Yiddishlands: A Memoir, Second Edition

By David G. Roskies

This lively and irreverent memoir explores the settings where Yiddish—a language of song, rebellion, and eternal longing—has thrived: in the cabaret and café, the kitchen and classroom, the literary salon and mystical commune, the partisan brigade and on pilgrimage to Poland. Inspired by his mother’s recitations of their family saga in his youth, author David Roskies uncovers a tale of survival, intrigue, sacrifice, and divided loyalties that began over 4,000 miles away and two generations ago. A careful reconstruction of the details of his parents’ escape from Europe at the outbreak of the Second World War is juxtaposed with his personal odyssey in the postwar center of Yiddish culture that was Montreal. Roskies embarks on a search for other speakers of his mother tongue with very different stories to tell, which takes him on a journey through the upheavals of 1960s America, the struggle for Soviet Jewry, the Six-Day War and Yom Kippur War, the fall of the Iron Curtain, and the revival of Jewish life here, there, and everywhere. Along the way, he encounters great Yiddish poets and their widows, survivors of the Holocaust, artists, actors, scholars, and teachers. Yiddishlands is essential reading for students of the recent Jewish past and the living Yiddish present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Oct 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9780814350737

David G. Roskies

David G. Roskies is the Sol and Evelyn Henkind Chair in Yiddish Literature and Culture and professor of Jewish Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He is author of numerous books, including Against the Apocalypse and A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling.

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Praise for Yiddishlands

"Among the greatest strengths of Yiddishlands is Roskies’s skill in recapturing not only his mother’s stories but also the rich nuance and cadence with which she told them."

—Montreal Gazette

"Yiddishlands brings to life the major debates, struggles, and triumphs of the modern Yiddish experience and provides readers with portraits of its great writers, cultural leaders, and educators."

—Shofar

"Yiddishlands is a richly transcendent piece of writing that salvages many episodes of personal, family, and social history, not only in the Old Country but in modern Montreal and numerous other places."

—Jewish News of Northern California

"Yiddishlands is a thoughtful reflection on a complicated epoch through which the Jews have passed. The richness of the memoir and the hopeful tone of the writing ultimately belie the author’s own contention ‘that everything of importance happened before I was born.’"

—Jerusalem Report

"David Roskies is the only one of his generation who can map the Yiddish literary world after the war with personal stories, vivid portraits of the key players, and extraordinary acumen and wit. Yiddishlands is a tour de force."

—Hana Wirth-Nesher, founding director of the Goldreich Family Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture at Tel Aviv University

David G. Roskies’s passionate narrative of a brilliant family is more than a memoir of rupture and renewal—it is a history of a civilization, its languages, its lost cities, its living songs.

—Cynthia Ozick, recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

"David G. Roskies’s marvelous Yiddishlands is at once rollicking and haunting, profoundly sad as well as uplifting. This idiosyncratic Yiddish Bildungsroman moves from Montreal to Jerusalem to Somerville to New York but is always circling around Roskies’s mother’s (largely fictive) Vilna. Roskies is a master storyteller, and his readers will delight in this memoir."

—Michael Stanislawski, Nathan J. Miller Professor of Jewish History, Columbia University

"Yiddishlands drops you directly into the uniqueness of a world that was destroyed and then into the multitude of attempts within one family to reconstruct it—not through ‘history’ but through the vivid and unforgettable voices of those who lived it, in a whirlwind of conversation, song, and storytelling that conjures up a city in multiple reincarnations. It’s a virtuoso performance that resurrects the dead."

—Dara Horn, author of People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

David Roskies’s sparkling memoir of growing up in the cauldron of an intense Yiddish world in the 1950s and 1960s is a masterpiece of storytelling. The tale stretches from his mother’s salon in Montreal back to Vilna and forward to New York and Israel. It encompasses the tragedy of the Shoah, the beauty and humor of the Yiddish arts, and the wit of the Jews who survived against all odds. It is essential reading for all who want to encounter the essence of Jewish life.

—Susanne Klingenstein, Yiddish literary historian, Harvard University

"A panoramic history of Yiddish culture as seen through the life and career of a son whose family embodied its trajectory, Yiddishlands is both an intimate memoir and scholarship of the highest order. In this welcome new edition of his classic book, the foremost historian of modern Jewish literatures and languages has preserved the treasures of the past in his own life story."

—Eric J. Sundquist, editor of Writing in Witness: A Holocaust Reader

Yiddishlands

Yiddishlands

A Memoir

Second Edition

David G. Roskies

Wayne State University Press

Detroit

© 2023 by David G. Roskies. First edition originally published 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

ISBN 9780814350720 (paperback)

ISBN 9780814350737 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023933154

On cover: (top) Aunt Annushka and daughter Lubochka in a pretend airship, taken in a Vilna photography studio; (bottom) mother and son in Montreal, 1954, photographed by Hertz Grosbard. Family photographs courtesy of David G. Roskies. Cover design by Will Brown.

Publication of this book was made possible through the generosity of the Bertha M. and Hyman Herman Endowed Memorial Fund.

Portions of this book have appeared in Commentary, Maggid: A Journal of Jewish Literature, The Pakn Treger, and Jewish Fiction.

Wayne State University Press rests on Waawiyaataanong, also referred to as Detroit, the ancestral and contemporary homeland of the Three Fires Confederacy. These sovereign lands were granted by the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, and Wyandot Nations, in 1807, through the Treaty of Detroit. Wayne State University Press affirms Indigenous sovereignty and honors all tribes with a connection to Detroit. With our Native neighbors, the press works to advance educational equity and promote a better future for the earth and all people.

Wayne State University Press

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Visit us online at wsupress.wayne.edu.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Wayne State University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

—אריה-לייבן אַ מתּנה

,זאָלסט באַגערן צו לייענען

.און צו פֿאַרציילן מעשׂיות

Our Rabbis taught: Thirteen things were said of the morning bread: It is an antidote against heat and cold, winds and demons; instills wisdom into the simple, causes one to triumph in a lawsuit, enables one to study and teach the Torah, to have his words heeded, and retain scholarship; he [who partakes thereof] does not perspire, lives with his wife and does not lust after other women; and it kills the worms in one’s intestines. Some say, it also expels jealousy and induces love.

—BABYLONIAN TALMUD, Baba Metsia 107b

Der iker iz der pas-shákharis.

The most important thing in life is your morning bread.

—MASHA WELCZER ROSKIES

Contents

Revisiting a Memoir

Matz-Welczer Family Tree

I. Table Talk

1. The Rebbe Elimeylekh

2. The Dybbuk

3. Café Rudnitsky

4. Bread

5. Prayer for the Tsar

6. Scribal Errors

7. Malvina’s Roses

8. The Watercarrier

9. Yeast

10. Beloved Fatherland

11. The Black Canopy

12. May Day

13. The Wooden Box

14. The Last Seder Night

15. Lisbon

II. Talking Back

16. Playing Solitaire

17. The Soirée

18. Cape Cod

19. Double Feature

20. Male Bonding

21. Études

III. Jewspeak

22. Sutzkever’s Address

23. Leybl’s Ark

24. Between Two Mountains

25. Kotsk

26. The Sale of Joseph

27. The Two Bulvanes

28. Yom Kippur

29. New York Jew

30. Partisans’ Hymn

31. The Menorah

32. A Piece of Cake

33. Dream House

34. Footloose in Vilna, 1939

Genealogy

Masha Roskies Sings

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Revisiting a Memoir

The odds were not great that I would grow up speaking Yiddish, teaching Yiddish, and dreaming in Yiddish. Every step along the way, things could have turned out differently. If the American consul in Lisbon had not granted my parents, my older brother, and my oldest sister a transit visa to New York, there would have been no exodus for them in the summer of 1940 and they would not have departed Europe to join Roskies kin in Canada. If Mother in Montreal had not fled her three sisters-in-law in English-speaking Westmount and relocated to Yiddish-speaking Outremont, my parents would not have had their choice of secular Yiddish day schools for each of us children, nor would our home have become a salon for Yiddish writers and artists, nor would any of us have performed in amateur Yiddish or Hebrew theater. If the poet Leyb Feinberg had not had a fourth child and Mother had not read about it in the Yiddish press, it’s likely that I myself would not have been born. If Father hadn’t hired Lerer Dunsky to tutor me in Talmud, I would not have learned to breathe Yiddish through one nostril, Hebrew through the other. If Gabby Trunk in New York had not thought to bring my letter about creating a Yiddish student magazine to the attention of his teacher, Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter, there would have been no Yugntruf and I would never have graduated from writing School Yiddish to writing Literary Yiddish. If Israel hadn’t won the Six-Day War, I would not have spent my junior year at the Hebrew University taking every course that the Yiddish Department had to offer, including all but one of Prof. Shmeruk’s course offerings: his advanced seminar on the poetry of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern. And if my letter seeking employment had not landed on the desk of Dr. Gerson D. Cohen at exactly the moment when he was aggressively hiring new talent, I would not have been appointed, out of the blue, to introduce the subject of Yiddish literature and culture at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. The Yiddish word bashert means fated, inevitable, but it also means promised, as in matrimony. Small as were the odds of my being born into Yiddish, on the far side of the abyss, the odds of my marrying Yiddish were laughable.

Books too have their own bashertkeyt. Why wait for Chapter 30 to reveal that the idea for this memoir was born at a seminar with Kenneth Silverman on The Theory and Practice of Biography? My warrant for the seminar was an intended biography of Solomon Rabinovitsh, aka Sholem Aleichem, but the seminar portrait I drew of him as a young artist bore a striking resemblance to my mother. Both were always on, in performance mode, both ever hungry for love, and both unhappy with any but the most constant attention. Turning to me at our farewell luncheon, Silverman suggested that rather than Sholem Aleichem I might take up the biography of Masha Roskies—and when that time came, ten years later, I could use the arsenal of tricks he had shared: raid your sources—don’t treat them as sacrosanct; lace the dialogue with lines lifted from letters; no footnotes.

My mother died at the age of ninety-three. When I got up from the seven days of mourning I started writing in earnest, something I originally called The Last Yiddish Novel, because in Yiddish and Russian as well as French, roman can mean both novel and love story, and wasn’t it Solomon who said, in terse biblical Hebrew, For love is as strong as death (Song of Songs 8:6)? What better way, then, to keep her memory alive than by telling the story of Mother’s remarkable life and unrequited loves, even as I segued to the less remarkable life and unrequited loves of her youngest son. For a time, I played with the title By Bread Alone. Today, were I starting over, I’d choose the alliterative title Litvaks in Love, especially after restoring the original final chapter, Footloose in Vilna, 1939, where I drop all pretense of truth-telling. Vilna in our story is paradise lost. Litvaks, those eastern European Jews from whom I am immediately descended, call it the Jerusalem of Lithuania.

Inspired by the work of Sholem Aleichem, I also hoped to capture the wildly associative flow of her stories as narrated over the breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner table. I. B. Singer, another Yiddish sage, once remarked, No one ever says ‘The late Anna Karenina’; she exists for us in the here and now—all the more so when she’s talking. Trying to retell her stories in loose chronological order, I found the cast of characters growing so exuberantly that it was even hard for me, her youngest son, to keep track of the half-sisters and brothers on my mother’s side and the uncles and aunts on my father’s. Uninitiated readers would also need to know something about the lives and untimely deaths of the writers, poets, actors, teachers, artists, and other cultural figures who entered stage left, suddenly or summoned, and exited stage right. A family tree to start with and a biographical dictionary at the end would offer some footing. As for all the plots afoot in story upon story, after further reflection I found they were less about love and bread than about border crossings: from present to past, from sacred to secular, from war zone to sanctuary, from mother tongue to the lingua franca and back again. So: Yiddishlands.

The plural signifies polyphony, a multiplicity of voices, high and low, pious and parodic. But as Itzik Manger said, There is only one Sholem Aleichem, and ventriloquizing Yiddish is not the same as writing in Yiddish. My first readers, God bless them, advised that a run-on sentence here and there was sufficient to capture the rhythm of Mother’s speech; whole chapters helter-skelter would be asking too much. And anyway, Mother herself had been ventriloquizing her mother tongue, Russian, for the sake of her Canadian-born children, so when Samuil Isakovitsh says (in Chapter 6), referring to my Aunt Annushka, When her little red cheeks turn pale, and her beautiful locks turn gray, that’s when I’ll give her a divorce! I needed to point out what language was actually being spoken, because this punchline was part of the oral lore of the highly Russified Matz family.

From one revision to the next, as the immediacy of her voice receded and I regained my own, the differences between her stories and mine became more pronounced. Hers, punctuated only by a cycle of meals, had no ascertainable beginning or end, whereas I had produced a string of independent chapters that could be sorted into three speech-related headings. Gathered together in part 1, Table Talk, are fifteen of the core matriarchal narratives about the indomitable Fradl Matz, as recounted by Masha, the only surviving child from Fradl’s second marriage to Yisroel Welczer. Part 2, Talking Back, is shorthand for my coming of age—tales of a stormy adolescence that was mercifully brief, because if Yiddish was to be saved there was no time to lose—while the concluding part 3, Jewspeak, tracks my own adult itinerary in search of the living past: Vilna-in-Israel, Vilna-in-the-USSR, Vilna-in-Somerville, Vilna-on the-Upper-West-Side-of-Manhattan, Vilna-in-Post-Communist-Poland, Vilna-in-Yeltsin’s-Moscow, Vilna-Back-in-Montreal, and the most intrepid journey of all, Vilna-in-situ.

After breaking bread with Masha & Co. in part 1, from the breakfast and dining rooms at 17 Pagnuelo Street in Outremont back to Uncle Grisha’s sumptuous table on Small Pogulanka in Vilna and Malvina’s favorite table at The Eclaire on West 72nd Street, the reader is invited to join me at the cluttered coffee table of Avrom and Freydke Sutzkever in Tel Aviv, at Ida Erik’s Spartan table in Moscow, then at Evelyn Licht’s kitchen table on Morningside Heights, three distinct points on the compass of Yiddish culture. (Should I mention the desk at the Montreal office of Huntingdon Woolen Mills, where Uncle Enoch fed me a subversive counternarrative?) Such table talk has also a sacred setting, for in addition to the seder table described in part 1, there is the Rebbe’s tish, a setting for mystical contemplation through song, stories, and words of Torah, whether revived in the Jerusalem home of Leyb Rochman or by my fellow neo-Hasidim in Somerville, Massachusetts. Born into oral lore, recitation, and song, my mother’s grand achievement was to sweep the world into her Dream House on 17 Pagnuelo, while her progeny would have to labor long and range widely if they wished to own and transmit the folk arts she took so charismatically as birthright.

The Watercarrier (Chapter 8) is typical of Mother’s repertoire: it unfolds over decades and several continents and bears out her credo, her cri de guerre: "lebn, derlebn, un iberlebn, Live, live to see your wishes fulfilled, and to outlive your enemies!" Precisely how long it took for Mother to avenge Fradl’s incarceration in Lukishki Prison a dedicated reader will discover by reading the entry on the villain Gilinsky in the Genealogy. What took fifty-five years in calendar time happened at the table between compote and tea. And here the son must fervently agree with the mother: a life that is not narrated as part of an ongoing conversation is a life that is not fully lived.

I love this tale, in part because it plays off the confluence of history and story in Yiddish, Russian, Polish, German, French, and a host of other languages. I love it too because it so tellingly straddles the formulas of folktale and the sagas of matriarchy. What could be more heymish than a vaser-treger and yet what more formidable than the voice that carries him to us in a Yiddish that unites young and old, the pious and the freethinker, the white collar and the working stiff—as it did for Vilna Jews, sometimes at gunpoint.

Two Litvak families underwent a complete transformation during World War I: the Matz family that stayed put in Vilna when the Germans advanced and the Roskies family that retreated toward the Russian interior. In one, the matriarch tried to hold the family together; in the other, the patriarch. The way that Fradl Matz-Welczer is revered and remembered by my mother recalls Glikl of Hameln (1624–1724), whose Yiddish memoirs were written in the form of an ethical will to her children. Like Glikl, Fradl time and again leapt into action when faced with the absence or aberrant behavior of men. As in Glikl’s memoirs, we follow the marital life, commercial activity, and religious imagination of a matriarch through a turbulent period. Not coincidentally, the names of many Jewish families that hail from Lita (Jewish Lithuania) derive from a matriarchal figure: Syrkis, Syrkin (=Sorke, Sarah), Rivkin (=Rivke, Rebecca), Brokhes (=Bracha), Reines (=Rayne), and Roskies (=Royz, Rose).

And when such matriarchs have many children, autobiographers and memoirists routinely dismiss or discount siblings. Of Masha’s ten half-brothers and sisters, Yiddishlands focuses only on three: Nyonya, Annushka, and Grisha. As for my father, fortunately I am not the first chronicler of my family. My European-born sister, Ruth Wisse, has written with great empathy about our father, remembering him as a source of strength and wisdom. (Free as a Jew, subtitled A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation, was published in 2021 to great acclaim.) No two siblings paint the same portrait of any family, and younger siblings are sometimes richly rewarded for sticking around the longest.

Yiddishlands itself is filled with contested memories. Did the Black Canopy actually happen? Did Uncle Grisha really approach Malvina with roses after every performance? Why didn’t Masha marry Seidman? If Russian was the language of her home, who taught Masha to speak Yiddish—and such a superabundant Yiddish at that? How could she have allowed her infant daughter to die alone in her crib? Why did she forbid Ida Erik from visiting her in Montreal? Why did three of her children attempt aliyah and fail? What can we know for certain about our immigrant parents and how much escapes us?

---

Yiddishlands is not the end of the story. Having beaten the odds more than once, we, the offspring of Fradl Matz-Welczer, were joined in the battle against oblivion by:

Teresė Fedaravičienė, a Lithuanian woman who owned a butcher shop less than twenty yards from the fence of the Kovno ghetto, and who received a family photo album from a former customer or acquaintance of hers sometime before the ghetto’s final liquidation.

Juozas Federavičius, her grandson, who inherited the album and held onto it.

Raimundas Kaminskas, a politician with an interest in local history, who organized a small exhibition of photographs from this family album at the Sugihara House, a museum named for the Japanese Vice Consul in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara (1900–1986), whose work to issue Jews transit visas through Japan in 1940 saved over 6,000 lives.

Richard Schofield, a photographer and British expatriate making his home in Kaunas, who happened upon the album while photographing an interwar telephone directory in the Sugihara House, and who set about learning what he could about the people who appear in it.

Ina Navazelskis, a representative of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, who acquired the album from Juozas and made the digitized images of the photographs available to Schofield, who uploaded all 119 of them onto Facebook, under the heading A Lost and Forgotten Family.

Saulė Valiūnaitė, a historian at the Vilna State Jewish Museum, who through creative sleuthing connected the place-name Birštonas on the back of one photo of children dressed up in costume to L. [Leonas] Warshawski and Anna his wife, who owned a sanatorium there and were mainstays of the Engel Jewish Choir in Kovno-Kaunas, which association was corroborated in a memoir called Yiddishlands where Anna Warshawski has her own biographical entry. A Google search for the author, David Roskies, led Saulė to the film Daughter of Vilna: The Life in Song of Masha Roskies, which includes one of the photographs in the album, allowing Saulė to definitively identify the owner of this album as Aunt Annushka, the half-sister of Masha Roskies. The two sisters had shared many songs and photographs.

All this and much more (including a recording of the Engel Choir, then of Annushka singing solo—exactly as Mother remembered—that Richard was able to track down) went on display in the Yeshiva University Museum at the Center for Jewish History in New York on October 24, 2018, with the gala opening of Lost and Found: A Family Photo Album, a multimedia exhibition through March 2019 curated by one of Masha’s grandsons, Dr. Jacob Wisse.

As the Rabbis said: Whosoever saves a single life has the merit of having saved a world entire. Or as Masha Roskies would say: The most important thing in life is to eat your morning piece of bread—accompanied by a story.

New York City, January 2023

I

Table Talk

1

The Rebbe Elimeylekh

The first thing I heard when I entered this world was my mother singing. It must have been a command performance. Given her rich past, her gift for languages, and her tenacious memory, she might have sung to me in Russian, Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish, or Ukrainian; but given our recent and decisive move to the Yiddish-speaking part of Montreal, away from the assimilated Jews of Westmount, it behooved her to sing only in Yiddish, the consecrated mother tongue.

Because March 2, 1948, the day of my birth, happily coincided with the festival of Purim, the most obvious song for her to sing was Hop, mayne homentashn. Set to a Ukrainian folk melody, it memorialized the mock-heroic efforts of a housewife named Yakhne Dvoshe to bake a batch of three-cornered Purim cookies. Mother, who always prayed from her own siddur, that is, marched to her own drummer, replaced the song with another that better fit her mood; she would no more be bound by the Jewish calendar than link her joy to a shtetl half-wit.

And didn’t she have reason enough to celebrate? While Purim merely commemorated our rescue from the hands of wicked Haman, Mother had beaten the odds twice over, having escaped from Europe with her husband and children, and now, eight years later, was about to give birth to a healthy, adorable boy at the age of forty-two. Only a song from her rich repertoire could mark the present moment; therefore she chose a tishlid, one of the lively sing-alongs that she would orchestrate while seated around the table or tish at the end of a satisfying evening.

Just as she had done so many times before, singing a song, whether solo or in chorus, would help her when the going got rough, as when she was forced to undergo inner ear surgery in a Warsaw hospital when she was seven months pregnant with my brother, Benjamin. If she survived that, it was only thanks to the hymn she had instructed those assembled around her hospital bed to sing. So the moment she went into labor with me, Mother launched into a solo rendition of the triumphant Az der Rebbe Elimeylekh.

What a great song to choose! To the untrained ear of her obstetrician, this was an Old Country song about a wonder-working Hasidic rabbi named Elimeylekh who in a crescendo of religious ecstasy at the conclusion of the Sabbath called for his fiddlers, then for his cymbalists, and finally for his drummers to play. Mother knew full well that this was not your standard Hasidic folk song, first because she had learned it from her sister Annushka, who in turn had heard it sung on a train by two Yiddish actors visiting from America; moreover, the lyrics played fast and loose with Jewish sancta. As for the refrain, which mimicked the sound of each group of musicians playing his instrument, such a display of virtuosity was a perfect way to banish the excruciating pain.

Taken together, the dance tempo, the parodic lyrics, and the simulated orchestration worked their magic. No sooner did the good Rebbe Elimeylekh have his whole klezmer band fiddling, cymbaling, and drumming away, than I poked my slimy head into the world; whereupon Mother was never heard to sing Az der Rebbe Elimeylekh again. No reason to worry, though. The song lives on in my classroom repertoire, where it deftly illustrates the art of creative betrayal, as practiced by the American Yiddish poet Moyshe Nadir, who adapted the lyrics from Ol’ King Cole Was a Merry Ol’ Soul.

Other unscripted things happened in the wake of my birth. The first person to show up in the maternity ward was not my father but my brother. When the nurse announced that Mr. Roskies was here to see her, Mother rushed out in her blue-green surgical gown and blushed scarlet at the sight of her seventeen-year-old son still carrying his school bag. The nurse had mistaken Ben for my father.

My birth, in short, was greeted with much joy. Papale, my father, she loved to remind me, burst out laughing when she announced that she was pregnant, and they should have named me Yitskhok, which means he shall laugh—like the patriarch Isaac, except that one Isaac in the Roskies family was more