מענדעלע

In my previous message to the list [6.210] I asked for information on the phrase "bet lemden." It should have been "bet hemden."

Sorry for the typo!

Joy Kingsolver

Ellen Cassedy asks for leads on Women writers of short stories for use in her daughter's Yiddish bas mitzvah....Reminds me that when I taught a class in Yiddish Literature in translation a couple of years ago I was struck by the notable absence of women Yiddish fiction writers. While women are well represented as poets, fiction writers appear to be exclusively male.

I'd certainly appreciate hearing about women who were fiction writers --especially ones who would have been contemporaries of Mendele Moicher Sforim or Sholem Aleichem and I. Peretz.

Loretta (Liebe) Denner Santa Rosa, Ca.

"Der Yiddish-Vinkl" column in the last Forward (Jan 24, p.11) is dedicated to the Yiddish writers who were killed by Stalin in 1952. The column has no byline, which perhaps means that it reflects the editorial opinion. The central passage of the column reads:

"Today, these martyred writers are heroes. At one time, however, they were looked upon as heretics who had betrayed their people with their words in praise of the Russian Revolution, Birobidzhan and the communist regime. They were playing the game that the marranos had played centuries earlier when they were Catholics on the outside and Jews on the inside. These Yiddish writers were Stalinists on the outside and Jews on the inside."

Without going into deep discussion about ideological and political persuasions of these writers, one thing is clear: any one-line simplistic formula ("Stalinists on the outside and Jews on the inside" in this case) applied to all of them does great disservice to their memory and to the historical truth. If for nothing else, just because there were many of them, they were very different, and all of them underwent complex evolution during their lifetimes. And all what is known about them from their works, their lives and their deaths suggests that Communism or Socialism for them, as well as for countless other intellectuals of their generations, was not "the game", but a rather profound belief in better future for their people (whom they hardly betrayed by praising the Russian Revolution) and for the world at large. Of course, writers' vision of Communism might have been very different from that of Stalin, but it does not mean that they were "playing games".

It seems to be quite ironic that Forward effectively vindicates Stalin and his henchmen in the killings:

"They [writers] were playing games with Stalin on "Uncle Joe's" home turf. They lost. They were executed."

Simple, clean, and kosher, like the neighborhood butcher shop. Indeed, the writers (and other members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee) were accused, tried, and executed precisely on these grounds: that they were Communists (Soviet patriots) on the outside and Jews (bourgeois nationalists, Zionists, imperialist agents, rootless cosmopolitans) on the inside. And MGB investigators and prosecutors just did what they were supposed to do: fight the turncoats.

In the subscription advertisement in the same issue Forward prides itself as "The Unbroken Link in American Jewish Journalism". Probably Forward never particularly liked Soviet Yiddish writers, but does it necessitate dubious "marranic" compliments in paying tribute to them?

Today, thanks to some changes in and around the former Soviet archives, we know better why and what happened in the Soviet Union in the late 40s - early 50s. Several excelent monographs and document collections are must reading for everyone interested in modern Jewish history (detailed bibliography is available at

http://sunsite.unc.edu/yiddish/Bibliog/jews-ussr-2.html):

Redlich, Shimon, War, Holocaust and Stalinism : a documented study of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR, Luxembourg : Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995

Kostyrchenko, G., Out of the red shadows : anti-semitism in Stalin's Russia, Amherst, N.Y. : Prometheus Books, 1995

Vaksberg, Arkadii, Stalin against the Jews, New York : Knopf, 1994

Nepravednyi sud : poslednii stalinskii rasstrel : stenogramma sudebnogo protsessa nad chlenami Evreiskogo antifashistskogo komiteta, Moskva : "Nauka", 1994

Ro'i, Yaacov (Ed.), Jews and Jewish life in Russia and the Soviet Union, Ilford: F. Cass, 1995 (The Cummings Center series)

The whole picture contains much more colors (and different ones) than Marrano-Stalinist schema.

Iosif Vaisman

ven ikh bin geven a kind, hot mayn mishpokhe genutzt dem nomen moyshe kapoyer far a mentsh vos geyt mit kop arop un fis aroyf, oder tuen epes farkert.

me hot mir gezogt az moyshe kapoyer iz geven a parshoyn in a "cartoon" inem forverts. ikh bet me zol mir helfn mit informatsiye vegn moyshe kapoyer. ikh vil hern vos mentshn gedenkn vegn mayses, un efsher vu tsu gefinen di originele "cartoons". oyb me hot an arkhive baym forverts, vi azoy ken ikh gefinen zakhn in dem un far vosere yorn zol ikh zukhn.

When I was a child, my family often used the name moyshe kapoyer to refer to someone when they were either upside down or doing something in a way they considered backwards, inside out, or counterproductive.

I've been told that moyshe kapoyer was a character who was the subject of cartoons in the forverts.

I would appreciate any information about moyshe kapoyer, including people's memories of how the name was used in their families, descriptions of the cartoons, or where I might find copies of the cartoons. If the forverts has an archive, how would I access it and what years should I look for.

a sheynem dank.

Joe Kurland Colrain, MA