NO LETTERS ARRIVE ANYMORE: AMERICAN YIDDISH HOLOCAUST LITERATURE

Abstract

This dissertation examines Yiddish-language poetry composed during the Holocaust and in direct response to news and rumors of the events as they reached the Jewish communities of the United States. Physically removed from Europe, but unable to imagine themselves as separate from the communities being destroyed, the authors examined are deeply concerned with Jewish existence beyond physical survival. Interpreting the unfolding events against a background of Jewish history, literature, and theology, this poetry confronts the question of what it means to retain, maintain, and rebuild a communal Jewish identity and to imagine a future for the Jewish people in the face of its imminent and ongoing destruction. “No letters arrive anymore”: American Yiddish Holocaust Literature focuses in particular on four Yiddish poets: Kadya Molodovsky (1894-1973), Yankev Glatshteyn (1896-1971), Arn Tsaytlin (1898-1973), and H. Leyvik (1888-1962). The immediacy of these events, the intensity of the crises of identity they engender, and the critical self-awareness that these poets express produce distinct forms of knowing and experience that cannot be understood through current interpretive frameworks derived from the study of survivor memoir and testimony. Rather, these authors are preoccupied with their complex positioning as individual witnesses to the destruction, and as members of a community and, as Jewish tradition would dictate, speakers for a community under existential assault. This dissertation thus offers a critical interpretive framework that understands Holocaust literature to be responding not only to the physical destruction of Europe’s Jews, but also to an accompanying crisis of Jewish self-understanding and collective identity, especially reflective of American Jewish communities of the time, yet to understand their own relationship to the destroyed communities of Europe.