The Dos poylishe yidntum collection (1946–1966)

The article that follows this introduction owes its existence to a project funded by the Agence nationale de la recherche¹ which ran from 2011 to 2014 within the Centre de recherches historiques of the EHESS, which gave rise to an international colloquium² and is currently being extended through a seminar within that same institution.³

The object of this interdisciplinary project, at the crossroads of history and literary studies, was the collection of Yiddish works published after the war in Argentina under the title Dos poylishe yidntum (“Polish Jewry”), conceived by Marc Turkow, a journalist and an influential personality of the Yiddish diaspora, and Abraham Mittelberg. This series, published by the “Central Union of Polish Jews in Argentina” from 1946 to 1966, comprised 175 volumes.

Dos poylishe yidntum is known, and has frequently been cited, for having published the Yiddish version of Elie Wiesel’s book, Un di velt hot geshvign [And the World Kept Silent],⁴ which, reworked, would become in French, under the title La Nuit (Night),⁵ a work of universal scope and one of the matrices of the writings of “Shoah testimony.” Yet this Yiddish book, by its date of publication (1956) and the figure of its author (a young writer and a Romanian Jew), is not representative of the series as a whole. Dos poylishe yidntum was first conceived as a collection publishing “documents” — one would today more readily speak of “testimonies” — written by Polish Jewish intellectuals about their experience of the war, the ghettos and the camps (the catastrophe, or khurbn in Yiddish); the collection gradually opened to writings by these same authors recounting their earlier experience and bearing more broadly on prewar Poland, and later to the reissue of works by deceased authors. So many axes announced by Turkow as early as the end of the first volume, Malke Ovshyani Derzeilt: “memories of the old home / descriptions of the towns and villages / biographies of famous Yiddish personalities / documents on the khurbn of Polish Jewry / the history of a hundred years of Yiddish life in Poland / works of famous writers and personalities: such will be the content of the series.”⁶

While this collection had previously been the object of synthesizing articles,⁷ it had never, before this collective project, given rise to an in-depth study targeting both the content of its works and the way in which they were conceived, composed and published. Such a study draws its interest from the fact that this is, quantitatively, the most important Yiddish collection published in that period, but above all because, unlike other collections, it was not conceived under a political or ideological patronage,⁸ but according to a complex and coherent editorial vision, developed by its principal designer, Marc Turkow, in the course of the introductions to the works of the collection: the richness of this paratext (which also contains photos, press articles, etc.) is itself a specificity of the collection that contributes to its great interest, while also nourishing its study. The article that follows returns in detail to Turkow’s editorial role.

From material of such breadth, what has been our perspective? First of all, a rediscovery of this collection of works, for the most part fallen into oblivion, and of the project that underlies it. Beyond the richness of the singular writings that compose the series, Marc Turkow’s project summons ways of doing that, in part, derive from the intellectual, scholarly and editorial practices of prewar Jewish Poland, where Marc Turkow, a journalist at the Moment of Warsaw, lived until 1939. Turkow reinvests them in the aftermath of the Catastrophe, in a configuration where everything is to be reinvented, and where one still believes in a possible renewal of Yiddish life in the diaspora. It is this crossing between the prolongation of prewar practices (which have been, in themselves, little studied, notably in France) and an attempt at repairing and reconstructing Yiddish culture through books in the aftermath of the genocide that appeared to us remarkable in the project of this collection.

Prewar Jewish Poland appears there as the place of emergence of an intelligentsia strongly engaged in a reflection on itself, on its cultural, social and political role. Our intention was therefore to explore the way in which this reflection, which had never ceased, even at the heart of the Catastrophe,⁹ was able to be mobilized anew in the postwar period, after the disappearance of that world. Here lies the whole ambiguity of Marc Turkow’s project, which surfaces from the very title: “Polish Jewry” is what is at issue in the collection, but it is also the world of its authors, who constitute an informal and henceforth international network. Moreover, the collection, if it opens onto an earlier world — from a distant past¹⁰ to the most recent — also offers itself as a sounding board for its own period of publication and for the evolution of the Yiddish world, and for the relationship that this world maintained with its past in those years. Indeed, the collection itself underwent a profound evolution over the course of its existence.

At its beginnings, then, Dos poylishe yidntum published a great majority of testimonies (twenty works out of the first thirty-two, until 1948), although this term, like that of Shoah, was then unsuited to describing these writings which, as we have said, were designated as “documents.” Indeed, these writings drew inspiration from the movements of documentary collection elaborated, from Simon Dubnow onward, in the secularized Judeo-Polish culture prior to the Catastrophe, and reactivated in the course of it by multiple initiatives, the best known of which are those of Ringelblum in the Warsaw ghetto and, after the Liberation, of the Central Jewish Historical Commission. In both cases, these undertakings were based both on the collection of accounts and on the inquiry among witnesses, then among witness-survivors, on the basis of which syntheses were to be produced (not all could be, in the Warsaw ghetto notably, but part of the materials was safeguarded). In the same way, Marc Turkow published certain of these collected accounts¹¹ — he is himself, symbolically, the author of the first volume, which gathers and gives to read the account of Malke Ovshyani, the first survivor to reach Argentina. Alongside these individual documents, Turkow also published more synthetic studies which sometimes emanated directly from the works of the Commission with which he had ties¹² and which were, in fact, pioneering in the historiography of the Shoah. In reality, Turkow’s collection understood “documents” in a very broad acceptance: they could also include literary writings that had acquired a documentary and testimonial value by virtue of having been produced, and saved, at the heart of the Catastrophe, or by virtue of being based on the memory of a lost documentation.¹³ In a general way, all these writings, whatever their form, whether they were produced in the turmoil or in its immediate aftermath, presented a variety of experiences (the camps and the ghettos of course, but also wandering, life under a false identity, exile) and often the chaining of several of these experiences, over a broad chronological range, possibly going from the premises of the Nazi occupation up to the immediate postwar period: they were then nearly contemporary with the very era of their publication.

If the “documents on the Catastrophe” dominated at the beginning of the series, the “world of before” was represented from the second issue with the reissue of a monograph on Peretz, written and published before the war by one of his friends, the critic Nomberg. This place does not seem to be a matter of chance, any more than do the multiple appearances of the figure of Peretz throughout a whole network of works or chapters of works, of allusions, of quotations,¹⁴ which make him appear, without its being formulated as such, as the spiritual father of the collection. A filiation that lays claim not so much to the literary aura that made his renown, but more profoundly to the whole of his relationship to Yiddish culture, passing through ethnography and a scholarly approach to folklore, as the source of the reinvention of this culture.¹⁵

Beyond this presence in filigree, this relationship to Yiddish culture pervades the collection, and makes it possible to understand, beyond an apparent eclecticism, its coherence: all the works devoted to the “before,” which constitute the near-totality of the publications from 1950 onward — memoirs of intellectuals, of workers or of militants (which often go back well before the First World War), folkloric collections of songs or of stories, reissues of successful prewar novels — are underpinned by one and the same idea: to make disappeared Jewish Poland be reborn through writing, with always, in the subtext, the horizon of its disappearance.

Thus the collection Broder Zinger [The Singers of Brody] by Shloyme Prizament, composed of songs written by the author (who was a famous composer and actor of the Yiddish theater) or by others, for that troupe which was one of the first to offer a secular Yiddish theater at the beginning of the century. The collection proper is preceded by a triple introduction, constituted of an account of the life and work of the author; of a text by Zygmunt Turkow (brother of Marc and a personality of the theater world) on the role of the Broder Zinger in the history of the Yiddish theater, based on collected materials and interviews; and finally of a text by the author himself on his encounter with the Broder Zinger.¹⁶ The authors of these texts hold, respectively, the roles of biographer, ethnographer and witness, in relation to this swathe of the history of Jewish Poland, presented as belonging to a bygone past, but resuscitated by this approach. Other folkloric collections are present in the collection, such as the astonishing Gelekhter durkh trern [Laughter through Tears], in which the author, Nudelman, presents “funny” stories that he collected during and about the Catastrophe.¹⁷ Ways of doing belonging to the past — here, the collection of folklore — are thus applied, in an almost experimental manner, to more recent objects: the coherence of this collection arises for this reason as much from its themes as from the approaches employed to address them.

The novel Yidn fun a gants yor [Ordinary Jews] provides another example of this: initially published in Warsaw in 1936, this novel, which recounts the life of an adolescent in a shtetl and his first amorous stirrings, caused a scandal on its release. Its author was, moreover, during the war a member of the Oyneg Shabes collective directed by Emmanuel Ringelblum; he died in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943.¹⁸ In republishing this novel, Turkow accomplishes several operations: he offers a window onto an aspect of the life of the Polish Jews before the war — the “simple Jews,” the moment of youth in that milieu. By being republished after the Catastrophe, this novel constitutes itself as testimony to a vanished form of life, but also to the literary life of the era of its publication. Its reissue appears also as a gesture of commemoration toward its author, who resisted Nazism and disappeared tragically. Passed through the sieve of an interdisciplinary reading attentive to all their dimensions — intellectual and material, textual and paratextual, micro- and macrotextual — the works of the collection appear as layered, and open to a plurality of contexts and interpretations. This emerges clearly from the reissues, in which the writing itself is distinct from the editorial gesture that gives it again to be read in a new context, that of the post-Catastrophe. This “reading of the after” in fact underlies the whole collection, and inflects the reading of the writings in two directions: a testimonial reading that makes of any writing on the before a retrospective document on that period, and a commemorative reading that makes of these writings homages — either to the authors when they died during the Catastrophe, or, in the manner of the Books of Remembrance, to the places of which they speak.

Many of these writings constitute traces of a world that is no more. In this, they are themselves survivors of that world — an idea thematized in the magnificent novel-saga by Leib Rochman, recently resurfaced from oblivion thanks to the translation by Rachel Ertel.¹⁹ But for Turkow, this idea is not only nostalgic and melancholic. His project is also underpinned by a constructive will to safeguard a cultural patrimony and to publish works destined for future researchers.

From this point of view, the ethnographic approach that lies at the heart of the folkloric collections does not present itself merely as one of the dimensions of the collection, but occupies a central place. The editorial gesture of Marc Turkow, in his manner of presenting the writings he publishes, is also, in its way, a gesture of exhumation and revitalization. The specter of the disappearance of the old customs had been the motive and the lever of action of the folklore-studies movement at its beginnings in the late nineteenth century, in the East European Jewish world as indeed in all of Europe, in the face of the mutations of industrialization and urbanization. It is because the khurbn tragically realized this dread that the gesture of ethnographic collection holds a central place in the project of cultural safeguard of the collection.

Thus the group work carried out on Dos poylishe yidntum, by envisaging the collection in its global project and in the singularity of its writings, has made it possible to restore the work and the intentions of Marc Turkow — whether these were put into practice or contradicted in the realization of the works. This work has also made it possible to raise certain questions that resonate strongly with current problematics, by bringing to light documentary and testimonial practices anchored in historically situated ways of doing. Put back into their context, they offer a counterpoint to the forms of testimony that we know and whose universality and ahistoricity appear too, by contrast, as editorial choices and strategies to be reconstituted: such is the whole distance, already largely studied,²⁰ that separates Wiesel’s famous French testimony from its Yiddish antecedent. The study of the collection also brings out historiographical perspectives, long passed over in silence in Poland become communist, which resurfaced after the fall of that regime, or are still awaiting it: thus the role of the local populations in the extermination²¹ (one finds, notably, several mentions of the Kielce pogrom), the life of the Jews refugees in the USSR,²² or again life under a false identity²³ find, in the works of the collection, early narrative formulations.

Notes