The Ambassadors of Yiddishland

The dissertation explores the history of the Yiddish PEN Club and examines how it represented Yiddish literature within PEN International, which issues it raised and which strategies it used to advocate for Jewish and Yiddish concerns. Its inclusion into the writers’ association in 1927 constituted a significant step toward recognizing Yiddish, which for a long time has been dismissed as »jargon«, as a literary language. With its head office in Vilnius and branches in Warsaw and New York, the Yiddish PEN Club reflected the transterritoriality of Yiddish literature on an institutional level. Its establishment ultimately served as a powerful expression of the concept of a transnational language-based »Yiddishland«.

Its members included the most renowned literati, who were also cultural activists in a broader sense. Through PEN, the Yiddish PEN Club represented Yiddish literature in an international organization for the first time. Although the considerable success for the international recognition of their literature, Yiddish writers faced existential dangers to their culture from the 1920s on until the 1960s, the period taken into account in the dissertation. Linguistic assimilation, economic crisis, antisemitism, Nazi persecution and the murder of millions of Yiddish speakers – readers and writers alike –, and Stalinist repression and the liquidation of Soviet Yiddish writers have endangered the future of Yiddish in different ways. The dissertation sheds light on the various reactions by the Yiddish PEN Club to the constant uncertainty of its culture’s existence.