What emerges from such a consideration, although Lambert and Stavans
never address this explicitly, is an understanding that the Ashkenazic
cultural nationalists who established Yiddish language institutions in
the United States (and throughout the world) were the functional
equivalents of what in contemporaneous African American culture were
known as “race men.” Committed to avant-garde aesthetics or radical
politics (often both), they cultivated a mode of address, whether
linguistically or culturally, that was exclusive to their own
marginalized communities. Because of this exclusivity, they have mostly
been omitted from broader surveys of global or national modernisms.
Although an understanding of modernist art, for example, is likely to
include Marc Chagall, how many readers of world literature know of
Chagall’s Yiddish-language literary collaborator, Der Nister? Equally
apposite, when one thinks of literary modernism in the United States,
the names that leap to mind are F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner,
and Gertrude Stein — but seldom Nella Larsen or Wallace Thurman. These
comparisons highlight the prospect that, to a figure such as Der Nister
or Wallace Thurman, canonization among larger audiences might have been
irrelevant, since they only had the opportunity to address their own
communities. But for readers today, these figures should matter. And,
although the editors of this anthology understand the importance of
Yiddish culture in the United States, they leave unexamined the ways in
which the modifiers “Yiddish” and “American” bespeak an unequal playing
field, as much as they do a catalytic interaction between the two.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-undying-half-life-of-yiddish/
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