Jan Schwarz's Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust made a significant impact when it first appeared in 2015. As one of the first books to address comprehensively the postwar phenomenon of Yiddish cultural productivity after the Holocaust, it helped to lay the groundwork for what has become the thriving scholarly fields of Yiddish transnationalism and Yiddish responses to the khurbn. Combining expert historical research and deft literary analysis, Schwarz's book surveys a broad range of subjects: from Yiddish writing by survivors of Nazi ghettos and camps—including luminaries such as Avrom Sutzkever and Chava Rosenfarb—through early efforts to re-canonize Yiddish literature, and finally to the dynamic literary scene in New York City in the 1950s and 60s. Survivors and Exiles has recently been reissued in paperback, which will, happily, make this important work available to a wider audience.
Rather than a single monograph, Schwarz's work is best understood as a series of brilliantly researched interconnected essays. Drawn significantly from previously-published articles and book chapters—ten acknowledgements are given for republishing permissions—Schwarz's work speaks to the various ways that Yiddish writers contended with the loss of their community of speakers during the Holocaust and the many cultural institutions, venues, and literary traditions that sustained it. The surviving writers in Europe and the Americas with whom Schwarz's work contends confronted a broad range of emotions and practical concerns regarding the future of their literature in contexts that were particularly hostile to the future of Yiddish as a spoken and print language. Most writers saw themselves as the last of their kind and worked through their rage, guilt, sorrow, and nostalgia via a range of strategies, including exploring their own experiences of the Holocaust through poetry and fiction, through efforts to reconstruct the world so recently destroyed, and by creating works of fantasy and eroticism. As Schwarz notes, the post-khurbn era of Yiddish was something of a “Silver Age” (6) in which surviving Yiddish writers (as well as new ones) often wrote and published at a frenetic pace, anxious to get everything down on the written page before their time ran out.
In eight chapters (plus an introduction and conclusion), this work is particularly engaging when it contends with the efforts outside of Europe to establish new centers for Yiddish and with unpacking the many tensions that were present in the various meeting spaces for Yiddish, such as among critics in the Yiddish press or on the stage of the 92nd Street Y in New York City. In a chapter on the 175-book series Dos poylishe yidntum (Polish Jewry) published in Buenos Aires from 1946 to 1966, Schwarz relates that no less than a 250,000 volumes of the series had been sold. The series, which included “classic” works of Yiddish literature alongside newly created works, as well as several dozen Holocaust memoirs, helped to foster a transnational network of Yiddish speakers who had been scattered across the globe, both on account of longstanding migrations of Jews from eastern Europe but also as a result of World War II and its chaotic aftermath. As Schwarz explains, the series served as invaluable “vehicles of commemoration, kinus (ingathering), and literary entertainment” (93). The chapter on the long-standing Yiddish poetry series at the Y provides a much-needed insider's look into this multi-generational forum that featured writers as diverse as Rokhl Korn, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Kadya Molodovsky, Yankev Glatshteyn, Sutzkever, Itsik Manger, and Chaim Grade, and which became the setting for Cynthia Ozick's masterful 1969 novella, “Envy; or, Yiddish in America.”
Focused as it is on the matter of sustaining of a Yiddish high literary culture in the aftermath of the destruction of the cradle of Yiddish in eastern Europe, the book is perhaps not as comprehensive as its subtitle might suggest. With perhaps the exception of Bashevis, the authors covered in the work are ones who strove to maintain the most sophisticated and advanced literary forms for Yiddish. Not included in this work are both the more “lowbrow” works that could be found, for example, in the popular Yiddish press or in mass-market works. Not included also are broad range of Yiddish scholarly works that appeared in this same period and out of a similar set of impulses for the preservation of Yiddish language and culture after the Holocaust.
This concern aside, Schwarz's work is a convincing and compelling examination of a crucial development in the history of Yiddish letters.
