A Jewish Refugee in New York

Kadya Molodovsky, Anita Norich

Description

Rivke Zilberg, a 20-year-old Jewish woman, arrives in New York shortly after the Nazi invasion of Poland, her home country. Struggling to learn a new language and cope with a different way of life in the United States, Rivke finds herself keeping a journal about the challenges and opportunities of this new land. In her attempt to find a new life as a Jewish immigrant in the US, Rivke shares the stories of losing her mother to a bombing in Lublin, jilting a fiancé who has made his way to Palestine, and a flirtatious relationship with an American "allrightnik."

In this fictionalized journal originally published in Yiddish, author Kadya Molodovsy provides keen insight into the day-to-day activities of the large immigrant Jewish community of New York. By depicting one woman's struggles as a Jewish refugee in the US during WWII, Molodovsky points readers to the social, political, and cultural tensions of that time and place.

Introduction / Anita Norich

From Lublin to New York: The Journal of Rivke Zilberg, A Young Jewish Refugee / A novel by Kadya Molodovsky

Sujets

• Judaïsme
• Judaïsme
• Judaïsme
• New York
• Immigration
• Fiction
• Migration
• Novel
• Refugee
• Poland
• Nazisme
• United States
• Jew
• 21st Century
• History of the Americas
• Judaism
• Nazism
• Literature
• Jews
• Nazismo
• Nueva York
• HISTORY

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253040770
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

A JEWISH REFUGEE IN NEW YORK
THE MODERN JEWISH EXPERIENCE
Deborah Dash Moore and Marsha L. Rozenblit, editors
Paula Hyman, founding coeditor
A JEWISH REFUGEE IN NEW YORK
Rivke Zilberg s Journal
Kadya Molodovsky
Translated by Anita Norich
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
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
2019 by Anita Norich
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. 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 Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN 978-0-253-04075-6 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-253-04076-3 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-04079-4 (ebook)
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CONTENTS
Introduction / Anita Norich
A Jewish Refugee in New York: Rivke Zilberg s Journal / A novel by Kadya Molodovsky
INTRODUCTION
O N M AY 30, 1941, THE FIRST INSTALLMENT OF a serialized novel appeared in the New York Yiddish newspaper Morgn-zhurnal (Morning journal). Entitled Fun Lublin biz Nyu-york: Togbukh fun Rivke Zilberg (From Lublin to New York: The diary of Rivke Zilberg), the novel tells the story of a twenty-year-old refugee who flees the Nazis and comes to live at her aunt s home in New York. Rivke keeps a journal that begins on December 15, 1939, and ends ten months later on October 6, 1940. In her 107 entries, Rivke looks back to Poland and forward to possibilities in the United States. Knowing of her mother s death in the German bombing of Lublin, 1 and unsure of the fate of her father, brothers, or the man she was to marry, Rivke must now contend with the difficulties of immigration. Her fianc , she learns after months of uncertainty, has made his way to Palestine and urges her to join him. But having been pursued by two young, rather self-satisfied American Jews, she settles on one and remains in the United States. Yet her views of American Jewry are hardly flattering. One Yiddish reviewer of the book wrote that Molodovsky saw the tragic loneliness of American Jews . . . that hides itself behind the three foundations of Jewish life here: making money, spending money, and the good times of parties, movies, card games. 2
Fun Lublin biz Nyu-york , or A Jewish Refugee in New York , as it is called in this English translation, is not a novel about the Holocaust in the familiar sense, but it is written under its palpable shadow. The story illustrates the mundane, ongoing lives of those not directly in the line of fire as well as the undercurrent of horror and uncertainty with which those lives were lived. Nor is this a love story in any traditional sense. It is the story of a young woman shaped by historical crises, trying to make sense of her place in a bewildering, threatening world. Rivke seems alternately callow and thoughtful; she is as likely to comment on her cousin s hairstyle and her desire for nicer shoes as on the effects of American assimilation or the fear of what is happening in Europe. Throughout her reflections, Lublin-invaded, devastated, the site of death and massive destruction-remains home. Rivke s refrain of I don t know or Who knows? is both a question and a plea voiced by a woman bereft of everything familiar. Frequent metaphoric uses of fire, conflagration, and burning point the reader beyond the symbol to the real inferno. The book confronts us with a protagonist whom we may or may not like or admire but with whom we are compelled to sympathize.
The novel was serialized daily (except Saturday, when the newspaper did not print) until August 11, 1941, and appeared as a book in 1942 under the imprimatur Papirene brik (paper bridge), which Molodovsky and her husband Simcha Lev, a printer, used when they published some of her works. 3 (The paper bridge is a reference to poems in Molodovsky s oeuvre and to a legend about messianic days when Jews will cross into the Promised Land on a paper bridge made of Torah and learning.) The serialized version followed the exigencies of newspaper publication, including the amount of space the paper had on a given day; dated entries and even paragraphs of the journal could be spread out over two or more issues of the newspaper. Molodovsky (or Lev, the printer) made some editorial emendations when they published the book. Spelling was standardized, most Yiddish translations of the newspaper s transliterated English were dropped, errors in dating were corrected, and, infrequently, a sentence was added or deleted. They also made more substantive changes. In the book, titles were added to each journal entry, as if to highlight the fact that this was, in fact, a novel. More significantly, the subtitle was changed from Dos togbukh fun a yidish flikhtling-meydl (The diary of a Jewish refugee girl) to Togbukh fun Rivke Zilberg (Diary of Rivke Zilberg). The earlier version is more compelling and is resonant of the novel s major themes and character. Because neither Molodovsky nor Lev left any explanation for the changes that were made, we can only speculate about their motives. Perhaps refugee implied some hope for those who needed refuge, a hope that had been betrayed in the months separating the two publications. Perhaps a focus on Rivke in New York suggested a future that was difficult but necessary to imagine for those who were painfully conscious of the devastated past. Molodovsky and other Yiddish writers from Eastern Europe, living in the United States as the war unfolded, wrote about that past, mourning the people and places that were being destroyed while they were safe in New York. Yet they also imagined what it would mean to prepare a future for Yiddish and for those who might be saved. 4
Although Rivke reflects primarily on the events of the war affecting her immediate family, Molodovsky was writing with a broader and more frightening knowledge. Born in 1894 in Bereze (or Byaroza), a small town in the Grodno province in what is now Belarus, Molodovsky s movements-from Russian small towns to Odessa, Kiev, Warsaw, New York, and Tel Aviv-encompassed the trajectories of Jewish migration in the twentieth century. In her teenage and young adult years, she was compelled to relocate many times, pursuing education and employment as a teacher of Yiddish and Hebrew and barely escaping the worst horrors of pogroms, war, and revolution. Like many Yiddish writers of the last century, she was not only peripatetic but also multilingual and well educated in both secular and religious subjects. Although this range of knowledge and activity is usually ascribed to the men of her generation, she is perhaps the most prominent instance of similarly educated Jewish women. As a socialist Zionist engaged in educational reform, she was committed to the politics and culture associated with Yiddish. Her husband was a historian, a printer, and a Communist. In 1935, a time when it was exceedingly difficult to come to the United States, Molodovsky made the journey at the invitation of the publishing house Matones for a much-heralded visit initially understood to be a lengthy stay. 5 Molodovsky was reunited with her father and sisters in Philadelphia before settling in New York, where Yiddish literature thrived and seemed to have a promising future. It took another three terrifying years, filled with bureaucratic obstacles, before her husband was able to join her.
For Lev, and Molodovsky herself, it was just in time. On September 1, 1939, the Germans invaded Poland. Warsaw, which had rivaled-some said overshadowed-New York as a Yiddish center, and which had been their home until the war, surrendered to the Nazis on September 29. Lublin, where Molodovsky s character Rivke had lived, was bombed on September 8 and was occupied by the Nazis ten days later. But knowledge of the dangers facing Jews was inescapable years before the bombs dropped. Hitler was named chancellor of Germany in January 1933. In Poland, so-called ghetto benches (segregated seating for Jews in universities) were being used as early as 1935; quotas followed in 1937. Germany annexed Austria in March 1938. The German Kristallnacht pogrom destroyed synagogues, Jewish homes, and businesses on November 9 and 10, 1938. The Kindertransport of 1938 to 1940, in which Great Britain granted more than nine thousand children asylum, was a response to that destruction.
Rivke s journal entries in A Jewish Refugee in New York postdate these events. From her March 2, 1940, entry and elsewhere, it is clear that Rivke, like other Yiddish newspaper readers, learned about these atrocities daily. Today, Rivke writes, I read in the newspaper about what is being done to Jews in Lublin. Even though I already knew about it earlier, it was upsetting. Her journal entries predate still more terrible catastrophes. During the dates of the novel s serialization in 1941, readers would have read the columns of Molodovsky s novel alongside headlines about the war s battles and the murder of Jews. When the book appeared months later, there was even more horrifying news. Chelmno, the first extermination camp in Poland, began murdering Jews in early December 1941. Soon thereafter the Nazis turned camps ostensibly built for labor into death camps. The most notorious of these, Auschwitz-Birkenau, established in April 1940, began experimenting with Zyklon B gas in September 1941, which was followed within months by mass murder on an unprecedented scale: Belzec, bui