Michigan's Yiddish Library Offers Rich
Primary Sources for Scholar Kalman Weiser

In September 2008, the University of Michigan received the library and personal papers
of Beatrice (Gina) Silverman Weinreich, a scholar whose life's work was to preserve the
Yiddish language and culture. Her son, Don Weinreich and daughter, Stephanie, donated the
deep collection that includes books inscribed to Bina, Uriel and Max Weinreich from such
classic 20th-century Yiddish writers as Avrorn Sutskevei; Chaim Grade, Itsik Manger, and
H. Leyvik. There is an extensive collection of Jewish and general folklore, including hard-
to-find Yiddish publications, a variety of Yiddish children's books, Yiddish cookbooks, and
Passover Haggadahs. Of most interest, perhaps, is the extensive personal correspondence
among members of the entire Weinreich family, which open a window into an intimate world
of Yiddish in Europe and America.

Kalman Weisel; Silber Family
Professor of Modern Jewish Studies
York University Toronto

In Fall 2010, Kalman Weiser, the Silber Family Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at
Toronto's York University, came to Ann Arbor as a Frankel Institute fellow to explore the
primary sources housed in the Weinreich collection. Specifically, he was interested in the
personal papers of the Weinreich family. He had heard about the library from Don Weinreich,
Bea and Uriel's son, who following a talk at YIVO given by Weiser had invited him to Bea
Weinreich's home, where Don was packing his mother 's collection for Michigan.

What is housed here in the Beatrice Weinreich collection
that you see being of particular interest and why?

Weiser: Beatrice Silverman Weinreich, the only American-
born member of the extended Weinreich family, made
important contributions as a Yiddish folklore scholar as
well as helped her husband Uriel with his various research
projects. Her archive is significant not only because it
contains her personal and professional papers but because
it also holds many of the papers of her husband and father-
in-law, two titans of 20th-century scholarship. While
YIVO possesses perhaps the lion's share of Max and Uriel
Weinreich's professional papers, the Beatrice Weinreich
Collection at the University of Michigan contains a treasure
trove of personal correspondence among members of the
Weinreich family and their friends from the 1930s on. The
letters bring to life the intellectual and emotional lives of
these people as well as help us to reconstruct aspects of
pre-war Vilna Jewish intellectual society and its post-war
diaspora. The archive also holds a significant amount of
material related to projects in the field of Yiddish such as
the Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry and
Modern Yiddish-English/English-Yiddish Dictionary and
material related to Uriel Weinreich's groundbreaking work
as a general linguist. Beyond offering a window into the
lives of members of a rather remarkable family of refugee
intellectuals, the archive vividly documents the post-WWII
development of the field of Yiddish Studies as well as
developments in the history of American Jewry.

Who was Max Weinreich?

Weiser: In his own lifetime, Max Weinreich (1894-1969)
was already recognized as the leading scholar of Yiddish
language and culture. Today, he is recalled chiefly for two
monumental achievements: firstly, he was a co-founder of
YIVO (the Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut, or the Yiddish
Scientific Institute as it was long known in English; it
exists today as the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
in New York City) and served as its research director for
decades. Secondly, his magnum opus, Di geshikhte fun der
yidisher shprakh (History of the Yiddish Language, recently
published in full translation by Yale University Press and
YIVO) offers brilliant insights not only into the linguistic
development of Yiddish but also into the cultural history of
Ashkenazic Jewry and the field of Jewish languages.

But Weinreich's legacy is far more profound. At a time when
Yiddish was widely dismissed as low-brow and parochial,
especially among Jews, he helped to achieve recognition
for Yiddish and its culture as worthy subjects of scholarly
inquiry. He also encouraged the application of the latest
methodological developments in the social sciences to
the study of Eastern European Jewry decades prior to the
widespread acceptance of Jewish Studies in universities.
All of this was done by Weinreich and his YIVO colleagues
in Yiddish, the mother tongue of the majority of Eastern
European Jews prior to WWII, thus helping to show that
the language itself could be used as a vehicle for serious
intellectual expression. Beyond this, Weinreich was
instrumental in training a generation of scholars in the USA
after the Holocaust to carry on the academic traditions
of YIVO and to develop the field of Jewish Studies in
American academia.

Weinreich and his wife Regina, a distinguished pedagogue
in Vilna prior to the outbreak of World War II, had two
remarkable sons: Uriel, the pioneering linguist and Yiddish
scholar and Gabriel, an expert in musical acoustics who is
now an emeritus professor of Physics at the University
of Michigan.

No longer viewed as marginal, Yiddish has achieved an
unprecedented measure of respect even if some still dismiss
it. American universities boast an increasing number of
courses, especially at the undergraduate level, in English
about Yiddish literature and culture as Jewish Studies in
general has expanded as a field. An - albeit shrinking -
number of universities also offer a year or two of Yiddish
language instruction. At the same time, since there exist at
best a handful of Chairs in Yiddish and even fewer ones
supporting well-developed graduate programs, students
seeking to specialize in Yiddish language and culture must
study at multiple universities and language programs around
the world in order to develop real expertise in the field.
This globalization of Yiddish Studies is, of course, in many
ways a positive phenomenon, as it promotes intellectual
exchange. On the other hand, departments find it difficult to
hire qualified instructors in the absence of teacher training
programs and adequate funding for language instruction.
Yiddish language and culture courses struggle to survive as
universities cut budgetary allotments for "less
popular languages."

Frankel Center for Judaic Studies
202 S. Thayer Street ,
zm Thayer Building - --
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608
734.763.9047 -
,
.
Executive Committee
Deborah Dash Moore, Directo _ r
Todd Endelman
Mikhail Krutikov
Maya l3arzilat,

The Regents of the .„.
University of Michigan
Julia Donovan Darlow:
Laurence B. Deitch •
Denise Ilitch
Olivia P. Maynard
Andrea Fischer Newman_
Andrew C. Richner
S. Martin Taylor
Katherine E. White
Mary Sue Coleman, ex officio

Frankel Institute for Advanced
Judaic Studies

Steering Committee
Derek Collins -
Maya Barzilai
Geoff Eley
Daniel Herwitz
Mikhail Krutikov
Julian Levinson
Deborah Dash Moore

Academic Advisory Boar
Robert B. Alter
University of California-Berkeley
Jonathan Boyarin
University of North Carolina
Frances Degen Horowitz
City University of New Yor -
Paula Hyman
Yale University
Deborah Lipstadt •
Emory University
Peter Machinist
Harvard Divinity School
Michael V. Fox
University of Wisconsin
Ray Scheindlin
Jewish Theological Seining
Kay Kaufman Shelamay,,
Harvard University
James Young
University of
s
Amherst
Steven Zipperstein
Stanford University-.

Kim Reick Kunoff, Editor/ = yout

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