Di gantse velt af a firmeblank: The World of Jewish Letterheads
Assemble the letterheads of Jewish organizations, institutions, and individuals in Europe, North and South America, and Palestine from the 1890s to the eve of World War II in 1939 and you have a portrait of the Jewish world: transnational; diverse in language, political, and religious orientation; and flourishing.
Di gantse velt af a firmeblank (The Whole World on a Letterhead) is an experiment in building that portrait. Here, we hope to bring you several times a month, a different example of letterhead from a single collection in the YIVO Archives, the Papers of Kalman Marmor.
Marmor, a Yiddish writer and cultural activist, was born October 11, 1879 in Mayshigola, Vilna Gubernia (today Maišiagala, Lithuania). In 1906, he settled in the U.S. Initially active with the Labor Zionist movement, he later became a Communist. He was an organizer of the 1937 World Yiddish Culture Congress, cultural director of the International Workers Order, and a contributor to the Communist Yiddish newspaper, Morgn Frayhayt. Between 1933 and 1936, he lived in Kiev, where he worked at the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture and prepared scholarly editions of the work of American Yiddish poets and writers. During Stalin’s Great Terror, the Institute was liquidated, and much of its leadership was arrested and executed. Marmor, an American citizen, returned to the U.S. He died in Los Angeles in 1956.
His papers at YIVO contain several thousand letters from the turn of the 20th century to the 1950s. He had an astonishingly diverse array of correspondents, not limited to Zionist and Communist activists.
From Shlomo Epshtein in St. Petersburg, Russia to Kalman Marmor in Philadelphia, [September 14?], 1906. (RG 205, Folder 116)
Shlomo Epshtein was the publisher of Evreiskaia zhizn’ (Jewish Life), a Russian-language Zionist weekly and monthly, published in St. Petersburg from 1904 to 1907. He also, it seems, had an arrangement to serve as a special Russian correspondent for Der yidisher kemfer (The Jewish Militant), the Yiddish Labor Zionist publication that Marmor edited. It was the time of turmoil in Russia known as the Revolution of 1905. Left-wing Jewish socialist and Zionists took part in the strikes and demonstrations demanding political reforms, but even apolitical Jews were swept up in the violent pogroms that swept Russia.
Here, Epshtein apologizes for a delay in sending his dispatch. The authorities shut down the Evreiskaia zhizn’ weekly and so he couldn’t arrange for anyone to translate his piece into Yiddish. Apparently, he was not that comfortable writing in Yiddish: he also apologizes for the poor style of his letter.
He asks Marmor to make sure that all of his dispatches are identified as being written by “a regular special correspondent” and also asks Marmor to let him know by telegram when the first report appears in print. If he doesn’t get the telegram, he warns, he won’t send additional dispatches.
Series curated by Roberta Newman; Images digitized by Vital Zajka. Biographical information on Kalman Marmor from biographical note by Daniel Soyer in the inventory to RG 205, Papers of Kalman Marmor.