The Reality of Jewishness vs. the Ghetto Myth

Although Max Weinreich grew up in a German-speaking family in Kuldiga (now in Latvia) and received a thorough Russian gymnasium and university education in Petersburg, he embraced Yiddishism intensely before World War I and devoted the rest of his life to Yiddishist cultural and scholarly goals. After completing his doctorate in philology and linguistics in 1922 in Marburg, he helped inaugurate the serious study of medieval and modern Yiddish literature as a scholar and popular writer. Settling in Vilna (then Polish Wilno) in 1925, he played a major role in turning that city into the center of Yiddishist cultural endeavor by cofounding the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research—the first research institute devoted to humanistic and social scientific study of Yiddish culture and Yiddish-speaking Jewish life in all its forms—and by creating the Vilna-area Yiddishist youth movement Bin (The Bee) in 1927. In the 1930s, his growing sense of the crisis in Polish Jewish communal life drove him to redirect much of his energy toward social-psychological research, particularly on Polish Jewish youth. His 1935 book Der veg tsu unzer yugnt (The Approach to Our Younger Generation) drew on what would become in the course of the 1930s an extraordinary corpus of hundreds of autobiographies gathered by YIVO, most of them still extant. Throughout that period, marked by mounting crises and growing concerns on Weinreich’s part, he worked tirelessly to maintain YIVO and protect it from financial collapse, Polish state pressure, and demands for politicization from Jewish revolutionary circles. He also worked to nurture young Yiddish poetic talents in Vilna’s embattled but vital Yiddish scene in the 1930s, most notably Abraham Sutzkever. Escaping to the United States during World War II, Weinreich was instrumental in the rebuilding of YIVO in New York, where the institute remains today. A prolific scholar and teacher after the war, the later Weinreich is most famous for his blistering historical exposé, Hitler’s Professors (1946), and his posthumous four-volume Geshikhte fun der yidisher shprakh (History of the Yiddish Language, 1973). Weinreich’s youthful Yiddish translation of the ninth chapter of Homer’s Iliad was atypical of his oeuvre but reflects his participation in a more general focus on translation among Yiddishists and Hebraists in his generation eager to render their young literatures and languages more cosmopolitan and mature.