Fifty Years of Life in America

A couple of weeks ago it was Thanksgiving, the quintessentially American holiday. One would think that it, and American life in general, has little to do with the Vilna Collections. (These collections, from YIVO’s prewar archives, were looted from its original headquarters in Poland by the Nazis. Their remnants, scattered in three locations in Lithuania and at YIVO in New York are now being digitally reunited online in the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Collections Project.)

But one would be wrong about America having nothing to do with YIVO in Eastern Europe: there was a constant back and forth between YIVO and its supporters and colleagues in the United States. YIVO was keenly interested in documenting Jewish life everywhere, including in America. So, within the Vilna Collections are many books, newspapers, posters, theater playbills, letters, and manuscripts from America.

One example is this 42-page manuscript excerpt of the published memoirs of Yisroel Yekhiel Kopeloff, a Yiddish writer and activist. Entitled Fuftsik yor lebn in Amerike (Fifty Years of Life in America) it was sent around 1919 to Vilna, to Zalmen Reyzn, a scholar and journalist, for use in his Leksikon fun der yudisher literatur un prese (Biographical Dictionary of Yiddish Literature and Press), a comprehensive resource for the study of Yiddish literature.

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Kopeloff, by then a resident of Riverdale in the Bronx, was born in Bobroisk in 1858. Like the overwhelming majority of Jewish intellectuals of his day, he began his education in yeshivas, where he was known for his erudition in Talmud, the Bible, Hasidic lore, and the Kabbalah. But he left that world to become a Socialist Revolutionary, an anti-tsarist activist. He was soon forced to become a political refugee. In 1882, he fled to America, the first sight of which, as the opening passage of his memoir recounts, made him “astonished and surprised.”

In the New World, he underwent yet another transformation and became a successful businessman. But he never abandoned his radical loyalties, becoming an anarchist activist, and helping to found the Yiddish anarchist newspaper, Die Freie Arbeiter Stimme (The Free Voice of Labor.) He was also a Yiddishist, a follower of Chaim Zhitlowsky, a leading light of diaspora nationalism and proponent of Yiddish culture. Kopeloff himself was a prolific writer, publishing articles in the Yiddish press, sometimes under a pen name. (One was “Khaym Shrayber” – Charlie Writer.)  He died in 1933.

The Yiddish anarchist world of Yisroel Yekhiel Kopeloff and comrades will be explored in YIVO’s upcoming conference, Yiddish Anarchism: New Scholarship on a Forgotten Tradition, on Sunday, January 20, 2019. Read more.

Roberta Newman is YIVO’s Director of Digital Initiatives.