Yiddishist in the Mayrev: Yiddish Poetry and Jewish Women in Los Angeles, 1920-1950s

Abstract

“Yiddishist in the Mayrev: Yiddish Poetry and Jewish Women in Los Angeles 1920-1950s,” examines how Jewish women in the mid-twentieth century made Los Angeles a Yiddish-speaking place, and reshaped American yidishe kultur in the process. These poets employed western environmental motifs in their poetry, including natural landscapes and urban structures, to grapple with changing racial demographics in their L.A. neighborhood, Boyle Heights, the interracial partnerships that emerged particularly between Jewish and Mexican residents there, and the physical urban changes that occurred in the neighborhood during the postwar years. Their commitment to yidishe kultur—an ideology of an autonomous culture that tethered Jewish immigrants together through the Yiddish language and Ashkenazi culture—and their focus on western motifs, symbols, and archetypes created a Yiddish literary style distinctive to the American West. Through analyzing Yiddish poetic works that utilize western themes this thesis demonstrates how these women writers responded to international and domestic events in Los Angeles. This further illustrates how Yiddish culture transformed in the American West but did not disappear after the 1920s, when Jewish immigration from Europe drastically decreased due to the passage of two national origin bills in 1921 and 1924. This analysis also highlights how Jewish women crafted Yiddish culture in the American West. While both Jewish men and women contributed to this place-making process in Los Angeles, I focus on three prolific Jewish women poets who were all part of a communal group of Yiddish writers associated with the Yiddish Cultural Club in Los Angeles, founded in 1926: Shifra Weiss, Brokhe Kudli, and Esther Shumaitcher-Hirschbein. By analyzing these three women’s work the thesis adds new Yiddish source materials into a historical discussion predominantly focused on English source materials and male perspectives. All three of these women emigrated from Europe. Weiss and Kudli made their way through New York City and Shumaitcher moved to New York City from Calgary, Canada in 1918 with her husband Peretz Hirschbein. While these three women moved to Los Angeles at different points in their lives it was California and Los Angeles, not the Yiddishkeit centers of New York and to a lesser degree Chicago that influenced their works and style. This study will illuminate how their poetry reimagined yidishe kultur as a part of the American West and how they navigated international events in the mid-twentieth century, including the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, shifting racial demographics in Boyle Heights, and the construction of new urban landscapes to create their own distinct style. This style of western Yiddish writing combines motifs and themes of Jewish experiences and the American West to address the lived experiences of Yiddish culture in the West. I focus in particular on three substantial poems written by these women between 1953 and 1958: Shifra Weiss’ Kalifornie (California, 1953), Brokhe Kudli’s Fri-vayz (Freeways 1958), and Esther Shumaitcher-Hirschbein’s Kalifornye (California 1956). In addition to providing new non-English source materials, analyzing these Jewish women’s poems expands the American Yiddish literary canon, both in terms of gender and geography. Yiddish writing in California falls outside the period between 1890 and the 1920s that historians usually identify as the hightide of yidishe kultur in the United States. Scholars have also tended to focus on male writers as Jewish men assumed authority over Yiddish writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and as New York established itself as the hub for the male-centered Yiddish publishing world. It was precisely postwar Los Angeles’s limited number of Yiddish institutions that contributed to the inclusion of Jewish women writers. The L.A. Yiddish Cultural Club with its focus on creating a nonpartisan environment for all writers regardless of political and religious ideologies or gender and its emphasis on local publishing created an environment where women writers could flourish. Through this cultural institution women writers could continue to choose yidishe kultur as a cultural identity, while also reimagining and redefining what it meant. Yiddish cultural productions in the American West indicates that Yiddish did not “die” after the passage of comprehensive immigration restrictions in 1924, the accompanying decline of the Yiddish press, or the suburbanization and acculturation of Jews during the 1940s and 50s. Examining these women and their poetry shows how Yiddish culture did not disappear but was rather transformed as Jewish women travelled to the western United States and recontextualized the culture they carried.