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The Vilnius
Yiddish Institute Newsletter, No. 11
June, 2004
In this
issue:
Vilna Author Avrom
Karpinovitsh (1913-2004)
Chatzkel Lemchen Remembered
New Yiddish Column in New York's
Algemeyner zhurnal
Visiting Lecturer at Vilnius
University
New VYI Expedition to Eastern
Ukraine
New York's Itche Goldberg honored
at 100
Prague Conference on the Future of
the Jewish Heritage in Europe
Vilna Author Avrom
Karpinovitsh (1913-2004)
The staff, students, and wider
community of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute mourn the
death of master Yiddish prose writer Avrom
Karpinovitsh on 22 March 2004, some two months short
of his 91st birthday. Beloved by readers and friends,
in his works he depicted the everyday life of pre-war
Vilna (then Polish Wilno; Yiddish always Vilne).
Focusing on the poor, the disenfranchised, and the
underworld, he offered a bold counterpicture to that
of the pious scholars or revolutionary secularists
found at the center of so many other Yiddish works.
Born in on 29 May 1913 in Vilna (then
Tsarist Russia), Karpinovitsh was the son of Moyshe
Karpinovitsh (1882-1941), founder of the Vilna Yiddish
Folk Theater. In 1941, Moyshe Karpinovitsh perished in
the Vilna Ghetto. Avrom himself escaped to Russia, and
after a brief postwar sojourn in the ruins of Jewish
Vilna, he settled in Israel in 1949. From 1952, he
administered the Philharmonic Orchestra in Tel Aviv.
From 1947 until his death in 2004, he published
countless short stories and critiques, along with
memoirs, and was widely translated.
After the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the emergence of independent Lithuania,
Karpinovitsh became a frequent visitor to Vilna. There
he would spend hours at the forlorn building on
Ludwisarska Street (now Liejyklos), where he erected a
plaque in Yiddish and Lithuanian in memory of his
father.
Karpinovitsh was deeply gratified by
the founding of the Yiddish Summer Program in Vilnius
in 1998 and the Vilnius Yiddish Institute in 2001.
Whenever he could, he delighted in reading and
lecturing before our students, who were often left in
tears after his glowing recreations of a destroyed
world. He also participated loyally in Israel's
Yung Yiddish movement, appearing for the last time
in public with a talk titled "My Vilne." On that
occasion, only four days before his death, he was as
exuberant and inspiring as ever. With lasting thanks
in our hearts, we mourn the passing of a treasured
writer and friend.
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Chatzkel Lemchen Remembered
When the Vilnius Yiddish Institute
was formally launched on 27 August 2001, preeminent
among the guests was the last great pre-war Yiddish
scholar resident in post-Soviet Vilnius, 97 year-old
Chatzkel Lemchen (1904-2001). With deep emotion, the
founders, faculty, and students of the new institution
in the Lithuanian capital welcomed him to the event.
For all who knew him, his presence symbolized that a
grand old heritage was finally, at the twelfth hour,
being transmitted to an eager new generation.
Thereafter, sadly, he was to live only a few months.
To Lithuanians, who know him as
Chackelis Lemchenas, he was a great Lithuanian
lexicographer and the compiler of a series of
authoritative Lithuanian-Russian dictionaries. But
from his youth in interwar independent Lithuanian,
Lemchen maintained an avid interest in Yiddish
philology and literature. Before the war, he
translated a number of Yiddish classics into
Lithuanian, and during the Soviet period, he managed
to publish a study of the impact of Lithuanian on
Yiddish in western Lithuania. Published in Vilnius in
1970, it is the only book ever in the Lithuanian
language dedicated to Yiddish. In the early 1990s, he
prepared an enlarged version in Yiddish, which
appeared in Oxford Yiddish III in 1995.
A native of the shtetl Popilan
(Lithuanian: Papile) in northern Lithuania, Lemchen
spent much of his youth in nearby Zhager (Zagare). He
became a wunderkind of Lithuanian philology under the
aegis of Professor Jonas Jablonskis (1860-1930),
regarded as the father of modern literary Lithuanian.
Lemchen was beloved as an
exceptionally modest, gentle, and kind personality,
who embodied the love of learning for its own sake
that is one of the hallmarks of the traditional Litvak.
During Lemchen's final years, his
nephew Rod Freedman, a film director in Australia,
discovered him and made the extraordinary documentary
Uncle Chatzkel. The Vilnius Jewish Museum's
Ruta Puishyte is near completion of a book on Lemchen
for Lithuanian children to accompany the film. After
Lemchen's death, Mr. Freedman appointed Jewish Vilnius
tour guide Regina Kopilevich and the Jewish Museum's
Jurate Razumiene to erect the gravestones for Chatzkel
Lemchen and his late wife Ella. The Vilnius Yiddish
Institute composed and oversaw the engraving of the
Yiddish inscription.
Lemchen's legacy as a rare scholar and human being
lives on. In Lithuania and far beyond, he is fondly
remembered by many admirers and friends.
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New Yiddish
Column in New York's Algemeyner zhurnal
On 30 April 2004, New York's
traditionalist Yiddish weekly, the Algemeyner
zhurnal, began to carry a new column, Vilner
igéreslakh, by the VYI's Dovid Katz, Vilnius
University professor of Yiddish Studies. The formal
translation of the title might be "Letters from Vilna"
but igéresl, the Yiddish diminutive of
igéres ("epistle" or "missive") conveys a certain
cheery and intimate twist that has no exact English
correlate. The first "igéresl" is dedicated to the
incredible life story of Avrom Orlinsky of Mozer,
Belarus, a dedicated Jew who lives in a house in which
he is surrounded by crosses and crucifixes. He is just
one among hundreds of precious characters encountered
by Professor Katz during years of expeditions
throughout Eastern Europe. The Algemeyner zhurnal
(English spelling: Algemeiner Journal) can be
contacted at
algemeiner@aol.com; telephone: (+1718) 771-0400;
fax: (+1718) 771-0308.
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Visiting
Lecturer at Vilnius University
The VYI proudly welcomed Professor
Pieter W. van der Horst of the University of Utrecht,
Netherlands to Vilnius University in May. Professor
van der Horst is the author of 25 books, most recently
Philo's Flaccus: The First Pogrom (Leiden
2003). As part of the seminar series sponsored jointly
by the Center for Stateless Cultures and the
Institute, Professor van der Horst lectured on the
origins of anti-Semitism, which he traced to
first-century B.C. Alexandria in Egypt. Afterward, his
daring thesis sparked sparked a lively discussion.
The seminar was jointly chaired by
Professor Sharunas Liekis and Mr. Mindaugas
Kvietkauskas.
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New VYI
Expedition to Eastern Ukraine
Professor Dovid Katz, Research
Director of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, has just
completed an intensive two-week expedition to eastern
Ukraine. The aim was to seek out, record, and provide
assistance to the oldest Yiddish-speaking survivors in
a broad swath of that region. Supported by a grant
from the Shoah Foundation in Paris, the expedition
covered nineteen towns and cities. It started in
Pereyaslav, Sholem Aleichem's birthplace, swung
southward to Kherson at the Black Sea, then back up
north along a more easterly route to Sumy near the
Russian border, and wound up at Borispol, a suburb of
Kiev. The humanitarian component of the mission was
enabled by the On-Site Survivor Support Project based
in Los Angeles. Its founder is Mr. Chic Wolk, whose
late father was a native of Pereyaslav.
The 1449 mile (2332 kilometer)
expedition visited the following locations (given in
their current Ukrainian form; Yiddish forms follow
when appreciably different): (1)
Pereiaslav-Khmel'nits'kyi (Pereyaslav); (2) Lubny (Luben);
(3) Myrhorod (Mirgorod); (4) Poltava; (5) Krementshuk;
(6) Kryvyi Rih (Kriverog); (7) Kherson; (8) Nikopol;
(9) Zaporozhe; (10) Dnipropetrovsk (Yakaterinoslav;
Katerineslev); (11) Hadyatsh (Haditsh); (12) Konotop;
(13) Glukhov; (14) Sumy (Sume); (15) Romny (Romen);
(16) Pryluky (Priluk); (17) Berezan; (18) Yagotin;
(19) Boryspil (Borispol).
One of the scholarly goals of the
expedition was to help establish the rapidly vanishing
border between Northeastern (Lithuanian) Yiddish and
Southeastern (Ukrainian) Yiddish, the latter itself a
subvariety of Southern East European Yiddish (often
called "Polish" or "Galician" in popular parlance).
Twenty-eight extensive interviews,
conducted entirely in Yiddish, were recorded on
professional digital video equipment. The oldest
informant was Ester-Henye Krasnikov of Konotop, who is
97 years-old. The second oldest was Hertz Brusilovsky
of Kherson, who is 91. Nearly all the others were in
their 80's. While the informants were encouraged to
speak freely in Yiddish without time restrictions,
further dialectological and folkloric data were
elicited through a standardized questionnaire. With
this methodology, the VYI is creating an audiovisual
archive of the last genuine local native Yiddish
speakers and their dialects for students and
researchers— today and in
the future.
On the journey, Professor Katz
encountered a number of younger and middle-aged
Ukrainian Jews deeply interested in Yiddish. Several
of them ardently wish to enroll in the VYI's annual
Vilnius Summer Program in Yiddish, held each August.
But this wish can be realized only if scholarship
assistance becomes available. Readers who can identify
funding sources for these worthy applicants are asked
to contact the Institute as soon as possible.
In addition to Professor Katz, the
team included filmmaker and videographer Pawel
Figurski of Poland, and coordinator Ludmilla
Makedonskaya of Belarus. The home-base coordinating
team at the VYI comprised executive director Professor
Sharunas Liekis, office manager Loreta Paukshtyte, and
development officer Olga Bliumenzon.
Because of the advanced age of the
remaining Yiddish speakers, time is rapidly running
out for the VYI expedition project. For this urgent
reason, we hope that support for further expeditions
will be forthcoming quickly.
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New York's
Itche Goldberg honored at 100
Itche Goldberg, the master Yiddish
editor, educator, scholar, and writer, was honored at
a gala banquet in New York City on 25 April marking
his 100th birthday. Held at the Habonim Synagogue in
Manhattan, the event attracted hundreds of leading
figures of modern Yiddish culture from around the
globe. Born in Apt (Opatow), Poland in 1904, Goldberg
was raised in Warsaw, emigrated to Canada in 1920, and
moved some years later to New York. There he became
head of the left-wing Yiddish Ordn schools,
and, from 1937 to 1951, editor of the young people's
magazine Yungvarg. Over the decades he grew as
an innovative literary researcher and a beloved
teacher of Yiddish language and literature, from
elementary school level to the university. In 1970 he
was appointed Professor of Yiddish at New York's
Queen's College. But he is best known as the tireless
editor of Yidishe kultur, widely hailed as the
world's finest journal of modern Yiddish literature.
He assumed the editorship in 1964, and continues to
publish the journal from his offices at Broadway and
26th Street.
In honor of the occasion, Vilnius
University issued a special certificate of recognition
in Yiddish. On behalf of the Vilnius Yiddish
Institute, it was presented to Professor Goldberg at
the banquet by Yiddish teacher and poet Troim Handler.
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Prague
Conference on the Future of the Jewish Heritage in
Europe
The Conference on the Future of the
Jewish Heritage in Europe was held in Prague from 24
to 27 April and attended by 150 leaders in the fields
of cultural preservation, education, and protection of
the Jewish heritage in Europe. It resulted in a number
of specific proposals to enhance Jewish life, culture,
and education in the new Europe. Representing the
Vilnius Yiddish Institute, Professor Dovid Katz read a
paper in which he argued that the elderly survivors
are living treasure troves of language, culture,
folklore, and oral history and themselves a precious
Jewish legacy in today's Europe. Professor Katz
illustrated his paper with video clips from a number
of his expeditions to Belarus.
Thanks to a generous grant from the
Hanadiv Foundation in London, the VYI has been able to
digitize older recording formats and thus enrich its
scholarly archives.
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The Newsletter is produced by the
Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University.
Editor: Professor Sidney
Rosenfeld
Coordinator: Ms. Loreta
Paukstyte
Contact:
press@yiddishvilnius.com
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