OPINION | LITVAK AFFAIRS | YIVO | YIDDISH AFFAIRS

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Introduction (in Yiddish, Lithuanian, and English) to the exhibit honoring Yivo’s centennial at Vilnius’s Jewish Cultural and Information Center in the heart of the city’s Old Town

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by Dovid Katz

It is heartwarming to see the widespread celebration of Yivo’s centenary this year, which is ipso facto a celebration of sophisticated Yiddish language culture in all its many branches. May the year’s events lead to ever more inspiring projects, particularly those that in the spirit of the Vilna Yivo will be carried out in Yiddish, strengthening living Yiddish as a vibrant means of communication, including the higher registers of scholarship and literature, for the generations to come, in accordance with Yivo’s raison d’etre. Although a researcher and teacher with a lifelong affiliation with Yivo and all that it means, I fully, to be honest, expected — as a critic of the present Yivo leadership’s participation in Holocaust obfuscation projects by a certain powerful establishment in Lithuania — to be excluded (not informed, not invited to submit a paper topic) by the recent Yivo conference in Vilnius and its eminent local partners.

It was pleasant to receive some generous personal messages from conference participants. It was less pleasant to hear that some explained why our communications must remain private, tantamount to adhering in public to the called-for boycotts and excommunication of colleagues that are necessary for brownie points for the gravy train of junkets, medals, honors, translations, grants and photo-ops with the great and mighty. The surprise and pain are somewhat amplified by the defamatory efforts coming on the heels of (and at times with parallel content) the parallel campaign of defamation and personal destruction emanating from far-right and neo-Nazi elements over the years.

As a counterpoint to that exclusion by a Jewish institution desirous of a Baltic government’s largess, I was touched and most grateful to be so generously and graciously invited to contribute, here in Vilnius, to Yivo’s centenary by two well-established Lithuanian state-related institutions which do not worry about the boycott, excommunication and demonization of any who dare disagree with this or that government commission’s “policy” on history. Both institutions are dedicated to welcoming with open arms, in the Western democratic tradition, people with a wide array of differing perspectives. First, the invitation by the Vilnius Jewish Public Library to deliver a lecture on Yivo’s 100th last April (posted video), and second, an invitation by the Jewish Cultural and Information Center in Vilnius’s Old Town to loan items from my personal collection and put them together as a modest exhibition, and write the texts for the exhibition in Yiddish and English, with the Center providing a full Lithuanian translation (exhibition album by William Adan Pahl). The modest exhibition opened on October 20th, in time for the conference scholars to come and have a look too (text of the intro poster in Yiddish). My heartfelt gratitude to both institutions that are proudly building the new vibrant, democratic, multi-opinion Vilnius.

Yivo’s “Holocaust problem” and painful betrayal of the last survivors, particularly the veterans of the Jewish partisans at the apex of the one state campaign in history to prosecute and defame them, is a serious, not a trivial or concocted issue. Every major institution at cultural and historical frontiers has a complex and fascinating history, and it does no good to push such things under the proverbial rug: intellectual confrontations are an essential part of the history of ideas. Indeed, recent years have been characterized by some of the highest and lowest points in the century of Yivo history. The scanning of millions of documents and archival materials and making them available free online is a magnificent, and frankly eternal, achievement that will enable ever new progress by scholars, roots-seekers and many others whose lives will, thanks to Yivo, have room also for a bona fide East European Yiddish culture component.

On the other side of the ledger is the lamentable participation in far-right Baltic Holocaust revisionism, including, most painfully, legitimization, via membership, in the Lithuanian state commission dedicated to “equalizing” Nazi and Soviet crimes (“double genocide”) in an effort that has included the defamation and criminalization of Holocaust survivors who joined the anti-Nazi partisans, as well as state glorification of local Holocaust perpetrators. The roster of scholars who have spoken out on (and/or resigned from) that commission includes not only Dr. Yitzhak Arad, Sir Martin Gilbert, Prof. Konrad Kwiet, and Prof. Dov Levin, not only the last association of Lithuanian Holocaust survivors, but also an extraordinary current resident of Vilnius.

He is Professor Pinchos Fridberg, now the last living Vilna-born Holocaust survivor in Lithuania, and one of the last prewar-born Yiddish speaking survivors in the country. In standing up to the state’s commission, in writing, and in a youtube video (in Yiddish, loyally adhering to the Vilna Yivo ethos), he demonstrated his bona fide Litvak courage and character (which means all the more when the word “Litvak” has become a lame and often untoward PR tool). To tell the truth, it also took a lot of courage for him to address Yivo’s leadership in a public letter on the subject of its participation in the state history commission whose formal right-out-of-Orwell name is “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania.”

Professor Fridberg’s public letter was also published in New York’s Yiddish Forverts, after which he posted video of his reading of the letter in Yiddish. (Another open letter to Yivo’s leaders came from the then editor of the Jewish Community of Lithuania’s quadrilingual newspaper, Milan Chersonski, who was unceremoniously disinvited from Yivo’s 2013 conference in Vilnius, but is now immune to such things because he passed away.) For those interested in the state history commission’s attitude toward the last Holocaust survivors who were veterans of the anti-Nazi partisans, the quickest route is via the on-camera proclamation by its longtime executive director (who was featured in June explaining how Yivo’s history will now be taught at schools).

That is as useful a peg as any to come to the recent international academic conference on Yivo held in Vilnius. It was a great disappointment that the conference’s leading academics did not invite Vilnius’s last Vilna-born Holocaust survivor, now deep in his eighties, to at least be included. All the more so bearing in mind that in recent years he has researched and published work on (and by) a forgotten Vilna Yiddish poet (some of them coauthored by Polina Pailis, a former Judaica librarian at the National Library who prepared over a hundred bilingual (Yiddish and Lithuanian) exhibits on Litvak Jewish culture for the foyer of the Jewish community building. Was she invited? Or will this conference go down for systematic exclusion of the last Yiddish speakers and researchers in Vilna?).

To be sure, Zalmen Reyzen, Max Weinreich, Meyshe Kulbak and Zelig Kalmanovich are turning in their graves that the price of state largess is instrumentalization for far-right historical revisionism, to the extent that a scholar with a dissident view, even if he is Vilna’s last native-born Holocaust survivor, must be “cancelled” from any mention, let alone included.

Turning from the conference to its coverage in the Forverts, that coverage made no mention of Prof. Fridberg, no mention of the local and non-local scholars excluded because of the Holocaust revisionism that must not be mentioned, and no mention of the other Yivo exhibit in town, modest as it may be in comparison to the large state or Yivo funded projects. Here one transitions from issues of Vilnius and Lithuania’s commission dedicated to “double genocide” revisionism to issues of New York’s secular Yiddish newspaper (nowadays online) which has still failed to mention the Vilnius-based Yiddish Cultural Dictionary project (coming to its eighth anniversary in a few months), other than a few crude potshots in an article by the same Forverts correspondent. Indeed, “potshots” is a word that describes Forverts coverage of Yiddish in Vilnius over the last quarter of a century.

Surely, the secular Yiddish cultural world deserves more diversity, balance and honesty in coverage, beyond PR for a single parochial clique in a weak field that has been all too easily hijacked by a few such cliques (including the veterans of Moscow’s Soviet propaganda sheet Sovetish Heymland), and, for many years now, forces (and budgets) of East European Holocaust revisionism which has found in Yiddish culture and studies a particularly useful mode of instrumentalization.

Finally, I would like to voice a view on the greatest lapse of this year’s Yivo centennial events, with an eye to its imminent correction in the time ahead, to the great potential benefit of Yivo, Yiddish, and Jewish Vilna studies. These are the extraordinary works of the inspirational Leyzer Ran on the culture, lore and history of Jewish Vilna (in Yiddish: Vílne). These works have been understudied, undermentioned, and sadly, on occasion used without appropriate accreditation. Let us hope that Ran’s three volume masterpiece, Jerusalem of Lithuania (quadrilingual text in English, Hebrew, Russian and Yiddish, N.Y. 1974) will very soon be republished beautifully, perhaps by Yivo itself, bearing in mind how much Leyzer Ran did to document its history during all those decades when American Jewry, and world Jewry, was not particularly interested.

Ran’s beautiful postwar book, Ashes from the Jerusalem of Lithuania (N.Y. 1959) contains a wealth of information on what he found coming home to Vilna right after the Holocaust and the valiant efforts by a few remarkable people to save Yivo treasures. One would hate to think that exclusion of Lezyer Ran from so many of the Yivo history festivities might be connected to the Ran family’s public protest nearly a decade and a half ago re the untoward entanglements with Holocaust revisionism.

The best way to move forward in harmony might well be republication, and where needed, translation, of Leyzer Ran’s writings on the civilization in which Yivo played such a major role. Dear Leyzer himself would, I feel certain, be happy that such a project, if not on the centenary, were to come in Yivo’s 101st or 102nd, or even its 103rd year. May Yivo’s conflicts and issues be studied as part of a dramatic, invigorating history that is evidence of actual, and dramatic, participation in the history of ideas. And may Yivo and the true Yivo spirit survive, grow and thrive for centuries to come.