מענדעלע

Mendele starts its ninth volume which will take us into the computationally problematic year with many zeroes. With 1,922 subscribers at the moment, Mendele will certainly face its own "s2k" problem very soon (mir zoln ale zayn gezunt). Recently (vol.08.097) Mendele presented the geographical distribution of subscribers, here I am posting some statistics about Mendelyaner in the US academe (not because this group is better than others, but because it is much easier to count: e-mail addresses in the .edu domain readily reveal the subscriber's affiliation).

When Noyekh Miller and Victor Bers started Mendele eight years ago, almost all of the 22 subscribers were affiliated with US universities, but since then their portion in the list has been steadily declining. Today, only 503 (26%) of all subscribers have e-mail addresses in the .edu domain. New York University boasts the largest team - 22 Mendelyaner. It is followed by Harvard (18) and U. of Michigan (15). Berkeley, Chicago, Maryland, and Ohio State are tied for the fourth place with 14 subscribers each. Syracuse U. (13) needs to make just one small step to move up the ranking, and so do Columbia and UCLA (12 each). Brandeis, JTSA, MIT, U. of Pennsylvania, U. of Texas at Austin, and Yale are represented by 11 and Stanford by 10 subscribers. More than 100 other campuses around the world have fewer than 10 subscribers. Universities outside the US with more than 10 subscribers include U. of Toronto (18) and Hebrew U. (13).

Currently there are only 6 subscribers from the Indiana University, but as the next item in this Mendele issue shows, this number may change soon. Academic Yiddish programs grow, books are published (see 3 and 4 below), various Yiddish activities proliferate (see todays Mendele notices and announcements) -- all this inspires some optimism. Mendele will, mirtshem, stay busy for the next year and probably for more years to come.

Iosif Vaisman

Dr. Alice Field Cohn Professorship in Jewish Studies: Yiddish Studies

The Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University invites applications from distinguished scholars for appointment to the Dr. Alice Field Cohn Professorship in Jewish Studies. We are seeking a specialist in Yiddish language and literature who will teach Yiddish language, at all levels from beginning through advanced, as well as a range of attractive undergraduate courses on Yiddish literature and culture.

This tenure-track position begins fall semester 2000 and will be a jointappointment between the Jewish Studies Program and the Department of Germanic Studies or some other appropriate department. Candidates should be able to demonstrate scholarly excellence in research and teaching and a willingness and ability to participate actively in the various outreach and other service activities of the Borns Jewish Studies Program.

Send application, curriculum vitae, four letters of reference, evidence of effective teaching, and relevant publications to the chairperson of the search committee, Professor Alvin Rosenfeld, Borns Jewish Studies Program, Indiana University, Goodbody Hall 308, 1011 East Third Street, Bloomington, IN 47405-7005.

The search will remain open and continue into the fall of 1999.

Indiana University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.

Patricia Ek

Review: "Wanderers and Dreamers: Tales of the David Herman Theatre", by Arnold Zable and "Di Geshikhte fun Dovid Herman Teater" by Moishe Ajzenbud, Hyland House, Melbourne, 1998, ISBN 1864470615, pb 176 pp 22 x 27 cm, RRP A $30

Publisher's details: Hyland House Publishing Pty Ltd., 387 Clarendon St, South Melbourne, Vic, Australia. Email <hyland@a1.com.au> Tel 613 9696 9064, Fax 613 9696 9065

Wanderers and Dreamers, Tales of the David Herman Theatre, by Arnold Zable and Di Geshikhte fun Dovid Herman Teater by Moishe Ajzenbud, is a handsome bilingual publication, blending anecdote, memoir, biography and archival research into the history of Yiddish theatre in Australia. This celebratory community history was commissioned by the Kadimah, the Melbourne Yiddish cultural organization which was in its heyday the nerve centre of the immigrant Jewish community in Carlton.

(Despite the natural attrition of the Yiddish-speaking pre- and postwar immigrant generation, and the rapid integration of their children into the wider community, a relocated Kadimah still flourishes, organizing lectures, publications and social events for its ageing members and the general community.)

The Yiddish section of the book by M. Ajzenbud, Di Geshikhte fun Dovid Herman Teater, lists productions chronologically, with cast lists, excerpts from contemporary reviews, and biographies of many of the leading actors. For Yiddish readers it is an archival treasure-trove.

Arnold Zable's Wanderers and Dreamers, Tales of the David Herman Theatre is a ambitious overview of the roots of Yiddish theatre going back as far as the carnival traditions of medieval purimshpiler, itinerant jesters or badkhanim, and the social conditions and intellectual influences which shaped modern secular Yiddish theatre, from the mid-nineteenth century.

Zable skilfully weaves together the history of theatre groups in constant flux, merging splitting and reinventing themselves, with the colourful and sometimes tragic personal histories of the actors and their families. The trail of Yiddish theatre crisscrosses continents as Jews dispersed themselves in flight from persecution and in search of opportunity.

Eastern European Yiddish actors travelled throughout Western Europe, the US and Australia. Before settling in Melbourne, Sara and Nosn Ginter had toured South America, bearers of European civilization as decontextualized as the opera shipped down the Amazon in Werner Herzog's Aguirre or the Wrath of God. While "Latin America became a fading dream", the Ginters went on serving green mate tea to their fellow actors in Melbourne

Melbourne's flourishing Yiddish institutions attracted the big names of Yiddish theatre in the decades before and after the war. Rosa and Zygmund Turkow, commuted for years between Melbourne and Israel, while others, the Ginters, Rochel Holzer and Yankev Waislitz, and Mila Waislitz and Moishe Potashinski, Waislitz's daughter and son in law, made their home here. The cosmopolitanism of these widely travelled Yiddish actors contrasts rather favourably with the cultural cringe, the gloomy sense of inevitable inferiority and provincialism, which dogged the mainstream arts in Australia in the 50s and 60s.

Theatre is a communal activity par excellence. Among those who contributed, musical, artistic, and technical support were significant Australian artists, Yosl Bergner and his friend Jim Wigley. (Bergner was the son of the Yiddish poet Melech Ravich, who toured Australia in the 30s to research the prospect of a Jewish settlement in the Kimberleys, and nephew of the Yiddish novelist Herz Bergner.)

Zable's versatility as a story-teller, sympathetic biographer, archivist and social historian reminds one of the complexity of "background" knowledge that most Jews take for granted, and Jewish history in general encompasses, straddling as it does such varied places, languages, and cultures, from the impoverished pale of settlement in feudal Czarist Russia, and Hasidic Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to the centres of secular Jewish culture and enlightenment in Vienna, Warsaw and Vilna and to the immigrant meltingpots of New York's Lower East Side, the East End of London, Manchuria and Northern China, Buenos Aires, Carlton and Caulfield.

In absolute terms, the immigrant, Yiddish speaking audience of the 50s and 60s was minute, yet, well before the era of government subsidies for multi-culturalism, it sustained a popular year-round season of live theatre. In the 50s, when "the Melbourne Yiddish theatre audience had leapt to over 6000... director Yankev Waislitz alternated with Rochl Holzer and guest overseas directors to produce annual seasons of up to five full-length plays...except for the summer months, rarely a weekend went by without a performance on the Kadimah stage, or in other venues such as the Union Theatre or Assembly Hall." And in summer, Yiddish actors staged impromptu cabarets and recitals at holiday resorts where Jews congregated.

The professionalism of local Yiddish theatre was sustained by great and exacting directors, such as Israel Rothman, Yankev Waislitz, Rachel Holzer, and Joseph Schein who passed on the Stanislavski "art theatre" traditions from their own apprenticeship with Peretz Hirschbein's Odessa Yiddish Art Theatre, the Vilna Theatre Troupe and with great artists such as the Russian actor Solomon Mikhoels, murdered by Stalin in 1948, and the Warsaw actors, Ida Kaminska, and David Herman after whom the Kadimah theatre group was eventually named in 1940.

In Melbourne they trained small group of dedicated amateurs at weekends and after their long working days in factories and market stalls. These actors swapped rest, or overtime at work which could have brought in enough money for a deposit on a flat or house, for the slog of rehearsals night after exhausting night in unheated halls. Theatre was a refuge from alienation, loneliness and the drudgery of the sweatshop.

It was also a way of reaffirming their bonds to the families and communities left behind. As news of the annihilation of European Jewry was absorbed, Yiddish theatre may have become a form of resistance and perhaps also of denial. Some of the stars of the post war Yiddish theatre, such as Mila Waislitz and Moishe Potashinski, Meier Ceprow, Shia Tigel, and Shmuel Migdalek had made use of their talents to sustain themselves and their fellow inmates in concentration and DP camps. Those like Rachel Holzer, and Rachel Levita who had reached Australia before the war had lost families. The emotional closeness of collaboration in theatre was both comforting and cathartic.

Zable's research into the history of Yiddish theatre, literature and the acting profession across several continents is presented in a conversational style of story-tellying heightened by pathos, humour and lyricism. Biographical vignettes, reminiscence and even gossip jostle with literary criticism, and social and cultural history.

As a child Zable was enchanted by the superstitious folk tales which featured in the fantastically varied repertoire of Yiddish theatre. Also included were classics and popular contemporary plays in translation, such as Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, Arthur Miller, and, in the original Yiddish, nostalgic shtetl drama and melodrama, vaudeville, social realism, and sentimental comedy

Like so much of Zable's writing, Wanderers and Dreamers is a celebration of the resilience and creativity of an immigrant/minority community. Zable was an inspired choice for the history that the Kadimah commissioned, because he too was shaped by the secular-leftist humanist spirit of the Jewish Bund, the political movement which founded and supported the Kadimah and its cultural activities.

Founded in Russia in 1897, the Jewish Bund was a socialist, anti-Zionist, and subsequently anti-communist, political movement whose membership was drawn from the Jewish intelligentsia and the urbanized Jewish proletariat in Eastern Europe. While its social values were universalist, the Bund quickly recognized that language and culture were critical to the survival of ethnic minorities. Foreshadowing multi-culturalism, the ideology of the Bund was expressed in the establishment of Yiddish schools and youth groups and cultural and political activities for Jewish workers.

Many of the actors and other participants in Melbourne's Yiddish theatre were first introduced to the stage in the shtetls and towns of Eastern Europe under the auspices of Bund cultural organizations. (Since the war the politics of the Bund have been almost exclusively cultural.)

The human warmth and colour of Zable's history of the David Herman Theatre reinforce its fascination as a portrait of a particular subculture of the Jewish community. To outsiders, the Jewish community may appear enviably stable and homogeneous. The children of the immigrant Yiddish speaking Bundists have blended into the broader, predominantly middle, professional and business classes. However, there is still a discernible difference, even from their Jewish contemporaries, in their political idealism, and concern for minorities and underdogs, their gravitation to the arts, and their loyalty to the Kadimah, currently one of the less fashionable Jewish community organizations.

Today, many of the younger Jewish community seem to feel that the ruptures in identity caused by the Holocaust can only be healed by a return to the religious observance and pietistic enthusiasm of Hasidic Judaism. Wanderers and Dreamers reminds us of an alternative Jewish secular tradition, reflected in the extraordinary repertoires of Yiddish theatre performed by low-paid, immigrant workers, many of whom lacked much formal education because of economic hardship and the disruption of the war years.

Tales of the David Herman Theatre is a mosaic of memories. Many voices record the irresistible glamour and charisma that made Yiddish theatre the heart of the old Carlton days. The old Bundist ideals of art and culture for the working masses are revisited with pleasurable nostalgia. As always, an element of spiritual autobiography gives Zable's writing a special resonance.

Felicity Bloch, Melbourne

I would like to bring to the attention of Mendelyaner the following newly published book, which was translated from the Yiddish:

Abramowicz, Hirsz. Profiles of a Lost World: Memoirs of East European Jewish Life before World War II. Translated by Eva Zeitlin Dobkin; edited by Dina Abramowicz and Jeffrey Shandler, with introductions by David E. Fishman and Dina Abramowicz. Detroit: Wayne State University Press (published in cooperation with YIVO Institute for Jewish Research), 1999. 386 p., illus. (Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology) ISBN 0-8143-2784-2 $39.95

Hirsz Abramowicz, born in 1881 on an estate near Troki (now Lithuania), worked as a teacher and school administrator in Tsarist Russia and in interwar Vilna, and subsequently became a Yiddish journalist in New York, where he died in 1960. Profiles of a Vanished World is a translation from his Farshvundene geshtaltn: zikhroynes un siluetn (Buenos Aires, 1958), and contains essays on Lithuanian Jewish traditions, biographical sketches of Jewish personalities in pre-World War I Tsarist Russia and interwar Vilna, memoirs of World War I and its aftermath, and articles on Jewish vocational education between the world wars.

As David Fishman writes, "Hirsz Abramowicz's Profiles of a Lost World straddles the boundaries between genres, subjects, and eras. It is largely a memoir in the form of biographical sketches of East European Jewish personalities from the three generations prior to World War II. At the same time, it is a work of scholarship, with several important historical and ethnographic studies based on documentary and field research. The book's primary focus is the vibrant city of Vilna, which Jews referred to as 'the Jerusalem of Lithuania,' yet it also devotes considerable attention to the Lithuanian countryside, with its agriculturally based economy and more traditional way of life."

The introduction by my YIVO colleague, Dina Abramowicz (ir tsu lange yorn), is especially poignant. Bearing the title "My Father's Life and Work," this section eloquently describes Hirsz Abramowicz's upbringing in a maskilic family and includes Dina Abramowicz's personal recollections of his career as an educator and a writer. I can personally attest to the many hours that she devoted to seeing this book through the lengthy process of translation, editing, finding a publisher, proofreading, and finally publication. Profiles of a Lost World -- in addition to its own considerable merits, which speak for themselves -- stands as an eloquent testimony of a daughter's intense devotion to the heritage that her parents passed along to her and which she, in turn, has helped to transmit during the past five-plus decades to thousands of researchers at YIVO, many or most of whom are at least one generation removed from the way of life and the personalities that Hirsz Abramowicz describes so well.

A book party marking the publication of Profiles of a Lost World is scheduled to take place on Sunday June 13th, 2 p.m., at the Park East Synagogue (164 East 68th Street, New York City).

Zachary M. Baker, New York