The Holocaust and the Exile of Yiddish: A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye by Barry Trachtenberg (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Holocaust and the Exile of Yiddish: A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye by Barry Trachtenberg Mark L. Smith Barry Trachtenberg. The Holocaust and the Exile of Yiddish: A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2022. 293 pp. With this book, Barry Trachtenberg has achieved an enviable success in the fields of Yiddish and Holocaust studies. It will now be impossible to speak of the Yiddish encyclopedia without citing Trachtenberg’s comprehensive history, just as it is impossible to speak of YIVO without citing Cecile Kuznitz, or of Emanuel Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabes Archive without citing Samuel Kassow. After two tantalizing articles and a dozen lectures over the past decade and a half, Trachtenberg has delivered a masterful treatment of the history of the Yiddish encyclopedia. [End Page 495] If he had written nothing more than his first introductory article in 2006,1 we would have the basic facts about the first and only encyclopedia to be published in Yiddish. Di algemeyne entsiklopedye (The general encyclopedia) was founded in Berlin in 1930 by leading Yiddishist scholars closely associated with YIVO, issued its first volumes in Paris from 1934 to 1940, and came to completion in New York from 1942 to 1966, as its creators relocated urgently to each of these centers of Yiddish culture. We would, likewise, know that its original goal of offering modernizing education to the prewar Yiddish-reading public—with ten alphabetical volumes of general knowledge, plus one devoted to Jewish topics—was ultimately transformed into a memorial project that ceased publishing general topics after five volumes (covering alef and most of beys) and produced seven volumes on Jewish topics (concluding with two on the Holocaust). But Trachtenberg has not spent the past sixteen years merely reading deeper in the Yiddish encyclopedia. He has attacked the underlying question: how best to recover and interpret a nearly forty-year story that moves, like the Yiddish lullaby “Ofyn pripetchik,” from starting to learn the alphabet at alef to discovering the many tears that lie within, when all that remains of the melody is a set of finely printed volumes. If Trachtenberg’s original article was a work of textual analysis, of cultural anthropology in which the encyclopedia was his chief source for reconstructing the conditions that created it, his book now reverses the process. He has mined archives across Jerusalem, New York, Amsterdam, Southampton, Cape Town, Boston, and Washington, to uncover correspondence, personal papers, financial records, speeches, advertisements, and press accounts. He has researched the biographies of the participants and the social, economic, and cultural circumstances of each of the centers in which they worked. He has accomplished his task by writing two books in one, intertwined page by page. One is a historical work that, if it barely touched on the encyclopedia, would itself be a notable history of Yiddish-speaking Jews and Yiddish culture in the twentieth century. The other is an expanded account of the encyclopedia’s contents that, no matter how thorough, would be bloodless without this unusual measure of historical background. Such reliance on context is often the last (and first) resort of a second-rate historian, but here the context shares the foreground with the protagonists. When we might ask why it is necessary to know in detail the hardships faced by Jews fleeing across France to escape the Nazis, we learn the extent of the encyclopedists’ losses—and of their triumph in rescuing themselves and their project. Trachtenberg writes with the knowledge that topics in the relatively compact world of Yiddish studies rarely have second chances, that another history of the Yiddish encyclopedia is unlikely to be written in the near future. He is moved to include everything relevant—and does so in three principal chapters focusing successively on Weimar Berlin, interwar Paris, and postwar New York. [End Page 496] We learn of the coalescing of conditions that by 1930 made a Yiddish encyclopedia both necessary and possible: the maturing of secular Yiddish language and culture, the flourishing of Yiddish institutions and scholarly publishing, the rise of Diaspora nationalism, and the emergence of an educated worldwide Yiddish readership. Trachtenberg informs us that the encyclopedia “was...