YIDDISH AFFAIRS | LITVAK AFFAIRS | EVENTS | MEMOIRS

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The following is a revised text of Dovid Katz’s post that appeared on his Facebook page today.

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From the day I began to specialize in Yiddish linguistics, nearly every one of my papers and books in the field copiously references Zalmen Reyzen’s extraordinary output, including history of Yiddish literature, modern Yiddish spelling and standard grammar, stylistics, dialectology, all created in the spirit of harmonious synthesis of high-level scholarship with unabashed, and uncompromising, love of Yiddish and insistence that much of our work be carried out in the language itself. Moreover in my 1993 book on Yiddish stylistics and in much other work (And debates…) over the decades, I’ve regarded Zalmen Reyzen as the true codifier of the middle of the road modern Yiddish spelling, usage and lexical norms system beloved of so many great Yiddish writers (vs. the extremist, ultranormativist, ultrapurist school of lexicography and of the Soviet-inspired late 1930s Yivo rules that Reyzen never accepted, but that is all a story for another day…). Just one example from recent years, my 2021 entry in our little “Responsa in Yiddish Linguistics” project: https://defendinghistory.com/responsa-in-yiddish-linguistics-by-dovid-katz#daled.
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Avrom, Zalmen, and Sóre Reyzen, all Yiddish writers, were children of Hebrew author Kalmen Reyzen, they all hailed from Kéydenov (Kóydenov, now Dzyarzhynsk / Dzerzhinsk in Belarus; once Mínsker Gubérnye). When Zalmen Reyzen settled in Vilna in 1915, it was a prelude to others (including Max Weinreich and Zelig Kalmanovitsh) following and building the Vilna world center of Yiddish academic studies here. In a New York lecture near the end of his life, Max Weinreich recalled Reyzen being the central personality of the Vilna Yivo.
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When I came to London for the summer of 1975, as a 19 year old student, and quickly moved in to the attic of Yiddish author I.A. Lisky, Lisky told me about Zalmen Reyzen’s two sons living in London, Shólke and Léybe (Saul and Leon). I became friends with Léybe (father of Paul, grandfather of Rachel), and was thrilled when he came to address the August 1982 graduation of our first Oxford summer program in Yiddish (image of us that day: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=160513963979824&set=a.158743294156891).
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But all that was a kind of prelude. When I moved to Vilnius in 1999, and rented apartment no. 10 at Basanaviciaus 17 (prewar: Great Pohulanka 17), I had no idea where I was living until 2004 when the master of Vilna Jewish addresses, Genrich Agranvosky, brought me a stack of documents indicating that this had been Zalmen Reyzen’s apartment and the address of Yiddish Pen through the 1920s and part of the 1930s.
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Next day, I rushed “down the hill” (using Vilna Yiddish street names: down Greys-Pohulánke and Zaválne) to my dear friend Dr. Shimen Alperovich, long time beloved head of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, to ask about a Zalmen Reyzen plaque going up downstairs. Alperovich’s first question was about whether he fell victim to the Nazis or the Soviets? Given the “history politics” here, he explained it would be rather easy if he was a victim of the Soviets (he was), and very very difficult if a victim of the Nazis and their local collaborators and perpetrators.
It took years but we pulled it off. A year or so was lost by the local history establishment’s insistence that the date of death on the plaque be given as 1939 rather than 1940/1941 as indicated in testimonies and research on the subject (the nationalist motivation for this insistence is outside the scope of today’s post). Finally, Alperovich said to me (we spoke only in Yiddish): “Look Dovid, let’s give in on the damned year, or this thing will never get done in our lifetimes” and as usual, I accepted his sober judgment of things.
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Two matching stone plaques, in Lithuanian and Yiddish, were scheduled to go on the building in 2010, at the usual “too high for normal vision” level common for Jewish plaques in this neighborhood (cf. the Yivo and Sutzkever plaques on the opposite side of the street if you can stretch your neck enough). But the Russian speaking lady who lived in the apartment up there started to shout with all the colorful (well, off-color) wealth of the Russian language that her walls may not be ruined with holes for plaques (four little drilled holes still mark the spot). It was a year later, in 2011, that the plaques went up at (almost) proper eye level height at a ceremony masterfully chaired by Shimen Gurevich (Simonas Gurevicius), then executive director of the Lithuanian Jewish Community.
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The late Roza Bieliauskiene, then curator of the Jewish Museum, provided a facsimile of a postcard addressed to Reyzen and Yiddish Pen which hung proudly in my flat until I had to move out, after eighteen years (when the landlord sold it) in 2017. Since then, the Reyzen memorabilia headline a mini-exhibition of secular Yiddishist Vilna in my current place just around the corner (on the opposite wall is our exhibit on religious Jewish Vilna). Our Mini Museum of Old Jewish Vilna is also proud to own almost a hundred issues of the daily newspaper, Vilner Tog, that Reyzen edited from 1919 onward, on top of being a principal founder and top scholar at Yivo from 1925 onward (the Tog changed its legal name a number of times in response to legal harassment: Tog, Vilner Tog, Undzer Tog). Our mini-museum is proud to own issue no. 2 (May 1919): https://defendinghistory.com/issue-no-2-of-the-vilna-tog-11-may-1919-with-an-ski-novick-reyzen-shabad-weinreich-on-masthead-81;
a postcard invite to Reyzen to attend an avantgarde Yiddish theatre workshop featuring excerpts from Shakespeare, Gogol and others: https://defendinghistory.com/http-defendinghistory-com-mini-museum-of-old-jewish-vilna-69;
a postcard from Reyzen to a library in Tel Aviv: https://defendinghistory.com/postcard-from-zalmen-reyzen-to-the-shaarey-zion-library-in-tel-aviv-86, and more….
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So, how wonderful to be able to welcome Ruth and Rachel. The image just above me to the left is of Zalmen Reyzen.
Thank you, dear Ruth and Rachel, for visiting!