Lithuanian Jewish Culture, by Dovid Katz. Originally published 2004 and reprinted in 2010, by Baltos Lankos of Lithuania. Large format, 400 pages, hardcover. ISBN 9955-584-41-6. www.baltoslankos.lt. Available online from: http://www.amazon.com/Lithuanian-Jewish-Culture-Dovid-Katz/dp/9639776513
Dovid Katz, the New York-born, award-winning Yiddish scholar who founded the Yiddish studies programs at Oxford University and Vilnius University, has produced an immensely engaging, highly scholarly yet fully accessible deluxe folio volume on his specialty, the Jewish cultural, linguistic, and spiritual worlds of Lithuanian Jews.
Upon an initial browse through Lithuanian Jewish Culture (a second edition of which appeared in 2010), it quickly becomes clear that Katz does not do things by half-measure. His history traces the various migrations of the Jews since the era of the Patriarchs some four millennia ago, culminating in the rise of the Ashkenazic Jewish civilization in central Europe and the various medieval persecutions and expulsions that chased the Jews eastward into Lithuania.
It also quickly becomes obvious that the focus is geographically broad enough to include Lithuania at its most expansive: all the lands of the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania and its modern successor states of Lithuania, Belarus, Latvia, and parts of northern Ukraine, and northeastern Poland. This volume includes some of the best maps I have yet seen of these regions. A map of “Lita” (Jewish Lithuania) showing the extent NorthEastern Yiddish was spoken unexpectedly arrested my attention for nearly 20 minutes. My maternal ancestors came from Belarus, yet this map showed their shtetls and many others in the surrounding region. No wonder my mother’s family always declared themselves as “Litvaks” who spoke a Litvak-inflected variant of Yiddish.
The book has lavishly illustrated sections on the famed Vilna Gaon; the rise of the effervescent spiritual Hasidic movement and their rationalistic opponents, the Mitnagdim; the centers of Lithuanian Torah study; architectural features of the common wooden synagogues; famous Jewish personalities of 19th-century Vilna; the Haskalah or modernist movement; a full survey of Jewish writers and poets from Lithuania; leaders of the labor movement; and the dispersion of Yiddish writers and cultural figures to the United States, Israel, and elsewhere. Presented in logical sequence, each aspect of this diverse and enormous subject is illustrated with often-rare photographs and archival materials.
Lithuanian Jewish Culture presents an essential background for those researching roots in this part of the world or just wanting to know more about their past. This volume has much to teach us about the lost civilization it so thoroughly documents. Katz has stuffed these 400 pages with such an immensity of riches which is at once cause for celebration as well as for sadness, since it brings to mind the enormous treasures and vast worlds that have been lost.
Will the reader allow me to comment once more on the exemplary and colorful maps? “Dialects of the Yiddish Language,” which illustrates the territories of the Western, Eastern, Northeastern, Southwestern, and other regional variants of Yiddish, is a reminder that pronunciation of Yiddish also carries a geographical message. The map titled “Cultural Boundaries within Eastern European Jewry” highlights several other interesting regional distinctions such as style of synagogue architecture, whether the traditional gefilte fish was seasoned with or without sugar, and—wild as it sounds—whether the preparation of farfel was accomplished by cutting or by chopping. Some of these findings are the results of historic ethnographic expeditions, a tradition that Katz continues even to this day.
Those with an interest in Lithuanian Jewry may also appreciate The Litvak Legacy, by Mark N. Ozer (Xlibris, 2009), which treats the same subject, although in a much less appealing format and style, but which includes sections on “the English-speaking Litvak Diaspora” in the United States, Britain, Canada, and South Africa, as well as the Hebrew equivalent in Israel.
Bill Gladstone
