[Marxism] Paul Buhle Outlook Magazine obit for Itche Goldberg

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Itche Goldberg (1904-2006)

With the passing of Itche Goldberg, an era in Jewish life has truly ended. 
And yet the purpose of his life, the preservation of Yiddish and of a 
progressive Jewish secularism, has been accomplished in ways that a young 
Itche could not have imagined. That he contributed so vastly to these 
causes will remain his monument.

I hope a personal note will be forgiven. As editor-publisher of the US New 
Left journal Radical America (from Madison, Wisconsin), I began to receive 
exchange copies of the English language pages of the Frayhayt in 1970, 
thanks to  Sid Resnick, who oversaw those pages. In the next few years, 
with the collapse of New Left and my launching of the Oral History of the 
American Left project at New York University, I found myself, to my great 
surprise, on the road interviewing elderly Yiddishists to put their lives' 
stories on tape. A stop in Miami Beach was paid for by the Zhitlovsky 
Foundation, thanks to the intervention of Itche.

By the later 1970s, I had become a fast reader of Yiddishe Kultur along 
with the Frayhayt, and visiting Itche in his office great treat to me. He 
was so witty and cultured, he had moved beyond the "Old Left" defense of 
the Soviet Union and State Socialism without losing his leftwing 
sensibilities (as so many on the social democratic side if by no means all 
did, capitulating to US policies, especially in regards to Vietnam), that I 
could feel as if I had found a true mentor. From then on until the current 
day, I have been writing for an assortment of Jewish publications on 
cultural subjects mostly, touring to give lectures to Jewish audiences of 
different ages on the subject of "Jewish continuity," and writing or 
editing volumes contributing to the same continuity. Doing these things has 
been one of the great experiences of my life, and I owe it very largely to 
Itche. (I should perhaps admit, here, that I am a gentile, and came to 
Yiddish through my college German.)

Itche was born in Apt, Poland, moved with his parents to Warsaw at an early 
age, studied at Poznansky Teachers Seminary and by 1920 was enrolled at 
McMaster University in Toronto. It was in the intense Yiddish world of 
Toronto, as a Yiddish teacher, that he attached himself to the leftwing of 
the Workmens Circle. By the time he got to New York in the later 1920s, he 
had become a promising figure in the circles that percolated out from the 
daily, Communist-leaning Morgn Frayhayt into the garment district and beyond.

This world was full of contradictions, as every reader of Outlook knows. 
But I discovered in my interviews with oldtimers that it was especially 
rich in working class Yiddishkayt because the Left attracted the young, the 
poor, the recently-immigrated and the ardently devoted, while their 
factional opponents had a wider following among the older Jewish 
generations and the labor bureaucracies.  The Frayhaytniks also amazingly 
prided themselves upon the highest-quality Yiddish, that with the fewest 
compromises, and if political differences drove many writers  away, 
nevertheless some very brilliant essayists, poets and short-story writers 
remained. My favorite was also one of Itche's favorites and a good friend 
of his: Moshe Nadir.

In these decades especially, and in some ways all his long career, Itche 
was above all the hands-on (or minds-on) Yiddish pedagogue. As the 
factional divide in the Arbeter Ring/Workmens Circle led the Communist side 
first to the phase later referred to as "national nihilism," Itche must 
have suffered terribly. And yet, as his friend, proletarian poet Martin 
Birnbaum, reflected to me, even the most severely politicized art, of the 
Proletpen group for instance, contained within it the urge to produce in 
Yiddish. The summer camps-Kinderland in particular--and the Yiddish 
choruses flourished, somewhat protected from the Party hard-liners. With 
the coming of the Popular Front in 1935, it was almost as if the narrative 
film of history was being run in reverse. Yiddish identity as well as 
Jewish identity was anticipated to flourish in a future multi-cultural 
America and, somehow or other, the New Deal with all its undertones would 
help to bring that future closer.

The flourishing of the Jewish People's Fraternal Order, overwhelmingly the 
largest of the ethnic groups within the International Workers Order, 
offered a stunning glimpse of what might be. Itche was not the charismatic 
Moissye Olgin, founder of the Frayhayt, nor his successor Pesach Novick, 
nor the handful of other personalities most prominent on platforms of the 
Yiddish left in those days, the furriers' Ben Gold to that famous frequent 
visitor, Paul Robeson. But Itche was crucial behind the scenes, always 
teaching, always organizing.

The formation of the Yiddishe Kultur Farband in 1937 came tragically late. 
The call to world Jewry and its intelligentsia would be eclipsed by the 
murder of most of the world's Yiddish speakers. And yet, the call was still 
important. It reached beyond the limits of the Popular Front, and held a 
somewhat wider circle even with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the next 
round of wide intellectual disillusionment with all things communistic. 
Probably it was inevitable that the editorship of the YKUF journal, 
Yiddishe Kultur, would eventually pass to Itche, along with the larger 
responsibility of YKUF and its publications, including a children's 
section, Kinderbukh, taken over from the repressed JPFO.

A post-Holocaust surge of commitment to holding onto secular Yiddish 
culture was part of a post-New Deal reawakening that withered in the chill 
of the Cold War. Yiddish came to be viewed by many, including institutional 
leaders of the rightward-tilting Jewish mainstream, as a hindrance to 
upward mobility. During the same years, Israeli leaders decided against 
Yiddish as an alternative language for the Jewish State. The Soviet poets 
were murdered, the revelations of Soviet anti-Semitism could no longer be 
contained, and end of anything like a Yiddish Left seemed to be near.

Such a desolate conclusion, held by more than a few pessimists, badly 
underestimated the inner strength of an aging generation that Itche did so 
much to hold together. The ex-Communist Yiddishists whom I interviewed in 
Coop City, Miami Beach and West Los Angeles in the early 1980s recalled 
with pride that cultural work became their post-Party (and in retirement, 
post-labor union) focus. On the other side of the familiar political lines, 
the Workmen's Circle also held on, fructified by the influx that followed 
the persecution and destruction of the JPFO and IWO. The old opponents 
began to look at each other anew, still wary but in hopes of some future 
possible reconciliation.

The schools, somewhat reduced, nevertheless continued as did Kinderland. In 
them could be heard, especially in summertime, the sounds of the folk music 
phenomenon repressed from the mainstream, a renewed emphasis on civil 
rights that added a dimension to Yiddishkayt, and a preparation of a 
youngest generation for political and cultural leadership in the 1960s 
ahead. In the world of Yiddish literature proper, Itche was a late-blooming 
rose emerging as champion of the martyred writers (annual events in their 
name beginning in 1957) and the reinterpretation of the works of Perets 
Markish, David Hofshteyn and Dovid Bergelson as great artists and exemplars 
of Yiddish capacity. Along with the greats (the work often excerpted), came 
the continuing contributions of lesser but still valuable Yiddish writers 
in the US, the Soviet Union, Israel, Paris and elsewhere, in magazines like 
Zamlungen and the YKUF Almanach that Itche inevitably had a hand in. Among 
the dozens of books published by YKUF in these years, Amerike in Yiddishe 
Vort was the most magnificent, a massive compilation of Yiddish writers on 
themes that most often touched Manhattan scenes. This volume will not 
likely ever be outdated.

In 1964, when longtime Yiddishe Kultur editor Nachman Maisel retired to 
Israel, Itche was the only possible successor. Over the amazing duration of 
forty years to follow, the journal faced all the dilemmas of rising print 
and mailing costs, office rent, and above all an aging readership, adding 
up to an exhausting burden for any editor. Yet its literary quality never 
failed. Indeed, as writer of what some called "Shakesperean Yiddish," its 
quality actually rose. Itche had made so many compromises with the demands 
for simple prose, diction and syntax in the past decades, he determined to 
make no more. Yiddishe Kultur became a demanding journal to read, sometimes 
too demanding for its veteran readers.

Itche, always younger than his years mentally and physically, took to the 
job like a literary personality of old. A Miami Beach Yiddish club 
organizer reflected to me that the point of Itche's semi-annual visits was 
to raise money for the journal, but at least some of that money was spent 
on the ocean-view hotel room that he requested (and could not be denied by 
his faithful). It was little enough to ask in a life of self-sacrifice. 
Nearly all the great personalities of the Yiddish world, lecturers as well 
as poets and novelists, were gone by the 1980s, or grown quiet in elder 
retirement. Itche, strikingly handsome and eloquent, loomed large. His only 
compromise to advancing age was to give up his pipe.

He might have taken the route of honoring the Yiddish modernists brought to 
some mainstream prominence by the Howe-Greenberg anthology and the 
mini-cult of Yiddish (following a long period of liberal intellectuals 
denying that they had ever known any Yiddish). Itche took another path. He 
pointed to the significance of the 1890s founding poets, Edelshtot and 
Bovshover, that Irving Howe dismissed as primitives. He laid unique weight 
upon the folkish Sholem Aleichem and upon I.L. Peretz (Itche called him the 
"gontser yid," the complete Jew) in the inestimable work of setting the 
groundwork for a formal Yiddish literary culture. Most daring of all, Itche 
repeatedly took to task the one Yiddish writer who, in translation, had 
come to a higher point than all the rest: I.B. Singer.

This last stroke was done at some risk to the larger enterprise. Singer's 
Nobel prize seemed to prove, to a skeptical public, that Yiddish had 
something to contribute after all. But Itche was not making some sectarian 
leftwing complaint against the big-money winner of literary sweepstakes. 
Singer's work, as all Yiddish readers know, lacked the humanism that has 
been at the heart of Yiddish culture. Whatever could be said about the 
brilliance of Singer's writing, his development of character, the flashes 
of insight historical and otherwise (the film Enemies: A Love Story, 
perhaps captured it best for the ordinary American, with a protagonist 
Holocaust survivor who lacks any humane qualities and lives only for 
self-advantage). The outstanding piece in Itche's first collection of 
essays, Essayen, a critique of Singer was in effect a critique of the 
legacy that Yiddish culture must not accept as final note.

The Morgn Frayhayt folded in 1987, its editor Novick approaching the 
centenary mark himself. The Yiddish anarchist paper Fraye Arbeter Shtimme 
had folded a decade earlier, and the Forward went weekly. As the Frayhayt 
saluted its old critic the FAS on the demise, so the Forward saluted the 
Frayhayt. Another case of "enemies: a love story," this was the shrinkage 
of the Yiddish world, accelerated by morality and hardly affected, after 
all the generations of arguments, by the collapse of the Soviet Union and 
the Soviet system.

A long time ago and in another historical galaxy (perhaps an alternative 
reality), Itche Goldberg had seen, as young man, "Suddenly?.
Jewish culture was developing in the Soviet Union. It was really 
breathtaking. You had the feeling that both the national problem was solved 
and the social problem was solved?It was overpowering and we were young."

Outliving nearly everyone of his generation around him (everyone but his 
widow, Jenny, that is), Itche grew more interested in the religious or 
spiritual basis of Yiddish socialism and Yiddish culture. He had never been 
anti-spiritual in any real sense, of course. The thousand years of Yiddish 
European culture climaxed in an escape from the narrowness of the 
domination that the merchant and rabbi imposed upon Jewish village life, 
freeing the language to express what could hardly be thought in earlier 
days, but also recapturing, recovering and reinterpreting, the kernel of 
the faith that had sparked ordinary Jews across an eon.

Paul Buhle,a Senior Lecturer at Brown University, is author or editor of 32 
volumes, including an authorized biography of filmmaker Abraham Lincoln 
Polonsky and, most recently, the three-volume Jews and American Popular 
Culture (Praeger/Greenwood).

--

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