By Executive Editor Caroline Luce

Set in motion by the Yiddish Book Center, which announced the creation of their Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library in 1997, the “digital turn” in Yiddish Studies has injected new energy and vitality into the field. Like the advancements in printing technology in the 19th century, digital technologies have greatly expanded the availability of Yiddish materials, providing unprecedented ease of access to rare and remote Yiddish works from around the world. This access to a proliferation of Yiddish works has opened Yiddish culture to a broad new audience and, when coupled with translation initiatives, has enabled scholars and members of the public without Yiddish-language skills to examine the lives of Yiddish-speaking Jews with new depth and detail. Digital technologies have also enabled scholars to aggregate, process, and evaluate those materials in new and provocative ways, allowing them to expand the scope and scale of their studies and adopt new translational approaches that have helped to bring the global dimensions of Yiddish culture into focus. Others have used digital technologies to develop exciting new forms of engagement with Yiddish language and culture, including new digital history projects like the online edition of the YIVO Encyclopedia and the Digital Yiddish Theater Project, new online forums including In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies, and new multi-modal cultural programs like Yiddishkayt.

Inspired by these groundbreaking efforts, “Recovering Yiddish Culture in Los Angeles” aims to apply the digital strategies that have so greatly enhanced the field of Yiddish Studies to recover a long-forgotten body of Yiddish works: those produced by the Yiddish writers and poets who settled in Los Angeles. Published in small batches thousands of miles from the cultural capitols of Europe and the American east coast, these works – nearly 100 books and several dozen periodicals - have received very little scholarly attention. To date, the only attempt to characterize the works published in Los Angeles was made by Max Vorspan and Lloyd Gartner in their seminal 1970 study, History of the Jews of Los Angeles, in which they claimed that, “the [Yiddish] writers seemed bewitched by the drastic contrast between Southern California and their earlier homes.”*  Since then, there have been no scholarly investigations of Los Angeles’ Yiddish language press or its various Yiddish newspapers, journals, and literary circles, only a very few of works written by the local Yiddish writers have been translated, and there are no available biographies of the writers who settled in Los Angeles or studies of their literary careers. As a result, the Yiddish culture produced by the writers, journalists and poets who lived in Los Angeles in the first half of the twentieth century has largely been lost to history.

While dismissive in its tone, Vorspan and Gartner’s characterization accords surprisingly well with those of scholars of literature in the American West. Indeed, literary historian David Wrobel has identified the themes of “movement” and “adjustment” as defining features of Western American writing in the 20th century.** In his work on the literature of Los Angeles, David Fine similarly identified consistent themes of dislocation and estrangement in the works of writers there, particularly in the 1920s, when local writers like Don Ryan, Mark Lee Luther, and Louis Adamic adopted the voice of outsiders to examine the particularities of their new home. Vorspan and Gartner may have thought the Yiddish works produced in Los Angeles were out of step with concurrent trends and styles elsewhere, but the findings of Wrobel and Fine suggest that they may have fit comfortably within regional and local literary traditions.

There is also ample evidence to suggest that the Yiddish writers of Los Angeles worked actively to nurture and cultivate a new, western style of Yiddish literature that would give voice to the unique experiences of the Jews in Los Angeles and on the Pacific coast. They organized literary circles and published journals to provide forums for their work, organized book committees to support one another’s volumes, and even, for a time, operated a cooperative printing house for Yiddish-language publications. These men and women had been involved in artistic movements and literary circles elsewhere and brought with them styles and ideas about Yiddish that they then adjusted to suit their new environment. Yiddish was, after all, an inherently dialectical linguistic culture, developing through the interaction between local/regional/national cultural traditions and folkways and global Jewish ones. As the works collected here reveal, the Yiddish writers who settled in Los Angeles experimented with new themes and motifs, attempting to speak to the concerns of the local Jewish community while also reflecting national and international movements so that Los Angeles would become “a tsvayg fun dem Yidishn lebn in der gantser velt (a branch of the Yiddish life of the entire world).”***

This digital anthology project aims to map the Yiddish literary landscape of Los Angeles that these local writers created. Each author is presented as a “path” linking biographies and scholarly analysis to selected works, in both Yiddish and English, and bibliographies of works by and about him or her. Using metadata tags and other digital tools, the anthology also identifies the shared themes, topics and motifs they used in their work, exploring what the defining characteristics of the L.A. style of Yiddish writing might be. And using digital visualizations, it examines the social networks and relationships that the writers formed, in Los Angeles and beyond, to consider the literary and artistic influences on their work. Capitalizing on the heuristic potential of digital humanities, “Recovering Yiddish Culture in Los Angeles” aims to situate the works of the Yiddish writers and poets of Los Angeles in their relevant social, cultural, and spatial contexts.

In “Recovering Yiddish Culture in Los Angeles,” I have also aimed not only to remake the form of the traditional, printed anthology but also the process through which anthologies are typically created. As literary historian Cary Nelson has argued, traditional anthologies distance the texts included from the socio-economic and cultural contexts in which they were created, treating them as transcendent objets d’art whose meaning exists outside of the specific historical moment of their creation. By linking the texts to a variety of historical materials and content and displaying them in multimodal ways, I have worked to re-embed the texts in their original social, cultural and spatial contexts as a means of encouraging viewers to read them as historical artifacts.

I have also strayed from the integrative, single-author editorial approach to build this anthology, and embraced a more collaborative, decentralized model. Rather than having one editor to select the works and impose his or her judgment - based on ideology, political-leanings, or ever-problematic notions of “taste” – on the works as a whole, I have created a more collaborative process, allowing each of our contributors to choose which works to include, so long as they stay within the parameters of our focus on Los Angeles, and to translate them in accordance with their own stylistic preferences. Those contributors include scholars from a variety of fields and campuses across the country, professional and amateur translators, students, and members of the public and local and national organizations devoted to the preservation and advancement of Yiddish Culture, each organization and individual contributing resources and time and in turn, adding their perspective to the project

I hope as we expand the body of works included in this digital anthology, our collaborative community will grow as well. “Recovering Yiddish Culture in Los Angeles” is a work in progress – endlessly editable and expandable – and instead of presenting a conclusive, comprehensive narrative of this chapter in Yiddish literary history, my hope is to use the process of creating this anthology to analyze and assess this body of work, and to explore the ideas developed transparently, making them part of the digital project. I encourage anyone who visits this site to join our collaborative community by offering their comments on the works included, their feedback about the translations, and any additional works or essays they would like to submit through an email at cjs@humnet.ucla.edu. 

If you have any more information about an item you've seen on our website or if you are the copyright owner and believe our website has not properly attributed your work to you or has used it without permission, we want to hear from you. Please email Mapping Jewish Los Angeles at cjs@humnet.ucla.edu with your contact information and a link to relevant content.