INTRODUCTION
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Historical Background
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a time
of intellectual ferment, flux and physical upheaval for Jews in
Eastern Europe. Religious orthodoxy was still strong, but not
monolithic. In addition to the rationalist Misnagdik
stream, stressing erudition and study, there was popular mystical
Hasidism, which spoke joyfully - in Yiddish - to the heart of
the common man. The ethical Mussar movement of Israel Salanter
had also won adherents. Moreover, cross currents of new secular
ideas and ideals were challenging the young: Haskalah (Enlightenment),
with its beckoning windows to the knowledge and culture of the
Western world, the Bund and other forms of socialism, Zionism,
and various combinations of these ideologies.
All this intellectual ferment was taking place against a background
of shtetl (townlet) poverty, economic persecution, dislocation,
and recurrent pogroms under the czarist regime. In the New World,
wave upon wave of immigrants poured onto American shores, where
new traumas of exploitation and grinding urban poverty frequently
awaited.
Such was the turbulent but fertile soil out of which new shoots
in Jewish creativity were to sprout in the arts and in literature,
including Yiddish poetry. It was as if these currents and upheavals
aerated and nurtured the roots of creative expression in the Yiddish
speaking world.
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Goldie Sigal
Jewish Studies Librarian
McGill University Libraries