A Seamstress Wants to Learn Esperanto

A Seamstress Wants to Learn Esperanto | YIVO Institute for Jewish Research | The Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Collections Project

May 1, 2017

The publication of Esther Schor's Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language occasioned this excavation from the YIVO archives.

This application for registration in an Esperanto course offered in the 1930s in Vilna (Wilno) by VILBIG (Vilna Jewish Education Society) was filled out by Tsile Lyubitsh, a young lingerie seamstress. Born in 1911, she was a member of the first generation to have attended one of the new secular Yiddish schools that were established in the wake of World War II.

What motivated Tsile to want to learn Esperanto? One possible clue comes from the memoir of a young Jewish man in Kielce, born in the same year at Tsile. A. Greyno, as he signed his submission to an autobiography contest sponsored by YIVO in the 1930s, was from a poor family. Like Tsile, he was a garment worker, and in his case, a trade unionist. He also dreamed of a world without borders, but more specifically, of a unified world proletariat, and had found a socialist Esperanto organization with which to affiliate [....]

Thank you, YIVO! See also the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe:

Bialystok
Belmont, Leo
Braun, Mieczysław
Gorshman, Shira
Korczak, Janusz
Tuwim, Julian
Zamenhof, Ludwik
Zaretski, Ayzik

Litvakia revisited

This is my latest link in the documentation of "Litvakia":

Lituanie Juive 1918-1940 Reviewed by Joost van Beek (in English)

What is Litvakia?

    Now Litvakia, of course, is a country which has never appeared on any map. In fact, it‘s never been a country in any accepted sense of the word. It is, or rather was, a cultural realm. The name designates the world in which the Jews of Vilnius, of Kaunas, of Grodno, Bialystok, Riga, and Minsk lived and worked, during the centuries they constituted an important minority in the region. Although there are still a few Jews living in Vilnius now, the Litvak centuries lasted essentially from about 1300 to the time of the Holocaust. That dramatic annihilation of a people and a culture de facto ended the era of Jewish influence in the region and scattered the survivors over many continents.

     The above-mentioned notion of Litvakia, of a cultural specificity and unity of the Jews of this region, constitutes the basic premise of the book. Borders shifted and authorities imposed themselves, but this community of Jews had, in all its paradoxes and antagonisms, a certain sense of common identity and destiny. In fact, Henri Minczeles goes so far as to suggest the Litvaks were - in their way - a kind of nation: "Litvakia - that is a collective soul, a profound desire to be who one is, to have wrought great things together and to achieve new ones, a bit in the way Ernest Renan expressed it when he spoke of peoples and nations." (p.269).

This is an extended book review of a French book on the subject. Zamenhof, of course, was a Litvak, and "Litvakia" was the breeding ground of major Jewish cultural innovators.

For more, see this subsection of my Zamenhof Web Guide . . .

Zamenhof en/in Bialystok / Litova juda vivo / Litvak Jewish life

There you will find links pertaining to Zamenhof and to Bialystok and "Litvakia" more generally.

Sounds of Silence -- Traces of Jewish Life in Lithuania

This ten-day exhibition opened on 17 December 2009 under the auspices of Beit Hatfutsot located on the campus of Tel Aviv University:

Sounds of Silence -- Traces of Jewish Life in Lithuania
http://www.bh.org.il/on-line-exhibition-intro.aspx?67883

See also this essay on the subject:

The Sounds of Silence of Jewish Lithuania by Dovid Katz

This essay mentions two of my favorites in the same sentence -- L.L. Zamenhof, and the great philosopher of the Jewish Enlightenment, Salomon Maimon (much more confrontational than Moses Mendelssohn but highly respected by Immanuel Kant, the latter's anti-Semitic proclivities notwithstanding):

Then there were the modern realms of Jewish civilization, where Lithuanian Jewry also took a lead. The scope was breathtaking. It included the revival of the modern Hebrew language, and its first contemporary-grade literature. And modern Yiddish scholarship and research as a new field of humanistic inquiry. And a unique branch of Jewish socialism that stressed the development of Yiddish as a national Jewish language in the context of autonomy for minorities. The Litvak’s love of learning and education became proverbial. One result was a long line of original, maverick creators, among them the philosopher Solomon Maimon, the inventor of Esperanto Ludwig Leyzer Zamenhof, the artists Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine. For centuries, the compact and exalted culture of Lithuanian Jewry never failed to impress. In his 1899 Journey through Lithuania (in Hebrew), Nahum Slouschz comments: “We are in the Jewish country, perhaps the only Jewish country in the world.”

Who knew? And here is a sample of Maimon's chutzpah I translated into Esperanto:

Pri Proponita Konvertiĝo al Kristanismo: El la Aŭtobiografio de Salomon Maimon