Sarah Myerson, a cantorial student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, interned in the YIVO Sound Archive, and talked about her work digitally cataloguing the Strassfeld Collection of Hasidic nigunim.
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Aleksandra Imilowska, a full scholarship recipient from Poland, presented her research on Yiddish schools in interwar Poland, drawn from her work in YIVO’s Vilna Jewish Community Council archive. They elected to spend their afternoons in the YIVO Library and Archives, and presented their findings on the last day of classes. Some students came to the Summer Program with research questions they hoped to answer, as part of ongoing academic projects. By putting this drama back on the stage today, students of Yiddish can not only appreciate an important aspect of early twentieth-century vernacular Yiddish culture, they can be inspired to transport even more forgotten Yiddish plays out of the archives and into the auditorium. Allen Rickman introduced each piece before it was performed, stressing the fact that this kind of Yiddish theater is rarely seen today because it was scorned by critics, although adored by the Yiddish-speaking masses.
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These materials, drawn from the YIVO theater archives and specially transcribed and adapted for this course, featured well-known Yiddish authors such as Shomer (pseudonym of Nokhem Meyer Shaykevitch), and lesser-known playwrights such as William Siegel, whose play Hayntike Meydlekh recalls contemporary melodrama such as the TV show Boardwalk Empire: it features a gamut of troubled young women, manipulative men, drugs, guns, and sex work. The Yiddish Theater Lab Performance Workshop, led by Yelena Shmulenson and Allen Lewis Rickman, enabled students to assemble scenes from rarely-performed American Yiddish plays. Eve also gave a hands-on demonstration of Jewish culinary arts, and led a walking tour of Greenwich Village, illustrating the ways in which food can be used as a lens into Jewish culture and history, a way of exploring material culture and daily life from a rich and varied perspective. In the Foodways of Ashkenaz class taught by Eve Jochnowitz, students discussed such ethnographic questions as, “are there particular Jewish flavors?” They read articles comparing the use of garlic in Jewish and eastern European cuisine, discussed the importance of horseradish and pickles in Jewish life, and learned many idioms that encompassed the range of Jewish cultural and culinary geography, such as, “That pickle is so sour, you can see both Krakow and Lemberg!” ( me kon derzen kroke mit lemberik), meaning that, going cross-eyed from the sensation of acidity, one could see from one end of Jewish Galicia to the other. One student, although fasting for Ramadan until later in the evening, baked cookies shaped in the letters of the alef-beys, or Yiddish alphabet, for dessert. At an “oyneg shabes” potluck held at the Brooklyn College Hillel, students participated in creating a shabes meal together, and sang Yiddish songs until early in the morning. Conversation teacher Leyzer Burko provided each student with a two-page worksheet full of helpful vocabulary involving alcohol, such as the words for bar ( shenk), whiskey ( bronfn) and hangover ( katsnyomer). Through a jam-packed six weeks, students got to know each other through a variety of off-campus events, such as a lekhayim sho (happy hour) at the Franklin Park beer garden. Sundays were filled with supplementary activities, such as a theater translation workshop with New Worlds Theater Project’s Ellen Perecman, a trip to Yiddish Farm, and tours of the Tenement Museum and the Lower East Side. After lunch, students participated in conversation classes three days a week, attended workshops on Yiddish poetry, song repertoire, film, dance, and archival skills, conversed with native speakers, and took afternoon and evening electives in archival research, history, sociolinguistics, theater, and foodways.
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Held this year at Brooklyn College, students spent the morning studying language and literature at elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels, with teachers Sheva Zucker, Paula Teitelbaum, Anna Gonshor, and Itay Zutra. On July 26, teachers, family and friends gathered in the YIVO auditorium to congratulate the 40 students graduating from the 46th annual Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture.