Poetry for Businessmen

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

Vilna, 1929. It was a different world. Back then, to be an educated, worldly person, you had to be well-read. And this was not limited to the classics – it was also considered desirable to keep up with what was happening in the arts, even, perhaps, in the realm of modernist poetry.

And this went for everyone: even for people who hadn’t had the benefit of higher education, which was mostly everyone. It didn’t matter if you were a clerk in a warehouse, a tailor, or a shop girl – you could educate yourself. At least, this was the societal ideal.

This was a time and place where people were highly identified by class and profession. And members of those classes and professions took care of their own in the form of mutual aid associations. This was nothing new – there had long been bote-midroshim (batei midrash, Hebrew; study houses) associated with different professions. The newer secular associations didn’t always confine themselves to economic assistance. Like the earlier profession-identified synagogues and houses of study, they also sometimes fostered the intellectual development of their members, by sponsoring educational and cultural programs, and even libraries.

Hence, the Commercial Employees Library and Reading Room (Bibliotek un leyn-zal baym profesyonaler farayn fun handls-ongeshtelte), where, among other books on its shelves could be found this beautiful 1922 anthology of the poems of Melech Ravitch (1893-1976).

Ravitch was a leading modernist Yiddish poet, a member of the Warsaw-based avant garde poetry group, Di Khalyastre (The Gang).

This edition of his poems was a 1929 reprint (as per the stamp on the cover: “1929 revision”) of what was originally published in Warsaw in 1922 by Di tsayt (Time).

The new edition was jointly published by Ravitch in Warsaw and Sol Sheikewitz in New York.

This book is one of the thousands of Yiddish books being digitized in the YIVO Library for the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Collections project, a 7-year initiative to digitize books and documents in New York and Lithuania. The digital files will be presented on a free-access website, scheduled to launch in Summer 2017.

Roberta Newman is YIVO’s Director of Digital Initiatives.