Tales About Air: Popular Science for Yiddish Readers

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

“What could be more beautiful than a bright blue sky, swimming with little white clouds? On a hot summer day, what pleasure to lie face upwards on the grass in the shade of a tree and peer into the depths of the clear sky… the clouds disappear and there they are again. They race without end through the blue sky… where to? From where? Where were they born and where are they going?”

These are the lyrical words that begin “Tales About Air,” a late 19th-century work of popular science by Julius Wagner, translated from Russian into Yiddish and published by the Kletskin publishing house in Vilnius around the turn of the century. The book is an introduction to the properties of air, air pressure, and wind. It was a time when there was an increased appetite and audience for Yiddish books on secular subjects, especially on the part of serious young autodidacts who had no opportunity for more formal education.

This copy of the book was once owned by the library of the Hevrah Mefitsei Haskalah (Society for the Promotion of Culture Among the Jews of Russia), an organization founded in St. Petersburg in 1863 with the financial support of wealthy Jews to disseminate Russian language and culture among the Jews in order to encourage assimilation and to remove the cultural and religious barriers between Jews and Russians.  The founders believed that this would hasten the granting of civic equality to Jews.  The society's practical objectives were to teach Russian language and culture, to promote secular education, and to publish books and periodicals in Russian and Hebrew. There were branches in Moscow, Riga, Kiev, Grodno, Vilna, and other cities.

The records of the Hevrah Mefitsei Haskalah and this book (which is from the collection of the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania) have been digitized for the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Collections Project.

Roberta Newman is YIVO’s Director of Digital Initiatives.