...und ver nit fahrbrent
- By Jules Chametzky
Some years back I served with the late Kenneth Libo—who did wonderful work as chief researcher and contributor to Irving Howe’s magisterial and indispensable World of Our Fathers—on an advisory committee for a projected documentary on Abraham Cahan, the fabled editor for fifty years of the Yiddish language Forverts. As part of his research Libo spoke with the then Editors of the Forverts (social democratic), the Freiheit (communist), and the Arbeiter Tseitung (anarchist), all of them in their nineties, all writing in Yiddish. What kept them going into their advanced age, Libo quipped, was their hatred for one another.
A good story, but I prefer to believe it was their love and passion for the language and even their (dwindling) constituencies. This all came back to me as I learned recently of the death of two stalwarts in the field of Jewish American and Yiddish literature, both also in their nineties. Joseph (Yosl) Landis was the Editor for almost forty years of Yiddish, a quarterly journal operating out of his office at Queens College of CUNY, almost single-handedly, with the help for some years of Hannah Fischtal, as managing editor. It published mostly in English, but often also Yiddish articles, stories, poetry. With his death, this valuable resource will probably die, though the mantra published on the contents page, “ich bren und bren, und ver nit fahrbrent” (“I burn and burn, but I am not burnt” or “extinguished”) promises otherwise: a reference to the Bible’s burning bush, and also to the Jewish people and their thousand-year history in Europe with their Yiddish language.
It may sound like a pious hope, since the language and its people were indeed practically exterminated. Yet Landis’s work continues, as does that of Daniel Walden, who edited for decades Modern Jewish Studies out of Penn State, and combined with Landis to publish an annual called Yiddish-Modern Jewish Studies. Walden also edited an important volume on twentieth century American-Jewish writers in the Dictionary of Literary Biography series. Both also published important essays on the history of Yiddish literature and of Jewish American literature as well as editing volumes on Yiddish and Jewish American drama (Landis breaking new ground with these) and on literature more generally. This is a eulogy and recognition of these men, but also a testament to the survival of the literatures they served. And survived it has, with discovery of the Chaim Grade trove of manuscripts, and of many other Yiddish writers being newly discovered, translated and critically evaluated. And of course Jewish American writing flourishes unabated, refusing to be burnt out.
Jules Chametzky is emeritus Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a founding editor of The Massachusetts Review
