Cultural Capitals: Postwar Yiddish Publishing between Warsaw and Buenos Aires

Abstract

This dissertation is chiefly concerned with the story of Yiddish after the Holocaust and the prolific publishing endeavors of cultural activists around the world. I argue that postwar Yiddish activists engaged in a practice of literary zamlen (collecting) by producing a copious range of materials with an anthological character. These works center the editor and the publisher as authorial figures whose arrangement and intervention on the text shape its meaning. Further, editors and publishers were fixated on the idea of building a Yiddish world in a dual sense: first, the literary world within the text that often tried to capture a lost past; and second, the world-system of circulation and exchange through which these books came into existence, met readers, and ended up on dusty shelves. I investigate this moment for Yiddish in three chapters. The first examines the treatment of the iconic figure I.L. Peretz on his 30th yahrzeit in 1945 and his 100th birthday jubilee in 1951/2, events that called for numerous new publications in honor of the author. This chapter focuses on how negotiating the meaning of Yiddish literature for the postwar reader was also an occasion for cultural activists to wrestle over the contours of a literary network in flux. The second chapter turns to Buenos Aires, which became a central address for Yiddish publishing in this period, reversing its previously marginal position with respect to the United States and Europe. Of primary concern in this chapter are two large Yiddish series, Dos poylishe yidentum (Polish Jewry) and Der musterverk fun der yidisher literatur (Masterworks of Yiddish Literature), and how the creation, publication, and dissemination of these books reinforced the ascendence of Buenos Aires as a key player within a global system. In the third chapter I move to Warsaw, which had been a prominent capital of Yiddish culture before the war. This chapter tells the story of efforts to rebuild Jewish culture in Poland after the Holocaust by focusing on the activities of Yiddish cultural activists in the nascent Polish People’s Republic. These figures, who were ideologically committed to both Yiddish and communism, proposed a vision for a new mode of Jewishness in line with the political demands of the state, which is reflected in the range of their publications. They saw themselves as continuing a rich tradition of Jewish Polish history through their work, however, as my research shows, their efforts were far more symbolic than practical. Finally, in the conclusion I wrestle with the paradox of postwar Yiddish that sees these immense efforts alongside a decline in Yiddish literacy overall. I examine the matter of translation in this context, and I reflect on the affective hold that Yiddish books have as totemic objects, even—or especially—for those who cannot read them.