Children and Yiddish Literature

From Early Modernity to Post-Modernity

Gennady Estraikh, Kerstin Hoge, Krutikov Mikhail

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781909662339
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317198789
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Children have occupied a prominent place in Yiddish literature since early modern times, but children's literature as a genre has its beginnings in the early 20th century. Its emergence reflected the desire of Jewish intellectuals to introduce modern forms of education, and promote ideological agendas, both in Eastern Europe and in immigrant communities elsewhere. Before the Second World War, a number of publishing houses and periodicals in Europe and the Americas specialized in stories, novels and poems for various age groups. Prominent authors such as Yankev Glatshteyn, Der Nister, Joseph Opatoshu, Leyb Kvitko, made original contributions to the genre, while artists, such as Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky and Yisakhar Ber Rybak, also took an active part. In the Soviet Union, meanwhile, children's literature provided an opportunity to escape strong ideological pressure. Yiddish children's literature is still being produced today, both for secular and strongly Orthodox communities.

This volume is a pioneering collective study not only of children's literature but of the role played by children in literature.

CHAPTER 1

The Spanish Pagan Woman and Ashkenazi Children Reading Yiddish circa 1700

Shlomo Berger

Old Yiddish literature had no genre which can be defined as ‘children’s literature’. We encounter religious and secular texts: custom books, ethical literature, history books and also stories. The genre of stories (mayses) is usually grounded in Hebrew sources and mainly found in rabbinic literature and midrash; and in the course of centuries (from the fifteenth century on) stories were also translated from European vernaculars, especially from German into Yiddish.¹ The act of translation usually involved a process of adaptation, which served to remove allusions to Christianity found in the original non-Jewish text.² It is important to note that as far as we can compile and assess the quantitative evidence, these stories comprise only a small section of the Yiddish literary corpus. And, for our purposes here, it is clear that none of the Jewish and original gentile stories belonged to the genre of children’s literature. Nevertheless, title pages and prefaces of printed books do suggest that producers also considered children³ a potential reading public of these books.⁴

Although turning into a crude and unsophisticated topos to be found in dozens of title pages and prefaces added in Yiddish books, the claim that authors, translators, editors and book producers in general were preoccupied with preparation of texts whose language could be read and understood by children themselves is an indirect testimony to the possibility that a child would read the book. Of course, being produced for mainly the less educated Ashkenazi population, a Yiddish text was to be accessible to a wide spectrum of adult readers and the claim that a child could read the book was evidence that the text was accessible to adults as well. Ironically, although all texts until the end of the eighteenth century were published in a Western literary Yiddish that nobody actually spoke, a recurrent argument refers to the spoken language of the reading public (including children) as the criterion for judging the level of Yiddish of the printed book.⁵

One kind of book was indeed intended for children but was mostly used by adults; these were the Hebrew grammar books in Yiddish that a teacher at school would have employed in class and occasionally a pupil would consult and read.⁶ Of course, grammar books are not texts intended for leisure reading, and the educational demand governs each and every page of the text. Paradoxically, a pupil using such a grammar was supposed to acquire knowledge of the Hebrew of the prayer book and the Torah for the purpose of reciting liturgical texts at the synagogue and as a basic tool for Torah study (=lernen). Language acquisition and exercise of Yiddish was not a goal. As with other books, producers claimed that the Yiddish text of Hebrew grammar books was readily accessible because the Ashkenazi vernacular was a child’s mother tongue, and was therefore easy to read with or without the help of a teacher (=melamed).

A child was also confronted with Yiddish texts within another framework: the supervised reading event around the family table in the evening after dinner or on Shabbat and holidays. A child would usually and normally be a passive participant in text recitation by an adult: the father or a grown-up family member. Because it was a familial reading event, parents were entitled to choose the text, and the child was regularly exposed to adult literature. Thus, children were not restricted to reading ‘children’s literature’. They were treated as future participants in Jewish religious and cultural activities. Reading and listening to Yiddish texts functioned as an educational tool which also had an entertainment value.⁷

Treating children as grown-ups or striving to lead them into a rewarding adult Jewish life may serve as a basis for the following investigation of a Yiddish text whose producers claimed that it could help children to learn to read better.⁸ Indeed, definitions of the genre of children’s literature may fit well with Ashkenazi preoccupations between the sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries. Perry Nodelman offers a long list (five pages) of characteristics of children’s literature in his The Hidden Adult,⁹ among which the following: 1. the plot of literary pieces is focused on action and straightforward descriptions of events, though the actions also imply something deeper. Yiddish stories were usually simpler in their structure and told rewarding examples of people in action, which ultimately convey a deeper and meaningful (Jewish) moral. 2. Texts are focalized and, therefore, may offer a childlike view of events as well as an adult one.¹⁰ Yiddish tales had a similar focalization. 3. Children’s books are accompanied by illustrations, a strategy that was increasingly in use by producers of Yiddish books.¹¹ 4. The text presents and establishes binary oppositions: home and away, safety and danger, desire and knowledge, adulthood and childhood. Therefore, the plot presents a basic pattern of movement: from home to away and then back home. This is a strategy employed in midrash and Hebrew storytelling which was transferred to Yiddish as well.¹² 5. The texts are didactic.¹³ Stories, including Yiddish stories, contain ancient oral literature: myths and legends created in order to explain the natural phenomena of, for instance, night and day or the changing seasons. Ballads, sagas and epic tales were recited at court or at home to an audience of adults and children alike who were eager to hear about adventures of heroes.

When such characteristics are transferred to Yiddish culture, it is possible to label this genre of literature as ‘short stories’ — ‘mayses’ in particular. Old Yiddish stories may represent a mode of education coupled with a drive to entertain; a rabbinic ruling, a ritual or a custom (minhog) may be explicated to a less well-informed or uneducated reading public by employing a story rather than a legal and abstract argument. The story’s envisaged readers are grown-ups and children whose primary wish is to learn about and deepen their knowledge of Jewish tradition.¹⁴

Ashkenazi parents were encouraged to instil the love of books in their children’s hearts and minds, as poignantly demonstrated in Isaac ben Eliakum of Pozna’s Sefer lev tov (chapter nine):

When he is still very young and even before he begins to speak, let the parent show him books (sforim)¹⁵ and teach him to kiss the books in order to hold books in esteem. Later, when he begins to speak, [parents] should convey to him Torah matters (divrei Torah), reciting to him the verse: ‘and He gave the Torah to Moses’, and teach him the first verse of the kri’es shema. And when he grows up [they should] start to teach him the alphabet, and more [things] later on… then hire for him a rabbi (=teacher). Parents should always use flattery in order to convince a child to learn: bribing him with a piece of fruit, candy or cake (leykekh)¹⁶ … then coins… and the mothers should see to it that he goes to the heyder… in the end the father and mother are responsible for their children’s deeds (maysim) and the father should teach his child the disciplines he knows himself.¹⁷

Identifying children as readers of literature that is also suitable for an adult reading public (or indeed is primarily produced for adults) discloses another anxiety that troubled Yiddish book producers. Naturally, children belonged to the uneducated masses, but it is impossible to compare a child with a grown-up male who found Hebrew books difficult to understand. Nevertheless, being uneducated, children represented a public that was looking for Yiddish rather than Hebrew books. As I showed elsewhere, within Ashkenazi society Yiddish books became more than a utilitarian means of combating ignorance. Yiddish book producers introduced and developed the idea that printing in the Ashkenazi vernacular was a measure that supported the cause of lernen, and lernen itself received another meaning, that of supporting a basic rudimentary form of education and knowledge, a rather individualized mode of Torah study conducted in one’s home and not the beys midresh.¹⁸ Although there was no Yiddish grammar composed in Yiddish by Ashkenazim until the beginning of the twentieth century and there were many Hebrew grammars in Yiddish, one pamphlet published in 1710 already recognized that in order to be able to learn good Hebrew, one had to know the grammar of one’s mame loshn.¹⁹ Children were, therefore, a rewarding target group that showed the necessity to produce Yiddish books.

Subsequently, children were encouraged to read the supreme bestseller of Yiddish literature up till then, the Tsene rene. Jacob ben Isaac’s book turned into a classic during the seventeenth century and was recognized as an essential book for each and every Ashkenazi household.²⁰ In the 1711 Amsterdam edition of the Tsene rene, the publisher Hayyim Druker discusses a particular point when assessing older editions of the book and attempting to justify his own, which he describes as a particularly outstanding and scholarly edition of the Tsene rene. Among other things, he argues in the preface:

But I must confess that I have seen one edition of the Tsene rene which was printed with illustrations. I did not find a mistake in any of the illustrations, but above, under and alongside the illustrations there are some [mistakes].²¹ I must admit that the publisher did a good job in placing the illustrations correctly, and the children enjoy a nice shpil (=game, diversion) with these illustrations. But, thank God, here in Amsterdam this is not our practice. Good proofreading and good language are our illustrations.

Not being aware of any literary theory whatsoever, the publisher Hayyim Druker interprets the inclusion of illustrations in a book as an instrument that helps children to read books. Three aspects are of significance here: one, children were potential readers of the Tsene rene; two, illustrations have a specific role in turning the book into a children’s book; three...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Yiddish Writing for and about Children
• 1 The Spanish Pagan Woman and Ashkenazi Children Reading Yiddish circa 1700
• 2 The Sabbath Tale and Jewish Cultural Renewal
• 3 Heavenly Father: Portraying the Family in Hasidic Yiddish Children’s Literature
• 4 The Design of Books and Lives: Yiddish Children’s Book Art by Artists from the Kiev Kultur-Lige
• 5 Illustrating Yiddish Children’s Literature: Aesthetics and Utopia in Lissitzky’s Graphics for Mani Leib’s Yingl Tsingl Khvat
• 6 Reading Soviet-Yiddish Poetry for Children: Der Nister’s Mayselekh in ferzn 1917–39
• 7 An End to Fairy Tales: The 1930s in the mayselekh of Der Nister and Leyb Kvitko
• 8 The Upside-Down World of Baym Dnyepr: Penek
• 9 Jewish Wards of the Soviet State: Fayvl Sito’s These Are Us
• 10 ‘A Language Is Like a Garden’: Shloyme Davidman and the Yiddish Communist School Movement in the United States
• 11 Soviet Propaganda in Illustrated Yiddish Children’s Books: From the Collections of the YIVO Library, New York
• Index