Vilna as a Centre of the Modern Jewish Press,

Vilna as a Centre of the Modern Jewish Press, 1840-1928 Aspirations, Challenges, and Progress von Susanne Marten-Finnis 1. Auflage Vilna as a Centre of the Modern Jewish Press, 1840-1928 Marten-Finnis schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei beck-shop.de DIE FACHBUCHHANDLUNG Peter Lang Bern 2004 Verlag C.H. Beck im Internet: www.beck.de ISBN 978 3 03910 080 4 Inhaltsverzeichnis: Vilna as a Centre of the Modern Jewish Press, 1840-1928 Marten-Finnis

Introduction Outline of methodology The year 1928 was a watershed for the editors of the Vilna monthly Di yidishe velt. They could reflect with pride not only on their own journal but also on the entire journalistic tradition of Vilna, where the fundamental principles of Jewish party journalism had been established and nurtured since the 1890s. Nevertheless these principles were now felt to be in need of revision. Hence in July 1928 1 the editors were moved to call for a completely new type of journalism, signalling a radical departure from the original principles. They were proud of Vilna s journalistic past, they wrote, but the time had come to set new journalistic standards. Their completely new type of journalism had nothing to do with the completely new type of press that Lenin had advocated some two decades earlier in a very different context. Outlining in his first legal Bolshevik newspaper, Novaia Zhizn, the principles on which he thought a new press organ should be based, 2 Lenin was incorporating those very traditions of Jewish party journalism that the editors of Di yidishe velt now wanted to shed. What was the background to this call for new standards of Jewish journalism? What were the new standards to be? And what exactly were the old standards that the editors needed to break away from? What were the challenges confronting the Jewish press, how did they affect its progress and orientation? And why was 1928 the turning year? These are the questions I address in this volume. They apply to a wide geographical region, but I will confine myself to the case of Vilna, or Wilno, as it was called between the two World Wars. 1 M.W., Yidishe prese Di yidishe velt [a monthly journal for literature, criticism and art] No. 4 (July 1928) 477 480. (Wilno, B.A. Kletzkin) 2 Vladimir Lenin, Partinnaia organizatsiia i partinnaia literatura Novaia Zhizn (13 November 1905). 11

Wilno was Europe s other side of the tracks and, within that area, one of the poorest of her borderlands. One should be cautious, however, about equating economic inferiority with weakness in all spheres. writes Czeslaw Milosz about the city of his youth. 3 Vilna (Polish Wilno), today Vilnius and capital of Lithuania, was the traditional spiritual and intellectual centre of Jewish thought in the north-western provinces of the Russian Empire, and often referred to as the Jerusalem of Lithuania. Vilna was a home to rabbinical studies and religious debates, to many authors of religious works and secular literature, as well as a base for the Haskalah, the late eighteenthcentury Jewish Enlightenment, embodying the first phase of the rapid process of secularisation and modernisation of Ashkenazi Jewish culture. Most people today will have learned what they know about Vilna by reading autobiographies or personal memoirs, which describe the city as a location of memory, such as From that Place and Time by Lucy S. Dawidowicz, 4 Joseph Buloff s From the Old Market Place, 5 Chaim Grade s Rebbetzin, 6 Czeslaw Milosz s autobiographical work Native Realm 7 or the novels of Tadeusz Konwicki, and not least Israel Cohen s volume Vilna. 8 Most of these books kept alive the idea of The Jerusalem of Lithuania, a term that has now come to stand for the lost world of Jewish life in Europe. This book is neither a history of Vilna, nor a personal memoir. It describes Vilna, up until the First World War, as a uniquely important centre of the Jewish press, that was the child of the Haskalah in Imperial Russia. 3 Czeslaw Milosz, Rodzinna Europa [Native Realm. A Search for Self-Definition] (Paris, 1959) 61. 4 Lucy S. Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time. A Memoir, 1938 1947 (New York, London, 1989). 5 Joseph Buloff, From the Old Market Place (Harvard, 1991). 6 Chaim Grade, Rabbis and Wives [Translated from the Yiddish by Harold Rabinowitz and Inna Hecker Grade] (New York, 1997). 7 Milosz, 1980. 8 Israel Cohen, Vilna (Philadelphia, Jerusalem, 1943). 12

The year 1840 marks the appearance in Vilna of the first Jewish press item, Pirhei Tsafon [Flowers of the North]. The term press at the time referred to almanacs and omnibus volumes issued infrequently, rather than to topical news items that were issued on a regular basis. The articles that started to appear in the early 1840s were written in Hebrew, and therefore restricted to a narrow circle of educated readers and scholars, the Maskilim; they were certainly not intended to be read by a mass Jewish audience. In chapter one of this book, I will describe how from these beginnings Vilna became a centre of modern Hebrew journalism. I will follow the development of the Jewish press within the context of modernising Imperial Russia during the second half of the nineteenth century and, at the end of the chapter define its aspirations and identify its characteristic features. Chapter two deals with Vilna as the most important centre for the Jewish Socialist movement during its formative period in the mid 1890s and the years running up to the 1905 Revolution. It charts the new literary activities and publications of Jewish Socialist Revolutionaries, especially those launched by the Jewish Bund in Russia, or more precisely, the General Jewish Workers Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia, founded in Vilna in 1897. As a Marxist-oriented party composed of Jewish workers and intellectuals within the Tsarist Empire, the Bund represented the first great attempt at organizing Jewish masses in Eastern Europe for secular and independent political activity. I will survey and analyse the Bundist press including pamphlets and proclamations or appeals composed in Vilna, including the recently discovered periodicals 9 that are stored today in the Bibliographical Centre of the National Library of Lithuania, the same organization that earlier was in possession of the YIVO 10 archival 9 A few years ago about 50,000 books and newspapers were discovered in Vilnius where they were hidden by the Vilna Jewish community. They survived both the Holocaust and the city s Soviet period. See: YIVO NEWS Update of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research New York, June 1997. 10 Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (Jewish Research Institute), founded in 1925. 13

documents that have since been returned. The YIVO had compiled 40,000 volumes and manuscripts. 11 With the help of some examples I have translated into English we will see how a rhetoric drawn from Jewish religious and folkloric sources served to introduce the new Marxist agenda. After the turn of the century this rhetoric provided the justification for the course followed, besides inciting the readers to action. Such an analysis enables us to perceive how the traditions of Jewish writing shaped the modern Jewish press in general and, more specifically, Bundist journalism. We can then see how the Bund s policy of multilingualism carried these traditions into different speech communities and new ideological camps, often leaving the original symbolism in their Jewish past. Chapter three will show how Bundist journalism became a sponsor of a Jewish cultural ideology called Yiddishism. It is followed by an Appendix listing the Vilna-based dailies and periodicals for the city s Russian period and the years from the end of the First World War until 1922, the year when Vilna became part of Poland, including an index of editors and contributors, and the present location of most issues of each press item. A preliminary inventory of Jewish dailies and periodicals, including those from Vilna, published in Poland between the two World Wars, was compiled in 1986. 12 As this inventory covers the whole inter-war period, it overlaps with my bibliography for the period 1918 to 1922. My own bibliography was compiled independently and largely concurs with the data presented in 1986. I have established its accuracy by personal inspection of all the items listed there. 11 Eva Kirn-Frank, Litauisches Jerusalem. Rückblick auf eine jiddische Alternative: Das YIVO in Wilna Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung No. 274 (24 November 2000) 46. 12 Polish Jewry: Preliminary Inventory of Yiddish Dailies and Periodicals Published in Poland Between the Two World Wars, prepared by Yechiel Szeintuch with the assistance of Vera Solomon, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Center for Research on the History and Culture of Polish Jews (Jerusalem, 1986). 14

It was particularly in the period between the Wars that Yiddishism came to signify both the culture that is embodied in the Yiddish language and a standard of ethical conduct that preserved the essence of Judaism without the requirements of ritual and law. 13 After 1905 when the various restrictions on the publication of Yiddish periodicals were removed, the Yiddish press grew. It reached its peak in 1928. This growth, both in quantity and diversity of publications was interrupted by the First World War, but picked up again during the period immediately afterwards. The years 1918 to 1922 were very active for the Yiddish press, especially in political journalism, which has at times led to the mistaken assumption that Vilna was, beside Warsaw and Lódz, one of the three major centres of inter-war Poland where a Yiddish press was created. My thesis however, developed in chapter three, is that the active years 1918 1922 were the continuation of a process that had started well before 1914, while the existing political and social situation, and not least the city s unclarified status, were stimuli for its active political journalism. The years 1923 to 1928 saw an increasing number and diversity of Yiddish newspapers and journals, most of them, however, ephemeral or appearing irregularly, evidence of the ongoing financial plight of the publishers. 1928 was the year when the editors of Di yidishe velt announced they would make clear and deliberate efforts not to give the Jewish press its head but instead to change its direction so as to approach the standards of modern European journalism. 1928 is also the most active year of the Yiddish press world wide, with Poland far ahead of any other country. 45 per cent of the world s Yiddish press was published in Poland 14 of which Vilna was then part. While Chapters one and three focus mainly on the aspirations and progress of the Vilna Jewish press, Chapter two presents a detailed analysis of its challenges during the period when the city was a centre of Bundist journalism. This analysis was carried out within the traditions of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). I follow here the 13 Ruth R. Wisse, The Politics of Yiddish, Commentary, Vol. 80 No. 1 (July 1985) 29 35. 14 I. Anilovitch, 5 yor yidishe prese (1926 1930) YIVO bleter Vol. II, No. 1 2, (Wilno, September 1931) 96 15

School of British linguists 15 who in the 1970s developed a critical linguistics by combining the theories and methods of text analysis belonging to systemic linguistics with theories of ideology drawn upon Foucault s theory of discourse. I have also been influenced by the Vienna School of Discourse Analysis 16 which has roots in Bernstein s socio-linguistic approach. Presupposing that discourses 17 do not just reflect or represent social entities and relations, but also construct or constitute them, 18 I will show how the voices of the Jewish press can be used not only as a vehicle for reconstructing social reality, but also for studying the discursive construction of Jewish national identity. Critical Discourse Analysis starts from the perception of discourse as an element of social practices, which constitutes other elements as well as being shaped by them. 19 Social questions are therefore in part questions about discourse. For instance, the question of power in social class, gender and race relations is partly a question of discourse. And careful linguistic and semiotic 20 analysis of texts, such as press articles, and interactions such as conversations or interviews, therefore has a part to play in social analysis. 21 The fact that language has become a salient element of contemporary social 15 Norman Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change, (Cambridge, 1992); Roger Fowler, Linguistic Criticism, (Oxford, New York, 1996). 16 Ruth Wodak, Rudolf de Cillia, Martin Reisigl and Karin Liebhart, The Discursive Construction of National Identity, Critical Discourse Analysis Series Norman Fairclough (ed), Edinburgh University Press, 1999; Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak, Critical Discourse Analysis, in Teun A. Van Dijk, Discourse as Social Interaction, (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi, 1997). 17 Discourse refers in the present context to extended samples of written language in the study of which the emphasis is on interaction between speaker and addressee or between writer and reader, and therefore processes of producing and interpreting writing as well as the context of language use. 18 Fairclough, 1992, 2 3. 19 Norman Fairclough, Series Preface, in Wodak et al., 1999, vii viii. 20 Referring to semiotics as the study of signs and symbols, especially the relations between written or spoken signs and their referents in the physical world or the world of ideas. 21 Wodak, et al., 1999, vii viii. 16

practices (as for example its use in the media, advertising, politics and election campaigning), has led to an increase in conscious interventions to shape linguistic and semiotic elements, and consequently to its critical analysis, which has become increasingly popular since the 1970s. The enhanced critical consciousness of language is in part a response to these more recent colonisations of language, but of course Critical Discourse Analysis can still be applied to historical and political topics and texts. In such an analysis, the historical dimension of discursive acts can, according to the Vienna School, 22 be approached in two ways. The first is to integrate as much information as possible on the historical background and the original historical sources in which discursive events are embedded; in the present study we unearth information relevant for identifying the aspirations and characteristic features of the Jewish press in Chapter one. Secondly we try to document and trace the changes that particular types of discourse undergo during a specified period of time; this information is pertinent to the analysis in Chapter two of Bundist discourse during the period 1897 1906. Another important focus is on historical change: how different discourses combine under particular social conditions to produce a new, complex discourse; this is particularly relevant to Bundist journalism as a sponsor of Yiddishism, or, in more general terms, the discursive construction of national identity, as illustrated in Chapter three. The identification with political goals, which had been reinforced by the Bund s pioneering development of a revolutionary literature in Yiddish, came to symbolise the cultural unity of the Jews in the Pale of Settlement, and this was very influential, particularly among those uncomfortable with the religious definition of the Jew but nevertheless anxious to retain their Jewish identity. According to Fowler, the essential prerequisite of valid criticism is the possession of historical knowledge of beliefs and values of cultures and periods, and this knowledge is embedded in discourses. 23 I therefore pay particular attention to the specific conditions under which the Jewish press emerged in Vilna, which at the time was part 22 Fairclough and Wodak, 1997, 258 284. 23 Fowler, 1996, 253. 17

of Imperial Russia. 24 I will explore how the uniqueness of these conditions had implications not only on the frequency, circulation, distribution, and lifespan of a publication, but also on the use of a certain phraseology and rhetoric 25 which shaped the rise of a specific kind of political journalism throughout the twentieth century, not least via the style set by Lenin, which I alluded to at the beginning. History, social conditions, and ideology are major sources of knowledge and hypotheses in linguistic criticism. Changes in language use are an important part of wider social and cultural changes, and a variety of disciplines these days have come to appreciate the importance of using linguistic analysis as a method for studying social change. With this book I hope to contribute to the study of such social change by investigating the ways in which language use within the framework of Vilna s Jewish press is linked to both diverse ideological tensions and to wider social and cultural processes within Eastern European Jewry. Thereby, I hope to provide a tool for the study of the Jewish press in the context of the modernisation of Eastern Europe. 24 Fowler s model incorporates the relevance of history and social context, i.e. the relationship between language use and its social contexts including their historical development, and fundamentally, the systems of shared knowledge and beliefs within a defined community. See: Fowler, 1996, 110 129. 25 According to Fowler, it is essential to recognise that there is a relationship between the construction of a text and the social, institutional or ideological conditions of its production and reception. See: Fowler, 1996, 15 16. 18