INTRODUCTION

IN the lead article of its January 1939 bulletin the Bundist organization Kult-bukh bemoaned the wretched financial state of the Yiddish book market in Poland and appealed to several organizations—the Yidishe Literatn un Zhurnalistn Fareyn (Jewish Writers’ and Journalists’ Union), the Yiddish PEN Club, the Tsentraler Yidisher Shul-Organizatsye (Central Yiddish School Organization, TsIShO), the YIVO Institute, and the Bibliotekn-tsenter (Library Centre) of the Bundist Kultur-lige—to proclaim a Yiddish book month. Its aim was to revive the book market and to make the reading public aware of the role it could play in ensuring that Yiddish books would continue to be published in Poland.

The weakness and vulnerability of the Yiddish book market on the eve of the Nazi destruction of east European Jewish life points to a variety of adverse forces that were in play at that fearful moment in history: economic depression, anti-Jewish government policies, the omnipresence of entertainment fiction in the Yiddish daily press, and the rapid linguistic assimilation of Polish Jewish youth.

Jewish public libraries played a pivotal role in working-class Jewish culture in the period between the wars. Since many young people typically left school in their early teens to enter the workforce, libraries and the cultural activities that took place in and around them enabled young people to continue to develop intellectually.

The symbiosis between the Yiddish book industry and Yiddish libraries in interwar Poland meant that the relative health or infirmity of libraries strongly affected the book industry. Thus, when the Yiddish book sounded the alarm in 1939, it was an indication of the troubled state of the libraries as well.

Although the twenty-year interlude between the two world wars was an extremely difficult period for Polish Jewry, one that, with hindsight, we may see as characterized by significant losses, it was also distinguished by the tremendous creative energy of its cultural activists.