Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish poetry of struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine

Abstract

Which Yiddish past ought to inform contemporary Jewish values? This is the question Amelia M. Glaser sets out to answer in her intricate study of selected “Yiddish poetry of struggle” published in the 1930s in Communist-aligned periodicals. Glaser argues that these poems, borne out of solidarity with the global proletariat, make their non-Jewish subjects “metaphorically Jewish” through the use of “passwords” situated within Yiddish discourse—for instance, kateyger (“accusing angel”) to characterize the prosecutor of an accused Italian anarchist. For Glaser, formally complex techniques to admit non-Jewish “Others” into a Jewish fold constitute both a literary act of moral resistance against the ruling classes, and a positive expression of Jewish identity. Divided into six chapters, the book offers analyses of Yiddish poems that express solidarity with the executed anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, Palestinian Arabs in Mandate-era Hebron, massacred Chinese workers, lynched African-Americans, the anti-fascist brigades in the Spanish Civil War, and the peasant figures of Ukraine’s national writer, Taras Shevchenko. At the book’s chronological close, Yiddish poems of teshuva (return) express solidarity with Jewish victims of genocide. The book concludes with a small corpus of expertly translated complete poems. “The Yiddish poets whose verse filled Communist Party journals during the long 1930s,” Glaser writes,