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 H. Bailowitz of the Progressive Workers’ Center in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, N.Y., to Kalman Marmor, December 18, 1928. (RG 205, Folder 101)

An invitation to a New Year’s Eve banquet in honor of the opening of a new “workers’ center” at 48 Bay 28th Street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Today, a Young Israel synagogue occupies the site.

The “A. Olkin” listed on the stationery as a member of the Board of Directors may be Abraham Olkin, who went on to serve as the secretary of IKOR (Yidisher kolonizatsye organizatsye in rusland – Jewish Colonization Association in Russia) an American support group for Jewish agricultural settlements in the Soviet Union; the first national secretary of the left-wing YKUF (Yidisher kultur farband – Jewish Culture Association); and the Philadelphia and Los Angeles manager of the Morgn Frayhayt Yiddish daily.

Series curated by Roberta Newman; Images digitized by Vital Zajka.