Writing Jewish history
YIVO celebrates its centennial
A little bit of this, a little bit of that.
A pot, a pan, a broom, a hat.
…
A bench, a tree.
So, what’s a stove? Or a house?
…
A stick of wood. A piece of cloth.
— From “Anatevka,” lyrics by Sheldon Harnick
No, the book commemorating YIVO’s 100th anniversary, straightforwardly called “100 Objects from the Collections of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research,” has no pots, pans, brooms, stoves, or houses. Nor does the exhibit that accompanies it. (More about the exhibit later.)
But the book does have pictures — and the exhibit includes many of the physical objects that defined Jewish life for the last century, as well as older ones collected during that period. It includes handwritten manuscripts, books, drawings, posters, photographs — and a typewriter, red shoes, a furrier’s tools, puppets, and a cigarette box among many other things.
YIVO’s history is too long and complicated to retell in a newspaper story, but here’s the CliffsNotes version: It’s a research institution; it provides adult education to casual students and in-depth Yiddish-language instruction, up to and then through fluency, to more serious students, who have the time to go all in on their studies; it’s a library, an archive (and an active recipient of archival material), and a cultural institution. It was established in Vilna in 1925 as the Yiddish Scientific Institute, it was forced to move to New York in 1940, as the war approached, and its collections, showing the depth and breadth of Jewish life, its intellectual vigor, its spiritual traditions and extravagances, and the unavoidable reality of day-to-day life, are unparalleled.
The letters that make up YIVO do not translate into English; transliterated from Yiddish, they are “yidisher visnshaftlekher institute.”
It’s now at the Center for Jewish History at 15 West 16th Street in Manhattan.
guards representing anti-immigration forces say “Goddammit, she’s still breathing!”
YIVO’s holdings go back more than a century, because people donated old precious things to it from the start, and although it has material from around the Jewish world (which means around the world, with no modifier) its focus is mainly, and logically, given its history, on Europe.
Stefanie Halpern is YIVO’s director of collections; she worked with the staff to assemble the book. “The idea for it had been floating around in my head for many years,” she said. Her doctorate, from the Jewish Theological Seminary, is in Jewish literature, and her dissertation is in Yiddish theater in America in general, and the connections between the Yiddish stage and Broadway in particular. She found her way to YIVO through an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York about Yiddish theater; she worked closely with her advisor and mentor, Edna Nachson, who contributed some of the liveliest essays to “100 Objects.”
Dr. Halpern did some research at YIVO and fell in love with it, to the point where “I realized that I was more interested in the preservation of these materials than in going the traditional academic route.” Soon she was on staff at YIVO, and by now the collections are her sprawling baby.
When she realized that YIVO’s centennial was approaching, Dr. Halpern’s idea for a book about its collections took form. “It couldn’t be more perfect,” she said. “I worked with a lot of people here at YIVO, who have a lot of knowledge. In this organization, we do our best work when we do it together.
“My first thought was that the framework would be to have 100 objects to show different aspects of Jewish history and culture,” she continued. “I knew that it would be important to highlight the major scholars in each of those areas, and particularly those who have done research at YIVO and are our good friends. YIVO would be nothing without them.”
(It is striking to talk to people who work at YIVO, because they genuinely love it. It doesn’t sound like lip service. It’s not the company line. The place evokes deep feeling in the people who work there.)
“So I thought that we’d create these 10 categories in Jewish history and culture, and I’d have a scholar write an essay on each topic and follow it with 10 objects in each section. But as the list was coming together, I realized that anyone can write a general essay about Jewish beliefs and customs. You can read that essay anywhere.” The essays were too general — and therefore in a way too bland — for the highly specific objects that illustrated them.
“I pivoted,” Dr. Halpern continued. “I realized that it would be much more interesting to make the book not as much about Jewish history and culture as YIVO’s role in collecting and curating.” The project moved from the general to the particular.
There is now a brief unsigned essay explaining each topic, explaining YIVO’s relationship to the topic and the objects it’s collected. A brief signed essay explaining each object accompanies it. The essays were written by experts in each microfield.
“I was adamant about having only one object represented in each essay,” Dr. Halpern said.
Winnowing down a collection of literally millions of things into just 100 was hard. In the end it had to be subjective, but Dr. Halpern did apply some self-imposed rules.
“One of the important things was not having stories that overlap. We don’t have three items about ‘the Dybbuk,’ for instance, or about the same actor, or the same moment in history. But if you go through the book, you can see that there are objects that go together. Each is a story on its own, but taken together they tell a broader, more complete story.” Still, it’s up to the reader to connect them.
“Visual appeal was important, and so was interesting provenance,” she continued. “And I wanted to have a mix of materials, and also to include the weird and wonderful things that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be in YIVO’s collections. I wanted to show that collections aren’t just one thing. They’re not just papers or books or photographs.”
The building at West 16th Street is big, but it is not enormous, much less infinite, and it does house five organizations. Each has collections of objects that illuminate various parts of Jewish history. “We do have a warehouse, and it houses about a quarter of our collections,” Dr. Halpern said. “That’s also true for the other institutions in the building. We get at least a few collections every month. And space in the middle of Manhattan is an issue.”
The pair of red satin high-heeled shoes with rhinestone-studded heels is one of her favorite objects — and viewers seem to love them too, Dr. Halpern said.
They belonged to Mae Simon, a European-born, New York City-bred vaudeville performer who later moved to straight dramas. Eventually she had her own theater company, Dr. Halpern said. She was very famous and then faded from the public eye as she grew older. “Her name is not part of the canon” of famous Yiddish actors, Dr. Halpern said. “By highlighting those shoes, we are able to tell the story of her career, and of the careers of other people who followed a similar trajectory.
“Another favorite of mine is what we call the furrier’s toolkit,” she continued. “It’s buttons and mechanical devices and ribbons and a hat form from Albert Snyder, a furrier from the Bronx who was in the U.S. Navy during World War II and eventually opened a business called Contour Furs in Manhattan’s fur district. He retired in the mid-1980s but he kept working. He died around 1994.
“There are still little bits of fur attached to some of the pieces. There is a little box of pins and buttons and a tape measure and a thimble. There’s a whole story about the fur district and Jewish involvement in the fur trade and in the garment industry more generally.”
On a more personal level, she said, “people don’t sew anymore, but this box of stuff — my grandma also had a box of sewing stuff that she had next to her sofa.
“There’s something special and intimate about it.”
She also talked about a photograph from Argentina. “It’s from a Jewish agricultural community there, called Moisés Ville. The men staring intensely from the photo are gauchos. “Ilan Stavans, who wrote the essay, questions whether there truly were Jewish gauchos,” Dr. Halpern said. “Maybe there were, and maybe there weren’t. It might have been more mythic than actual.” Whatever the truth, the photo is compelling.
Many but not all of the objects pictured in the book are displayed in YIVO’s ground-floor exhibit space at the Center for Jewish History. “There are six sections,” its creator, Dr. Eddy Portnoy, YIVO’s senior academic advisor and director of exhibitions, said. Like Dr. Halpern, Dr. Portnoy’s doctorate is from the Jewish Theological Seminary; his is in modern Jewish history. He’s the author of “Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press”; as the title might suggest, he’s frequently funny. Like Dr. Halpern, he talks about his work at YIVO with passion.
“One of the difficult things about doing the book is that we have this enormous archive, over 24 million artifacts to whittle down to 100.” What percentage of the collection is that, Dr. Portnoy? “I don’t know!” he said. “Point zero zero something. It is minuscule.” Even more ruthless surgery had to be done for the exhibit. “We agonized over what to include.”
One of the objects that people seem drawn to look at and tend to write about — as I had not planned on doing — is the menorah bong, from Austin, collected in 2019. “It is an anomalous object,” Dr. Portnoy said. “I understand why people are drawn to it, but within the grand scheme of our archival material it is not typical.” He added it to the collection, because “no one else was going to collect it, so YIVO might as well, so that it becomes part of the historical record.
“The ethos of YIVO’s policy is that we collect anything and everything that has to do with Jewish cultural life,” he continued. “That ranges from expressionist poetry to rabbinical responsa to menus from Catskills resorts to menorah bongs. We collect anything and everything that has to do with Jewish life.”
Although Yiddish is part of its name, and although much if not most of its collections are in Yiddish, “that’s because when YIVO started, Yiddish was the dominant Jewish language,” Dr. Portnoy said. “About 75 percent of Jews spoke Yiddish. But there probably are about a dozen languages represented in the collection from the beginning.”
Some of the objects that most interest him include the little glass bowls, called bankes, used for the generally debunked pseudo-medical practice called cupping. (Apologies to those readers who swear by what they call an alternative therapy.) “It was part of eastern European Jewish culture, a remedy that had cameo parts in Jewish literature. It’s a fascinating look at the way Jews lived then.”
Because culture is “porous, with things flowing in and out of it, whether it’s folk sayings, jokes, stories, or anything else, Jews share these things with their neighbors,” Dr. Portnoy said. Certainly that was true of cupping. “Once something enters the Yiddish sphere, it somehow becomes Judaized or Yiddishized in some way, and ends up having its own place in Jewish culture.”
He’s also interested in one of the rare objects that isn’t in the book. “It an iron bar that was bent by a circus performer,” he said. That was Siegmund Breitbart — he was born Zishe, in Lodz, Poland, in 1893, but Siegmund worked better in Germany — who ran away with the circus. (Apparently that was a real thing.) “He became a circus strongman,” Dr. Portnoy said. “He refined an act. He would do typical things, like biting chains in half, but he’d also lie on a bed of nails and have a team of oxen drive over him. He would lie on a box with an enormous conical structure on top of him, and on top of that structure he’d have two guys on motorcycles, riding in circles.
“He died in 1925, because in a part of his performance he’d pound railroad spikes through a piece of wood with his bare hands. During a performance, he accidentally stabbed himself in the leg and got blood poisoning.
“He was probably one of the world’s most famous Jews in this period, and he was a real folk hero to Jews.”
Another of Dr. Portnoy’s favorite objects is the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade’s typewriter. “I did an exhibit on Yiddish typewriters in 2018,” Dr. Portnoy said. “I was in the stacks one day, and I looked up and saw maybe 20 old Yiddish typewriters. They are fascinating machines. People still type every day, but not on these old machines, that clank and clink and ding. I find them fascinating. And I realized that we have probably thousands of typewritten manuscripts, in Yiddish, as well as letters by common people, invoices, all kinds of different things. People used typewriters for everything.
“So I took these typewriters; I used about a dozen of them in the exhibit. I wanted to get one of Grade’s typewritten manuscripts. At the time, his archive still was being catalogued, so I went to the archivist who was working on it, and asked if I could have a page, and she said sure. And she added that he had a couple of typewriters in his archives.” Dr. Portnoy was surprised because he hadn’t seen any of them with the other typewriters, but it turned out that they were with Grade’s archives, on another floor.
“So I went into the stacks. He had two typewriters. One was modern, plastic, from the 1970s. The other one was older, in a leather box, and I think that no one had opened it since it arrived at YIVO.
“I opened the box. The typewriter still had a piece of paper in it, with Yiddish writing. I can only guess that it was the last thing Grade ever typed. So we left the paper in the typewriter, as part of the artifact.
“It was an amazing find. It was one of those rare moments when you discover something that’s almost alive.”
It’s magic, isn’t it? Yes, Dr. Portnoy confirmed, “and I am basically like a kid in a candy store.
“In Yiddish, it’s ‘Ikh hob arayngefaln in a shmaltz grub.’ It means ‘I fell into a vat of schmaltz.’”
In other words, he’s in heaven.
Learn more about YIVO, the book, and the exhibit at www.yivo.org.