Second Letter from New York to Warsaw

The Yiddish literary critic Shmuel Charney, who adopted the pen name Shmuel Niger as a young revolutionary and writer, grew up in fervently Hasidic surroundings in the Belorussian region of the Russian Empire. At the age of seventeen, in the middle of advanced religious studies, he abandoned religious observance. Becoming active in widening Jewish intelligentsia circles that advocated a mix of socialist and cultural nationalist ideas before and during the 1905 Revolution in Russia, he devoted himself thereafter intensely and exclusively to the cultivation of modern secular Yiddish literature and culture. By 1907 and 1908, he had begun to emerge as a leading champion of the fledgling Yiddishist movement and as the most influential Yiddish literary critic of the next decade. Fiercely committed to the idea that Yiddish should become the chief language of Jewish culture while Jews recast themselves as a secular diasporic nation, he also demanded that the Jewish intelligentsia approach Yiddish literature and culture as valuable ends in themselves rather than subordinating them to narrow party-political agendas or treating them merely as disposable tools of popular enlightenment, famously articulated in 1908 in the short-lived but influential journal Literarishe monatsshriften. Within the literary sphere, Niger emerged as a champion of the neo-Romantic aesthetics of the mature Y. L. Peretz and the young Sholem Asch, and more generally as an enthusiast of all forms of literary creativity that, in his view, had the potential to help bring about a “Jewish national renaissance.” In later years, Niger also wrote pioneering work in Yiddish cultural and literary history, including an influential essay on the role of women readers in the shaping of modern Yiddish literature. In 1919, disillusioned with the Russian Revolution and barely escaping death at the hands of the invading Polish army, he left Vilna for New York City, where he played a central role in the American Yiddish cultural scene as a literary and cultural critic. Among his more notable later works was a pioneering Yiddish biography of Y. L. Peretz and a book-length defense of the equal value of Hebrew and Yiddish as languages of modern Jewish creativity. 

His exact intent in taking the pen name Niger, pronounced according to most sources like the American racist epithet, is unknown. It does seem that he meant to invoke associations with contemporary racism directed at African-Americans and people of African descent generally, and he may even have meant the racist epithet that the Yiddish pronunciation of his pen name elicits. Possibly he also meant to evoke the meaning of his real name, Tsharni/Charney, which is linked to the Slavic root for the color black. Most scholars find it hard to imagine that he identified with white racism, however. It seems much more likely that he chose the moniker out of a sense of his own targeted status as a revolutionary and/or Jew under the oppressive tsarist regime. In scholarly terms, Niger is the standard transliteration of the name under which readers will find all his Yiddish work. For this reason, the Posen Library retains the pen name as the author’s primary identifier.