A Yiddish poet’s love song to America

Gertrude DUBROVSKY*

A body of American literature written in Yiddish grows out of the immigrant’s encounter with the New World. It had its beginnings in the 1880’s, almost as soon as significant num¬ bers of immigrants arrived. It continues to contemporary ti¬ mes. Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose Nobel Prize made him perhaps the most famous, is but one of many Yiddish writers who described the homes they left in Europe and the homes they found in America. Sadly, the destruction of the Eastern European Jewish community caused an end to the flowering of Yiddish in the New World. No new Yiddish speakers are arriving to bolster the language. It remains like the memory of the smells and tastes of childhood, in the consciousness of se¬ cond — and third — generation Jews, and then it disappears.

Early American Yiddish literature was full of nostalgia for the home, families, and lifestyle left behind. The most cheris¬ hed dream of many immigrants was to save enough money to return to Europe. But after the failure of the Russian revolu¬ tion in 1905, they abandoned that hope. Instead, new arrivals came to America determined to succeed in their new home. Among those who settled in New York between 1905 and 1910 was a gifted group of young poets and writers: Zisha Landau, Reuven Eisland, Mani Leib, H. Levick, Moshe Leyb Halperin, and I. J. Schwartz. They set out to explore their new country, traveling from east to west — from north to south — excited by their personal discoveries in the adopted land. Their creative energies and newly-found freedoms resulted in an outpouring of experimentation in the arts, science, techno¬ logy, economics, and agriculture.