Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl

Roberta Newman, Alice Nakhimovsky

Description

The everyday lives of Yiddish-speaking Jews through letters

At the turn of the 20th century, Jewish families scattered by migration could stay in touch only through letters. Jews in the Russian Empire and America wrote business letters, romantic letters, and emotionally intense family letters. But for many Jews who were unaccustomed to communicating their public and private thoughts in writing, correspondence was a challenge. How could they make sure their spelling was correct and they were organizing their thoughts properly? A popular solution was to consult brivnshtelers, Yiddish-language books of model letters. Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl translates selections from these model-letter books and includes essays and annotations that illuminate their role as guides to a past culture.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Translation and Romanization

1. The World of Brivnshtelers
Encountering modernity
The brivnshteler and traditional education
The brivnshteler and the history of model letters
Yiddish language, Yiddish publishing, and the brivnshteler
The brivnshteler and literature
What makes the brivnshteler Jewish?
2. From the Pages of Brivnshtelers
Modernity and mobility
Parents and children: Russia
Parents and children: America
Courtship and marriage: Russia
Courtship and marriage: America
Business
Judaism and Jewish Identity
Imagining America
3. Beyond Letters
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Jewish
• HISTORY
• Jews
• Jewish studies
• Letter
• Diaries

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253012074
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl

Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl
YIDDISH LETTER MANUALS FROM RUSSIA AND AMERICA

Alice Nakhimovsky Roberta Newman
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931
2014 by Alice Nakhimovsky and Roberta Newman All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo-copying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nakhimovsky, Alice S., author.
Dear Mendl, dear Reyzl : Yiddish letter manuals from Russia and America / Alice Nakhimovsky and Roberta Newman.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01199-2 (cl : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01203-6 (pb : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01207-4 (eb) 1. Letter writing, Yiddish. 2. Yiddish letters-Translations into English. I. Newman, Roberta, 1958- author. II. Title.
PJ 5118. N 35 2014
839 .16308-dc23
2013039248
1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15 14
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Translation and Romanization
1. The World of the Brivnshteler
Encountering Modernity
The Brivnshteler and Traditional Education
The Brivnshteler and the History of Model Letters
Yiddish Language, Yiddish Publishing, and the Brivnshteler
The Brivnshteler and Yiddish Literature
What Makes the Brivnshteler Jewish?
2. From the Pages of Brivnshtelers
Modernity and Mobility
Parents and Children: Russia
Parents and Children: America
Courtship and Marriage: Russia
Courtship and Marriage: America
Business
Judaism and Jewish Identity
Imagining America
3. Beyond Letters
Bibliography
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Brivnshtelers
Other Sources
Index
PREFACE
In 1913, Sonia Lubelski, a young woman living in the Lithuanian shtetl of Baltrumants, wrote a letter to her fianc in America. The two young people were trying to negotiate a present and a future through the mail, and Sonia was still uncertain about whether to join Morris-the former Meyshe Abba-in Lynn, Massachusetts. I too want to put an end to the paper life, she writes, hopefully. But her next words are more resigned: As the women say, They take people and they exchange them for paper. 1
Sonia and Meyshe Abba were hardly the only young couple who were living through the mail. A paper life-a life of correspondence-ran parallel to the real lives of East European Jews at the turn of the twentieth century. People wrote letters of all kinds: family letters, business letters, courtship letters. For a highly migratory people, letters were a necessity. Even within the Russian Empire, sons left home to study, or to make a living, or to board with in-laws, or because they had been drafted. Daughters left with husbands or went alone to seek a better life in big cities. Men traveled to seek business opportunities. And few families were unaffected by emigration.
Letters presented all sorts of opportunities beyond satisfying the desire to maintain contact with loved ones. Write the right kind of letter, and you present yourself as you want to be seen; use good arguments, and you impel others, for example, your grownup children, to act in ways that match your expectations. But to take advantage of these opportunities, lower-middle-class Jews needed skills they might not have had a chance to acquire. Jews in Russia and Poland needed help in writing correct Yiddish, and sometimes, Hebrew and Russian (in America, they needed English). They needed examples of how to express feelings in a formal or classy or modern way, and models for constructing effective arguments. For all these purposes, people turned to the brivnshteler , an anthology of letters for business and private correspondence.
The idea of correspondence to copy-the occasional letter-writing manual actually leaves blanks to fill in-is by nature a little comical: letters, especially of the family and romantic variety, are supposed to be spontaneous and sincere. People were aware of the paradox. The heroine of Isaac Bashevis Singer s story A Crown of Feathers dismisses an unattractive suitor with the comment that he talks like a brivnshteler. 2 Sometimes, brivnshtelers even poked fun at themselves, as in this joke from a manual of 1900:
The Convenient Brifshteller
A not too bright young man wanted to write a letter to a girlfriend but didn t know how to begin. So he bought a brifshteller and immediately found the sort of letter he wanted. He wrote it down exactly the way he found it and sent it on its way. The girlfriend also had the exact same brifshteller and when she found the letter there, she answered him on the spot: Mein herr! I have received your letter, adding the page number on which his reply to her letter could be found. 3
The mockery was widespread-this was not a genre that commanded respect. And yet these cheaply printed handbooks provided thousands of readers with formulas for turning private, often highly emotional, real-life situations into expressions on paper. A standard brivnshteler had sections for love letters, business letters, letters asking for a loan, and letters between parents and children that were linked to particularly Jewish dilemmas. If a reader wanted to know how to write to a son who had been drafted into the Russian Army, if a wife needed help writing to her husband who had emigrated to America years before, there was a brivnshteler that had anticipated the situation. In short, the brivnshteler taught its readers how to live a paper life.
The specificity and emotional intensity of the brivnshteler allowed it to function as a kind of cheap literature. The sensationalist letters that appear in some brivnshtelers-letters, for example, from abandoned wives-served the same Jewish audience that, in Yiddish-speaking America, read shund (lowbrow) literature and pored over the confessions in the advice column of the Forverts newspaper. But however indispensable this entertainment aspect might have been, the core of the brivnshteler was pedagogical.
Aside from letters, brivnshtelers featured varieties of lists and guides, some useful for business (information on postage, place names, forms of address, even lessons on bookkeeping); and others helpful to the composer of any kind of letter (lists of how to spell men s and women s names; names of months and days of the week in different languages). Jewish men, whose base-level traditional education did not include instruction in secular practicalities like writing in their native language, turned to the brivnshteler for self-instruction. In it, they found not only a guide to writing good, educated Yiddish, but also the meaning and spelling of Hebrew phrases that were standard for openings and closings in the correspondence of more highly educated elites.
Teachers of handwriting and spelling- shraybers -also made use of brivnshtelers, either in the kheyder (traditional elementary school), or in private lessons at home. The target learners in a home setting were often girls. Proficiency in secular skills like business correspondence and foreign languages would boost their worth as brides without challenging the male sphere of religious learning.
Another pedagogical function of the brivnshteler was foreign-language instruction. Bilingual brivnshtelers served not only as textbooks of foreign languages, but also as manuals of foreign behavior. Yiddish-speakers who wanted to assimilate Russian manners and attitudes could learn from Yiddish-Russian brivnshtelers how to write a passionate (as opposed to decorous) love letter or how to write a letter of friendship between men. Readers of Harkavy s 1902 American manual, Amerikanisher briefen-shteler un speller (American brivnshteler and speller), could study the American approach to courtship and friendship, presented in American English with a complete Yiddish gloss.
The focus of this book is on the ways that brivnshtelers portray and reflect Jewish life in both Eastern Europe and America during the latter part of the nineteenth century, and the first decade or so of the twentieth. We approach the letters as social history documents and also as literary texts, but with the acknowledgment that unlike prose that aspires to art, these texts are distinguished by their unapologetic pursuit of banality. Unlike today s off-the-shelf texts-for example, outr birthday cards-brivnshtelers rarely try to push the envelope of the genre. What they were after was fluent banality, the kind that would enable users to fit in as people who understood acceptable modern patterns of discourse and behavior. The scope of instruction was extremely broad. It ranged, on the personal end, from the composition of love letters to the crafting of a moralistic or impatient letter to your adult child-and on the business end, from how to properly announce the opening of an import-export business to how to mollify someone to whom you owe a rather large debt.
The pursuit of banality was probably not conscious, and involved some contradictions. On the