Yiddish Is the Language They Speak in Their Dreams: Interview with Markus Krah

On Tuesday, February 25, at 7:00pm, YIVO’s Rose and Isidore Drench Memorial Fellow/Dora and Mayer Tendler Fellow Markus Krah will deliver a lecture based on his research: YIVO, Freud, and American Jewry: Discourse on Eastern Europe as a “Talking Cure” for American Jewish Ambivalence.

In the 1940s and 1950s, American Jewish leaders voiced concerns about the suppression and fragmentation of Jewishness in modern mass society and the pressure to assimilate to mainstream American expectations. Guided by Max Weinreich, who was intellectually engaged with Freudian ideas, YIVO advocated for a more holistic, integrated Jewishness modeled after the East European ideal of yidishkayt. YIVO was a key voice in a larger discourse, as American Jews encountered different images of what the East European past was about: shtetls and pogroms, piety and poverty, religious tradition and political progressivism, Hasidism and Socialism, among others.

Markus Krah’s dissertation traces these competing narratives in magazines, sermons, radio shows, and popular literature. His lecture will discuss the idea that this discourse served as a “talking cure,” as American Jews consciously searched the complex East European past for meaning and grounding in the complex American present.

Attend the event.

Markus Krah

Markus Krah is a Ph.D. candidate in Modern Jewish Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York and a lecturer at the Potsdam School of Jewish Theology in his native Germany. He is interested in American and European Jewish history, particularly in the cultural and intellectual engagement of Jews with the modern challenges and opportunities for Jewish identity. His dissertation focuses on the role of the East European past in 20th-century American Jewish explorations of new ways to understand their Jewishness. This week, he answered the following questions for Yedies.

Yedies: How were YIVO’s mission and work in the 1940s and 1950s compatible with American Jewish anxieties in that era about Jewish identity and assimilation?

MK: The leaders of YIVO, Max Weinreich in particular, sensed that American Jews had lost their spiritual moorings in the process of going  through a rapid modernization process, from traditional societies in Eastern Europe through immigration to integration into American society. In the 1950s, they were trying to find meaning in their Jewishness under very new circumstances in the post-Holocaust Jewish world and postwar America. YIVO saw its mission as the preservation of the legacy of East European Jewry—a broad, positive sense of Jewishness, yidishkayt—and making it useful for American Jews, as a model for finding meaning in identification with the Jewish heritage and the community with its Yiddish-based folk culture. And this identification of Jewishness as vital and creative, YIVO’s thinkers hoped, would prevent assimilation, by preserving Jews as a distinct ethnic group.

Yedies: Was YIVO in step or out of step with the zeitgeist? And if out of step, how conscious were Max Weinreich and other YIVO activists of serving as an alternative to prevailing trends?

MK: I think YIVO was very much in step with the zeitgeist in addressing these
concerns about identity and assimilation, and also in its focus on social science as the way to analyze the issues and find solutions to them. On the other hand, it seemed out of step with the prevailing trends when it came to its fierce commitment to Yiddish as the embodiment and vehicle of Jewishness. The number of Yiddish-speakers was declining, and English had become the language and culture in which most American Jews expressed their Jewishness.

I think Weinreich and his colleagues at the time were quite conscious of the fact that America was not immediately fertile soil for their vision of an autonomous Jewish culture based in Yiddish. Weinreich is reported to have said “Der amerikaner grund is a shteynerdiker” [America has stony soil]. But, by virtue of his ideological commitment to Yiddishism, he was convinced that it had to be made fertile.

Yedies: You’ve made an analogy between YIVO’s promotion of a holistic, integrated model of Jewishness with the Freudian talking cure. Can you say a little more about this?

MK: I’m not a psychologist, so I try to use these terms with caution, and I certainly don’t want to suggest that American Jewry was sick. But much of the concern about the state of mid-century American Jewry was expressed in psychological terms: Jews had “divided selves,” because they tried to be like everybody else in public and realized their Jewishness only in specific situations. This meant that they “repressed” their Jewishness, along with Jewish names or Yiddish accents, and therefore were “not well-adjusted,” but psychologically unstable, vulnerable, and fragmented. Weinreich is quoted, by Dan Miron, to have said that “if American Jews still dream as a group, Yiddish is the language they speak in their dream. It is still the idiom of their collective unconscious. For their personality to become whole they—or at least some of them—will have to go back to Yiddish one day. Otherwise, their enormous creative force will be blocked by an inner, psychic fragmentation.  … Somebody will have to spell out for them the contents of their dream, to elucidate the vision they saw with bleary eyes.”

Yedies: How consciously did Max Weinreich use Freudianism to shape YIVO’s work and message?

MK: Weinreich knew Freud’s work, he translated it into Yiddish, and he had also studied contemporary issues in social psychology. So I think it was quite a conscious   application of psychology to the individual and communal concerns that American Jews faced at the time.

Yedies: Did YIVO’s work in America represent a radical break with what it had been doing before the war in Vilna? Or was it more of a continuum?

MK: Weinreich sensed that in that period American Jews were in a somewhat similar situation as East European Jews when YIVO was founded twenty-five years earlier. They were no longer anchored in the traditional way of life and therefore needed new ways to make Jewishness meaningful. But of course, America in 1945 was a very different place from Vilna in 1925, so the answer might be a paradox: YIVO tried to establish continuities in the face of radical change. The tension inherent in this constellation is what made YIVO’s work so challenging – and so rich and fascinating for the scholar.