Jewish social sciences

In interwar Poland, Jewish social sciences reached their peak with the creation of a dedicated institute, the YIVO (Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut), the Jewish Scientific Institute, established in 1925 in Vilnius, then Vilno. Until now, there has been a lack of a study of this fundamental moment in Polish Jewish intellectual life between the wars. This is now done with the work of Cecile Kuznitz.

Jewish studies and self-writing

The author endeavors to reconstruct the birth of this Institute and its scholarly genesis. If the social sciences developed at that time, as everywhere in Europe, they nevertheless emerged on a specific soil linked to the history of the Jews of Poland and, first of all, to that of their language, Yiddish – the word “ Yiddish » meaning in this language both “ Yiddish ” And “ Jewish “. Yiddish, in fact, was at the center of the conception of YIVO not only as a linguistic project, but much more broadly from a social and political perspective.

It was, for intellectuals, the language of the Jewish people of Poland, the cement of identity capable of making this community a nation. This search for a history was based on ethnographic investigations, launched by Dubnov and An Ski at the end of the XIX^e century, which aimed to collect written and oral, but also material, sources, with a dual aim of preserving traces of Jewish popular culture which was disappearing and of writing its history. Furthermore, another major concern of the scholars behind the project was to show the usefulness of Jews in Polish economic life, to go against the negative image attached to them.

In many aspects, this project intersected with that of the German Jews who, with the Wissenschaft des Judentums (“ science of Judaism “) since the beginning of XIX^e century, aimed to inscribe Jewish history into German history. But the big difference, as Dubnov said quoted by the author, lay in the fact that “ there Wissenschaft des Judentums (German) studies Judaism ; we, the people “. This reflection, much more than a joke, illustrated the common thread of Polish Jewish social sciences, which we will find in the YIVO : the interest of scholars for the people, both as repository of popular culture and recipient of the knowledge produced from it. It was among these same ordinary men and women that the collectors were recruited (“ zamlers “) of YIVOcarrying out voluntary work, then transmitted to researchers in the different sections.

When reading the work, what is most striking is the disproportion between the fragility of the company and the retrospective importance of the projects implemented and the issues at stake. One of the major companies in the YIVO was the autobiography competition for young people, launched in 1932, 1934 and 1939. As part of the “ research on youth » of the educational section, inspired by Polish sociology and in particular by the competitions of Znaniecki, author with Thomas of the work The Polish Peasantthese competitions aimed to better understand young people. They met with massive success, both among participants and readers, and trained an entire generation in self-writing.

Certainly, the history of Polish Jews in the first half of the XX^e century, marked by the abandonment of the traditional way of life due to the phenomena of urbanization and emigration, punctuated by pogroms and wars, explains the original motivation of Jewish social sciences to collect materials to keep traces of a changing world. But the idea that in the time of destruction, there was the “sacred duty” to save the remains of popular culture » (ibid.., p. 25), as a writer said after the First World War, retrospectively takes on another resonance.

Cities and faces

It is at the moment when Cecile Kuznitz’s work ends that that of Jan Schwarz begins, devoted to the cultural life of Polish Jews in exile after the genocide. He registers against the “ myth of silence “, which has, since the beginning of the 2000s, been the subject of several works showing how, from the day after the genocide, there was the circulation of information on this event, a fortiori in Jewish circles. Jan Schwarz focuses more broadly on describing the cultural vitality of this transnational community. A specialist in Yiddish literature, he focuses specifically on the Yiddish-speaking community.

The work, by highlighting places and remarkable moments in Yiddish cultural life in the two decades following the post-war period, follows the chronological and spatial progression of this history of emigration. The first part is devoted to three major figures of Yiddish culture from this period, each linked to a place: Avrom Sutzkever in Vilnius, Chava Rosenfarb in Lodz and Leib Rochman (recently discovered in France thanks to the translation of his masterful novel, À not blind in the world, by Rachel Ertel) in Minsk Mazowiecki.

While illustrating the cultural diversity of Polish Jews, through the choice of these three cities with such different faces, the author traces the exit routes from the war of men and women who, if they remained known as writers or poets , were active in safeguarding Jewish life and recognized the impossibility of its reconstruction in Poland.

The other two parts take us across the Atlantic, with a focus on two large-scale undertakings: first of all, the collection Back poylishe yidntum (“ Polish Jewishness “), comprising 175 works in Yiddish published between 1946 and 1966, including writings counting among the first “ testimonies about the Shoah “, but also numerous memoirs on pre-war Jewish life, as well as novels, essays, and collections of poems. Jan Schwarz gives an overview of the extraordinary richness of this collection, which included among its authors recognized intellectuals like Max Weinreich, found here, and promising talents like Élie Wiesel. He retraces the ups and downs that Marc Turkow, his visionary publisher, went through to bring this enterprise to fruition, and enhances his speech with magnificent illustrations taken from the collection.

New York and the future

The third part takes place in New York, restoring the questions and journeys of two great poets after the genocide, then among the poets of the 92^e street, place of artistic development and happenings. Through the play of echoes between these moments, which each constitute fascinating and little-known pages of post-war life, this work manages to convey the profound paradox of this parenthesis where a Yiddish life seemed possible again. The protagonists were both in a bubble, caught up in their own issues, and very much in touch with extremely current issues of this period.

As both works say in their introductions, the genocide cast a shadow over the entire earlier history of Eastern European Jews. In the case of YIVOthanks to the rescue of a large part of its archives by a group of resistance fighters from Vilna including Avrom Sutzkever, the institute was transferred to New York during the war and has been able to continue until today. Present in both works, it is not surprising that the figure of Sutzkever constitutes a link between a historical approach and a literary approach to Yiddish culture, as the two are closely intertwined in this one.