Chronist einer verloren gegangenen Welt

·1 hr·5 clips

From a Leipzig book fair, discover the first German translation of a 1961 book archiving lost Jewish life in interwar Romania.

The episode begins with host Jessie Jues introducing the live recording from Speckshof in Leipzig during the Leipziger Buchmesse. She welcomes guests Gail Fischer, a historian from the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe researching the Holocaust in Romania, and Caroline Piorun, a PhD student at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture Simon Dubnov studying the Jewish PEN-Club. They discuss the newly translated book by Schleume Bickel, a Jewish intellectual, lawyer, writer, and editor born in 1896, who is considered a key figure in Yiddish language and literature in Romania. Bickel's book, first published in 1961 in Buenos Aires, offers essays written over 20 years reflecting on his experiences in interwar Romania after his emigration to the USA in 1939. The book is described as a hybrid of history, memoir, and anthology, featuring portraits of Jewish figures, literary criticism, and personal insights into Jewish cultural production. The discussion covers the historical context of Greater Romania, formed after World War I, which included diverse regions like Bukovina and Bessarabia and housed a Jewish population of 750,000 people with varied linguistic backgrounds. Yiddish is explained as a component language drawing from Middle High German, Hebrew, Aramaic, Romance, and Slavic languages, and its role as a political tool for Jewish autonomy and identity in Romania is highlighted. Bickel is characterized as a social democrat and Yiddishist who advocated for Jewish minority rights and cultural activism. The translation process, led by Martin Wiesche, Franziska Solomon, and Gail Fischer, faced challenges due to the lack of comprehensive Yiddish-German dictionaries and the need to contextualize Hebrew and Romanian terms. Wiesche's death in 2022 added a personal dimension to the project, which received funding from BKM. The book's structure includes three parts: the fight for Jewish rights, depictions of Jewish spaces, and Jewish creative work. The episode includes a reading of a Yiddish passage about Wilhelm Fildermann, a Jewish activist, followed by its German translation. The guests note that Bickel's work is not widely known outside specialized circles but serves as a vital record of a lost world, emphasizing the diversity of Jewish experiences in Romania before the Holocaust and Stalinist persecution. The conversation concludes with reflections on the book's importance for understanding Jewish history in Eastern Europe and the transnational nature of Yiddishland.

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