Interest in yidishkayt has been growing dramatically among Jews in the United States and overseas. In March, 2007, one of America’s most prestigious literary magazines, Prairie Schooner, published by the University of Nebraska Press, will release a special issue featuring a portfolio of work by Jewish writers who examine the revival of yidishkayt. Many contributors to the portfolio have championed Jewish literature and culture throughout their careers and express the perplexing contradictions embodied by contemporary yidishkayt.

One of them is Jehanne Dubrow, an accomplished poet now residing in Lincoln, who says the word is difficult to pin down: “Yidishkayt means ‘things Jewish’ or ‘the quality of Yiddishness.’ It evokes Yiddish, klezmer and folklore, Chassidism, the orthodox, the Bund, the lost world of the shtetl, YIVO, and The Forward. Simultaneously culture and language, Yidishkayt can also be understood as a tone of voice…While the yidishkayt of the 1900’s was for insiders only—music, theater, film, and literature created by Jews for other Jews—contemporary yidishkayt engages a world beyond itself.”

At a recent Evening of Jewish Poetry at the South Street Temple, Jehanne was joined by Hilda Raz, a member of our congregation, who is a UNL English professor and the Luschei endowed editor of the Prairie Schooner. Her poems, essays, articles, and reviews have been widely published.

Jehanne is pursuing a Ph.D. in creative writing at UNL, and is the recipient of UNL’s Maude Hammond Fling Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, Tikkun, and The New England Review. She was born in Italy, and grew up in Yugoslavia, Zaire, Poland, Belgium, Austria, and the United States. During the South Street Temple event, she read several of her poems, including “Souvenir”:

In Kraków’s marketplace, the kiosks vend
carved men at thirty złotys each: a Jew
who grips the Torah in his wooden hands,
a beggar Jew, a bobble-headed Jew
whose body sways and nods with just a pull
against his jagged nose, a singing Jew,
a Jew who spills gold coins onto a scale,
the balance tipping in his favor. These Jews
will be wrapped up and taken home to stand
on cluttered shelves. Children will clench the Jews,
the żydki, as their parents say. How pale
their faces are, how dark the beards of Jews,
as black as coal dust covering new snow
(and lost like memory in the dirt below).

Published in Poetry, (March 2005): 436.
David Feingold
Congregation B’nai Jeshuruan

Yidishkayt: A Prairie Schooner Portfolio will be published on March 30, 2007. Pre-orders for the issue and annual subscriptions are available by calling 1-800-715-2387.