Jews and Poles in Yiddish Literature in Poland Between the Two World Wars

Summary

The beginnings of modem Yiddish literature, in east European Yiddish, are to be found at the end of the eighteenth century within the borders of pre-partition Poland. With the waves of emigration from the second half of the nineteenth century, Yiddish literature became an extra-territorial literature as considerable numbers of its writers and readers dispersed across western Europe and the Americas. Until and even beyond World War II, eastern Europe has continued to be almost the sole birthplace of Yiddish writers despite the dispersion of the authors and audience of this literature. The Jewish centres outside of eastern Europe have not produced native-born Yiddish writers; in fact Yiddish literature exists in these centres only insofar as Yiddish-speaking immigrants have maintained it.

Despite regional differences and ties to a dominant territorially-defined culture and literature, it is possible to regard Yiddish literature in eastern Europe until World War I as more or less a uniform field in relation to its ideological and artistic trends, and readership. Sh. Y. Abramovitch or Mendele Moykher Sforim (1836-1917) from Odessa, Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916) from Kiev and Y. L. Peretz (1852-1915) from Warsaw-three writers whose works are considered classics of modem Yiddish literature - wrote and worked with a sense of belonging to one literature for one audience. Yet, each one came from a different dialectical region of eastern European Yiddish; a review of the writings of Abramovitch and Sholem Aleichem reveals clear ties to Russian literature, while in the writings of Peretz an intimate knowledge of Polish literature is evident. This sense of a shared heritage was also preserved in the lands of immigration.

After World War I, a schism began to divide the two major centres of Yiddish literature in eastern Europe. In independent Poland, a centre of Yiddish literature arose which possessed clear signs of singularity. Although there were many contributing factors, it is the political factor - that is, the isolation of the other great centre of Yiddish literature in eastern Europe, the Soviet centre - which is most pertinent. Ideological pressure was so strong that as early as the end of the 1920s a substantial barrier separated the Moscow and Warsaw literary centres.