A man visited the home of a friend who had just got married. When he saw his new wife, he whispered to him: “I have to tell you, as a friend, I really don’t like the looks of your wife. If you didn’t marry her for the money, I’m not sure what you see in her. She’s got a hunchback and a bad eye.”
“Don’t worry about it,” the newlywed replied, “you can speak normally – she’s deaf, too”.
And that, dear readers, is an example of one of the hundreds of Yiddish jokes, salty and no respecter of persons, to be found in the archives of YIVO, the unique institution dedicated to the lives and culture of East European Jews, which is celebrating its centenary this year.
On 25 March 1925, a group of around 30 Jewish scholars — mostly in their mid-20s or early 30s — gathered in a public building in Vilnius, a city then in Poland, home to a huge Jewish community. The building, YIVO specialists believe, may have been one of the Yiddish-language schools then flourishing in the city.
Linguist, literary historian, and political activist Nokhem Shtif (1879–1933). Credit: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
They were there to respond to a proposal sent to them by a colleague in Berlin, Nokhem Shtif. Shtif, according to Professor Cecile Kuznitz of Bard College in New York, was a somewhat obsessed figure, a description echoed by YIVO academic adviser Eddie Portnoy.
“Shtif was born in Rovno, now in Ukraine, but he wrote from Berlin proposing a Yiddish Academic Institute. In this five-page memorandum, it set out what such an institute should be,” says Portnoy.
Both Portnoy and Kuznitz agree that Shtif was desperately poor, unable to support his family and relying on his valiant wife, Devorah, as they moved around Europe in search of employment. By the time Shtif wrote his seminal memorandum, he couldn’t even afford the stamps to send his proposal to Jewish intellectual colleagues in Warsaw, Berlin and New York, as well as Vilnius (which became Vilna in Lithuania.)
But he did scrape up the money to post his suggestion, born of a “vision” that had gripped him in his early life. Yiddish, believed Shtif, was the language in which ordinary Ashkenazi Jews lived and breathed — and it was worthy of study.
Max Weinreich
Most receptive of the places to which Shtif wrote was Vilna, and among that first group of men accepting his challenge was the scholar Max Weinreich, who had written a dissertation on “dialect distribution in Yiddish” and who became YIVO’s first – and legendary – director.
Max Weinreich teaches Yiddish at seminar at CCNY in 1947
The early years of YIVO, from 1925 up until 1940, had a number of focuses in building up the academic ‘heft’ of the Institute. Its founders wanted it to be akin to a university which studied Yiddish. But it needed on-the-ground material — and so Weinreich and his deputy, Zalman Reizin, set up a system of ‘zamlers’, or collectors, whose job was to go to every town and village where Jews lived and bring in examples of spoken and lived Yiddish.
And so the YIVO archives — miles and miles of them — are stuffed with such unexpected gems as a lexicon of thieves’ slang. Portnoy says at one point the academics even brought in a former criminal to check the expressions, to ensure they were getting it right.
A portion of the stacks in the YIVO Archives. Credit: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Some examples: Er ganevt aroys s’shvarts apel fun oyg (he’ll steal the pupil out of your eye); Er iz a ba’al-sliche (he is a master of slicḥot prayer – these are said before sunrise, the same time that a thief’s work takes place); Me’ hot im oysbadeknt (he was identified – literally, they took off his wedding veil); Me’ hot bay im gemakht a biyer-khomets (he was investigated – literally, they searched for his bread before Passover).
The zamlers collected jokes, folktales, insults and even erotica, restaurant menus, theatre playbills, slang used by card-players, athletes, street-fighting expressions, even Yiddish puppets – anything you can think of pertaining to daily life. Schoolchildren were encouraged to contribute and write about their Yiddish literary heroes.
Notebook of Musar shmuesn (Lectures on Morality) by head of Telz Yeshiva, Yosef Leib Bloch (d. 1930), delivered between 1916 and 1918. Part of the discovery of lost Jewish materials thought to have been destroyed during the Holocaust. Credit: Courtesy of Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. Photo: Getty Images, Thos Robinson
And, despite its male-dominated origins, there were some women involved in early YIVO, including graphic designer Fruma Olkenitski, who created the YIVO logo in 1928 which is still in use today.
There were some big names, too — Marc Chagall said YIVO should create an art department, while both Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud sat on the YIVO board.
In 1940, disaster struck as the Nazis invaded and took over most of eastern and central Europe. Max Weinreich, in whose apartment was a room which became YIVO’s first office, was, with his wife Regina, at a conference in Denmark when war first broke out in 1939. Max and his elder son, Uriel, did not go back to Vilna with Regina, but instead moved to New York in March 1940.
A branch of YIVO already existed in New York — there was one in London, too, launched in 1937 — and Weinreich took the decision that New York should become the headquarters of the organisation.
The nave of the book chamber, formerly St. George Church, where YIVO Archives material was hidden by Lithuanian librarian Antanas Ulpis. Vilnius, Lithuania. Credit: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Meanwhile, there was drama taking place in Vilna, as groups of Jews from what had become the Vilna Ghetto understood that they had to save the cultural treasures collected by YIVO. Styling themselves as the Paper Brigade, men and women led by Abraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski smuggled books, paintings, papers and sculptures past Nazi guards, and hid them in various places around the Ghetto.
Once the Ghetto was liberated by Soviet forces, those Paper Brigade Jews who survived, found and recovered material to establish the Vilna Jewish Museum. But when it became clear that the Soviet authorities were just as implacable in their opposition to Jewish culture, much of the material was smuggled to New York.
It’s estimated that the Paper Brigade saved about 30 to 40 per cent of YIVO’s archives. Some of their rescued documents ended up in Frankfurt and were salvaged by the American army-led Monument Men immediately after the war, and sent to New York.
But there were other surprises in store.
In 1948, Antanas Ulpis, a Lithuanian librarian, saw “an enormous cache of YIVO’s collections in the yard of the Vilna recycling plant”, says Portnoy. “The Soviets had sent it there to be pulped. He wasn’t Jewish, didn’t know Yiddish or Hebrew but he understood that this was valuable material, and so he arranged for it to be retrieved and hidden”.
Manuscript on Astronomy, 1751, by Issachar Ber Carmoly (also known as Behr Lehmann). Rabbi of Soultz, Alsace, North Eastern France. Carmoly was head of the yeshiva in Jungholtz. The manuscript contains descriptions and drawings of the solar system, as well as calendrical charts. Part of the discovery of lost Jewish materials thought to have been destroyed during the Holocaust. Credit: Courtesy of Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. Photo: Getty Images, Thos Robinson
Ulpis squirrelled away the books and documents into the basement of the Church of St George in Vilna, even hiding some of the material from the Soviets in the church’s organ. These documents lay undisturbed until 1989; a further cache of YIVO material, including rare and unpublished works, was discovered in the Lithuanian National Library in 2017.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, YIVO successfully negotiated with the Lithuanian government to produce copies of approximately 100,000 pages of this material. Additional works – those confiscated, rather than hidden by the Brigade – were discovered in 1954 in the building of a former bank in Vienna and returned to YIVO.
The institution today is in some respects a different creature from its founding principles — because of the massive destruction of Yiddish-speaking Jews during the Holocaust — but in other respects, says YIVO chief executive Jonathan Brent, very much fulfilling the aims of 100 years ago.
He says: “We do feel that we are carrying out the founding vision, which was to preserve and disseminate, and to conserve. It has continuously evolved because of changing circumstances — people don’t learn today in the same way as they did in 1925. By contrast, there are a host of new technologies which enable us, for the first time, to reach a global audience”.
Pinkes (communal record book) of the Hevra Lomde Shas (Learners of the Talmud Society) in Lazdijai, a town in southwestern Lithuania, 1836. Part of the discovery of lost Jewish materials thought to have been destroyed during the Holocaust. Credit: Courtesy of Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. Photo: Getty Images, Thos Robinson
Now that YIVO has the Vilna collections online, in 2024 there were 700,000 individuals around the world using that material, a figure which so startled Brent that he asked for it to be checked three times. And these were people using “primary source material, not translated from Yiddish”.
So there is clearly a present day appetite for Yiddish, as we can see with the klezmer music revival and ventures like Joel Grey’s Yiddish version of Fiddler on the Roof and actor-singer Mandy Patinkin’s Yiddish song albums.
And Jonathan Brent reveals the latest exciting news — this autumn YIVO, in conjunction with a leading American university, will offer the world’s first master’s degree programme in Yiddish language and civilisation.
Now that, as they say, should bring us all naches.
