1000 Essential Yiddish Books - Yiddish Book Center

Yiddish literary activity during the postwar decades is a somewhat underappreciated
phenomenon, and this collection implicitly supports the contention that the quarter
century following the end of World War II was a “Silver Age” of the Yiddish book.
The inclusion of volumes belonging to such distinguished publishing initiatives as
Dos poylishe yidntum and Musterverk fun der yidisher literatur, both from Argentina,
testifies to that assertion, as do so many of the books appearing in Israel under the
labels Hamenora, I. L. Peretz, and Israel-Book.
The Yiddish Book Center has not yet cataloged its serials and has no plans at this point
to digitize them. Exceptions have been made for literary annuals, including three
pivotal titles: Di yudishe folks-bibliothek, edited by Sholem Aleichem and published in
Kiev in 1888; Shriften, edited by the poet David Ignatoff and published in New York
from 1912 until 1926; and Zamlbikher, which came out in New York from 1936 to
1952, under the editorship of the poet H. Leivick and the novelist Joseph Opatoshu.
Certain periodicals, including YIVO Bleter, Tsukunft, Di goldene keyt, and Sovetish
heymland, are available for purchase in limited numbers.
Digitization of oversized volumes and books printed on very brittle paper was
deferred until work on the rest of the digital library was completed. At the time that
this list was put together (2004) the corpus of digitized texts was still very much a
work in progress, and some titles that might otherwise have been selected for the core
collection were not yet available.
Thus, a careful perusal of this list will reveal a number of obvious lacunae. Some
of these could not be avoided, due either to these works’ absence from the National
Yiddish Book Center’s holdings or to the fact that copies in hand are too brittle
to be digitized at this juncture. A case in point is the prolific author Nahum Meir
Shaikewitz, also known as Shomer. Although he published dozens of chapbooks
during his lifetime (in thousands of copies), these publications are by their very nature
highly ephemeral, and those books of his that do survive are usually very fragile. For
these reasons relatively few of them are included in the digital library. And – unlike
another popular Yiddish author of the nineteenth century, Isaac Meir Dick – he was
not fortunate enough to have some of his representative writings collected in a welledited
anthology. On the other hand, this core collection does include a biography of
Shaikewitz, Undzer foter Shomer, written by his daughter Rose Shomer-Bachelis.
Suggestions regarding additions, subtractions, and corrections to this core collection
of Yiddish books are welcome. The bibliographer understands perhaps better than
anyone else the import of Rabbi Tarfon’s classic maxim (from Pirke avot 2:21), “It is
not for you to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.”
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