From sweatshop to suburbia, the Yiddish-language Forverts has chronicled Jewish life in America, a saga to which the newspaper’s offices themselves bear witness.
Founded 97 years ago as boatloads of immigrants were landing at Ellis Island, it still publishes a Yiddish edition for the few Jews left who can read that ancestral language. Since 1990 it has also appeared in an English version, the two staffs maintaining a kind of cultural non-aggression pact in side-by-side quarters in a Manhattan office building.
Taking a right turn off an elevator, a visitor is alerted by a sign pinned to a wall announcing: Do red man Yiddish (Here we speak Yiddish). A compositor wearing a skull cap and the long, braided sideburns of the ultra-Orthodox bends over a drafting table, pasting together long columns of the angular Hebrew characters in which Yiddish is written. The literary editor pounds an ancient Yiddish typewriter, working on his pet feature, “Pearls of Yiddish Poetry,” through which readers share snatches of lullabies half-remembered from long-ago Eastern European childhoods.
Across the lobby, the Forward, as the English version is called, is edited on desktop computers like those at the Wall Street Journal or the New York Daily News, where these journalists trained. The dress code is something between preppie and mod. The editors, half the age of their counterparts next door, are quick to assert that, despite its brief life, modest circulation (20,000 weekly) and Jewish identity, their edition has already made an impression on the gentile Establishment.
“The Forward was first to dig into the law review articles of Lani Guinier,” said Editor in Chief Seth Lipsky, 48, recalling President Clinton’s failed nominee for assistant attorney general. “We’ve broken a number of stories like that, which the mainstream press picked up and ran with.”
The Forverts and the Forward share a longstanding formula of Yiddish journalism, offering readers a mixture of heady political analysis and good literature. Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer published his short stories in the Forverts long before translations of them began to appear in The New Yorker. Lipsky proudly notes that Philip Roth asked to have excerpts from his latest novel, “Operation Shylock,” appear in the Forward.
It was envisioned that the Forward and the Forverts would reprint some of each other’s material. That hasn’t happened much, partially because making translations proved expensive, but also because the two papers have quite different philosophies.
Socialist roots
The Forverts was established by turn-of-the-century socialists convinced that only capitalism’s fall could liberate the Jews from Old World pogroms and New World tenements. True believers in egalitarianism, the paper’s founders provided that the editor annually stand for re-election by his staff, a tradition still upheld today.
“Who knows where we’d get a replacement if our editor were to lose; there’s only a handful of Yiddish writers left,” said Harold Ostroff, 70, business manager for both editions. “Still, it’s customary for somebody to withhold his vote so it wouldn’t be unanimous, reminding the editor he’s responsible to the people.”
On the English-speaking side of the office, Lipsky styles himself a “Kennedy liberal.” But to judge by the kinds of stories his edition digs into, its politics are a bit more to the Right. Other publications took a kid-glove approach during the Crown Heights riots of 1991, when a rabbinical student was murdered in that Brooklyn neighborhood, but the Forward used an unambiguous, if not quite politically correct, label: pogrom. From the editorial spin on its coverage of similar issues, such as black-Jewish conflicts on college campuses, it is clear its editors don’t think traditional liberal ideas are of much help in understanding contemporary social problems.
“I was very happy when I sat on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal,” said Lipsky, who also was a foreign correspondent for that paper. Striking the deal by which the Forward was born, Lipsky noted, was his personal fulfillment of a perennial dream of working journalists: to have a newspaper of their own.
“The Forverts and the Wall Street Journal, there’s a lot of irony in that match,” Ostroff said. “But isn’t that the American story? An immigrant arrives here penniless. He lives in a cold-water flat, scrimps and saves so his children can go to college. They become professionals and move to the suburbs.”
Creating a new paper
The Forverts’ new incarnation, Ostroff explained, was made financially possible when the paper unexpectedly came into a fortune after years of financial losses had forced it to cut back from daily to weekly publication in 1984.
Back when FM radio was in its infancy, the Forverts had acquired a station that it dubbed WEVD (in honor of Eugene Victor Debs, founder of the American Socialst Party). By the late 1980s, Yiddish listeners were scarce and Spanish-speaking immigrants were flocking to New York, often to the very neighborhoods occupied by the Forverts’ readership decades before. It was a seller’s market for FM outlets, and a Spanish-language broadcaster paid approximately $40 million for WEVD’s spot on the broadcast band.
Lipsky, who was then working for the Wall Street Journal, proposed using the windfall to establish a new edition to carry the Forverts tradition into a post-Yiddish-speaking world. Summoned to a meeting at the Forverts offices, he arrived to find several dozen aged editors and trustees seated in a semicircle of chairs, with an empty chair in the center reserved for him. He was asked a few polite questions about his family, journalistic experience and other background. Finally, one old man got out of his chair and waved off the other questioners.
“Listen, Mr. Lipsky, these people don’t want to hear your answers to the easy questions,” he said. “They want to know what’s your position on Jabotinsky?”
Dredging the name out of memory, Lipsky remembered that Vladimir Jabotinsky, who died in 1940, had founded the Zionist Revisionists, a right-wing version of the movement for a Jewish homeland. He also dimly recalled being impressed by Jabotinsky’s biting criticisms of Zionism’s socialist founders, an answer hardly likely to win friends in the Forverts’ offices.
“A chill went through the room and I knew it was the most important question I’d ever answer in my life,” Lipsky said. “Finally I said, `Well, you have to admit he was right when, after Hitler came to power in 1933, Jabotinsky argued for the evacuation of the Jews from Europe.’ “
Heads nodded in approval as Lipsky’s interrogators welcomed him into the Forverts family.
Yet even now, some of the older staff can’t quite get over the linguistic limitations of their new colleagues.
“Those young people on the other side are our heirs, yet they don’t know a word of Yiddish,” said Forverts Editor Mordechai Strigler, 72. “But maybe all that means is that this world is no longer my world. That one doesn’t exist anymore.”
For the man on the street
Strigler, who has been with the paper for 40 years, was almost dwarfed by the upright typewriter upon which he was working on one of the six or seven articles he writes each week, in addition to his editing responsibilities. At its height in the 1920s and ’30s, when it sold 280,000 copies a day and published a satellite edition in Chicago, the Forverts had contributors filing stories from every country with a Jewish population. That luxury is long past, the paper’s circulation hovering between 10,000 and 15,000 recently. So Strigler is now a deskbound one-man team of foreign correspondents.
Like European intellectuals of his generation, the Polish-born Strigler is fluent in half a dozen languages. His desk is piled high with magazines and newspapers from abroad. From that pyramid he makes a weekly selection of articles, rendering them into Yiddish with a personal touch that gives Forverts readers the momentary sensation of again walking the streets of their old homelands. Strigler signs his work with half a dozen pen names.
“The few Yiddish writers left are in their 70s, their 80s, so I schlep (handle) everything around here,” Strigler explained. “It’s some kind of sentiment with me that we’ve got to keep this thing alive. I couldn’t even tell you why, except maybe that this isn’t just a paper, it’s a whole tradition.”
Strigler explained that the Forverts’ founding editor, Abraham Cahan, envisioned his newspaper as a kind of newsprint social-work agency ministering to Jewish immigrants in culture shock. Cahan was a consummate intellectual who wrote a number of novels, one of which, “Hester Street,” was made into a movie. But he insisted the Forverts be accessible to the man in the street, whether he was right off the boat or here for a few years and already absorbing a bit of American culture.
Rival publications held to a pure Yiddish, Strigler noted, but Cahan’s paper supplemented its vocabulary with Yinglish, the mixed-jargon, half-Yiddish, half-English that was the lingua franca of immigrant Jewish neighborhoods. In the Forverts’ columns, the person who lived in the apartment above was an upstairsakey.
“One time, they say, a young Jewish writer came to Cahan’s office, just out of the university and proud of the cultivated Yiddish style with which he had written an article,” Ostroff said. “Cahan called his secretary, gave her the young man’s manuscript and said: `Give it to the elevator operator to read. If he understands it, we’ll print it in the Forverts.’ “
The immigrant’s friend
Besides political commentary and Yiddish literature, Cahan’s paper published self-help articles explaining the ways of their adopted homeland to the hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews who annually arrived in New York in the first decades of the 20th Century. The Forverts ran stories on indoor plumbing and explained the mysteries of the handkerchief to immigrants who hadn’t known such luxuries, recalled Yosl Mlotek, 75, the paper’s literary editor.
“Forverts readers got lessons in English, and Cahan taught them how to behave in this country,” Mlotek said. “Above all, Cahan created the `Bintel Brief,’ an advice column answering readers’ questions. I was the last editor to write the answers before we stopped running the column in the 1970s.”
For 60 years, Mlotek recalled, the “Bintel Brief” (Yiddish for a “bundle of letters”) recorded an immigrant generation’s moral dilemmas, family quarrels and quandaries about their children. Bearing salutations such as “Worthy Editor” or “Esteemed Editor,” those letters were the paper’s most popular feature and were often read aloud and commented on at subscribers’ kitchen tables, Mlotek said. Collectively they constitute an oral history of all but the latest chapters of the story of Jewish life in America.
“I am a Socialist and my boss is a fine man,” wrote one correspondent. “I know he’s a Capitalist but I like him. Am I doing something wrong?”
“Is it a sin to use face powder?” asked an immigrant’s daughter. “Shouldn’t a girl look beautiful. My father does not want me to use face powder.”
“The fact that my children are well educated and have outgrown me makes me feel bad,” a European-born reader wrote. “I can’t talk to them about my problems and they can’t talk to me about theirs. It’s as if there were a deep abyss that divides us.”
Those kinds of dilemmas are rarer for this generation of American Jews, Mlotek noted. Parents and children have by now both moved into the middle class and often out to suburbia, and there are ever fewer Yiddish-speakers.
Like the other editors on this side of the office, Mlotek is delighted that an English version of the paper will perpetuate its name after the Forverts goes the way of other immigrant-generation institutions. But something is always lost in translation, he noted, especially from a polyglot language such as Yiddish whose vocabulary was enriched with words from every country through which the Jews’ wanderings took them.
“You see, Yiddish isn’t so much a language as a people’s life, and now there’s so few of us left who know that,” Mlotek said. “We’re the last Mohicans.”
