By LUIS FIELDMAN
Emma Lyandres heard about the summer camp “Great Jewish Books” from a friend, and says she knew right away she wanted to join.
“I am interested in languages, philosophy, theology and history — basically anything with the humanities,” said Lyandres, a high school senior from South Bend, Indiana.
Lyandres is one of 72 students who attended the program at the Yiddish Book Center during two sessions in July and August.
The students, all rising juniors and seniors, read and studied modern Yiddish and Jewish literature, translated into English, and explored themes such as self-identity and the struggles between power and vulnerability in American culture.
Issac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool,” poetry by Dahlia Ravikovitch and some of Joann Sfar’s graphic novel, “The Rabbi’s Cat,” are among the selections included in the curriculum.
The program offers a way for the younger generation to connect with the culture and language of their grandparents and great-grandparents, says the book center’s executive director, Susan Bronson.
“We are very much interested in preserving this particular culture and creating ways to engage new generations in understanding its importance, beauty and value,” Bronson said.
Before World War II, two-thirds of the world’s Jews spoke Yiddish, a Germanic language written using the Hebrew alphabet. But, Bronson says, after millions of Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and much of the old-European Jewish, Yiddish-speaking world was destroyed, the language gradually receded for most secular Jews.
“A generation ago, people just wanted to assimilate and forget about where they came from,” Bronson said.
Today, she added, that is changing.
“Young people want to celebrate their culture and their ethnicity and their language and they want to know where they come from,” she said.
Through its Jewish literature program, organizers at the center say they aim to engage and educate that growing new audience.
“Great Jewish Books” started five years ago, but this summer, the center expanded its programming to two sessions, due to an increase in the number of applicants.
Accepted students participate on a full scholarship from the Yiddish Book Center, with room, board, meals, books and lessons all free of charge.
“We think its important for young people to understand and get to know the breadth of Jewish literature and inspire them to further study,” Bronson said. “Our mission is to rescue these books and to open them up to new audiences. One way to do that is through this program that brings young people in.”
The program is funded by private donors who believe students should be able to attend, regardless of the ability to pay, according to Bronson. Like other programs at the center, gifts and grants make it possible to expose new people to these stories.
Each morning, students took part in two seminars at the center, located on the Hampshire College campus in South Amherst, as well as in small-group discussions about the themes in the books and how they apply to their lives.
“Today, we talked about the split-self and belonging to multiple cultures at once,” Lyandres, the senior from South Bend, said during a lunch break at the Hampshire College Dining Commons on day-two of the camp. The ultimate question, she says, is: “Is one going to override the other?”
Activities each day also included hikes and other leisure activities.
The program is open to anyone who wants to learn about Jewish literature, regardless of his or her religious beliefs.
“What we do here is not just about connecting to Jewish kids who want to understand where they come from,” Bronson said. “I think it also resonates with people of all cultures and backgrounds because it relates to the American experience, which is an immigrant experience.”
Hannah Biener of Wilmington, Delaware, says she was looking for an educational Jewish program for the summer and this one stood out because it looked well-organized.
Biener, who says she considers herself “strongly Jewish,” will begin her senior year of high school in the fall.
“It’s fascinating looking at modern Jewish literature like I have not had the opportunity to do, and in this environment, everyone is super-interested in discussing the themes of the texts and exploring their own Jewish identity,” Biener said. “It’s been a very healthy experience for me.”
Harris Berger, another senior from South Bend, says the literary-based summer program was a good fit for him, as well.
“I like that it’s a Jewish program, but … the viewpoints are all very secular,” he said. “Its nice to approach it from that direction, especially because I grew up in a pretty religious area, so most things end up being about religion.”
The students in the program are self-selecting, says Josh Lambert, the book center’s academic director.
“They are people who really love to read, really care about the literature, that want to come to a program like this,” Lambert said. “It is a chance to talk at a high level and meet other people that like the same thing.”
On a Tuesday morning earlier this month, in a classroom in the Yiddish Book Center, 12 students dressed in casual summer clothing, shorts and T-shirts, arrived for their second lesson of the day. As they took their seats around the rectangular table, their teacher, Lambert told them the day’s theme: “power and vulnerability.”
Lambert projected onto a whiteboard a copy of a New York Times article from the early 1900s, and asked the students to compare the news account to a 1907 short story, “The Kiss” by Lamed Shapiro, they had read earlier.
Both were about a pogrom, which Lambert described as “a word for getting pitchforks and attacking Jewish people.”
The New York Times article read, in part, “A serious outbreak against the Jews in Cracow, Galicia, is reported in a Vienna dispatch to the Lokal-Anzeiger of Berlin. A mob, headed by members of the Polish Legion and students, raided the Jewish quarters, plundered the shops, and committed other excesses. One man was killed and twentyone persons were injured badly.”
The students said they found the news account informative, but lacking a certain emotional element. In contrast, the descriptive language in Shapiro’s story really drove home what the victims experienced, said student Annelise Goldman of Chicago.
She quoted a short excerpt from the story: “Reb Shakhne’s hands and feet were shaking and there was an unbearably bitter taste in his mouth.”
That powerful language, she said, enabled her to feel the emotion of the bloody attack. “It made it seem real.”
In an interview after the class, Lambert said the aim of the exercise was to focus on the differences in the craft elements and language style of the story and the news article. Also, in referencing material depicting a pogrom, he addressed pressing questions about the Jewish experience.
“Jews over the last 100 to 150 years have lived through incredible persecution, disenfranchisement,” Lambert said, pointing out that in places in Eastern Europe, Jews could not own land or vote.
“And yet,” he added, “in a very short period of time, Jews also have had some of the most opportunity and access to power you can imagine. … No matter who becomes the next American president, both of them have Jewish grandchildren.”
The Yiddish Book Center is a nonprofit organization that started as an effort by the center’s founder and president, Aaron Lansky, to preserve Yiddish and Jewish literature. Indeed, Bronson, the center’s executive director, says, more than 1 million books have been saved since Lansky began collecting Jewish and Yiddish literature 36 years ago.
That literature is the basis for much of the center’s educational programming.
“We are always thinking about how the literature is relevant, some of it through our translation program, and some of it trying to find ways to make traditional Yiddish texts relevant to the current crises in the world,” Lambert said.
For example, he tells his students, there are parallels between the current waves of Syrian immigrants from the Middle East, which has created a refugee crisis for many nations in Europe.
In the earlier part of the 20th century, he says, Jews were also forced to migrate, in the face of the Holocaust, and the literature they wrote from the time is often hard, heartbreaking and confusing.
Lambert says he relishes the chance to teach young students about these stories that “feel pressing in the moment. … That’s part of the work we do at the center.”