Noir Press

25/02/2025

Lovely to see this interview with Dovid Katz in the Jewish Telegraph.

𝗬𝗶𝗱𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗵 𝗶𝘀 𝘀𝗼 𝗰𝗼𝗼𝗹 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗞𝗮𝘁𝘇

21.02.2025

It was while in a Brooklyn Jewish secondary school that had banned Yiddish that Dovid Katz was so incensed that, at just 15, he set up a Yiddish-English journal, Aleichem Sholem.
That set New York City-raised Dovid on a path which today has seen him become the world’s leading authority on the intricate language historically spoken by Ashkenazim.
Dovid, who divides his time between North Wales and the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, has since written dozens of books and papers on the subject.
And his latest, East Broadway to Whitechapel (Noir Press, £10), sees him put together evocative short stories translated from Yiddish by Barnett Zumoff.
“The origin of the book lies in my happy and inspirational years as a young Yiddishist who was thrilled to enter the small, poor, aged but wondrously resilient and creative Whitechapel-based group of Yiddish writers,” Dovid said.
In the summer of 1975, aged 19, he became a devotee of Whitechapel’s mystic Yiddish poet AN Stencl.
Stencl’s circle kept high-level, sophisticated Yiddish literature alive — and he wouldn’t speak a word of any language other than Yiddish.
“When I returned to London as a visiting student, I rented the attic of Yiddish writer and editor IA Lisky,” Dovid recalled.
“The Whitechapel-based stories in the new book derive from my experiences among the last of the Yiddish literary mohicans in London, mostly in the East End.”
Now 68, he was immersed in Yiddish and English from an early age. His Yiddish poet father, Menke, emigrated from Lithuania in 1920 aged 14, and schooled his son completely in Yiddish.
His mother, Rivke, was a Brooklyn-born artist of Ukrainian Jewish heritage.
And, despite being raised in a largely secular environment, traditional Yiddish was always present in his life. His parents sent him to Orthodox Jewish day schools and ,during his youth, his neighbourhood, Boro Park, was rapidly becoming chassidic.
During his time at the Yeshiva of Flatbush, Dovid and 50 of his classmates requested that Yiddish be included in the curriculum.
But their request was met with vehement opposition from the school’s Israeli-born leadership, a reflection of the broader anti-Yiddish sentiment that prevailed in Israel’s earlier years.
Dovid said: “They had a hate for Yiddish which was around in Israel’s early years, where Yiddish was banned.
“It was a shock to see New York-born Jewish children being taught to have zero respect for the language, literature, and culture of their own parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.”
It resulted in his Yiddish-English journal, Aleichem Sholem.
Despite those obstacles, Dovid’s passion for Yiddish only grew stronger. As an undergraduate, he became the first to major in Yiddish linguistics at Columbia University.
In 1978, he settled in London and began his doctorate on the origins of Yiddish.
That same week, David Patterson, the renowned Oxford scholar, was searching for an instructor of Yiddish, and therefore began Dovid’s 18-year tenure at Oxford.
In December 1990, as the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, Dovid made his first trip to Lithuania in search of his father’s roots.
His friend and mentor, the late Harry Shukman at Oxford, took him out for lunch and warned him not to make the journey.
He declared: “You have built this happy programme, and all you will find there is devastation and destruction.
“Whatever the Nazis didn’t destroy, the Soviets will have bulldozed.”
Despite those warnings, Dovid found something unexpected in Vilnius.
He recalled: “I discovered hundreds of Yiddish-speaking Jews and dialects I had never been able to find elsewhere.”
He began to mount twice-a-year expeditions to record the last Jews of Lithuania, Belarus and Latvia. The thousands of tapes are being digitised and added to the Lithuanian Yiddish Video Archive, now on YouTube.
That first visit led to an agreement with Vilnius University to send Lithuanian students to study Yiddish at Oxford.
In 1999, after a one-year stint at Yale, he moved to Vilnius, becoming a professor of Yiddish language, literature and culture at Vilnius University.
However, his academic career in Lithuania took a dramatic turn in 2008 when he began speaking out against the country’s attempts to revise Holocaust history, which included police coming to look for his department’s Holocaust survivor librarian, Fania Brantsovsky, then in her 80s, accusing her of ‘war crimes’ for having escaped the Vilna Ghetto to join up with the anti-Nazi Jewish partisans in the forests.
“Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia had many ‘nationalists’ who were quite happy to kill their Jewish neighbours,” Dovid said. “It was the same in western Ukraine.
“The Holocaust in these lands started in June 1941, and thousands of Jews were murdered there before the first Germans actually got there.”
As these countries sought European Union and NATO status, a disturbing movement emerged to rewrite Holocaust history and glorify local collaborators and indeed to ‘export’ the revisionist history to a naive and unsuspecting west.
As a result, Dovid founded the web journal Defending Jewish History in 2009 to combat these distortions.
But his activism eventually cost him his job.
He explained: “When I was sacked in 2010, I asked what I had done wrong. I was told it was because of articles I had written in what they called ‘far-left publications in the West’, publications like The Guardian and The Irish Times.
“The people in the cities of Lithuania are wonderful, tolerant and humorous. Young people, especially, do not suffer from the old prejudices.
“The tragedy is that a small ultra-nationalist and antisemitic elite is disproportionately powerful.”
Over the past decades, there has been a revival in Yiddish culture, particularly in klezmer music.
However, Dovid is cautious when discussing the so-called revival of the Yiddish language itself.
“In countries like America and Britain, there were many prejudices about Yiddish, especially among the first generation born in those countries,” he said.
“That began to change in the 1960s and 1970s in America, with the ‘ethnic is beautiful’ movement.
“Many Jewish students were discovering that their parents and grandparents had been part of Yiddish cultural movements.”
At the same time, the last remaining immigrants from eastern Europe were dying, leading to a newfound romantic attachment to Yiddish.
But Dovid warned against overstating a revival. He added: “When speaking about language, you either learn to read it and write it, or you don’t. The word ‘revival’ is vastly overstated.
“Very few secular or modern Jews have mastered Yiddish as part of this movement.”
Yet he remains optimistic about the future of Yiddish, particularly among chassidic communities.
And his own certainty in the future of Yiddish is something he has put into practice with his free online Yiddish Cultural Dictionary.
Throughout his career, Dovid has also been a storyteller.
His early Yiddish fiction was set in London and New York but, he had shifted to writing stories set in pre-First World War Lithuania.
One of his key concerns is how future generations will interact with Yiddish.
“There are thousands of young Jews and some remarkable non-Jews who are enthusiasts,” Dovid said.
“Among the chassidim, there are a million Yiddish speakers, many of them at child-bearing age.”

15/02/2025

A thoughtful review of Jaroslav Melnikas' The Last Day in The Times of India. '“The Grand Piano Room” fits as a perfect allegory to the situation faced by Ukrainian victims of war today' Rudroneel Ghosh writes, 'One moment, you are basking in the privileges of life, your own house, with your favourite grand piano and art canvases. The next moment you are forced to abandon it all because war is foisted on you.'

At the recently concluded New Delhi World Book Fair, Lithuanian-Ukrainian author Jaroslavas Melnikas made a powerful case for reading, even in this digital age. “Language is a tool for us to understand each other. In...

08/02/2025

Great to see Ukrainian-Lithuanian author Jaroslavas Melnik in India promoting his fabulous writing and an understanding of Lithuanian-Ukrainian affairs.

21/11/2024

Out Now

East Broadway to Whitechapel
by Dovid Katz

A collection of short stories translated from Yiddish by Barnett Zumoff

Dovid Katz’s East Broadway to Whitechapel offers a collection of Yiddish short stories that weave together vivid portraits of Jewish life in both New York and London, spanning decades of tradition, migration, and cultural change.

The collection opens with stories set in Katz’s native Brooklyn, where Yiddish thrives in the bustling Jewish neighbourhoods. We're introduced to a mischievous young boy navigating the Hasidic-dominated streets of Boro Park. To a young Yiddish playwright captivated by Eldra Don, a beautiful Spanish girl. To an unlikely friendship between Abe Gilinsky and Mendy Kopelov, highlighting generational and cultural differences.

As Katz shifts focus to London, the setting changes but the core themes of community and cultural preservation remain. In “A Day in Whitechapel,” we meet characters connected to London’s last great Yiddish literary circle. This story, which resonates with melancholy and nostalgia, captures the fading vibrancy of Yiddish in a city where the language once thrived. Katz pays homage to A.N. Stencl, a central figure in London’s Yiddish community.

Katz’s prose is rich and descriptive, often humorous and touched by sadness.

Available from bookshops, online retailers and from Noirpress.co.uk

02/11/2024

'Kanovich loved his fellow Jewish painter, Marc Chagall, especially his paintings of the luftmensch, the Jew floating above the town. Chagall represented the Jew as not rooted in society, never fully at home because of discrimination all around him.'

jewishtelegraph.co.uk/arts22319_3.ht…

23/10/2024

East Broadway to Whitechapel by Dovid Katz.

'More than anyone else, Benjamin was curious about two Jews who were under a sort of unofficial ban of excommunication, though people weren’t afraid of them. They were considered comical, half-mad fellows who even served to strengthen khasidic education by serving as an example to children of what sort of twisted thinking secular Jews could be led in to.

'The first one was The Communist, as he was called. He was short and fat, with thick, white hair that he combed out behind him and glasses with big brown tortoise-shell frames. He always had a pipe in his mouth, also tortoise-shell. He clamped the pipe between his blackened, tobacco-stained teeth. He took it out of his mouth only to speak. His gait was slow, like a turtle’s, not like an old man’s but proud like that of someone who did not lack self-assurance in any hostile environment.

'He lived alone in a basement apartment on 57th Street, which was then one of the border streets between the Jewish majority streets below it and the almost pure Italian streets above. Next to his door there always stood four large trash-barrels belonging to the four apartments into which the house had been divided, so it was easy to find him in the long row of similar houses.'

Pride in Benjamin
Translated from Yiddish by Barnett Zumoff.

12/10/2024

'Eldra Don liked the word shikse very much. She wrote little English poems on the theme as homework in her literature classes in the last year of high school. She gave one such poem to her teacher, a Jewish woman named Mrs. Applebaum, knowing very well that it would make the teacher very upset.

I am Eldra Don,
Queen by night, Lilith by day,
Eve at twilight, and to the end of my days
A shikse.

A gaze a sword, a word a spear,
Spoken - captured, walked - lost,
Touched - died, loved - betrayed,
Sat shiva

Pious, freethinkers, father, mothers,
From fright - pale, from fear - feeble,
Everything from me, the most shikse-y shikse,
The black witch.

Mrs. Applebaum’s custom was to ask all the students to come to the front of the classroom to read their compositions or poems to the class, but it was little wonder to anyone that she departed from custom that time, in spite of the fact that Eldra’s classmates had been waiting for her recitation with bated breath.'

Excerpt from 'Eldra Don'
East Broadway to Whitechapel
Collected Yiddish stories of Dovid Katz
Translated by Barnett Zumoff

Out 25th October 2024
Pre-order now: https://www.amazon.co.uk/East-Broadway-Whitechapel-Yiddish-Stories/dp/0995560072/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.0Tie9dnYDvsshCi7MgZjnA.tAnKFMrcB-CVmEpsvHLV8xYjLx7QspM_6j5gv9ZLxVY&dib_tag=se&keywords=dovid+katz+east+broadway&qid=1728727619&sr=8-1