The Forverts and the Vorwärts

By MAURICE WOLFTHAL

On a recent stroll down Second Avenue, I came across a charming old building, the Freie Bibliothek und Lesehalle.  A little research revealed that this “free library and reading room” (now the oldest existing branch of the New York Public Library) had been built and endowed by Anna and Oswald Ottendorfer: successful immigrants; publishers of the Staats-Zeitung; philanthropists who supported hospitals and old age homes in the US and in Europe; and passionate believers in modern education who wished to promote literacy among German-speaking immigrants.

Cover of the New Yorker Volkszeitung.

Seeing the building was a vivid reminder of something that I’ve learned in the past few years in the process of translating Bernard Weinstein’s Yiddish book of 1929, Di yidishe yunyons in amerike: bleter geshikhte un erinerungen (The Jewish Unions in America: Pages of History and Memories). Weinstein had come from Odessa in 1882, lived on the Lower East Side, and worked in sweatshops with Samuel Gompers and Abraham Cahan.  He devoted his life to improving the lot of Jewish immigrant workers, primarily through the militant labor organization that he founded with Morris Hillquit, the Fareynigte idishe geverkshaftn (The United Hebrew Trades).

Cartoon from the Nyu-yorker yidishe folkstsaytung comparing the tsar to the chicken used in the kapores, ritual before Yom Kippur. October 4, 1889.

The Freie Bibliothek und Lesehalle opened in 1884. I would not be surprised if Weinstein used it. He had already been exposed to democratic and socialist ideas in tsarist Russia, and when he came to New York he joined the Socialist Labor Party (its Russian branch) and soon afterwards, he organized its Yiddish branch. But equally active in the party were many German workers who supported the Jewish socialists both financially and by letting them use their meeting rooms, which were sometimes in the back of beer halls.

Their Vereinigte Deutsche Gewerkschaften (United German Trades) was the model for Weinstein’s federation. Their newspaper, the New Yorker Deutsche Volkszeitung (German People’s Newspaper) was the inspiration for the Nyu-yorker yidishe folkstsaytung (Yiddish People’s Newspaper).

Cover of the April 16 1912 issue of the Forverts, reporting on the sinking of the Titanic.

And there is another reminder of those long-forgotten links between progressive workers in New York’s German-speaking immigrant community and those who spoke Yiddish and Russian. Look at the front page of one of the first editions of the Forverts, which was begun in 1897 by a group of dissidents from the Socialist Labor Party who joined the new Social Democracy of America of Eugene V. Debs.  On its masthead are the name of the new paper in Yiddish, English, and…German. Vorwärts was the organ of the Social Democrats in Germany.

Maurice Wolfthal is a Yiddish-English translator. An excerpt of his translation of Yitzkhak Erlichson’s Mayne fir yor in sovyet-rusland (My Four Years in Soviet Russia), published by Academic Studies Press, appeared in Yedies in 2013. His translation of Shmerke Kazcerginski’s  Khurbn Vilne (The Destruction of the Jewish Community of Vilna) is forthcoming by Wayne State University Press. He is currently working on a translation of Bernard Weinstein’s Di yidishe yunyons in amerike.