Pushkin, Aleksander 81, 169

Raysher, Moshe ben Menahem Mendl 31
Red Army 113, 116, 147, 148, 155, 160, 171, 180
Remenik, Hersh 132, 82
revolution, in Russia 2, 5, 6, 49, 53–55, 63, 64, 68, 71, 72, 78, 79, 107, 111, 112, 113, 123–24, 126, 131, 132, 134, 141–43, 146,
150–51, 155–60, 169–71, 173
Reyzen, Avrom 30
Rosenfeld, Alla 64, 67, 73 n. 3, 74 n. 40, 76
Rosh, Y. 177
Rosh Hashana 162
Rovno (Rivne) 140
Ruzhiner Rebbe 41
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 163, 164
Ryback, Issachar Ber 2, 4, 50, 52–54, 56, 59–62, 72, 74 n. 21, 75, 77, 78, 83, 85, 86, 88, 91, 169, 174
Ryklin, Mikhail 124, 125, 135 n. 7, 136 n. 18, n. 19

Sacco, Nicola 160
St Petersburg see also Petrograd, Leningrad 52, 141
Schaechter, Mordkhe 24–25
Schiller, Firedrich 22
schools, 3, 20–21, 24, 28–29, 32
imperial Russia 95, 129
Poland 30, 36 n. 5
religious, see also kheder 2, 9, 17 n. 16, 41, 44, 45, 80, 141
secular 1, 2, 23, 50, 79, 171
Soviet Union 137, 143, 148, 150, 151, 171, 173, 180
United States 6, 154–66
Seer of Lublin 34, 41
Sendak, Maurice 56–57
sexual education 145–46
Shindler, Eliezer 169
Shmeruk, Chone 1, 7 n. 1, 17, 18, 36, 77, 89 n. 4, 90
Shakespeare, William 79
Shatskikh, Alexandra 63, 75 n. 66
Shavit, Zohar 27, 37 n. 41
Shlonsky, Avraham 138
Sholem Aleichem 1, 7 n. 1, 17 n. 4, 24, 34, 36 n. 6, 37, 77, 78, 80, 89 n. 6, 90 n. 9, 114, 161, 164, 168, 180
Shor, Sara 77
Shrayer, Israel 141, 143, 145–46, 151, 152
Shteynbarg, Eliezer 24, 27, 37 n. 38
Singer, Isaac Bashevis 30, 124, 135 n. 4
Sito, Fayvl 6, 137–52, 157, 166 n. 12
Slotnick, Susan 123–24, 135 n. 2, 136 n. 23
Socialist Realism 79, 112, 113, 134, 136 n. 27, 182
Soviet Union 2, 3, 5, 21, 64, 96, 105, 107, 109 n. 5, 111, 125, 128, 129, 137, 138, 142, 145, 146, 147, 150, 151, 154, 157, 158, 160,
160, 168–70, 173, 174, 180, 182, 183
Spartacus League (Spartakusbund) 148
Spektor, Mordkhe 1
Stalin, Josef 5, 115, 116, 119, 120, 122 n. 29, 124, 125, 129, 135 n. 13, 138, 180
Stasov, Vladimir 52, 73 n. 16
Steiner, Evgeny 57, 66, 67, 73 n. 4, 74 n. 40, 75, 76, 92 n. 38, 169, 173, 177, 182 n. 4
Stommels, Serge-Aljosja 59, 62, 75, 91 n. 27
Strelits, Oskar 140
Symbolism 51, 59, 79, 92 n. 42, 93–95, 103, 108, 110 n. 15, 112, 118–20, 171, 176, 183 n. 9
Szwarc, Marek 52

Tarant, Devoyre 159, 166 n. 19
Tatlin, Vladimir 49
Taytsh, Moyshe 146, 152 n. 29
Tel Aviv 33
Tengnagel, Mattheus Gansneb 12, 13, 18 n. 28
Territorialism 20, 35 n. 1, 169
textbooks 50, 63, 159–61, 163, 173
Tolstoy, Lev 78, 90 n. 9
Torah 10, 11, 16, 23, 24, 29, 26 n. 37, 40, 48 n. 4, 86
TOZ (Society for Safeguarding the Health of the Jewish Population) 30
translations, into:
English 136 n. 18, 167 n. 37
Russian 3, 90 n. 6, 111, 113, 115, 121 n. 9, 123, 132
Ukrainian 3, 111
Yiddish 9, 12, 15, 17 n. 15, 18 n. 24, 21, 50, 63, 68, 69, 83, 109 n. 7, 114, 168, 169, 177, 180
Tsene rene 11–12, 17–18, 51, 58
TSYSHO 21, 30, 36 n. 5
Twain, Mark 169
Tyshler, Alexandr 171

United Kingdom 41
United States of America 6, 41, 154–56, 158, 160–63

Vasnecov, Viktor 87, 88
Verwers-Dusart, Catharina 12–13, 18 n. 29
Vico, Giambattista 93, 109 n. 1
Vanzetti, Bartolomeo 160
Vilna 2, 28, 30, 78, 90 n. 7, 168, 169, 182 n. 3
Vitebsk 67, 76 n. 72, 92 n. 40

Warsaw 2, 21, 30, 31, 33, 88, 90 n. 12, 95, 168
Wasilewska, Wanda 30
Wiggins, Ella Mae 160
Wolfthal, Diane 51, 71 n. 11
Wolitz, Seth 53, 58, 59, 63, 68, 73, 74, 75, 92 n. 36, 135 n. 4
Workmen’s Circle 157–58
World War I 2, 78, 95, 137, 140, 148, 150, 169
World War II 21, 138, 151, 182

Yakhinson, Israel 143
Yakir, Yonah 113, 116
yeshivas 159
Yom Kippur 128
Young Communist League (Komsomol) 138, 148, 173
Young Worker-Writer’s Union 156
Yiddishism 3, 21, 23, 38 n. 47, 49–51, 55, 78, 89, 111, 155, 160, 182 n. 3
Yudovin, Salomon 87

Zabila, Natalia 180
Zabolotskii, Nikolai 113
Zfatman, Sara 16, 17, 18
Zhitomir 95
Zionism 3, 20, 21, 33–36, 143, 152 n. 27, 155, 169