Miriam Udel, "Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature"

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Schneer Zalman Neufeld
Guest: Miriam Udel, Associate Professor at Emory University
Book: Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature (Princeton UP, 2025)
Date: January 6, 2026

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Overview

This episode features an in-depth conversation with Miriam Udel about her new book, Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature. The work explores how 20th-century Yiddish children’s literature served as a vehicle for constructing new forms of secular Jewish identity, imbuing young readers with shared values, ethical frameworks, and imaginative worlds that transcended traditional nation-building. Udel and Neufeld discuss the corpus, its ideological ambitions, notable stories, and how these texts responded to historical currents ranging from the Enlightenment to the aftermath of the Holocaust.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Miriam Udel’s Path to the Project

• Personal and Scholarly Roots: Udel describes how her own experiences as a parent and a Yiddish language instructor converged to spark her interest, leading to over 15 years of research (03:00).

  • Quote: “It came as a kind of convergence of my mommy track with my Yiddish lerka track...wondering whether there had ever been any Yiddish children's literature.” [01:56]

• Companion Volumes: Her latest book is a “companion volume” to her 2020 anthology Honey on the Page. She frames both as parts of an “idea ecosystem” for thinking about Yiddish children’s literature as a vital force for modern Jewish self-understanding.

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Defining "Worldmaking"

• Contrast With Nation-Building: Unlike Hebrew or Soviet Russian children’s literature, Yiddish texts aimed to create an "ideational homeland" rather than a bordered nation—offering children a “symbolic world” bound by shared values and stories rather than territory (03:50–07:00).

  • Quote: “Yiddish educators and cultural leaders sought to hand the children...a kind of symbolic ideational homeland, a world, if you will, and to try to push the norms and values of that world toward their utopian visions of the good and the just.” [05:45]

• Transnationalism: Yiddish literature reflects diaspora identity, with children’s books published across four continents and embodying global connections.

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Shame and the Yiddish Language

• The Double Bind of Yiddish Shame: Udel explores the persistent association of Yiddish with shame—first as a “degraded” language, later as a marker of cultural loss for descendants of Yiddish speakers (07:14).

  • Quote: “There is the shame of too much Yiddish...for many speakers, Yiddish is perceived as a kind of degraded, bastardized form of German. ... Today we are left with the shame of not enough Yiddish, of having lost Yiddish.” [07:14]

• Psychological Parallel: Both hosts discuss how this shame mirrors feelings of religious inadequacy among secularized Jews—underscoring the intertwined layers of Jewish identity, language, and loss (09:48–11:20).

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The Corpus: What Is Yiddish Children's Literature?

• Secular Orientation: The focus is on literature produced for secular (“veltlech”) or secularist school networks—not for religious settings (13:12).
• Scope and Genres: Begins in the late 19th century, flourishes dramatically in the interwar years, and produces nearly a thousand standalone works, including poetry, picture books, novels, plays, and periodicals. Major publishing continued in post-Holocaust Americas, with some activity in Israel (13:12–17:11).

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Ideals and Ambitions: “Writing a Better World Into Being”

• Founding Values:
  • Proto-feminism: Girls as protagonists, mixed-gender education.
  • Stewardship of nature and empathy: Literature encourages care for the environment and for others less fortunate.
  • Equality and anti-racism: By the 1930s, even explicitly leftist/communist works included anti-racist elements.
  • Child psychology: Recognition of children as a distinct audience with unique needs and capacities for delight and imagination (17:22).

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Theoretical Frameworks: Utopia and Heterotopia

• Foucault's "Heterotopia": Udel borrows Foucault’s idea of heterotopia—an “other place” that reflects and distorts ordinary society, enabling reflection and critique—to frame how children’s literature operates as a unique imaginative laboratory (22:13).
  • Quote: “Children's literature can serve as a heterotopian space that is a little bit different...When we study children's literature critically, we can then take that back to our broader sense of how literature works and learn new things about it.” [23:30]

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Mapping the Field: Structure of Udel's Book

Part 1: Claiming a Usable Past

• Orientation toward Jewish Time: Texts look inward, focusing on Jewish history, holidays, and mythic heroes.
• Secular Sabbatarian Stories: Even secular authors valorized Shabbat, framed as a technology of rest and resistance to capitalist exploitation—showing convergence between religious tradition and modern, secular ideals (24:41–29:20).
  • Quote: “Shabbos was a technology of rest, and rest was resistance. ... If the worker can claw back one seventh of his...time, then that means that that's 1/7 that the boss doesn't own.” [28:58]
• Notable Reading [30:20]: Excerpt from a story where an everyman tailor finds supernatural comfort and community on Shabbat.

Gender: For Whom Was This Literature Written?

• Audience and Protagonists: Targeted at boys and girls alike, with plots often featuring girls having adventures—sometimes as a crisis (lost child), other times as self-driven exploration (32:59–35:15).
  • Quote: “When we start to see girl stories...she is not where the adults expect her to be.” [34:49]

Part 2: Contesting the Jewish Future

• Universalist and Outward-Looking Texts:

  • Themes include democracy, nature, new ideas about gender and empathy, class and racial disparities, and leftist ideology (35:34).

• Medem Sanitarium Case Study: Bundist institution for urban children combined health, democracy, and nature education—with its ethos reflected in children’s stories. Stories turned the real-life activities of the institution into lightly fictionalized episodes, making its values portable for children unable to attend (37:03–40:52).

• Memorable Moment [40:24]:

  • Udel: “We voted on everything, including the question of whether to have spinach with dinner.”
  • Host: “Did spinach get voted out up or down?”
  • Udel: “At least some of the time, spinach got a yay vote because children knew it was good for them.”

• Distinctly Jewish Elements: In universalist stories, “Jewishness” is sometimes implicit—primarily evident in the decision to write in Yiddish and through the cultural context of the authors (42:05).

Empathy and Allegory: Kobach’s “The Wind That Got Angry”

• Emotional Life as Allegory: A story about the wind rejected by the world is interpreted as a child’s tantrum—showing how literature offered tools for processing complex feelings (44:42).

  • Reading: Udel shares a dramatic excerpt describing the wind’s growing distress and ultimate “blizzard” (44:42–46:45).
  • Alternative interpretation: The host suggests an allegory for the Jewish people negotiating the tension between assimilation and distinctiveness.
  • Udel: “One of the hallmarks of truly great literature is that it is susceptible to various interpretations.” [47:37]

• Political Allegory: Stories like Tales of a Clever Pup (Labzik) embedded leftist, democratic values—depicting working-class struggles, protests, and dog heroes symbolizing collective action (48:24).

  • Udel reveals she is translating all 12 Labzik stories for Suni Press (expected 2026) and mentions a recent Yiddish puppet film adaptation (51:07).

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The Holocaust: Metabolizing Harm Through Literature

• Role of Postwar Stories: Yiddish children’s literature, mainly outside Europe, helped American and Latin American children process the trauma and moral consequences of the Holocaust, using both direct and indirect storytelling (51:49).
• Excerpt: Udel reads from Isaac Metzger’s romanticized account of Don Yitzhak Abravanel’s early exposure to religious persecution and the importance of Jewish commitment—serving as an implicit call for young readers to “double down” on Jewish learning as a response to historical violence (53:22–57:22).
  • Quote: “…the implicit message to the American Yiddish speaking teenager is that in the face of historical violence against the Jews, we double down on Jewish learning and Jewish self-expression.” [57:15]

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• “They constitute a kind of idea ecosystem about Yiddish children's literature as a force for political and ethical formation.” — Miriam Udel [01:56]
• “If the worker can claw back one seventh of his...time, then that means that that's 1/7 that the boss doesn't own.” — Miriam Udel [28:58]
• “One of the hallmarks of truly great literature is that it is susceptible to various interpretations.” — Miriam Udel [47:37]
• “Stories like Labzik and his human beings go on adventures against authoritarianism in favor of democracy...” — Miriam Udel [48:24]
• “In the face of historical violence against the Jews, we double down on Jewish learning and Jewish self-expression.” — Miriam Udel [57:15]

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Key Timestamps

• 01:56 — Udel on her research journey
• 03:50 — Definition and stakes of “worldmaking”
• 07:14 — Addressing the shame associated with Yiddish
• 13:12 — Corpus scope and secular orientation
• 17:22 — Enlightenment values and child psychology in Yiddish literature
• 22:13 — Foucault’s concept of heterotopia
• 24:59 — Mapping and organizing the book’s themes
• 28:58 — Shabbat as technology of rest and resistance
• 32:59 — Gender and intended readership
• 35:34 — Universalist texts and educational ambitions
• 37:11 — The Medem Sanitarium as a model institution
• 44:42 — Reading from “The Wind That Got Angry”
• 48:24 — Labzik and leftist allegorical fiction
• 51:49 — Yiddish children’s literature and the Holocaust
• 53:22 — Reading from The Life of Don Yitzhak of Bravanel
• 57:15 — Udel’s summation on literature’s response to Jewish trauma

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Conclusion

Miriam Udel offers listeners a rich, detailed map of a “symbolic world” painstakingly constructed by generations of Yiddish writers for children—balancing nostalgia, boundary crossing, cultural affirmation, and political vision. Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature provides both inspiration and a scholarly platform for further study, underscoring the power of children's literature to serve as a “heterotopia” where new Jewish identities and hopes could be imagined and rehearsed.

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Transcript

[Zalman Neufeld]

Hello, everybody.

[Marshall Po]

This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Zalman Neufeld]

Welcome to New Books Network. I'm your host, Schneer Zalman Neufeld. In her book Modern Jewish World Making Through Yiddish Children's Literature, published by Princeton University Press in 2025, Miriam Udell traces how the stories and poems written for Yiddish speaking children in the 20th century underpin new formulations of secular Jewishness. Miriam Udel is Associate professor of German Studies and Jewish Stud at Emory University. I'm so glad Miriam's new book has brought her to our program.

[Miriam Udell]

Welcome, Zalmen. It's wonderful to be back with you. Thank you so much for having me.

[Zalman Neufeld]

It's our pleasure. So, to get started, could you tell us a little bit about your background and what attracted you to this project?

[Miriam Udell]

Sure. So I've been referring to this new book, Modern Jewish World Making Through Yiddish Children's Literature, as the companion volume to my 2020 anthology, Honey on the Pa. I really worked on these two books alongside each other for the first several years until Honey on the Page was published. And they are inextricable to me. They constitute a kind of idea ecosystem about Yiddish children's literature as a force for political and ethical formation and also as a repository for new understandings of the modern Ashkenazi Jewish experience. So when we ask, you know, how I got into doing One, it's really how I got into doing both. And it came as a kind of convergence of my mommy track with my Yiddish lerka track. I had two young children at the time. I was also teaching a four day a week Yiddish language course, a sprach course at Emory University. And both as a language instructor and as a parent, I found myself wondering whether there had ever been any Yiddish children's literature. And so it was really that inquiry that launched me into a decade and a half's worth of scholarly work.

[Zalman Neufeld]

And all of us are the beneficiaries of that. Gewald. Fantastic. Fantastic. So to jump into this a bit, in the title of your new book, you have the word world making. What do you mean by world making?

[Miriam Udell]

So this is a term that is used both in the world of. In the fields of political science and related social sciences, and in the field of fiction writing, creative writing, genre writing, to talk about the imaginative building of symbolic worlds. And the way that I use this term, and the reason that I use this term is that I really want to underscore the contrast between projects of conventional nation building that underwrote so much of children's literary activity in the early 20th century, to draw a contrast between that and what was happening in Yiddish. So if we look to the land of Israel, what would eventually become the state of Israel, if we look to the Soviet experiment, the USSR Children's literature was regarded as a really central cultural project and a kind of a cultural vanguard in both of those instances, because they were trying to create a new country and produce citizens who are going to have a shared fund of knowledge and set of values and aspirations. In the case of Yiddish, some of those ideas and ideals are shared. There is a sense of common knowledge and common values that are being imparted. But Yiddish is transnational. It's a global phenomenon. By the time children's literature is being written in Yiddish, the language is flourishing on four continents. And the children's literary corpus reflects that. And instead of trying to create a conventional nation with borders and a military to defend them, Yiddish educators and cultural leaders sought to hand the children in their school systems and in their cultural ambit, a kind of symbolic ideational homeland, a world, if you will, and to try to push the norms and values of that world toward their utopian visions of the good and the just. And so they used story. And when I say story, I don't mean that in a restrictive sense of genre. They use poetry and drama also alongside fiction to kind of make this symbolic world spring up before Yiddish speaking children and to encourage children to inhabit and then to perpetuate that world.

[Zalman Neufeld]

Right, and you write that quote. Even for those most invested in the language, it is difficult to disentangle Yiddish from shame. Could you tell us a little more what you mean by that?

[Miriam Udell]

Yeah, that's a great next place to go. Because, you know, what was the, the urgent urgency kind of pushing this cultural project along? Well, a lot of it had to do with dismantling structures of shame that had been attached to Yiddish and replacing them with a positive vision, a vision of dignity. Now, what do I mean by shame? First, there is the shame of too much Yiddish. Yiddish really kind of into its own as a cultural force during a period that's been an enlightenment period that's been very deeply influenced by ideologies of language purism. So for many speakers, Yiddish is perceived as a kind of degraded, bastardized form of German. So it's inherently shameful. And before the name for Yiddish came, you know, before everyone agreed that the name for Yiddish was going to be Yiddish, it went by many other names, including Taich, including Mameloshen. But one of those names, the one that really gave expression to that sense of shame, was that Yiddish denigrated itself to itself as jargon, just a jargon, not a real language. And then in the century between that time and our own time, everything changed. Language politics, you know, the decline of Yiddish as an everyday vernacular in the secular Jewish world or the non Hasidic Jewish world even. And so today we are left with the shame of not enough Yiddish, of having lost Yiddish. And people feel that very keenly. You know, if I had a nickel for every time someone comes up to me at a book event or another talk and says, you know, my grandparents spoke Yiddish, but they used it only as the language of secrets that they didn't want my parents to understand. So I don't know Yiddish and I feel terrible and I really should do something about it, but I haven't yet, etc. Etc. If I had a nickel for every one of those times, I could fund all of my dreams for adaptations of these materials into, you know, the forms that thrive today.

[Zalman Neufeld]

Right, right. And I mean, not, not to get too far afield, but I think there is something interesting about this kind of impulse that you're, that you're alluding to. I know I have experience as someone who grew up in the Lubavitch Hasidic community and eventually left it, but still kind of identify with it or am identified by others with it, I'VE had a kind of religious parallel of the same dynamic where people come to me and basically see me as a kind of rabbi, and they say, well, you know, I really should go to synagogue more often, and, you know, I'm not a good Jew, and blah, blah, blah. And I keep on telling them, I don't know what you want from me. I'm not your rabbi. I'm certainly not your priest. You don't have to. I'm not a father conf. Have to tell me your averis, your sins. You know, if you don't want to go to synagogue or you want to go, but you don't go, okay, that's your business, whatever. And, but I think that it's interesting that, that, that maybe, you know, both of these, a kind of religious version of this and a kind of more secular version of this, are both, you know, similar and, and, and. And speak to a similar kind of impulse on the part of many secularized Jews that somehow they're inadequate and they know that there's an ideal that they should be living and are not quite living up to that in some way.

[Miriam Udell]

Or even just that there's a sense of loss and that in the kind of translation to modernity, something valuable from the past might have been forgotten or lost. And, you know, in the case of Yiddish, a lot of that anxiety about loss, anxiety about severed connections to the past. Because certainly in the U.S. american context, or really even in the North American context, the Latin American context, unlike other immigrant groups who came from Europe, for most Jews, there was no expectation and no reality of being able to. To go back home again or go back and forth. It really represented a break with the past. And some of that is reflected in the assimilationist pressures and the way that that plays out in terms of language knowledge and language politics. And now, three generations, from the Holocaust, from the founding of the state of Israel, I think the American Jewish community is in this moment of kind of taking stock and saying, well, wait a minute. What has been lost? What can be recuperated and regained? How can we create bridges back to some of what we do want to carry with us into modernity?

[Zalman Neufeld]

Right. So speaking about what we're going to carry with us into modernity, could you tell us a little bit about the corpus of Yiddish children's literature that you focus on? Meaning, how many texts are we talking about? What kinds of texts? When were they written and by whom?

[Miriam Udell]

Okay, great. So my focus is on Yiddish children's literature that understood itself as veltlech, literally worldly we typically translate this term as secular. So this is not literature that was being produced for use in religious schools or contexts. There was a whole parallel world in Yiddish that understood itself to be secular. Or secularity is kind of asymptotic. You can. You can go toward it infinitely without ever quite reaching it. So I like to say that these schools were secularist rather than secular. They were oriented toward a vision of the secular. And this literature starts to be published in Dribs and drabs in 1889 with a story about Purim by Mordche Specter. And then it kind of gives up for a little while, in the sense that cultural leaders did not think that it was going to be possible to create a homegrown, full, flourishing, robust Yiddish children's literature. And so in 1900, we have a wonderful programmatic article that ran in. In a newspaper called Vos Solen undre kind der Lesen. What should our children read? And the recommendation was, we should translate the great works of Western Europe. Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, Russian folktales. We should translate those into Yiddish. And we should go back to our classika, our classic writers like Sholem Aleichem and Yudlamid Peretz. And we should put out children's editions with glossaries and kind of simplification and very crucially, making sure that we have happy endings. Because everyone knows that children need happy endings, right? And so for about a decade, a decade and a half, that was most of the Yiddish children's canon. And then after World War I, we start to see the trickle turn into a flood throughout the interwar period, the 1920s and 1930s, in Warsaw, Vilna, then in Soviet cities like Kharkov, which we would now call Kharkiv, in current day Ukraine, New York after the war, it continues in Mexico City and Buenos Aires. A little bit of publishing activity in Tel Aviv. So it really becomes. Becomes this global publishing phenomenon between the wars. It continues after the Holocaust in the Americas and a little bit in Israel. And we get almost every children's genre that you can think of. We end up, you know, taking stock in the 1970s when this comes to an end, we end up with almost a thousand standalone books, some of them short picture books or picture books without pictures is the reality. Some of them novels and novellas, anthologies, also periodicals. In New York alone, the Yiddish left produced four different children's periodicals, some of which had multi decade runs. There, as I mentioned before, there are plays that were put on by children, there are collections of poetry. So, you know, all of this is the 20th century legacy of Yiddish children's literature.

[Zalman Neufeld]

Right? And how does the idea of writing a better world into being relate to Yiddish children's literature?

[Miriam Udell]

So every children's literature is really stamped by their circumstances of its founding and by the ideals of its founders. Because Yiddish children's literature is being created for the first time at the turn of the 20th century by a group of post Enlightenment and post Haskalah. Haskalah, Jewish educators and cultural leaders. It reflects their ideals. So some of those ideals include what I would call proto feminism. It's not quite full blown feminism by our standards, but a sense that girls are people, girls can be main characters. Boys and girls are being educated together for the first time in Jewish history, in modern shules, rather than in very traditional single sex chadorim, the informal elementary schools that were attended mostly only by boys. And so we start to see plots about girls on adventures. There is a sense of stewardship of the natural world and being in nature as a good thing. That's another kind of Enlightenment ideal that finds its way into this literature. There is a keen sense of equality and there is a very sophisticated mechanics of empathy that gets embedded in this literature, teaching children the practice of taking perspectives imaginatively of people who are not you, of people who are unlike you. And one of the topics that that empathy really focused on was wealth inequality and the idea that there are richer and poorer people in the world and that it is incumbent upon everyone to try to redress these gaps and make sure that people have what they need. In some parts of the Yiddish world, on the far left, those who identified as Communists and more often known as die Linke, the left, there's also a praxis of anti racism that is fully articulated by the 1930s and that is reflected in children's literature. So, you know, all of these different ideas that they saw as modern, those were all topics. And then the one other kind of meta idea that spreads over all of this is that the decades when this literature is being created are the decades when the idea and ideals of this new science of child psychology are diffusing broadly throughout the culture. So a sense that children are not just mini adults. They have special vulnerabilities, special needs, and that they have a special capacity to delight in whimsy. Or sometimes there's a romantic idea about children as being particularly connected to nature or having particularly lively, unspoiled imaginations, and that their reading material should both reflect and further these distinctive properties of childhood.

[Zalman Neufeld]

Today is why we wear the uniform ABC Tuesday.

[Miriam Udell]

The rookie returns to ensure the safety of all Angelenos.

[Zalman Neufeld]

Try not to mess it up.

[Miriam Udell]

I'll do my best.

[Zalman Neufeld]

But don't do your best. Do my best.

[Miriam Udell]

And for the first time ever, this.

[Zalman Neufeld]

Is a global operation.

[Miriam Udell]

It's an international sting.

[Marshall Po]

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Track down terrorist targets.

[Miriam Udell]

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[Miriam Udell]

The Rookie season premiere, Tuesday, 10, 9 Central on ABC next day for Hulu subscribers.

[Zalman Neufeld]

Right, Right. Shifting gears a bit. What did Michel Foucault, the French thinker, mean by the concept of heterotopia? And how does this relate to your study?

[Miriam Udell]

I'm so glad you asked about this, Ahmed. You know, we tend to everything that I've just described. Sounds like it's a utopia, right? It's a utopian vision of the world. And utopia means no place, Right? These. These idealized ways of imagining the world that don't actually exist anywhere. And Michel Foucault came along and he said, yeah, we can talk about utopias, but I want to talk about the idea of. Of what he calls a heterotopia, which is literally an other place, a place that is other than the usual places, which replicates certain properties of the usual world, but with some kind of a twist or a wrinkle that ends up shedding a new light on the ordinary world. So he talks about this concept in terms of places where you can think about a ship that has different levels. There's steerage, there's third class, second class, first class, or a cemetery that has different parts to it. Now, these kinds of spaces might reflect social hierarchies in concentrated forms. And when we look at them critically and we understand who's occupying what kind of space in the ship, who has what kind of agency, and then we turn those visions back to the larger society, we can understand more about the larger society. I propose that within literary space, if you will, the way that we kind of divvy up the world of. Of genres and of different kinds of literature, that children's literature can serve as a heterotopian space that is a little bit different. It has a little bit of a twist or a wrinkle, but it has many of the same things that literature writ large has. And when we study children's literature critically, we can then take that back to our broader sense of how literature works and learn new things about it.

[Zalman Neufeld]

That sounds fantastic. In the first section of your book, claiming a usable past, you focus on works that pull Inward paying attention to Jewish holidays, history and heroes. Could you tell us a little more about that?

[Miriam Udell]

Sure. So I, you know, I'm working with this impossibly large corpus, you know, almost a thousand standalone books. So how. And relatively little scholarly work has been done. What there is is fantastic. We have a great monograph from the late Naomi Pravar Kadar about the New York based periodicals. We have a wonderful dissertation that has been spun into several articles by Adina Barel, writing in Hebrew about Yiddish children's literature published in Europe. But I came along with the goal of really creating the first map of the whole, which is a very daunting task. So how am I going to organize all of these primary texts? In a way that's going to invite other scholars, hopefully to kind of move into this domain and figure out their own ways, ways forward in it. So I ended up organizing the new book according to the relationship to time of various works. So I start out with works that orient themselves toward the Jewish past, whether it was the kind of deep, mythic, ahistorical, mythologized Jewish past or the much more recent or historically documented Jewish past. A great instance for thinking about that and thinking about the way that these secular authors understood the past in relation to the Jewish present and drew meaning from it, was to about, think, think about a sub genre or a micro genre of stories that I call Sabbatarian tale, secular Sabbatarian tales about a hero who finds himself needing to make a snap decision in very vulnerable circumstances late on Friday afternoon about whether he's going to continue on a journey and kind of see to his own safety, or stop in the middle of a desert or a blizzard, whiteout, blizzard, forest, and put down the pack and observe Shabbos. And it's curious to me, it's notable to me that we have these authors who identify as secularists of various political stripes, a cultural Zionist, a Bundist socialist, who write stories that valorize and celebrate the decision to stop everything, stop the world. I'm getting off. It's time for Shabbos. And so interrogating that and what they thought they were doing and how they were using the concept of Shabbos as part of their own modern projects. That's an instance that I thought was worth really delving into about the Jewish past.

[Zalman Neufeld]

Sure. So don't leave our listeners hanging. What did these primarily, if not exclusively secularist, secular minded Jews, what do you think they understood or were trying to signify by this idea of embracing Shabbos, of stopping work or adventures in order to observe the religious strictures of the Sabbath. What did that mean for them in their secular vision of the world?

[Miriam Udell]

So for them, Shabbos was a technology of rest, and rest was resistance. Rest was resistance to the capitalist machine and to the bosses who would purport to own their time. If the worker can claw back one seventh of his today, we would say of their time, then that means that that's 1/7 that the boss doesn't own. So they create this convergence point between the deep Jewish past and the recent Jewish past and the Jewish present, and also the secular present and the secular future that they are trying to engender. And one of these stories really literalizes Rabbi Heschel's image of a palace in time, the Sabbath. When the Sabbath begins, a marble palace looms up, and Lipa the tailor is able to spend his 25 hour Shabbos in in the safety and the warmth of this palace, even though he's in the midst of this snowy blizzard in the forest.

[Zalman Neufeld]

Fantastic. Do you want to read a little bit from that story to share with us?

[Miriam Udell]

Absolutely. So Lipa enters this clearly supernatural palace, which he he infers is going to be safe to do, when he sees two Sabbath candles in the window, and he goes through rooms that have been set up for a sumptuous Sabbath feast. He goes through six different rooms, one more each one more lavish than the last. Until in the seventh room, the seventh day of the week, the he is welcomed by a group of zaknim of elders who are praying. And it goes like. Suddenly he made out a soft song arising from somewhere, floating from afar and coming closer. And what a song. Notes pure enough to break your heart. Then a moment of silence, falling like soft dew drops 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. Lipa didn't move a muscle, but let the sweet song pour into every part of him. It lifted him up and carried him around as if he were light as a 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? But never had he sensed its sweetness as he did now. He listened intently, and it flowed like a pure golden sound, flooded with divine joy. The words were the first phrases of the Friday night psalms. Lechun irona nal hashem. Come, let us sing to God.

[Zalman Neufeld]

Wow. Wow. Really, really beautiful. I just want to go back to something else that you mentioned before. So earlier on you mentioned that there was a kind of proto feminist sensibility in some of the writings that you look at. And then just before you mentioned, you know, you say, well, he, the reader gendering the reader as he. And you say, well, now we would say they. And I'm just curious, do we have a sense of who the authors thought that they were writing for specifically in terms of the gender of their would be readers?

[Miriam Udell]

So the authors very much understood themselves to be writing for the children of the various Yiddish school networks, each of which had a political alignment. So starting in Europe, in Warsaw, in Vilna, we had socialist schools that were founded as a joint project of the Bundists and the socialist Zionists of the farband in New York. We have four separate schooling systems that are running Yiddish after schools. So a child is going to public school in the morning, coming home for lunch, and then going off to a Yiddish schule that was either Bundest socialist if it was the Workman's circle, Communist, if it was the Ordenschulen, the International Workers Order schools, farband Zionist or just plain Yiddishist. And those schools and the fraternal organizations that they grew out of also operated the publishing, the children's publishers or the children's arm of a full scale publishing organization. And so the, the audiences were those school children and they were boys and girls. And it just kind of radiated out from the political base of each organization.

[Zalman Neufeld]

All right, so that, so the most, maybe a distinct aspect of the different publications wasn't the gender of the readers, but the kind of political orientation that they, or their, their, their family was connected to.

[Miriam Udell]

That's right, that's right. And when we, when we start to see girl stories, stories with girl protagonists, the single most common is at the center is that she is not where the adults expect her to be. And sometimes it's a crisis, she's lost, we have to go searching for her. And that's the plot. And sometimes she's having an adventure and there's no crisis at all.

[Zalman Neufeld]

Right, Very, very interesting. In your book, second section, Contesting the Jewish Future, you analyze the most universalist outward turning tendencies in the corpus that you look at. Could you tell us a little more about this?

[Miriam Udell]

Yes. So this is the section of the book that deals with this very ideologically informed literature that was trying to shape a political future, an ideological vision in some way. And so I start out by looking at the way that democracy education and nature education were intertwined with each other. And I move on to look at girl stories and changes in ideas about gender and about what girls are capable of and need. And then I move on to look at this mechanics of empathy and how that gets embedded and how stories talk about class and class differences and wealth disparities and racial disparities as well. And then finally, I take a look at the far left, the texts that identified as Communist in the USSR on the one hand, and the USA on the other, and the kind of contrasting visions of how communists were writing for children in these two very different social milieu.

[Zalman Neufeld]

Right. And what was the Medem Sanitarium? And what role did it play in Yiddish children's literature?

[Miriam Udell]

So this is an institution that was founded by the Bund, the socialist Bund, 17 kilometers outside of Warsaw in. In the late 1920s, I believe, 1927 or thereabouts. And it flourished throughout the interwar period until it was liquidated during the Holocaust. It was a combination of Fresh Air Fund and democracy education and nature education. So children would be sent from the city, typically from Warsaw, but not only for a stay at Medem between three weeks and three months, in order to either recover from, or more commonly to prevent tuberculosis by gaining access to fresh air, country living, good food, exercise, everything that was healthy for the body and for the mind. Now, what does any of this have to do with children's literature? Well, the nature instructor, the person in charge of the Naturwinkel, the Nature Corner, but it was really a nature center. Yisroel Biber wrote two volumes of stories for children, Winter Invold und Frieling, Winter in the Forest and Springtime in the Forest. That kind of took this institution and its ethos and put it onto the page. Whatever the kids were doing, if they were reading library books from the institution's library, if they were going on a nature walk, if they were working on working in the garden, if they were creating the radio, which was the daily announcements, if they were doing an art project, whatever they would be doing at Metem, it got written up as a kind of lightly fictionalized storyline and put between the covers of this book so that children could carry the experience of Metem away from the institution, back to their families. And children who never had the opportunity to go could experience it at secondhand. And so everything that informed the values of Metem becomes part of the story. And then I also combine that with archival research and with this huge doorstopper Metem Sanatoria book, which is the book of recollections of everyone who survived the war who had been part of Mehdem, saying things like it was run as a children's republic. We voted on everything, including the question of whether to have spinach with dinner.

[Zalman Neufeld]

Did spinach get voted out up or down?

[Miriam Udell]

So part of the idea was that if children were given true agency and responsibility and treated like partners, they would actually make responsible, kind of sober minded decisions. And so at least some of the time, spinach got a yay vote because children knew it was good for them.

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[Zalman Neufeld]

That's fantastic. Just fantastic. So in this section, you're, you know, as you mentioned, looking at texts that are really kind of universalistic minded that are trying to be very expansive in terms of its vision, you know, for the present or the future. And so it makes me think, you know, what elements in these stories, in the worlds that these authors were fashioning were distinctively Jewish? Were there elements in the in the world that these authors were fashioning that were distinctly Jewish?

[Miriam Udell]

So in the, in the first section of the book, those are the works that are, you know, most obviously Jewish. And in this second section, there's really a question of inflection, of things being inflected in a certain way, and also the circumstances of composition, both the fact that these stories are being composed in Yiddish as a conscious choice and other circumstances that reflect the immediate cultural context. So a story that I would love to talk about more and maybe to share a little bit with our listeners is by Meisha Kobach, who is remembered as a great Yiddish modernist who sent up the process of Sovietization in his wonderful comic novel, the Zelmanianer. And he worked as a teacher at an orphanage school in Vilna, the Dinizon orphanage. And as far as I know, he wrote one children's story which he dedicated as a gift to his students at the orphanage. And it's a story about it's called the Wind that Got Angry. And it's a story about a winter wind who's old and tired, and springtime has come early to the city, which means that the wind might not survive. He needs it to be a certain degree of cold in order just to stay alive. And so something that normally we would welcome as a kind of unalloyed, unquestioned good. The arrival of spring. This constitutes a mortal threat for our hero. And so he runs out of the city and he escapes to the fields. And he's looking for a rupplatz, a resting place for himself. And nobody wants the wind. He gets turned away by the oak tree and the rock and certainly the innkeeper who shoves the door on him. And all he's doing is looking for a crowd, quiet, calm place where he can rest. And he gets more and more frustrated. Should I read you a little?

[Zalman Neufeld]

Yes, please. Please continue. This. This is fabulous.

[Miriam Udell]

The wind started to feel angry at the entire world. Nobody would let him rest. And he felt terrible. He stood up like a strong man in the middle of a field, rolled up his sleeves, girded his loins, and began to blow with all his might. The snow flew off the ground and like silver flour, began to fall anew. The wind blew at everything as hard as he could. Then he began to whistle, to blow and whistle, whistle and blow, until he had whipped up a whirling, whistling, screaming blizzard. And the snow began to whirl and throw itself about like white handkerchiefs flying in a gale. The wind began to cry. He cried like a child without stopping. Then he began to howl like a dog. And with all the howling, hard driving snow and screaming, it grew darker than the white snow had ever seen it. The snow scattered through the darkness from the sky down to the ground and from the ground up to the sky. And the wind began to wail like a cat and to cry as cats wail and cry on a dark night. It was a great blizzard. So what is really happening here? I think that this story is an allegory for a child growing so frustrated and having so few communicative resources that they end up throwing a tantrum. And I think this is a case of a very empathetic teacher with more than usual literary ability who says, you know what? I'm going to dramatize the emotional process of a tantrum as a weather system. I'm going to give this story to my young students who are growing up as orphans, who probably have a lot of pent up frustration. And this is going to give us vocabulary for talking about their emotions.

[Zalman Neufeld]

Wow, that's fantastic. It's interesting. I thought you were going to go in a different direction. I thought you were going to say that this is an analogy for the Jewish people that on the one hand, with modernity and the promise of a secular and free society, Jewish people would be embraced and be able to live a sort of a peaceful existence. At the same time, the distinctive qualities of their Jewishness might be resisted or might disappear. And the wind. The Jewish people is saying, well, we don't want to lose our distinctiveness, even though we do want the springtime to come.

[Miriam Udell]

One of the hallmarks of truly great literature is that it is susceptible to various interpretations. Zalman, I think you just made the case that this story, aimed as it is at a young readership, stands next to Kubach's other work as great literature.

[Zalman Neufeld]

From a sociologist. Fantastic. Fantastic. All right, let's see. Because there's so much more we could talk about, but we're going to run out of time. And I definitely want to ask you about Tales of a Clever Pup. Please tell us a little bit about this clever Pup. And what kind of political sympathies does this text espouse?

[Miriam Udell]

All right, so Labzik was published in 1935. It was written by an author who signed himself Chaver Paver Bozambari, that was a pen name for Gershon Ayin Binder. And Labzik is 12 linked stories that tell us about a lovable mutt. That's the title figure. Labzik himself, who is adopted by the family of Beryl, der operator, Beryl the sewing machine operator, who is scraping by with his wife, Mama Molly, their son Mulik, and their daughter Rifkale, in the Bronx during the worst of the Great Depression. And in the course of these 12 stories, Labzig and his human beings go on all kinds of little local, realistic adventures against authoritarianism in favor of democracy. They strike peacefully when the owners at Betel's Sweatshop try to lengthen the workday. They protest at City hall when a corrupt mayor is letting the people starve as he feasts on ice cream. Bettel ultimately is chosen to represent their block at the March on Washington, which really did take place during the summer of 1932, albeit without a canine hero in the historical record, the way we see dramatized in the Labzik stories. And I am happy to say that if this piques your interest, Suni Press will be publishing my translation of all 12 Labzik stories in November of 2026. So I'm putting in final edits this week. It's very close to fully baked, and hopefully there will be a lot more Labzik out there. And in 2021, I worked with Yanko Krakowski and a wonderful, talented team on a puppet film of Labzik. Four of the episodes. It's 51 minutes long, and we are delighted to present it at all kinds of cultural organizations, academic institutions, you name it. So if this sounds like something that people are interested in, please get in touch either with Yankel Krakowski or with me about Labzik. Screamings Yes.

[Zalman Neufeld]

What is the name of the film version?

[Miriam Udell]

It's called Tales of a Clever Pup.

[Zalman Neufeld]

Fantastic. I think it's, it's just brilliant. I, I watched the, I think a little trailer of it on YouTube. It's, as you say in Yiddish, very geshmak. It's very delightful, endearing, and I definitely want to see the full version, hopefully very soon. So, again, we're going to run out of time soon, but here's a kind of easy question to answer. How did Yiddish children's literature respond to the Holocaust?

[Miriam Udell]

So Yiddish children's literature became a powerful force for helping children to metabolize the harm and to metabolize the moral injury of witnessing the events that came to be called the Holocaust. Not for European children, very few of whom survived, and even fewer of whom continued their lives with Yiddish as their spoken vernacular, but for children living in the Americas, in North America, Canada, the U.S. mexico, and in Latin America. So I analyzed both stories that directly represented the events of the Holocaust to elementary school aged children and historical fiction that was set in earlier periods of Jewish history, sometimes medieval, sometimes early modern, that spoke obliquely or indirectly about the events of the Holocaust and some of the questions and ideas that perennial violence against Jewish communities raised for children.

[Zalman Neufeld]

Yeah. Do you want to read a short excerpt related to this theme?

[Miriam Udell]

Sure. So one of those indirect texts would be the Life of Don Yitzhak of Bravanel, written by Isaac Metzger and published in 1940. 41. So this hews pretty close to historical reality, although it's certainly a kind of romanticized or mythologized version of the life of the leader of Iberian Jewry at the time of the Inquisition and the expulsion of Jews from Spain. And I want to share with you a passage where 6 year old Isaac learns of the the early days of the Inquisition already taking place during his childhood. And he learns about the idea of freedom of faith, as the text calls it. So his father has to explain to him that they're living in Portugal because his grandfather had to flee Spain during the first stirrings of the Inquisition. And then a messenger. Sorry, the thing that occasions this explanation is that a messenger has come from Spain to Talk about an attack by the priests on the Jewish community, essentially a pogrom. And he says, I come from Spain and I bring sad tidings from the Jews there. The Spanish priests won't allow the Jews to serve God freely. On Sabbaths and holidays, when Jews gather in the synagogues to pray, priests force their way in with crosses in their hands. They station themselves by the ark and scream loudly that the Messiah came long ago. And they try to drive everyone to apostasy by force. The priests in my city, just as in many others throughout Spain, issued an order to herd all the Jews into the middle of the market square to force the rabbis to debate the priests on matters of faith. The rabbis were strenuously warned to choose their words carefully. They were cautioned several times that they would pay dearly for the of the sake slightest word they let slip against Christianity. At first they were frightened. But when the priests began to interpret the words of the Torah and the speech of the prophets, our defenders forgot all about the warning. With enthusiasm and great erudition, they started to rebut the priests while everyone listened in silence. And so then we get the six year old's reaction to this messenger coming and talking about this violence and his kind of steely determination to double down on Jewish identity, Jewish commitment, Jewish learning. And so this become, this is portrayed as a kind of inflection point in the early life of the Abravanel where he became even more curious and more devoted to what the text would call Yiddishkeit, even though that's not what the Abravanel called it. And so the kind of implicit message to the American Yiddish speaking teenager is that in the force of historical, in the face of historical violence against the Jews, we double down on Jewish learning and Jewish self expression.

[Zalman Neufeld]

I think that's as good a place as any to end our discussion for today. I want to thank you so much for taking your time to share thoughts with us.

[Miriam Udell]

I've really enjoyed and appreciated the opportunity to be with you, Zalman. Thank you.

[Zalman Neufeld]

That concludes our program. Thanks for listening and have a great day.

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