A 19th century Yiddish reading list, pt. 1 - Why?

Before I went to Senegal last year, I put together a little reading list, a reader's bibliography, of Senegalese literature. Making the list was highly educational for me. So was reading the books, sure.

I don't have any plans to go anywhere anytime soon, so I am going to repeat the experiment with some place that can now only be visited through books: the Pale of Settlement, the shtetl, the New York City tenements. I'm going to read some Yiddish literature.

Modern Yiddish literature was created in the late 19th century, specifically 1864, in the serialized short novel The Little Man by S. Y. Abramovitsh aka Mendele Mocher Sforim. Before Abramovitsh/Sforim, there were traditional tales in Yiddish, and some religious writing, but no novels, no short stories. The elite wrote in Hebrew, which could not be read by most Jews. Sforim wanted to popularize, and to preserve.

Preservation - that's the center of the study of Yiddish now. Yiddish is a dying language, despite the wealth of its literary tradition. Harold Bloom, a native Yiddish speaker, recently wrote about this in an uncharacteristically humble essay in The New York Review of Books, highly recommended. Bloom foresees the day when Yiddish survives only in its literature. I'm not much help here - I'll be reading translations.

The three great early Yiddish writers, Sforim, Sholom Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz, all wrote, extensively, about the Jewish villages, the shtetl, in what is now Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. And so did later writers - I. B. Singer, Chaim Grade, Lamed Shapiro. This world is gone, utterly gone, destroyed by the Nazis. Irving Howe's anthology A Treasury of Yiddish Stories is dedicated "To the Six Million." Can a reader of Yiddish literature get out from under the shadow of the Holocaust, and read these writers on their own terms? Should he?

The strange, wonderful thing is that all three of these authors are basically comic writers - the whole tradition is basically comic, in the face of pogroms and persecution and poverty. That's one good reason to read them - they're funny. Or so I'm led to believe.

Tomorrow, I'll put together my little reader's bibliography of Sforim, Aleichem, and Peretz. Then on Wednesday, I'll move on to everyone else. I'm sticking to the 19th century, so no Singer brothers, for example. But there's plenty to read, and I don't think I ever mentioned that the Wuthering Expectations 19th century is longer than one might think, ending on November 11, 1918.

I'm going to create a sidebar for these posts as an invitation to help me fill out my list of books. What should I read? The mysterious, vanishing obooki says that 2009 is his year for Yiddish literature, too. So that's two of us.