A suggestion to write the present book reached me in the spring of 1898.
At that time my library contained several hundreds of volumes of the
best Judeo-German (Yiddish) literature, which had been brought together
by dint of continued attention and, frequently, by mere chance, for the
transitoriness of its works, the absence of any and all bibliographies,
the almost absolute absence of a guide into its literature, and the
whimsicalness of its book trade made a systematic selection of such a
library a difficult problem to solve. Not satisfied with the meagre
details which could be gleaned from internal testimonies in the works of
the Judeo-German writers, I resolved to visit the Slavic countries for
the sake of gathering data, both literary and biographical, from which
anything like a trustworthy history of its literature could be
constructed. A recital of my journey will serve as a means of
orientation to the future investigator in this or related fields, and
will at the same time indicate my obligations to the men and the books
that made my sketch possible.
From Liverpool, my place of landing, I proceeded at once to Oxford,
where I familiarized myself with the superb Oppenheim collection of
Judeo-German books of the older period, stored in the Bodleian Library;
it does not contain, however, anything bearing on the nineteenth
century. In London the British Museum furnished me with a few modern
works which are now difficult to procure, especially the periodical
_Kolmewasser_ and _Warschauer Jüdische Zeitung_. Unfortunately my time
was limited, and I was unable to make thorough bibliographical notes
from these rare publications; besides, I then hoped to be able to
discover sets of them in Russia. In this I was disappointed--hence the
meagreness of my references to them. The Rosenthaliana in Amsterdam and
the Imperial Library in Berlin added nothing material to my information.
Warsaw was my first objective point as regards facts and books. The
latter I obtained in large numbers by rummaging the bookstores of
Scheinfinkel and Morgenstern. In a dark and damp cellar, in which
Morgenstern kept part of his store, many rare books were picked up. In
Warsaw I received many valuable data from Perez, Dienesohn, Spektor,
Freid, Levinsohn, both as to the activity which they themselves have
developed and as to what they knew of some of their _confrères_. In
Bialystok I called on the venerable poet, Gottlober; he is very advanced
in years, being above ninety, is blind, and no longer in possession of
his mental faculties, but his daughter gave me some interesting
information about her father. Wilna presented nothing noteworthy, except
that in a store a few early prints were found.
In St. Petersburg I had hoped to spend usefully a week investigating the
rich collections of Judeo-German in the Asiatic Museum and the Imperial
Library. The museum was, however, closed for the summer, and the
restrictions placed on the investigator in the library made it
impossible to inspect even one-tenth of the three or four thousand books
contained there. When about to abandon that part of my work the
assistant librarian, Professor Harkavy, under whose charge the
collection is, most generously presented me with one thousand volumes
out of his own private library. In Kiev I had a long conference with S.
Rabinowitsch and with A. Schulmann; the latter informed me that he is
now at work on a history of Judeo-German literature previous to the
nineteenth century; the specimen of his work which he published a few
years ago in the _Jüdische Volksbibliothēk_ gives hope that it will
entirely supersede the feeble productions of M. Grünbaum. In Odessa I
learned many important facts from conversations with S. J. Abramowitsch,
J. J. Linetzki, J. J. Lerner, P. Samostschin, and depleted the
bookstores, especially that of Rivkin, of their rarer books. Jassy in
Roumania and Lemberg in Galicia offered little of interest, but in
Cracow Faust's bookstore furnished some needed data by its excellent
choice of modern works.
Thus I succeeded in seeing nearly all the living writers of any note,
and in purchasing or inspecting books in all the larger stores and
libraries that contained such material. In spite of all that, the
present work is of necessity fragmentary; it is to be hoped that by
coöperation of several men it will be possible to save whatever matter
there may still be in existence from oblivion ere it be too late. The
greatest difficulty I encountered in the pursuit of my work was the
identification of pseudonyms and the settlement of bibliographical data.
As many of the first as could be ascertained, in one way or other, are
given in an appendix; but the bibliography has remained quite imperfect
in spite of my efforts to get at facts. A complete bibliography can
probably never be written, on account of the peculiar conditions
prevailing in the Imperial Library, from which by theft and otherwise
many books have disappeared; but even under these conditions it would
not be a hard matter to furnish four or five thousand names of works for
this century. This task must be left to some one resident in St.
Petersburg who can get access to the libraries.
This history being intended for the general public, and not for the
linguistic scholar, there was no choice left for the transliteration of
Judeo-German words but to give it in the modified orthography of the
German language; for uniformity's sake such words occurring in the body
of the English text are left in their German form. All Hebrew and Slavic
words are given phonetically as heard in the mouths of Lithuanian Jews;
that dialect was chosen as being least distant from the literary German;
for the same reason the texts in the Chrestomathy are normalized in the
same variety of the vernacular. The consonants are read as in German,
and _ž_ is like French _j_. The vowels are nearly all short, so that
_ü_, _ie_, _i_ are equal to German _i_; similarly _ä_, _ö_, _eh_, _ee_
are like German short _e_. The German long _e_ is represented by _ē_,
_oe_, _ae_, and in Slavic and Hebrew words also by _ee_. _Ei_ and _eu_
are pronounced like German _ei_ in _mein_, while _ēi_ is equal to German
_ee_; _ā_ and _o_ are German short _o_; _au_ sounds more like German
_ou_, and _äu_ and _ō_ resemble German _öi_; _aü_ is equal to German
_ai_.
The collection of data on the writers in America has been even more
difficult than in Russia, and has been crowned with less success. Most
of the periodicals published here have been of an ephemeral nature, and
the newspapers, of which there have been more than forty at one time or
other, can no longer be procured; and yet they have contained the bulk
of the literary productions written in this country. It is to be hoped
that those who have been active in creating a Judeo-German literature
will set about to write down their reminiscences from which at a later
day a just picture may be given of the ferment which preceded the
absorption of the Russian Jews by the American nation.
The purpose of this work will be attained if it throws some light on the
mental attitude of a people whose literature is less known to the world
than that of the Gypsy, the Malay, or the North American Indian.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.,
December, 1898.