“America – A New World for Jewish Children”: An Unknown Letter by Sholem Aleichem in the YIVO Archives
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Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture in Eastern European Jewish Studies
The Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Fellowship Admission: Free Registration is required. |
Within the Herman Bernstein collection at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research lies an unknown and previously unpublished letter by Sholem Aleichem (Shalom Rabinowitz, 1859–1916), one of Yiddish literature’s most renowned writers. Unidentified for over a century, it was first recognized in 2017, 101 years after the author’s death. In the letter, Sholem Aleichem addresses the theme of Jewish cultural assimilation in general, and Americanization in particular.
Apparently written not long after Sholem Aleichem first arrived in America in 1906, the letter is significant because it demonstrates his approach to the phenomenon of Jewish American children, a subject which he developed during the last decade of his life and which culminated in his final literary work, Motl, the Cantor’s Son. A close reading of the letter sheds new light on the his impressions of American Jewish immigrants and, in particular, of American Jewish children. The excitement and fascination generated by this topic would turn out to be one of his main literary subjects until his death 10 years later.
In this presentation, Yael Levi will explore the letter’s content, situating it within the historical and cultural context of Sholem Aleichem’s biography and epistolary legacy, with a particular focus on the pivotal period of Jewish migration and the experience of East European Jewish children in America.
About the Speaker
Yael Levi is a historian specializing in modern Yiddish culture and American Jewish history. She earned her Ph.D. in History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she currently serves as a postdoctoral fellow and adjunct lecturer in Yiddish culture. Recently, Yael completed a year-long fellowship at Harvard's Center for Jewish Studies and at YIVO, where she was the recipient of the 2023-2024, Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Fellowship, focusing on a monograph about the phenomenon of suicide among East European Jewish immigrants in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Her books include “From The Cellar to the Top Floor: The Emergence of the Yiddish and Hebrew Press in the United States, 1870-1900" (2024) and "The Spirit that Materials Bear: A bilingual Yiddish-Hebrew Edition of Devorah Fogel's Poetry (2022), both in Hebrew.