New Los Angeles Yiddish scene continues a long tradition

Non-Angelenos, what jumps to mind when you think of Los Angeles? Pacific waves, “the industry,” Real Housewives? Yiddish probably isn’t on the list. But thanks to the efforts of Rabbi Zach Golden, Caroline Luce, Aaron Castillo-White and Miri Koral, maybe it should be.

L.A. was once a center of Yiddish cultural activity, and dedicated activists are building on it to create a contemporary Yiddish scene.

Golden, until recently deputy editor of the Forverts, the Yiddish section of the Forward, is now dedicating himself full-time to the downtown L.A. synagogue Der Nister, “It’s important for people who are downtown to know there’s a physical shul they can go to, but it’s much more,” Golden said.

Together with Der Nister’s other two rabbis, Henry Hollander and Ye’ela Rosenfeld, Golden wants to offer “a full steeping in Jewish life, almost as it was before the Holocaust, with Yiddish, Hebrew, Talmud, literature and music.”  One of Der Nister’s visions is to partner with other organizations in creating an L.A. Yiddish festival similar to Yiddish New York or Toronto’s Ashkenaz.

“Los Angeles is the second largest Jewish community in the U.S. and one of the largest in the world, but it’s not viewed as a center of Yiddish culture the way New York is,” said historian Caroline Luce. “There’s no Camp Kinder Ring or Klezkanada for the West Coast. Yet L.A. was home to a vibrant Yiddish literary scene, especially in the 1920s and 30s. It was a destination for Yiddish writers and poets who sought it out as part of a greater health-seeking movement.”

Luce has curated a digital exhibit Recovering Yiddish Culture in Los Angeles, featuring the works of writers who lived or spent significant time in the city. Among them are Moyshe-Leyb Halpern and  Rosa Nevodovska. Each author’s poem or story is accompanied by biographies and bibliographies. The literary works are presented in Yiddish with English translation.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, about a quarter of migrants to L.A. were there for health reasons, looking to escape tuberculosis, rheumatism and asthma, Luce said. They believed the climate could cure ailments associated with crowded, polluted cities.

Migrants also imagined L.A. as a place with utopian possibilities, where one could reinvent oneself and build a life of one’s own choosing, Luce said.

Luce’s own interest in learning Yiddish began while researching the Yiddish-speaking activists of the Jewish Bakers Union, whose members had fled Eastern European pogroms and settled in L.A. during the beginning of the 20th century.

The people who started the union found one another through their workplaces, through the Workmen’s Circle (now known as the Workers Circle) and at bars, where bakers used to pass the time as their bread was proofing.

One of Luce’s purposes in curating Recovering Yiddish Culture in Los Angeles is to bring attention to the body of work Yiddish writers produced there. Modernist poet Moyshe-Leyb Halperin (1886-1932), for example, was born in Galicia and lived most of his life in New York. His poem “Los Angeles,” published in the periodical Di Vokh (The Week) in 1929, evokes his disenchantment with his utopian dream of living in a healthful land where one could create a new life.

Gekumen aher in der varemer gegnt
A kranker zikh do tsu heyln
Un men shnayt mayn layb azoy vi lekakh
Oyf a simkhe oystseteyln.

I came out to this tropical land,
A sick man in search of a cure,
Only to be sliced into pieces
Like honey cake dished out at a party.

(Excerpt, translated by Dr. Julian Levinson)

A second L.A. writer, Rosa Nevadovka, was born in Bialystok, Poland, and immigrated to New York where she began publishing poetry. Eventually she moved to the Venice Beach neighborhood of L.A. Labor Zionism was a central part of her identity. The work she created in California was less expressly political than the poems she published in New York, using images from nature, especially the ocean, to explore themes of home and national boundaries.

“These writers were trying to craft a voice distinctive to their experiences on the West Coast,” Luce said. “Many used the ocean as a landscape to explore themes such as diaspora and homelessness.”

There were three Yiddish literary journals in Los Angeles throughout the years. Mayrev (West), founded in 1925, was the city’s first Yiddish journal featuring literature, poetry and art. Previous Yiddish publications focused primarily on local and international news. Although the first issue included works by important writers like Lune Mattes and Yankev Ginzburg, Mayrev folded soon after, due to a lack of internal organization, difficulties in sustaining an audience and financial pressures.

Pasifik (Pacific) was L.A’.s second literary magazine, whose contributors included Moyshe-Leyb Halpern and H. Goldovsky. It published four issues in 1929, but once the Great Depression hit, there was no money to keep it going.

Kheshbn (Reckoning), the only literary publication in L.A. that lasted for years, was a prominent periodical with an international scope. Contributors included Abraham Sutzkever, Chaim Grade, Beyle Schaechter Gottesman and Melech Ravitch. It was one of the most long-lived Yiddish literary journals ever, publishing 150 issues between 1946 and 2008. Since its closing, all issues have been digitized by the California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language (CIYCL) with the support of the UCLA/Mellon Program, and are now available online.

Among the other Yiddish activists in L.A. today is Yiddish translator Aaron Castillo-White, who previously worked as director for individual giving at the Forward. In 2022, he founded Kultur Mercado, a nonprofit which seeks to foster and sustain global cultures and languages.

Recently, Castillo-White put out a call to realtors and estate sellers for Yiddish materials they might run across. He received hundreds of books and a trove of records, including Yiddish cowboy songs, some of it original material.

“It shows a great cross-pollination of culture, especially from the 1940s to the mid-50s,” Castillo-White said. He hopes to digitize the music and eventually make it available to the public.

In September, Kultur Mercado hosted a concert featuring the exuberant band Kleztronica, a mashup of Yiddish music and electronic beats with a rave vibe.  The event, co-sponsored with the SoCal Arbeter Ring and Der Nister, brought multiple Jewish generations together to enjoy the music.

Miri Koral grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home, and when her parents died, she realized she longed to speak it but didn’t know any other Yiddish speakers.This motivated her to take a Yiddish course.

She studied with the late Mordkhe Schaechter as a graduate student at Columbia University. Even though she had grown up going to the Yiddish theater in L.A. and listening to Yiddish songs on a record player, formally studying Yiddish gave her new respect for the language.

Koral joined a leyenkrayz (reading circle) and took classes in L.A.’s University of Judaism, now known as the American Jewish University. She also studied at the University of Oxford and in Vilnius. While she was in the Lithuanian capital, she realized something profound: The Holocaust was devastating not only because of the loss of millions of lives, but because an entire civilization was lost as well.

In 1999, Koral founded CICYL to organize high-quality Yiddish programming in California. Since the pandemic, many of CICYL’s events have been online with participants from all over the world. Recent events included a Yiddish drag queen show with actor Shane Baker and a lecture about the music used in classic Yiddish films.

Through the work of these and other Yiddishists, the future may see L.A. becoming a Yiddish destination once again.

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