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Yiddish Children’s Literature and Jewish Modernity: A Conversation with Miriam Udel
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Welcome everyone to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Of course, virtually we are very excited to be able to present this lecture as a part of our Summer Yiddish Language Immersion program and we have over 100 students from around the world learning Yiddish with us right now. And our public component of this is a nine lecture series called Introduction to Yiddish Civilization in which we have wonderful scholars from doing work in history and literature and various aspects of culture coming to give lectures which are both for the students of the summer program and also for the wider public. So thank you for joining us. For those of you that don't know yivo, YIVO is a wonderful place for the contemplation and the celebration of Jewish history and Jewish culture. At the core of YIVO is our archive and library which contains more than 23 million documents and over 400,000 books. Researchers and scholars from around the world come every year to use this material and we try to make it available to the broader public with public programs like this, educational initiatives like our summer program, aviation instruction, and also exhibitions. So we hope you'll join us again and follow us on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and our email address so you can stay tuned. And in the meanwhile, we're very pleased to have today's lecture on Yiddish Children's Literature by Professor Miriam Udell. So I'm going to just read you Miriam Udell's bio and then Dovid will say a few words and then we'll hand it over to Miriam. Miriam Udel is Associate professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at Emory University, where her teaching focuses on Yiddish language, literature and culture. She holds an AB in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University, as Well as a PhD in Comparative Literature from the same institution. She was ordained in 2019 as a part of the first cohort of the Executive Ordination Track at Yeshivat Maharat, a program designed to bring qualified mid career women into the Orthodox Rabbinate. Udel's academic research interests include 20th century Yiddish literature and culture, Jewish children's literature, and American Jewish literature. She's the author of Never the Modern Jewish Picaresque, winner of the 2017 National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience. Honey on the A Treasury of Yiddish Children's Literature will appear with New York University Press in October 2020.
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Dovid, I just want to take a half a minute to greet Miriam. Miriam and I first greeted each other at a meeting approximately to see the birth of this project. I would say because Miriam was not enrolled in Yiddish courses at Harvard University as an undergraduate she wanted tutoring, she wanted review of Eleazar Steenberg's mesholim at our first meeting because instead of just being with everybody else, she wanted to dive in and begin her project. And here we are about two decades later with a completed project. And it is a great pleasure. Sis Mira Greusser kovet dich zuhot in der lectes Bonsenmer program. Welcome Miriam, and thank you for bringing this project to the world and to our summer program today.
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Thank you. Dovid, that was the academic director of the summer program at yivo and without further ado, Myriam, thank you so much for joining us.
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All right, thank you so much to Alex and Ben, who invited me, to Jane, who's working behind the scenes, and to David Brown, who was one of my earliest teachers, who was my very first teacher after I did an initial summer at the YIVO Institute. And of course I also want to thank the person without whose help I could not be giving this lecture, my beloved husband, Dr. Adam Zachary Newton, who is with our young child. It's always nerve wracking to be melamed bifneira boy to teach in front of one's teachers. But now I have been teaching for long enough to know how much nachos it produces to learn from from my students. And so I take courage from that knowledge in teaching today before David and maybe some of my other teachers are out there. It's a little hard to know because I can't see all of you. The idea of writing a better world into being through telling stories that are aspirational and redemptive is characteristic of writing for children across most cultures. However, in the case of Yiddish speaking Jewry, the very idea of writing specifically for children arose in tandem with the sweeping effort of a society to reinvent itself. Since the late 18th century, Jewish intellectual and cultural leaders had been trying to bring about a so called Jewish Enlightenment. Ahaskala in Hebrew, a a haskola in Yiddish. A set of changes to the organization of Jewish society that would prod it into conformity with Christian norms with respect to education, economic activity, gender roles, family life, the relationship to the natural world and more. Perhaps most important, that new world would entail normalcy for the Jewish nation, whose deep religious civilization would ground a set of distinctive cultural commitments without imposing the strict constraints of a binding religious system. This movement flourished throughout the 19th century, moving eastward with the great demographic bloom of Eastern European Jewry and spurring the classic works of Yiddish literature. The end of the 19th century found enlightenment ideals firmly entrenched in in the collective Ashkenazi psyche. While the formal program of Haskala dissipated, its energies did not they merely eddied into other movements such as Zionism and leftist politics. We might discern the concentrated essence of Haskalah messaging for children in a mid century Zionist text, one of just a single book's worth of stories written in Yiddish by the pioneering and prolific Hebrew children's writer Levin Kipnis. Born in the Pale of settlement in 1894 into a family of 12, he emigrated to Palestine in 1913 and made a career as an educator. In 1961 he published Und rind Teitelboim under the Date Palm, a volume of Yiddish holiday stories with the children's house Verlagmatonis in New York. The book itself was indeed conceived as a gift, a matone from one of the foremost children's authors in a renaissance Zion to the Yiddish speaking children of the Diaspora who shared a set of socialist cultural aspirations with their Israeli coevals and who might be persuaded, with honey rather than with vinegar, to share in their Zionism as well. Over the course of a lifetime that spanned Almost the entire 20th century, Kipnis would go on to contribute about 800 stories and 600 poems to the burgeoning canon of Israeli juvenile literature, and to be numbered among its fondly remembered founders. Now I must confess that most of the children's stories that I talk about haven't been hyped, as this one was by Rochel Kafferson in her Golden City column last month. There's even a minuscule chance that you may have seen my translation of Children of the Field in Ingeveb during our pandemic spring under the rubric of this year's imperative to Seder in place. This Passover tale from Kidnas collection is based on a Talmudic elaboration in Sotah 11b of the Exodus story, which mentions the Israelite baby boys being placed protectively into the ground rather than drowned in the Nile as Pharaoh had commanded. Kipnis elaborates on this wisp of interpretive text, imagining an entire apparatus for the care and nourishment of the illegal baby boys. To replace the maternal breast, each child received two stones when sustenance flowed, oil and honey, according to the Talmud, milk and honey in Kipnis version. As to the baby's daily care, Kipnis furnishes some details that the midrash does not, and I quote here from my translation, the apple trees cared for the tiny little boys, the blades of grass kept them hidden, hidden, and the bright eyed angels with clear wings flew down from the heavens an angel for each and every child. They stroked the children's little heads so that their hair grew very long, soft and silky, and covered their whole bodies. They gave every child a pebble in each hand, One milk stone and the other the apple tree, and patted them with grass as a mother makes a bed for her child. They laid the children in the holes as a mother lays her child in a cradle, and they sang heartfelt songs as a mother lulls her child to sleep. Divine care and protection typically associated with the masculine God Biblical Exodus narrative is reimagined as maternal care in the Rabbinic Medjesh. Kipnis further tweaks the rabbi's imagery to focus on Mother Nature as it were, furnishing the necessary maternal care. A luminal period of vulnerability and exposure is transformed into a situation of womb like safety for the generation of boys whose very survival is at risk. The tiny boys slept peacefully in the dark cradles, the sucking milk from the milk stones and honey from the honey stones. They slept peacefully and dreamt of the bright day to come. Meanwhile, when the designated time of salvation arrives, Kypnis marshals the sun itself to ratify the day's specialness and to affirm in modern fashion the uniqueness of each individual child. Quote One lovely dawn. The sun rose large and dazzling, shining seven times more beautifully than usual, and spread its beams over the apple field, warm sweet rays, one for each and every child. The somme's warmth leads inexorably to the blossoming of the hitherto germinal children. This made the earth split open and little heads began to sprout forth like pretty flowers. In the blink of an eye, the entire field was full of little children, like a very large kindergarten or garden of children. Thus does Kipnis re literalize an image that had already been bent to figurative daily use by the mid 20th century. By foregrounding the image of the kindergarten, Kipnis redoubles an emphasis on cultivation, a rich and multivalent term we will return to momentarily. Although the boys grow up like tall grass in both the Talmudic and Yiddish accounts, each version builds to an instructively different narrative climax. In the Talmudic Tractate Sotah, it's the epiphanic moment when the newly freed grown up children recognize the divine author of their liberation and when the Holy One, blessed be he, revealed himself at the Red Sea, these children recognized him first. As it is stated, this is my God and I will glorify Him. Zeh Livian vehu that is to say, they're able to visually recognize God from the original divine revelation during their infancy and can claim with plausible authority, this is my God. Meanwhile, in Kipnis secularizing retelling, the human leader takes center stage, and the story crests with a more humanistic appeal to a generation that has been miraculously spared a disabling, servile consciousness, even while growing up in a time of slavery. So the sun illuminated the field, beams of sunlight flooded it, and the children bathed in light. They got up, found their footing, and began to grow bigger and taller. And just like that, they had become young men, tall and handsome as date palms, strong and brave, a large army of heroes standing at the ready and waiting for their liberator. And the rescuer came. It happened at midnight. Moses the liberator came and called, stand up, free children, you who were never slaves to Pharaoh, you who never felt his heavy hand, you who never molded any bricks and mortar, stand up and lead the way for the entire people. Retrieving the idea of cultivation suggested by the Garden of Children, Kipnis text manages to straddle the centuries between the biblical Exodus and the modern Haskola and its aftermath. Reading beyond the story's plain meaning in connection with the Passover liberation tale, Children of the Field offers an allegory for the cultivation of new, post Enlightenment Jews. This particular story, then, presents a concentrated synecdoche for the larger project of Yiddish children's literature that flourished during the first half of the 20th century. Just as Kipnis Moses eventually comes to redeem a generation and that has grown up bucolically in the fields and never known the overseer's lash, so too Yiddish authors began writing in the early decades of the 20th century. For a generation of Jews that wasn't supposed to have ever known the enslavements that dogged earlier Jewish life, whether these were imagined as religious superstition or anti Semitic violence, in this allegorical reading it is the educators and authors of books for Jewish children who serve as the liberators and redeemers of a new society of free men and women. Their vision would subtly reshape Yongju's relationship with the past and their purchase on the future. The sustaining milk, honey, and oil were to be the stories themselves, and the situation of the Jewish child suckling on this literature was figured as a kind of protected womb, like set off space by a place of nourishment and refuge from a reality that, by the time of publication of Kibnis volume in 1961, lingered in memory as being every bit as cruel and unyielding as Pharaoh's Egypt. While the rise of the modern Yiddish novel occurs in tandem with the Haskola, the rise of Yiddish children's literature tracks closely with the perfervid period of transition immediately following it. Writing for children necessarily stakes claims on a vision for the future, and whether they did so with subtlety or bald didacticism, texts intended for youthful audiences had no choice but to negotiate the tensions between traditional and emerging forms of Jewish identity in what authors and audiences alike perceived as a dizzyingly new world. The first decades of the 20th century were a time of bracing ideological ferment, when socialism, Soviet communism, and Zionism all appeared as lively and plausible potentialities, if not final eschatologies for Jewish communal expression. Roiling beneath the surface of these political cultural movements and the institutions they spawned were the animating phenomena of modernity, including secularization, urbanization, mass migration, and rapid economic development. These forces worked both centrifugally and centripetally on the Jewish community, flinging its energies outward while pulling into its very core disruption from the far corners of Europe and beyond. However improbably, though, a vibrant and variegated literature for Yiddish speaking youth dawned during those tumultuous early decades of the 20th century and endures today, albeit in attenuated form. The stories, poems, and plays written for children during the heyday of the 1920s and 30s and again in the post war 1950s furnish a record, little consulted until now, of the movements geospatial and ideological of the Jewish 20th century. My research has twin aims, then, to turn a new lens onto some of the essential events and phenomena of that unquiet century, and at the same time to grapple with how this body of literature sought to reshape the world by reshaping the Jews one child at a time. But in studying the project of Yiddish children's literature, I don't wish to reinforce the nostalgia that can attach to these artifacts of a largely forgotten, superseded world. Instead, I want to interrogate how this relatively neglected corpus can shed greater light on our understanding of Jewish modernity, of the relationship between childhood and adulthood, and the interplay between normal and other cultural spaces where normal has been figured as adult and majoritarian and other has been imagined as juvenile and minoritarian. Today I will place before you some additional examples of literary space time by Yiddish writers. Built on lived experience, they counter a set of normative Western assumptions about childhood. First we will look in on the Jewish elementary school, the cheder, and then we will catch a glimpse of what I call the the girl out of doors, a gendered third space between home and school. With the help of Michel Foucault's extremely useful concept of the heterotopia, this coupling of texts and topoi will throw into relief the contrast between the worlds inhabited by boys and girls in a highly gender stratified culture, as well as the discursive contrast between speaking about children and speaking directly to them. Foucault locates at the beginning of the 20th century a broad transition from preoccupation with time and its entropic sequences to an engagement with space and its network of simultaneities. Our epic, he writes, is one in which space takes for us the form of relations. Among sites. Of particular interest to Foucault are external spaces that are linked with all the others, which, however, contradict all the other sites that are quote outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. I wish to highlight two features of the heterotopia. First, such other spaces teach us something about conventional spaces by reproducing features of the ordinary world at an instructively oblique or altered angle, like a mirror image, at once reflecting reality and estranging it. A cemetery, for example, abuts the city of the living and reflects some of its hierarchies and other modes of social organization, but it's home to the dead. Second, Foucault constructs the heterotopia specifically in contradistinction to the more familiar unreal spaces known as utopias. To more fully appreciate the heterotopic effect, let us first glimpse a utopian snapshot drawn from one of Walter Benjamin's diffuse recollections of his Berlin childhood, a span of time perhaps burnished in memory by contrast to what later became of his beloved childhood city. Like the beginning of Marcel Proust's famous preface to Ruskin entitled On Reading or any number of other nostalgic avocations of childhood, and Benjamin sketches a portrait of the child reading as an almost missopoeic figure. You are given a book from the school library for a week. You were wholly given up to the soft drift of the text which surrounded you as secretly, densely, and unceasingly as snow. You entered it with limitless trust. You were reading at the time when you still made up stories in bed. The child seeks his way along the half hidden paths. Reading, he covers his ears. The book is on a table that is far too high, and one hand is always on the page. To him, the hero's adventures can still be read in the swirling letters, like figures and messages in drifting snowflakes. His breath is part of the air of the events narrated, and all the participants breathe it. He mingles with the characters far more closely than grown ups do. He is unspeakably touched by the deeds, the words that are exchanged, and when he gets up he is covered over and over by the snow of reading. And yet nostalgia makes for a narrow as well as a rose tinted spyglass onto the past. In limiting this miniature utopia, Benjamin seems to subscribe to French historian Paul Hazard's wistful notion of a universal republic of childhood. But childhood is no more universal or universalizable an experience than adulthood, and it may be more empirically reliable for us to consider children as colonizers or apprentices in heterotopic spaces than as static objects in utopian nostalgic imaginings. Yiddish works aimed at youthful audiences speak, often in concentrated and thus eloquent form, to the same large scale concerns as those aimed at their elders. They promise to disturb master narratives of development through their role in complicating stage theories of maturation and socialization, the finished states that constitute the very aim of Bildung as what one contemporary sociologist of childhood calls an artificially imposed quote notion of structured becoming. Why do I place such a heavy emphasis on revising master narratives of development? And why make the move from adult literary production and consumption to stories of and for children? Prying loose from all kinds of linear unidirectional narratives and assumptions, frees us to apprehend Jewish modernity in its full measure of multivalent complexity, from socially instructive fantasies of becoming to subversive fables of being. And as we thus pry loose, children's literature furnishes us with an astonishing lever. As I turn now to the specific texts through which I want to illustrate the pedagogic utility of Foucault's concept, I recur to an author important to my previous work on the picaresque, Sholem Aleichem took the kind of oblique view of Eastern European Jewry that enabled him to situate almost every social space he described, described as a revealing heterotopia. From the static imagined community backwater of Kasrilovke to the third class railcar to the spas of Europe, his characters move through counter spaces that render visible the deep assumptions and organizational structures of their society. So today I call once more on Sholem Aleichem in his guise as the first Yiddish children's author and the bard of one particular Eastern European Jewish heterotopia, the elementary school known as Vuheder. He did not address children directly, at least not until his works were retrofitted at the urging of educators and cultural leaders to serve as children's stories, he mastered instead the childhood recollection tale from the point of view of mature, even world weary adulthood. Several such stories thematized the child's guilt for some misdeed, often the transgression of a religious taboo. Passages brimming with Jewish boyhood lore alternate with stodgy disquisitions on social class clearly aimed at adult readers. Writing at the turn of the 20th century, Sholem Aleichem collapses the distance that might demarcate the passage through the stages of childhood and adolescence into adulthood. As critics have noted regarding the work of Walter Benjamin the the child collects experiences and the adult recollects them and places them into an increasingly elaborate framework of meaning. Part of how Sholem Aleichem established and communicated those frameworks of meaning was by relying on certain bounded, heterotopic social spaces familiar to his contemporary audience, such as the premier Jewish children's educational institution of Eastern Europe, the cheder or rum. While the word denotes room in the sense of a bounded space enclosed within four walls, I would note that in Jewish discursive space the cheder sometimes implies something more freeing, more akin to having room, ironically enough, since it designated the often claustrophobic space where elementary aged boys were instructed in basic Jewish textual literacy by rabbis who famously ran the gamut from nurturing to casually irascible to downright abusive. The setting evokes thick layers of lived experience that comprehend, for instance, the feel of the hard wooden bench beneath thinly upholstered posteriors, the draft creeping into a poorly insulated room, the jockeying of boisterous boys for a prized seat near the wood burning stove, the sting of wrapped knuckles at a wrong answer or wandering attention, and the undercurrents of competition and jocularity flowing through an all male space, the cheder, even after it gave way to co educational shoeless in the 20s and 30s or was reformed in the 1940s or made Mesukan dangerous in the estimation of the detractors of Reform, the cheder remained undiminished and unreconstructed as a literary touchstone of of Jewish authenticity, a site of memory that continued to play a central role not only in later Yiddish works such as Kadia Molodovsky's 1974 Khedermayses, but also in Jewish literature composed farther afield such as Henry Roth's Call it Sleep. Transcending the divide between shtetl and urban life, the cheder could stand in for Jewish premodernity even as it provided a meaningful point of contrast, and in a modern, secularizing cityscape, it became the quintessential topos and heterotopet, I.e. othering or altered space for a kind of story that moved back and forth between youth and adulthood. Speaking of and for children, if not quite to them, the cheder is not just a two dimensional backdrop to a variety of school themed tales and memoir chapters, but rather an evocative intersection of space and time for Eastern European Jewish modernity, bringing together representatives of several families in varying economic circumstances with differing priorities and worldviews. Just as the cemetery is implicitly linked to all other spaces, says Foucault, because, quote, each family has relatives there, and I would add, whom we will all join sooner or later, so too is the cheder, an institution where each family in Jewish Eastern Europe has an investment. As heterotopia, the cheder also stands as a counter site to the homes and other locales where friendships and family dynamics unfold. The schoolroom in Sholem Aleichem's 1903 story Dos Dredo, the Spinning Top is a typically informal place with no admissions or matriculation protocol of other than the parent dropping off her child. Our unnamed protagonist, who is urged to clamber over some classmates, legs and take his spot on the bench. When he arrives, the class is engaged in taich, the sing song, rote recitation and translation of biblical text into a formal and fossilized Yiddish that forms the sine qua non of the cheder curriculum, appropriately enough for a story that will focus on trust and deception. And the text under study as the narrator enters school is from Genesis, the Snake Seduction of Eve. The plot unfolds over eight sections but begins with a long peroration on the narrator's most cherished friendship with Benny Polkavoy, who is bigger, stronger, and richer than his classmates by virtue of his father's meteoric economic rise as a polkavoy, that is, a regimental tailor who secures a contract with the Tsar's army. Benny protects our unnamed narrator from hazing rituals, but he exacts a price when gambling is allowed on Chanukah, he soaks, the narrator whippings heel. The narrator says shame is forgotten, and in this case it's the shame of having given up all of his possessions, including a precious kolboynikle, a little sitter that his mother got him to mark his father's yahtzeit because our nameless protagonist is a yosem and an orphan in Jewish culture. Having lost his father in solid middle age, these two school chums meet up and reminisce on the train. A gold watch now spans Benny's prodigious paunch. Succumbing to uncontrollable laughter, Benny can barely get the words out to satisfy his friend's curiosity about his luck at dreidel so long ago. The dreidel was loaded, weighted to land on the winning letter. Any possible utopian nostalgia for such a childhood is deflated by by the author's unflinching gaze at childhood rapacity, forgotten but not outgrown the petty extortion allowed in. Hayter stood in for the manipulation of the vulnerable by the powerful that jeopardize the health of an entire society. As a sort of dress rehearsal, perhaps, for his presentation to the architects in 1966, Foucault appeared on French radio and offered a preliminary anatomy of the heterotopia. The better known elaborations of the concept usually treat it as some kind of physical enclosure, but the notion he described en Radio France Kultur was more freeform and less bounded significantly for our concerns. Foucault illustrated the concept in part by discussing how children constitute and inhabit other spaces through their imaginative play of the heterotopia. He said, these counter spaces are well recognized by children. It's the bottom of the garden, it's the Indian tent erected in the middle of the attic, or still it's on their parents bed where they discover the ocean as they can swim between the covers and the bed is also the sky, or they can bounce on the spot springs. It's the forest as they can hide there, or still it's the night as they can become ghosts between the sheets. And finally it's the fear and delight of their parents coming home. Children's play, as you might have observed, combines slavishly imitative and improbably fanciful elements and in so doing creates a unique kind of space. Space. If the designation of heterotopia can extend not only to physical sites in the attic or or the parents bedroom, but also to the abstractions of night, fear and delight, then I propose that we also extend it to the meeting in cultural time and space of the girl out of doors. The time that I refer to encompasses much of the 20th century, from the 1920s until about 1970, but especially the interwar period. This was when networks of modern Yiddish schools The shules I mentioned earlier flourished first in Vilna and Warsaw, but more enduringly in New York, Louisiana, Detroit, Boston, Montreal, Mexico City, and several other places. Besides these shules, which were full day schools in Europe and after schools in the Americas, were co educational and politically progressive and they espoused some variety of robustly secularist Yiddishist identity. These institutions demanded reading material for their pupils and they fueled the rise of Yiddish children's literature. The place, or more properly places that I refer to though are multifarious. We will draw examples from Warsaw and perhaps New York time allowing by virtue of being excluded from cheder, which, remember means room, Jewish girls at the beginning of the 20th century were literally, as the Karl current expression now has it, outside of the room where it happens. So the girl out of doors is not in school, but neither is she at home. She occupies a Fukurian counter space. Electing to remain outdoors becomes a way of pushing back against domestic constraints and expectations. For Oke, the protagonist in Kadia Molodovsky's eponymous narrative poem published in 1931, Indoors is a place of drudgery and compromised autonomy. A ramshackle hovel where swallows nest in the eaves paints an efficient portrait of urban Jewish poverty in the preeminent Yiddish cultural capital of Europe, the Okhota slum of Warsaw. Both of Olga's parents work hard, the adult reader feels, for their struggles, but all the narrative sympathy gathers around the put upon girl, and a child reader is playing plainly meant to see the world through her eyes. Shirts need rinsing, potatoes need peeling, dishes need washing, socks need darning, Kasha needs cooking, logs need splitting, and among all these sundry tasks that fall on the shoulders of six year old Olka, a baby sibling needs rocking. Although her parents also insist that she has a little to read, a little to write. There is no cheder for a girl, but and for a poor girl like Olke, there is no schooling at all. As it turns out, childhood reading experiences are neither as inevitable nor as equally equably distributed as the weather. There is neither time nor money in the slums of Warsaw to manufacture the Benjaminian snow of reading. Although her domestic situation is an exigent one, this little big sister has one possession to call her own the prize parasol that she employs to find and to make her own consolation. Geit OKE wasserbrengem hemdelich schmenken z gensgen geit die ganz gur declan genslechenschura federen weisse fies reute under Gonner der scheuter effend OKE diploia parasoka hotashtib una dach un genselach asa. And now I read from Katharine Hellerstein's lilting translation. When OKE goes to bring water for shirt rinsing, she sees geese walking. The goose walks proud and fine, and the goslings in a line, feathers of white, feet of red. Then comes the gander, that noodle head. Right then and there Olke opens up her blue parasolquest and she has a ruse and a house and geese. Numerous several times Olke takes solace in such reveries, opening her parasol and attaining a sense of mastery and possession over some small part of her tightly bounded world. An implement intended to repel the adverse effects of the elements is the girl's chosen dwelling, the dwelling place of her imagination. For her, the sky is not cannot be the limit. So instead she makes the limit, the everyday object within her reach and belonging to her alone into the sky. But as often as Olke gives herself over to imaginative flight, these reveries are pierced by her parents, yelled reminders of the chores still to be done. Until finally Olga finds accomplices in the form of some unruly button. Firta pass. When Olga unwinds some thread to sew on buttons, suddenly the buttons spill down and strew themselves all across the town. Each button turns into a wheel and the wheels begin to dance a reel. One of them races across the cobbles, rolling as fast as a runaway barrel that should have been firt afaas. She opens her parasolque as usual and relishes her wealth of button wheels. This time, though, when her parents recall her to the remaining housework. Zu IR un grisen nemt OKE alreder in ashpan un macht al langebaan un svife die ban. Het veit het weit iber a weissenweg. Olke does not want to hear or to know. The wheels stir and bow to her and greet her hello. Then Olke hitches all the wheels in a harness and makes a long train to go farther than farness. Then the train whistles and oka travels away, far, far away on a glowing white way. Olga dreams of escaping the domestic drudgery that defines and limits her existence. In contriving to be elsewhere, in spirit, if not yet in body, she is but one of the most elegantly realized avatars of a type in Yiddish children's literature that I call the New Girl, related to the proto feminist New Woman of the late 19th century. Perhaps her granddaughter. The new girl is a three dimensional character who is who bursts onto the scene in the late 1920s. She reads, she pumps on a swing with the wind in her hair. She disappears without permission. She gets lost. She orates. She has an attitude, a creature of freedom and possibility. Perhaps her most subversive move is simply failing to be where she is supposed to at any given time. For the new girl, getting lost is counterintuitively, even perversely, empowering. She finds that people will care for her, that her internal resources exceed anyone's imaginings. If Sholem Aleichem and Kadia Molodovsky, who published her final work for children, Marzipanis or marzipans, in 1970, constitute rough bookends to a 70 year span of Yiddish children's literature, then what lies on the bookshelf between them? Yiddish writing for children has been subject to the same sort of literary historical compression as the rest of Yiddish literature, an unusual situation that has fostered a lively, messy nest of simultaneities that resist paradigms of stage development just as children themselves do. The simultaneities that obtain among texts also obtain within them. In a recent special issue of Pedagogy, Culture and Society devoted to Walter Benjamin's engagement with childhood and pedagogy, the editors observed that his fragmentary writing about youthful moments quote invites us to think of childhood not so much as a chronological and developmental sequence, but rather as a set of overlapping and continuing sensations. Think here of the cadences of schoolboy's biblical chanting, the reverie under a blue parasol, or the gentle snow of reading, in a description that could just as well have applied to Sholem Aleichem or Kadia Molodovsky, the editors continue regarding Benjamin the reflections in the writing belong in two fluidly interconnected moments, the time of childhood and the time of writing. This leads us to feel that the writing is tentative and suggestive when rather than definitive and conclusive, and runs counter to dominant ideas which suggest that childhood happens in stages, that understanding comes from authority, that children have few resources with which to interpret, and that adulthood consists of not being a child. Tales featuring a narrative consciousness that alternates between childhood and mature adulthood are not simply deficient or precursory children's stories. Their very oscillations between now and then privilege the understanding that comes from revisitation and reflection, not from authority. They complicate the master narrative of development even as they unsettle the aim of mastery altogether. An anthology published in the 1920s styles children as Kleine in Der Griser Welt, little ones in the Big World. But this phrase was a more accurate descriptor of adult Jewish self perception than of the relative position of children in Jewish society. The rise of Yiddish children's literature was predicated on an appeal by writers and cultural leaders to children as the repository of a great deal of social, cultural, and political capital, an immense reservoir of latent but soon to be realized power. Children's literature might seem at first blush like a utopian project, furnishing ideal reading material for the idealized denizens of the world republic of childhood. As Foucault puts the case in his preface to the Order of Things, literary utopias console, while heterotopias in their uncanny mirroring function disturb. Although he intends to speak at the level of the lexical and syntactic, we might stretch Foucault's observation to include thematic disturbance as well. From its inception, the literature set before Yiddish speaking children reckoned with violence, cruelty, betrayal, and fear, and not only to disavow or outgrow them. It was very far from utopian. Having argued for the midrashic kindergarten, the Cheder and the Girl out of Doors as illuminating heterotopias within children's literature, now I want to deepen my claim and urge us to view children's literary and cultural studies themselves as a heterotopic space in relation to the larger study of Jewish and especially Yiddish culture. Every adult reader has once been a child reader, seeking his or her way along the half hidden paths of the Benjaminian topography of reading. Indeed, literature is a place people go to interrogate and and estrange the shared spaces we take for granted. Only now are we beginning to gauge how a corpus, perhaps several corpora, at once so near at hand and so nearly forgotten by critical study, might serve as a productively distorting heterotopian mirror for scholars as we negotiate the particular cartographic challenges in surveying and traversing the Jewish cultural space. Thank you.
- [46:01]
B
Thank you so much. It's really fascinating. And Dovid Brown just pointed out in the chat that that poem Olke meter Blojr Parasolka was actually produced theatrically in the graduation ceremony last year for the Zimmer program 2019. So something that I think our students are very familiar with is that recorded.
- [46:26]
C
I would love to see that.
- [46:27]
B
I don't know. We'll have to ask Ben if there's a recording. Lots of Yashikoyachs and bravos are coming in. Thank you. If anyone has any questions, we're going to Do a little Q and A. So feel free to write your questions in the Q and A box. We have about 10 minutes for questions, and while people are collecting their thoughts about that, I'll get us started. Miriam, maybe you could just take a moment to tell us about your forthcoming book. What can we expect in there?
- [46:55]
C
Sure. I thought you'd never ask. So actually maybe I can just quickly get you a link because it's available for pre order.
- [47:04]
B
Sure, absolutely. Yeah.
- [47:06]
C
Honey on the page. And it has a beautiful cover, which I did not create, so I feel like I can brag about it as much as I want. The art is by Paula Cohen Martin, who from whom we commissioned several new illustrations, some of which look like this. This is the rabbi riding on the lion's back. So it is a kind of sumptuous visual feast, which I'm very happy about. So the book is organized thematically and it presents almost 50 primary sources, mostly stories and poems. There were also a lot of plays. I probably have the dubious distinction of having read through more bad Yiddish children's literature than almost anyone else alive, but there are amazing. So I read through hundreds and hundreds of pieces and I pulled out almost 50. And I found that the plays. I couldn't make the plays work well in translation. I found most of the dialogue very wooden, but I chose stories and poems. And. And then because I do want this to be a resource both for scholars and for families, educators, people with children in their lives, I organized them according to theme. And when I was coming up with the scheme for that, I followed a pattern that I observed in a lot of anthologies and chrestomathies. It's not such a familiar word in English, but chrestomatia was actually the main word in Yiddish for an anthology. And. And it was an anthology with kind of pedagogical intent to take you through a group of texts in a kind of intentional or systematic way. And I noticed that the way these anthologies were organized in the teens and the twenties and the thirties was that they often followed a kind of arc from the most distinctively, particularistically Jewish content to the more universal and kind of incidentally Jewish content. And so I tried to do that also in Honey on the Page. And I aimed for as much geographic, ideological, gender diversity of authorship and publication as I could possibly find. And so, yeah, so that that kind of diversity is there. And then in order to make this a really useful resource for scholars and just for. For curious lay readers, I also created biographical header notes for each contributor in the volume.
- [49:49]
B
Wonderful. Well, we're really looking forward to to reading this and checking it out. Well, if anyone has any questions, please share them now in the Q and A or forever hold you'd peace.
- [50:00]
C
Okay, I'm going to quickly grab the link. The publicist will not be happy with me if I fail to put up the link, so I'm going to just put it right into the chat. So the book is already available for pre order, but it will be published in October.
- [50:20]
B
Wonderful. So everyone has that link now rush to NYU Press to get this new book. It sounds totally fantastic. So some more Yashikoyevs and kind words have come in. Okay, here's a question. What qualities do good children's stories share and what ones do bad stories share?
- [50:39]
C
Oh, that's such a great question because from the research that I've done, it's clear that it doesn't have one answer. Over time, over the course, course of the 20th century, we've really seen a shift from the embrace of the kind of heavily didactic, where the purpose of literature for children is to instruct them, to instruct them morally away from the didactic toward the more descriptive, sometimes the more whimsical, and a sense that the way to instruct children is to model good behavior and sometimes to show the consequences of bad moral or ethical choices. So I would say that the literature that's held up really well, you know, when I created this volume, I wanted things that would be of historical interest, but I also wanted to choose stories and poems that I thought would be of interest to contemporary children. And the things that have held up the best are probably the ones that are a little bit more subtle in the way that they go about teaching values.
- [51:58]
B
That's interesting the way that it shifts over time. Here's another question. Isn't the twenties, isn't it the twenties in which the Girl Scouts were founded? And does this have anything to do with the kind of thing that you were describing? Do you have any thoughts on that?
- [52:14]
C
Yeah, I think so. I have not done all of the historical research yet on the American context, but when we talk about Yiddish, we are clearly coming out of a culture that is first creating cultural materials specifically for children at the turn of the 20th century. And all of the default assumptions when we go to retrofit those Sholem Aleichem stories to become children's stories, all of the default assumptions are that boys are the ones with the interesting lives. And then when a secular network of schools arises and it's co educational and half of the people who are going to be consuming this literature are girls. Then it very rapidly becomes clear that girls have interesting lives. And there's one text that I would have loved to talk about and just felt like I should keep the talk a little shorter rather than a little longer. But the most recent one that I include in Honey on the Page is a chapter from a book by David Roden called An Unusual Girl from Brooklyn. And Modena Maidel from Brooklyn. And An Unusual Girl from Brooklyn described the adventures of Sprintze, who's living in 1930s Brooklyn, who has the kind of superhero power that she's an obsessive reader. And whatever is happening in the book that she's reading, she perceives to be happening in her real life. So it's a really fun text in terms of just the representation of what's real in literature and what's missing. But she's a total firecracker. She's what we would call, in Yiddish, a feferke, you know, like a fiery kid with all kinds of attitudes and opinions. And so we get stories about girls like her, and it becomes a very prominent feature of the Yiddish children's literature being produced under secular auspices.
- [54:20]
B
And we've got two last questions here. Sue asks, did you include any Holocaust literature in the anthology?
- [54:27]
C
Absolutely, because the heyday of this literature is really the 20s and 30s. And then we have another flurry in the 1950s. And the material from the 50s is all about cultural consolidation and preservation. And that literature, whether it's doing so explicitly or kind of implicitly behind the scenes, subtly, it is engaging the legacy of the Holocaust. So actually, one of the longest pieces in the book is a novella that was written by Tsina Rabinowicz, who published in Latin America, and who is one of the forgotten geniuses, I think, of 20th century Yiddish letters, at least for children. And I'm hoping that we can kind of bring. Bring back. But she writes this novella that is a family saga over four generations, beginning in the 1850s in Frankfurt and ending up with an orphaned child who has survived the war, who's now in a Kinderheuj near. Somewhere in. I think, in the Galilee, somewhere in Eretz Yisroel after the war.
- [55:42]
B
There's a few more questions here, but maybe we'll just end on this question of. Or these two, perhaps related questions. What is the interest in this literature today? Are people, for example, translating and creating picture books? Or is it more of the kind of work that you're doing, and in parallel to that, what brought you to do this work?
- [56:06]
C
So, okay, I have a prop that I should have here, and I'm just going to tell it really quickly because it's a great YIVO story. The first time that I got to teach any of this material was at the YIVO Institute as part of the Winter Ashkenaz program. And I had a wonderful class, including everyone from very young people who were in college at the time who are now Yiddishists, to retired ship sheep farmer and children's author. Not retired as a sheep farmer, but not retired as a children's author. Very active as a children's author. Linda Elovitz Marshall. And she was so intrigued by a story by Leib Kritko that I include in the anthology that she ended up modernizing it and creating a new children's story called Goodnight Wind that was published in the winter of 2019. So you can also Google and find Goodnight Wind. It's beautiful. It's really beautifully illustrated. I have taught three cohorts of Jewish authors, Jewish children's authors and illustrators some of this material. I'm about to do another mini course for the PJ Library aimed at contemporary Jewish children's authors. So I am hoping that if I put it out there and make this material available, if I build it, they will come and create new Jewish cultural artifacts using these Yiddish materials.
- [57:37]
B
That's beautiful. Well, we look forward to seeing it happen. Miriam, thank you so much for sharing your work with us.
- [57:43]
C
It was a pleasure. In Grastenfargenegen. I'm seeing a couple of questions here about can people contact me or get a recording? I. My email address is. You can just Google me and it'll come right up in the Emory website. And you are welcome to write me and I'll try to provide whatever I can to be helpful.
- [58:02]
B
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Miriam.
- [58:06]
C
You're welcome.