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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Welcome to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. My name is Alex Weiser. I'm the Director of Public Programs of yivo. We're so pleased to have you here with us for the Zoom webinar celebrating Jeffrey Chandler's new book, Homes of the A Lost Jewish Museum. Today's conversation will be led by Deborah Dash Moore, and I'll introduce both of our speakers in a moment, but first, I'll just say a word about yivo. For those that don't know, YIVO is a very special place for the celebration and cultivation of Jewish history and Jewish culture. We have a library and archive with over 23 million documents and over 400,000 books, and we make those available to researchers from around the world. We have public programs like this, we have exhibitions and much more. Today's program is very special for us because the story is a story about yivo's past, about a project that never totally took off, but it's a fascinating story. It's really a lens into the kind of work that YIVO does and what motivates us. And so we're so extra excited. And it's a really wonderful book. So without further ado, Jeffrey Chandler is Distinguished professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. His publications include Adventures in Yiddishland Post Vernacular Language and Culture, Shtetl, A Vernacular Intellectual History, Yiddish Biography of a Language, among other titles. He's the editor of Awakening Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust, and translator of Emil and A Holocaust Novel for Young Readers by Jakob Klotstein, among others. Chandler was the National Endowment for the Humanities Scholar in Residence at the center for Jewish history in 2021-2022, which supported his work on this publication. Deborah Dash Moore is the Frederick G.L. heatwell professor of History at the University of Michigan. She has engaged in a number of major editorial projects, including the three volume award winning City of Promises. And she serves as Editor in Chief of the ten volume anthology, the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization. She's also been in recent years teaching and studying documentary photography. So, Jeffrey and Deborah, thank you so much.
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Thank you.
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Okay, so thank you very much, Alex, for the introduction and. And it was great, actually, Jeff, to hear about a couple of the other books that you've written because you have a way to choose titles that are, or I should say subjects. Not just titles, but subjects that are different and unusual and yet open a window into fascinating questions. And here I think with Homes of the Past, you've done the same thing. This is a story about an exhibit that never happened. And normally we would think, who cares, right? It didn't happen. But tell us a bit about how you got interested in this exhibit, what prompted you to to write the book, and what drew you to it.
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Okay, well, thank you, Deborah. And before I answer the question, I just want to offer a few words of thanks to first of all, everyone who is joining us on ZOOM today. Thank you for doing so. I want to thank Yivo not only for hosting this program, but as Alex mentioned, this project is about part of yivo's history. And I want to especially thank the archivists at yivo, without whom I never could could have done this project. And I'm deeply indebted to them. And as Alex mentioned, I owe thanks to the center for Jewish History and the fellowship from NEH that I received and my own university, Rutgers, for giving me the time to work on this book. And last but not least, I want to thank Deborah and her co editor, Marcia Rosenblit, who, you know, Deborah supervises a lot of endeavors, and one that wasn't even mentioned is that she is longtime editor of a wonderful book series for Indiana University Press called Modern Jewish Experience. And they not only accepted this book for publication, but both Deborah and Marcia gave me lots of very, very helpful advice. So I am indebted to many people for the realization of this book. Now to the question, how did I wind up writing about this odd thing that never happened? So in 2019, I was starting to do a research project on contemporary Jewish museum projects. I started to plan for a sabbatical in 2020, when I was going to go to cities in Europe and I was going to Russia, I was going to go to Israel. I had big plans. Then the pandemic began, and I didn't leave home like a lot of other people. And I was trying to think, how can I continue to work on this topic? Because museums everywhere are closed, as are libraries, archives, schools, theaters. All these public cultural institutions are shut down with no sense when they might reopen. And so I actually started looking at what at the center for Jewish History, what was available in its various collections that was online. And I started to find interesting material about museums. And I found myself drawn to lost museums, maybe because at the time there was this concern among museum professionals that if this shutdown lasts long enough, some museums may not recover, they may not be able to reopen. I started to think, what happens when you lose a museum, even a museum you never visited? There is a symbolic loss in the cultural landscape if it's not there anymore. So I was drawn to this topic. And there are basically two kinds of lost Jewish museums. One are museums that did exist but then were shut down in the most case. Talking about museums that came or in cities that came under control of the Nazis, either in the late 30s or the early 1940s. And these museums were dismantled. Their collections sometimes were destroyed or were appropriated. So there was that set. But then there were some other museums and also major exhibitions that were planned but never happened. And among them was this exhibition called, in English, the Museum of the Homes of the Past, that a group of refugee scholars from YIVO were planning to make in New York in the middle of World War II. And I was astonished by this idea, including the fact that I'd never heard of it, because I studied at YIVO in the 1980s. I worked at YIVO. Why did I know nothing about this? So this became the focus of my attention and turned out to be something that, as Deborah, as you alluded to, it opens up a whole set of larger issues. And so that's how I wound up writing this book.
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Okay, so yivo's a crucial piece of the story, obviously. Alex mentioned briefly about yivo. I'm noticing that they have their logo, which is a really distinctive logo, as part of the, you know, the Zoom ID thing. Can you tell us a bit about YIVO and how these scholars coming to the US would have wanted to think about in the middle of World War II, a museum of homes.
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Yes.
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Yeah.
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So for folks who may not know, YIVO is a Yiddish acronym. And that's actually what this logo represents for those of you who can see it translated as the Institute for Jewish Research. It was set up in the city of Vilna, then part of Poland, in 1925 as an independent institute for social science research on the Jews of Eastern Europe. And this was. It came into existence because this was a culture that wasn't getting studied in universities or anyplace else, with an emphasis on Yiddish, of course, and with an emphasis on Yiddish as key to what defined this population as a kind of nation. And they actually thought of it in these kind of nationalist terms. And at the same time that the focus was on Yiddish speaking Jews in Eastern Europe, they were also very attentive to the fact that in recent decades there was an expansive worldwide diaspora of Yiddish speaking Jews who came from Eastern Europe, who had immigrated to the Americas, to South Africa, to Palestine, to Australia. They're all over the place, and they were interested in those folks as well. And as a result, they created a couple of branch offices in key cities outside of Eastern Europe. And the first one they created was in New York, same year, 1925. It was called the American Branch. I'm uptale in Yiddish. And it was a small operation, had an annual conference. They issued a few publications, they raised money for support of YIVO's work. But the main headquarters was in Eastern Europe. But then, after the beginning Of World War II, September 1, 1939, Germany invades Poland. And shortly thereafter, it is announced that YIVO's main headquarters will temporarily be in New York. And at that point, there were a couple of leading scholars from Yiva who had immigrated in the late 30s. A couple more would join them as refugees in 1940. But they saw this as a provisional move. This is where they would ride out the war. When the war was over, they go back to Europe and get back to work there as their home base and also their homeland. But by 1943, they come to the horrible realization that they won't be able to go back. There won't be anything to go back to. There has been such an extensive murder of Jews, especially in Eastern Europe, and such an extensive destruction of their cultural institutions and of their property, that
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they
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cannot rebuild their institute in Europe, and that New York will be their home for the future. And at this moment, which I contemplate, and I think about just how devastating this must have been for people who not only lived in Eastern Europe, they lived for Eastern Europe. They worked for the value of Jewish life in Eastern Europe as something that should be nurtured and cultivated and that Jews should continue to flourish in Eastern Europe. So this is different from Zionists who said, no, get out of the Diaspora, and we need a Jewish state somewhere else. But this was a commitment to maintaining Jewish life where it had been for centuries. And now a sense that that mission has ended. And they start to think both as, I think, as individual scholars, but as a collective, as an institute. What do we do now? And in the American context, how do we reshape our intellectual mission and our mission to present scholarship to the Jewish public, which they had always seen their scholarship in a sort of activist way, is. It's not only for scholars. It is to benefit the public. So we now have a new public. How do we possibly talk to them? And out of this thinking emerges this idea that they're going to make a museum. Okay, so
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what you sketched out for us is really fascinating. And they come to decide they're going to do homes now is that because of the American context. I mean, there weren't many home museums at the time. This is a really unusual idea, I think, right.
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So their idea, they're going to make a museum that eventually they kick around ideas for the title, but they call it in Yiddish, museefen, the Alta heyman from the old homes. And the alta hem is a Yiddish idiom that is closer to in English saying the old world or the old country. In English, they rendered it as the homes of the past.
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And
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what's key is, first of all, what do they mean by home, and why is it plural? So home, That's a very elastic word. It can mean the house you live in, it can mean your neighborhood, it can mean your hometown, it can mean your home region, it can mean your home country here. It's very interesting. What exactly? In a way, the openness of the term here gave them a certain elasticity. The fact that it's plural indicates that they weren't thinking that this is one unified home, but there are a variety of homes that Jews lived in in Eastern Europe, because they were thinking of this museum primarily in geographic terms. This museum was going to show American Jews primarily, but the American public as well, the great range of Jewish life in Eastern Europe across a wide swath of regions. And it was going to show the value of this culture, a culture that, as they said, it is a past that only began yesterday. It only has just become the past. And given that, how do we learn from it? What gifts does it offer us going forward for the future? And so home here, I think, probably referred primarily to hometowns, because the way they started to sketch out what they thought this exhibition, this museum would look like was that it'd be organized by different regions of Eastern Europe, and within each region, they would show you the life in individual towns. And so I think that hometown was probably the key operation, as opposed to, say, domestic life, that kind of home. So that's my sense of what home means here. But of course, dial to Heim refers to something much bigger. So it's playing, I think, with that tension between something big and something more intimate.
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That's really neat. So this is, in some ways, I think, a Holocaust story. It's unfolding as the Holocaust. It doesn't have that name yet. But as the murder of Eastern European Jews is going forward, and
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what does
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it let us understand about how people are responding to the Holocaust as it unfolds?
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Yes, it's a really good question, because this is an early example, which then becomes much more extensive, of trying to memorialize what is destroyed during the Holocaust. So when you think about Holocaust memory practices broadly defined, there's sort of two main categories. One is remembering the destruction. What was the apparatus of the destruction, the ghettos and camps and shooting squads and, you know, what was the process of the persecution and annihilation of Jews and of course, other people who were swept up in the Holocaust. The other area of Holocaust memory practice is, well, what was destroyed and how do we remember it? And that was clearly their focus. And their focus was distinct, the museum. And when they are promoting the museum, in 1944, January of 1944, they announced they're going to make this museum. And there's articles in the Yiddish press, not only in New York, but as far as South Africa, in the Yiddish newspaper in South Africa has this story. And they, they started collecting drive because, I mean, it's quite remarkable that they're thinking of all things a museum, because they don't have a lot of money, they don't have a lot of objects to put on display. They don't have space for a museum. They have a building that has some exhibit space, but they actually are planning a separate building for this museum. They don't have any museum professionals on their staff. And they are really not quite sure that they, how well they understand their American Jewish constituency, but they're going to make this museum. And so one of the things they do is they say, we want to do this and we need you American Jews to donate materials from your homes in Eastern Europe to the museum. And they have a list of kinds of categories of things that they want people to send them. And people do send them documents, photographs, not too many objects, three dimensional objects, but a lot of two dimensional material. Also information they were very interested in. Tell us about your hometown, Tell us regional folklore, regional customs. So they were interested in gathering intangible information as well as the material for thinking about how to create this museum. And they continue to collect material for somewhere between two and three years. And then there seems to be less information about this project. And it seems that by 1950, although I don't know exactly when, why, how they decide we're just not going to pursue it. But it is this early effort to think about this world that is gone, that is now the past. And what was distinctive about Yivo's approach to this is what can we bring into the future from this? So it's not only memorializing the past as an end in itself, but as what inspiration, what lessons, what, what gifts does it give us Moving forward and especially thinking about, for American Jews, what do you need to know about this past so that you have a stronger sense of self as a Jew living in America? And that's what distinguishes it among the wide range of Holocaust memory projects, and especially even among the ones that are focused on life before the war as opposed to, you know, the war itself.
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So what you're saying about the challenge of creating a museum, I mean, reminds me of some of the. The challenges that were faced in a number of local ones in the U.S. you know, there was a. In South Carolina, they had this call for candlesticks and, you know, efforts because they didn't have anything to build it with. But can you say a little bit about what was the situation of Jewish museums at the time? 44, 45. I mean, this seems really unusual.
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It is, you know, at this moment, Jewish museums are at low ebb. Every museum in Europe by this point has been shut down one way or another or has been appropriated. In the case of Prague, that museum becomes the collecting point for the looting of Jewish communal property in Bohemia and Moravia. Other museums, materials are just destroyed or are confiscated, and some never reappear after the war. And so. And there are, outside of Europe, there are two small museums in the United States, both at rabbinical schools. One is Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. One is Jewish Theological Seminary. Seminary, yes, seminary, excuse me, in New York. And neither museum is a big deal, and neither is a major center of attention for these rabbinical schools because it's not their main purpose. And by and large, what these museums exhibit are gifts that people have donated to the seminary or to huc. They're not things that they sought. And so they are museums by default, almost. And then there's one museum in Jerusalem at the Bezalel School of Art, which is basically a collection of objects for art students to look at. And that was it. So today, the mushrooming of Jewish museums around the world in all kinds of places, that's a development of the last really past 50 years. And when Yivo comes up with this idea for its museum, it is just an empty field at that point. Yeah.
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And it's an empty field in terms of history museums. Right. Because this was a history museum. It wasn't just ritual objects.
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It's a really good point. Most Jewish museums created before World War II, the collections are primarily ritual objects used for celebrate, holidays, life cycle events, synagogue worship. This museum was not going to be that kind of museum and was not focused on religious life primarily, but was on, I would say, Recent history as presented in the geographic expanse of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, because the material that they would be able to collect was of the recent past. It would be maybe mid 19th century, up until the start of the war. And even though we're talking about communities that would date back the 15th, 16th century, in some cases they would not be collecting artifacts from that period, but it would focus on really the remembered past of immigrants and of the last half century before the museum opens. And so it's, and it's also distinguished as a history museum because it's a museum of something lost as opposed to just something old. And I think that that makes it the, this a kind of pioneering effort to address something that is on the other side of the barrier of destruction. So the effort that they were making for this is really working with some very, very new ideas about what a museum, generally, a Jewish museum particularly might consist of.
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So that makes me think back to my first book, which was about second generation Jews. And my sense from, you know, reading your book, that that was one of their audiences, right, that they wanted to reach these American born Jews of Eastern European heritage, but who didn't necessarily know
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too much about it.
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So can you speak a little bit about that, that drive that they had and then maybe we'll, we'll go into the failure and what happens afterwards.
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Okay. So I mean, it really is a key question. I'm glad you asked it because that is a particular concern for this museum and these scholars who come from Eastern Europe and they look at American Jewish youth in particular, the second generation, in some cases even third generation by this point. Max Weinreich, who is the director of research and was really a leading figure in this project to at least initiate the museum, he writes at one point he said, you know, American Jewish youth, they have an inferiority complex. They think they're second class citizens in the United States. That's interesting. And he's looking at their situation and saying, well, look, there is quite extensive and quite forthright anti Semitic rhetoric in the public sphere. There are schools Jews can't get into, there are professions you can't enter, there are neighborhoods you can't move into. And he says that for many young American Jews, to them, being Jewish is a negative and whatever they know about their East European heritage, he wouldn't have used that word, heritage. But let's use it now. Either they don't know anything or what they know is ill informed and it's all negative. Right? And he said, we have to change that because they need to understand where they come from as a thinking in nationalist terms. This is your national heritage. You need it to strengthen your sense of who you are. He said, American Jews need to know they're not worse than other people. They're not better than other people either, but they are different. And that that difference is going to be defining an enriching part of their life. And that's what this museum is intended to Convey. And in 1940, that's a really provocative idea. I mean, today, you know, difference. We are all about difference. Right. 1940, not so much. And I think that, you know, this was a sense in which the vision for this museum was ahead of its time by decades. Right, right.
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Okay. So I know a good chunk of the book actually deals with the fact that the museum wasn't established, that it failed. So I thought maybe we would switch to the aftermath here and sort of think about not just what doesn't happen, but what does happen.
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Right.
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Because you do deal with the aftermath.
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Yeah. So first of all, why doesn't it happen? I was hoping I'd find the MEM with the name on it saying, we have met, and we're reporting that for the following reasons. We're just not going to go ahead with this project if such a memo exists. I never found it, and I looked all over the place. So not knowing that actually is more interesting than knowing which scholars like to know things. But not knowing makes you then think about what are the possibilities and therefore what. What did happen? Right. As you ask. So I think key factors as to why this project was set aside were other things that Yivo was dealing with at the same time. One was the recovery of materials that had been looted from the Vilna Yivo by the Germans that had been carted off to Germany and working actually during the war, start to work, lobbying the State department and the U.S. army, because this was in a part of Germany that was under American control to get the material to come to New York. Then it said, this belongs here. It doesn't go back to Vilna, because they thought if it goes back to Vilna, which was now Vilnius and part of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, we'll never see it. And so 1947, after extensive lobbying, this material arrives in New York, and we're talking about dozens and dozens of large wooden crates full of all kinds of stuff that they have to unpack, they have to sort through. They have to figure out what. What is, you know, in some cases, thrown together in these boxes and catalog it and, you know, incorporate it into their collections, which is an enormous task and probably was emotionally very challenging to go through all this stuff. That's one thing. The other thing which also starts during the war, is they start to initiate a project called the Archive of Jewish Life Under Nazi Domination. They start this in early 1945, so the war isn't quite over yet, and they start collecting material on what we now call the Holocaust. And they are pioneers in collecting this material and the field of Holocaust studies. They actually started publishing material during the war. And in 1947, they put some of the material that they were getting sent to them from Europe and from all over Europe, not just Eastern Europe. They put it on exhibition in New York in their headquarters, an exhibition with 2000 items. Most of them are very small, but still a lot of stuff. And the exhibition is called Jews in Europe 1939-1946, which has to be the most neutral title for the most unusual of events. And it's really quite remarkable that that's what they call it. And the focus, which says a lot about how they were beginning to think about their particular mission in relationship to this is not on what was done to Jews so much as how did Jews respond to what was done to them. How did they in ghettos? How did they end in resistance and working with the underground in documenting what was going on in whatever forms were available? How did they respond to persecution of an unprecedented scale? And the exhibition extends to 1946. Well, the war ends in 1945. So the last part of the exhibition is about, well, now that the war is over and there are people who survive the war, what are they doing and what are we doing to help them? So it shows a very distinctive orientation to how to think about what gets to be called the Holocaust. So that's one thing that they do. Then there are other variety of other projects that take the form of books that are written or compiled by people, some of whom have a connection to YIVO of some kind, that are different efforts to address this issue of how do we. For an American Jewish audience, how do we understand this past? So I'll just like. One example which may be well known to people is Abraham Joshua Heschel's book, the Earth Is the Lord's the Inner Life of East European Jews. And this book, published in 1950, grew out of a speech he gave in Yiddish at a YIVO conference in January of 1945. And he translated and expanded it and offered a book that takes a very transcendent approach to thinking about Eastern Europe. Not focusing on what is lost, but what endures, especially at a spiritual level. And this was a very popular book. It was in print for decades. It was translated into multiple languages and was, I think for many people, an influential book. Partly because it was so comforting, it was so ameliorative to have something that offered an alternative to focusing on destruction and on loss. So that's one example.
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So I know from our time together at yivo, because we did overlap, there was one of my favorite projects that occurred. There was a project that used photography, which is another thing, obviously that I'm very much interested in. And this was an effort to capture that world of Eastern Europe. And it was called Image Before My Eyes. And it's a really interesting exhibit that it began as, and then it became a volume and then it became a documentary. So it, it was truly successful in all of these different ways. It had a particular point of view because there had gotten to be certain kinds of images that dominated what one visualized about Eastern Europe. So could you just talk a little bit about Image Before My Eyes? I know it's, it's, it's in the book, but yeah, it'd be nice to revisit it.
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It really is a landmark set of related projects in this history of how American Jews are thinking about this past. And as you mentioned, it is an exhibition that focuses on photography. And an exhibition and the companion book were photographs of Jewish life in Poland. So the focus is on Poland from earliest photographs of mid 19th century up to 1939. And the documentary film juxtaposes these photographs with interviews of people who lived in that world before the war from various cultural, political, ideological, religious, non religious backgrounds. And it was, it's very interesting to think of it in relationship to this idea of the museum of a generation earlier. And it shows you what a generation later, a very different kind of approach to much the same material. In fact, I'm very sure that the exhibition included many photographs that had been donated to this museum of the homes of the past because it was. Over 700 photographs were collected for the original project. But the orientation is very different. But to say, first of all, photography as not only a source of information, but as a cultural practice that we want to think about in itself. And it's something that's distinctively modern. Even when you're taking a picture of something that you don't think of as modern, the act of taking the photograph, of publishing the photograph, of collecting the photographs, sharing them, archiving them, those are modern practices. And to focus on the Full range and vitality of Jewish life before World War II. And to do so in a way that brackets the words before World War II, because people don't know. I always say to my students, when you talk about Jewish life in the interwar years, they don't know. It's the interwar years. Right now. It's a post war year. It's after World War I. The idea that there's another war around the corner, that's going to change everything. They don't know. And so to show you the value of that life in its own right, as an end in itself and as something very. With great internal diversity and vitality, that was the goal of that project. And what's key is the thinking is of a younger generation. So think of the role of Barbara Kirschenblatt Gimblet, who's one of the curators of the exhibition and editor of the book, Josh Woletsky, who's the director of the film. These are folks who were born, Barbara, in Canada, Josh, in the United States, either during or right after, shortly after the war. So they have a different relationship to this material from people who inhabited that world.
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And I said working with Lucian Dobasudsky,
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right, And working with Lucian, who was a young survivor of the war, becomes a historian in Poland, has to leave Poland in 1970. He comes to Yivo. So he's sort of a very interesting figure because the pre war period is not something he experienced except as a very young person. And what he really experienced was post war Poland in the first decades of post war Poland. Very different, but who had a historian's knowledge of this material. So it's very different from the generation of Max Weinreich and the historian Elias Cherikova and these other guys. They were born before 1900, and their entire adult lives were formed in Pre World War II Poland. And so I think, especially for the people born on this side of the ocean, it's more about discovery than about loss. And I think that. And that is also, I think, what it wound up becoming for most certainly, people like me, that this was a way of expanding your understanding of a world you didn't know that much about, and to see it as much more interesting than you might have thought it was. I think it's very distinctive to its moment.
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Yeah. Okay. So speaking of its moment, I think so let's close with one last question, which you don't actually deal with in the book itself, but I think would be certainly relevant, and that is the establishment of the museum in Warsaw Polin
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is in there a little bit. Is there in there? I didn't remember. No.
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Okay, I apologize. Okay, I forgot.
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No, there's a little bit about it. No. The Polin Museum, History of Polish Jews. Right. Okay. So. Which is about to celebrate its 10th anniversary. Right. And it's so interesting to think about it in relationship to this series of projects, because you might think, at first, okay, at last, the vision that they had back in 1940s has been fulfilled. This museum that presents the history of Jews in Poland. This is Poland writ large. So including the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, which is, you know, in the early modern period, big territory, as well as interwar Poland, as well as post war Poland of today. It's a very different project in a number of ways. It covers a thousand years of history. It does not display artifacts. It is a series of installations with very relatively few artifacts that takes you. You walk through the history. And the key difference is Yivo in New York was envisioning a museum for. Primarily for Jews in New York. Well, that's the largest Jewish population in the world before World War II and certainly after World War II. At that point, correct me if I'm wrong, about a third of all Jews in the United States live in New York in around even more. More.
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40. 40%.
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40%. Okay. So this is a big Jewish audience that they see as key for their museum, the Warsaw Museum. Poland before the war had the largest Jewish population in Europe. Now it has, if not the smallest, one of the smallest Jewish populations in Europe. The museum is as much for Poles as it is for Jewish visitors from abroad, if not more so. And it is very much conceived as a museum presenting to Poles, saying, the history of Jews in Poland is part of your history, it's part of Polish history. And those are. That is the preponderance of visitors of the museum are people from all over Poland who come to this museum. And of course, there are a lot of visitors from abroad, not only Jews who visit this museum, but that's a key audience for, for that museum. It is also a museum for Jews from abroad, saying, in effect, I'll bet you don't know this history. There's a lot you don't know. And you're going to come out here knowing a lot more Jewish history as it relates to Poland than you knew before. So for both audiences is to expand a knowledge base and to think about what connections there are between what this story means for Jews and what it means for Poles.
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Okay, So I think looking at the time, maybe we'll Pause here. I have more questions, but I suspect that there probably are questions that went into the chat. I was paying no attention to the chat because I was really engaged. Jeff, it's just been wonderful talking with you.
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Pleasure.
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Thank you. Alex, do you have a question or two from people who were.
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Questions.
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Okay, great.
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1. Just to start off, one viewer asks about who are the specific scholars involved in this project, and can you speak a little bit more about their background? You mentioned that they all, you know, grew up in Eastern Europe, but were they all Polish Jews or from other places as well?
- [44:00]
A
Okay, so what's one of the things that was frustrating with this project is that, particularly for the museum, I've had memos about the museum with no names and no dates and trying to figure out. I could sort of figure out about when they were written, but I'm not always sure who wrote them. But I do know that Max Weinreich was one of the people who signs the letters that were sent to people who donated material. And back in the day, they made carbon copies of letters, and Yivo still has the carbon copies, and they are from him, in which invariably they thank people for what they donated and ask for more information or more material. If you have any friends from your town who might have something, send them our way. Max Weinreich, one of the founders of yivo, is primarily thought of as a linguist, but he was really an interdisciplinary scholar in an extraordinary way, best known for his history of the Yiddish language. But it is much social and cultural history of Yiddish speaking Jewry and theorizing of Jewish languages generally, as well as Yiddish in particular, as it is a study of Yiddish linguistics. He's born late 19th century. He actually grows up in Courland, which is part of Latvia. And. I think especially interesting is he did not grow up speaking Yiddish.
- [45:48]
C
Right.
- [45:49]
A
He grew up because Jews in Courland spoke German. And he learns Yiddish as an adolescent when he gets involved in the Jewish Labor Bund, this socialist Jewish political movement, and becomes one of the great masters of the language. So he's sort of a role model for anybody who's not a native speaker of Yiddish and you want to master Yiddish, like, if he could do it, you could do it. And so he is one of the founders of Yivo and helps really think about what its research agendas should be. There is also involved Elias Cherikova, who's a historian of Eastern Europe. There is Jacob Lesczynski, who was a social scientist, who did sociology and economic studies, a lot of demographic work and He. He comes to the United states in the 30s, and if I'm not mistaken, he goes to Israel eventually and continues to do this kind of work. And so there's also the linguist Jul Marck is another scholar of Yiddish. He comes in the mid-1930s, earlier. There are people who have ties to Yivo, even though they come very early, even before yivo. So the historian Jacob Schatzky and the literature scholar Shmuel Nigger, who comes to the United States in 1919, but who was, you know, Yivo had this international network of scholars that they were in touch with even, you know, if they weren't in Europe. And these were all figures in the orbit of Yivo generally, which ones had a hand in the project? The only other person I know whose name turns up on letters is Moshe Kligsberg. Moshe Kligsberg was an aspirant. He was basically a graduate student at YIVO right before the war. He comes to the United States in 1941 by way of Japan. So maybe he got a Sugihara visa or passport or whatever it was. And he works as a kind of research assistant on this project. And so his name turns up. But by and large, and it's. One of the things that's frustrating is I don't always have a sense of who's making the decisions. And so it becomes, at least in the storytelling, a collective project as a result. And it may have been that they're brainstorming together and deciding what this museum might be, could be.
- [48:55]
B
You spoke a little bit about the kind of Eastern European perspective that this museum brought. One viewer is asking about the idea of creating a museum like this in an American context in which there's kind of pressure to assimilate. And related question to that is, you know, what kind. How would you. How would you portray. How would you explain the sense of Jewish identity that this museum is assuming or exploring?
- [49:23]
A
It's a really good question. So they are. They're still thinking like East European Jews. And that's. That's. It's partly because that's what they know better than they understand American Jews. And I also think it's fair to say that they bring a certain bias towards American Jews who they don't think of as being as culturally deep, sophisticated, informed as Jews in Europe. And they are not the only people with that assumption, including American Jews. Many American Jews thought like, you know, the real deal is in Europe. And American Jewish literature is full of stories of people who come to America, make a lot of money and abandon Their Yiddishkeit, they lose their Jewish cultural literacy. So they're thinking very much this idea, which does not square with this model, that everybody should come to America and fit in. And maybe assimilation is these words. Is that the right word to use or not? But definitely the idea that immigrant groups come to America and they don't want autonomy. This is why everybody in Europe wanted autonomy. They wanted out from the Russian Empire, out from the Austrian Empire. In America, immigrant groups want to fit in. And a lot of it is manifest in culture and especially language. And so the large scale abandonment of old world languages by the children of immigrants, not only Yiddish speakers, but Italian speakers and Polish speakers and Swedish speakers. This was very common. It was not uniform. And there were people who maintained a strong sense of. Of the value of their distinctive ethnic backgrounds. But that was not the prevailing sentiment. And of course, it was not the message you got in the American public sphere. If you went to American public school, you learned English, and I don't want to hear you speaking those other languages. And I think it's in your first book, the story of principal in a school in the Lower east side, that if kids were speaking Yiddish, she would wash their mouths out with soap. Yep, right. Yeah.
- [51:56]
C
In the playground. Right. Yeah.
- [51:57]
A
Right. So if that's, you know, if that's the world you're entering, you know, this Yivo model where Yiddish is really essential and where an independent, distinctive culture that you realize in an array of cultural practices, not necessarily into only or even at all in religious life that don't square with that. And I think that was the challenge for this museum. So that's what made it too late and what made it too early is that they anticipated the desire for this distinctiveness that would become much more popular, much more appealing, starting a generation later.
- [52:41]
B
A few questions have come in about the kinds of materials that were sent to Yivo for this project. Could you speak a bit more about what we know was sent? And one viewer is also asking about the hometowns. Do we know what places would have been represented?
- [52:58]
A
Okay, it's a good question. So there are partial inventories of what had been said in inventories that are prepared at a certain point in the process of this museum. And there are lots of photographs, about 700 photographs. And there is a list of photographs by town. So it will say, from this town we got X number of photographs. They don't necessarily say if it's from one person or from multiple people. They don't necessarily say what they are photographs of. Sometimes they do, sometimes they Don't. But it shows you they're thinking with the geography of this material. There were lots of documents that were sent in one set that I found particularly interesting was a guy who had sent throughout the 1920s was sending money to relatives in Ukraine to support them economically, including when they were on a collective farm. They say, we need money because we need to buy a horse and some chickens and a cow. And so they have this record, and he's sending them, and he has the wire statements to send the money, and he donates all of this to Yivo. And it's a wonderful glimpse of a much larger phenomenon of, during the interwar years, what Jews in America were doing in the way of sending financial support, but sometimes also material support, like clothing, to folks in Europe who were in much worse shape after World War I than Jews were in the United States. So there are documents like that. Very few artifacts that I know from going through the artifact file were specifically contributed to this. And one that. An illustration that appears in the book is a Hanukkah lamp that was made by the father of the guy who donated it in his hometown in Galicia. It's a homemade lamp. It's really lovely. And the son brought it to America. He knows by the time that he donates it that his ancestor has been murdered. But he decides he's going to give this to Yivo for the museum. And, of course, it's a very moving story. And I think it also was testimony to why they weren't able to get a lot of objects. Because if, you know, it's 1944 and you have family in Europe, you don't know if they're dead or alive. And all you have is this kiddush cup or this Hanukkah lamb is like, I'm not going to give it away. It's all I have that's tangible of a family I may never see again. So the fact that people were willing to donate material to me is quite remarkable. And it, you know, what people are and aren't willing to part with and when is a whole subject in its own right that comes up in this and the related projects.
- [56:28]
B
Yeah. One viewer notes that so many immigrants came to this country with so little from the old country and so asks, you know, how this material, you know, how they would have had anything. So you're in part answering it, but can you speak a little bit more to that about the kinds of things that people did have and that they sent?
- [56:48]
A
So there were a number of other ritual objects. There are just sort of Objects of daily life. There's like, one of the things that I did see was a little wooden cup that, you know, I don't think it had any ritual function or anything, you know, but it was something that somebody had brought with them and donated. There's also what I think is, you know, from being able to intuit what was donated because the records are spotty, is a kanchik, which is a whip that was used in Hayter. It's like a little cat o9 tails that you would whack the kids with if they weren't paying attention, which is actually, I think, a very telling artifact that a you would bring who would bring it with you, but also that you would donate. And we know from, you know, memoirs of young men talking about their experiences in Haydar when they're getting their early Jewish education, that corporal punishment was the rule of the day. And so that, to me, is another interesting kind of artifact. Not a ritual object per se, but clearly for somebody, a memorable material example of life back in Europe. So that's another interesting piece to contemplate.
- [58:28]
B
So we're coming close to the time here, but maybe one final question. A bunch of different people have asked about what happened to this material afterwards. And you mentioned that, you know, many of the photographs perhaps were used in image before my eyes. Another viewer is asking, you know, was anyone upset that the museum didn't happen? Did anyone ask for their materials back? Do you. Can you just tell us a little bit about what you think the afterlife of this material was within Yivo or.
- [58:58]
A
It's a good question. So they collect this material. The project doesn't happen. If anybody wrote to complain about that, it didn't happen. I didn't come across any evidence of it. Doesn't mean that there weren't complaints, but I didn't see anything. But eventually, the material is folded into larger collections, which, of course, is standard practice in archives, where even for projects that are realized as archives grow, as collecting policies change, as archival best practices develop, collections get reorganized. And so, for example, the photographs that were collected are integrated into much larger collections that are organized geographically or by personalities, depending on the subject of the photograph, a few of which are tagged saying that they were donated for this project, but most not. And so it was. You know, I at one point thought, well, I can probably spend a year and, you know, coordinate the various sources I have and track down, if not all, some of these photographs. But to what end? I decided it was not. It was not an end I was going to pursue. But it would be an interesting exercise, but that is. So the materials are, you know, go on to another archival existence, as is, as is often the case with donations to archives.
- [60:38]
B
Well, let me just say it's a wonderful book. Thank you both so much for joining us for this conversation. For all you out there, I do highly recommend picking up a copy. It is for sale on YIVO's online store, so get it from Yivo if you can. And Jeffrey, Deborah, thank you so much.
- [60:54]
A
Thank you. Alex and Deborah, thank you so much, too.
- [60:56]
C
Oh, this was great. So thanks, Jeff and Alex and thanks
- [61:00]
B
to everyone who joined. We are actually about to start this week our Yiddish Civilization lecture series. We're going to have about two lectures a week, one in English and one in Yiddish. Tomorrow we're starting off with Sunny Yudkov speaking about the Leo Rothstein book the Joys of Yiddish. So join us tomorrow and join us all summer. This is a program that brings together the Yiddish language learning that we have with our public. So join us again and thank you for joining today. We had a wonderful crowd for this,
- [61:39]
A
Sam.