The Yiddish Book Center debuts a major new core exhibition on Oct. 15 that tells a multitude of global yet deeply personal stories.
“Yiddish: A Global Culture” explores modern Yiddish literature, theater, music, press and politics through approximately 350 objects, including rare books, artwork, photographs, sheet music, Yiddish typewriters and other artifacts. A grand opening on Oct. 15 will include a dedication, live performances, and exhibition tours (see details below).
The presentation brings to life a culture that was the bridge between tradition and modernity for a migratory and diasporic people,” said Susan Bronson, the executive director of the Yiddish Book Center. “The exhibition showcases the extraordinary creativity and resilience of a people who navigated change while preserving their heritage and impacting the world around them—a model of cultural preservation and adaptation that resonates today.”
“Our new exhibition celebrates Yiddish and the distinctly modern literature and culture that it generated around the world,” said Aaron Lansky, the center’s founder and president. He added that the exhibit will surprise and delight diverse audiences, even if they can’t read a single word of Yiddish. After viewing this exhibit, they’ll never think of Yiddish in the same way again.”
Exhibition Highlights
The exhibit introduces audiences to the full breadth and richness of modern Yiddish culture—a sophisticated, dynamic, international and interconnected civilization that evolved in constant dialogue with the majority of cultures around it. Featuring artifacts from the center’s collections or on special loan, it offers a multi-faceted narrative of identity, creativity, migration and belonging that reaches around the world. It also includes themed displays on Yiddish Theater, Soviet Yiddish, Modernism, Bestsellers and Women’s Voices, as well as broader cultural topics such as the Press and Politics, Celebrities, and Yiddish and the Holocaust.
“You’ll step inside our beautiful, light-filled building to find a Yiddish Palace of Varieties or a Yiddish World’s Fair,” said David Mazower, the Center’s research bibliographer, who is the exhibition’s chief curator. “We’ve created a bright, colorful space full of powerful stories and wonderful objects that make you think, but also touch the heart and soul; I want people to see this exhibition and feel inspired, surprised, moved, informed, and entertained.”
Visitors are greeted by a display of 49 books from the center’s vast collection, representing works published around the globe. Highlights include immigration narratives, socio-political tracts, travelogues and translated literature, such as Der alter un der yam (“The Old Man and the Sea”), Der kleyner prints (“The Little Prince”) and Heri Poter un der filozofisher shteyn (“Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”). Above the books is a new 60-foot color mural of “Yiddishland” by illustrator Martin Haake, depicting key moments, personalities and trends in modern Yiddish culture.
“Yiddish: A Global Culture” features the stories and work of many women artists, including a recently rediscovered portrait (c. 1925) of Celia Adler, a leading lady of Broadway and the Yiddish stage, painted by Ludwig Satz, himself one of the biggest stars of Yiddish film and operetta. Adler and Satz frequently played opposite each other on stage, and Satz had asked Adler to marry him. The portrait captures his unrequited love, as Adler turned down his proposal. Never before seen in public, the painting was recently discovered at a small auction house in New York.
Esther Carp was among the female artists pushed to the fringes of Yung Yidish, a male-dominated avant-garde circle in post-World War I Lodz, Poland. In 1921, in collaboration with artists Ida Broyner, Dina Matus, and poet Rachel Lipstein, Carp was part of a feminist project that produced a trio of Yiddish and German hand-colored books, now hailed as a masterpiece of modernist book art and the Jewish avant-garde. Scarce and highly sought-after, Himlen in opgrunt (“Heavens in the abyss”), with Carp’s boldly colored abstract figures, is on view in the exhibition. Also on view is Bella Chagall’s 1945 memoir Brenendike likht (“Burning Lights”), published posthumously and featuring illustrations by her husband, artist Marc Chagall. The copy on view is inscribed by Marc to Yiddish poet H. Levick “tsum ondenk fun Bela” (“in remembrance of Bella”) with her photograph, “di letste bild fun Bela’n” (“the last picture of Bella”).
Performers are prominently featured in the exhibition and include Ukrainian-born actor and director Michal Michalesko, who made his name in the 1910s as a star of the Warsaw Yiddish operetta stage. In 1920, he came to New York to star in a Yiddish translation of Emmerich Kalman’s operetta Die Csárdásfürstin (The Gipsy Princess) at Boris Thomashefsky’s National Theater and went on to star in dramas, including Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Yiddish translation. On view are publicity photographs of Michalesko in a wide variety of roles, theater posters, sheet music and his gold cigarette case.
Also on view is the tale of child singing prodigy Seymour Rechtzeit, who arrived in America from Poland with his father in 1920. When immigration quotas stranded the rest of the family in Poland, Seymour’s father appealed to New York congressman Isaac Siegel for help, and Siegel arranged for the wunderkind to perform for Congress, singing Brengt Mir Mayn Mamen fun Yene Zayt (“Oh Bring My Mother From Across the Sea”). The song, written by Seymour’s brother, was a success and the family was reunited by 1923. Seymour went on to perform at the White House for U.S. President Calvin Coolidge.
Among the popular books on view in the exhibition are detective novels featuring Max Spitzkopf, known as the King of Detectives or the Viennese Sherlock Holmes. Created by the prolific Polish Yiddish journalist and editor Yoyne (Jonas) Kreppel, the Spitzkopf stories captivated the young Isaac Bashevis Singer, who recalled their “magnetic attraction.” Advertisements proclaimed “MAX SPITZKOPF IS A JEW—and he has always taken every opportunity to stand up FOR JEWS. Whenever a Jew has faced some injustice and turned to Spitzkopf for help, he was never disappointed.” The rare ca. 1909 bound volume of Spitzkopf stories on view includes Kidnapped for Conversion (Geroybt tsu der shmad), in which a gang, including a priest and a nun, kidnap the teenage daughter of a Galician Jewish landowner.
Also on view is Geyt a hindele keyn bronzvil (A Hen Goes to Brownsville, 1937), published by the children’s branch of the Workmen’s Circle. Hindele the hen is determined to go to the poor Jewish neighborhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn, to lay eggs for hungry children. Fined for holding up traffic, she pays her bus fare with an egg and is surprised to learn that everything in the human world requires money.
Other artifacts of note in Yiddish: A Global Culture include:
The Memorial Album for the Thirty Day Mourning Period for Sholem Aleichem (New York, 1916), a special commemorative publication that features photographs from along the funeral route from his Bronx apartment to his resting place in Queens, for which 250,000 mourners lined the streets to pay tribute to Yiddish literary royalty;
A scrapbook of William Gropper cartoons from the communist-affiliated Yiddish daily newspaper Morgn Frayhayt (“Morning Freedom“), compiled in 1933-34 by Ukrainian-born immigrant dentist Froim Moiseyevitch Camenir, who was active in leftist Bronx cultural organizations and a devoted Morgn Frayhayt reader;
A life-size copy of a photograph (Brooklyn, circa 1910) of an unidentified man wearing a costume celebrating three of New York’s early Yiddish daily papers: the socialist Forverts (“The Jewish Daily Forward“) across his chest and cap, the anarchist Fraye Arbeter Shtime (“The Free Voice of Labor“) on his sleeves, and the centrist Morgn Zhurnal (“The Jewish Morning Journal“) on his pants;
A display of 20th-century Yiddish typewriters, some of which were used by renowned Yiddish writers; and
The world’s last Yiddish Linotype machine (c. 1920) was salvaged from the Jewish Daily Forward, a popular Yiddish newspaper, after it transitioned to digital composition in the early 1980s.
Visitors also can explore a re-creation of the turn-of-the-century Warsaw apartment of writer I. L. Peretz, whose legendary salon stood at the forefront of Yiddish modernism in the 1900s and 1910s. The period reproduction features books, a gallery of writers and artists in Peretz’s circle, a soundscape of voices from the salon, a re-creation of Peretz’s desk, and wallpaper based on original photographs.
Public Opening
To mark the opening of “Yiddish: A Global Culture,” a full day of festivities will take place on Sunday, Oct. 15, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Highlights include The Glorious, Fabulous, Incandescent World of Yiddish Theater, a cabaret-style performance with some of the leading stars of 21st-century Yiddish Theater (3:30 p.m.), and free guided tours and pop-up performances throughout the day. For more details, see: www.yiddishbookcenter.org/events-and-store/virtual-public-programs-calendar/save-date-yiddish-global-culture.
Exhibition Support
Yiddish: A Global Culture has been made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.
Additional major funding support has come from the Kaplen Brothers Fund, the Estate of Dr. Thomas Zand, the Simha and Sara Lainer Family Foundation, Dr. Martin Peretz, Arthur Sands, Leona Kern, the David Berg Foundation, Dr. Jesse M. Abraham and Amy Peck Abraham, the Morris and Beverly Baker Foundation, the Malka Fund at Jewish Communal Fund, Ben Schneiderman, and Dr. Matthew A. Budd and Rosalind E. Gorin Fund at Combined Jewish Philanthropies.
Media Contacts
Rebecka McDougall, Yiddish Book Center, 413-409-5118, rmcdougall@yiddishbookcenter.org
Amanda Domizio, Amanda Domizio Communications, 347-229-2877, amanda@domiziopr.com
Images (left to right):
Detail from Chaim Krol: Himlen in opgrunt (Heavens in the Abyss), Lodz, 1921, illustrated by Esther Carp
Michal Michalesko (center) and Chorus, Publicity Photo from an Unidentified Production, ca. 1930
A.M. Orzycer, Proletarishe yugnt (Proletarian Youth), London, 1943
About the Yiddish Book Center
The Yiddish Book Center recovers, preserves, teaches, and celebrates Yiddish literature and culture to advance a fuller understanding of Jewish history and identity. The Center engages diverse, worldwide audiences, generating enthusiasm, knowledge, and commitment to the history and future of Yiddish and Jewish culture. The million-plus books recovered by the Center since its founding in 1980 represent Jews’ first sustained literary and cultural encounter with the modern world. They are a window on the past thousand years of Jewish history, a precursor of modern Jewish writing in English, Hebrew, and other languages, and a springboard for new creativity.
Over the past 43 years the Yiddish Book Center has launched a wide range of bibliographic, educational, and cultural programs to share the treasures it has found with the wider world. In 2014, the organization was awarded a National Medal for Museums and Libraries in a White House ceremony. In 2019, the Yiddish Book Center launched its White Goat Press publishing imprint to bring newly translated works of Yiddish to the widest readership possible. Learn more at yiddishbookcenter.org.
