Bøger af Barry Trachtenberg

This book tells the saga of the Yiddish-language general encyclopedia Algemeyne entsiklopedye (1932-1966) and the editors who continued to publish it even as they were sent into repeated exile and their world was utterly transformed by the Holocaust. It is not a story only about destruction and trauma, but also one of tenacity and continuity, as the encyclopedia’s compilers strove to preserve the heritage of Yiddish culture, to document its near-total extermination in the Holocaust, and to chart its path into the future.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Yiddish was widely viewed as a corrupt form of German that Jews had to abandon if they hoped to engage in intellectual, cultural, or political work. Yet, by 1917 it was the dominant language of the Russian Jewish press. This title investigates how this change in status occurred.