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With the opening of the Yehoash exhibit in New York on Friday, the Jewish public is being provided with the rare opportunity of looking behind the scenes in the workshop of a great poet.
This exhibit, which will continue at the Yiddish Culture Society, 149 Second avenue, for a month, plays a beam of light upon the creative work of the poet, Bible translator and scholar, Yehoash (Solomon Blumgarden). Through the many-sided figure of Yehoash there is also being unfolded a miniature scale picture of Jewish life in America from the time the poet arrived here in 1890 to his untimely death in 1927.
2,638 ITEMS IN EXHIBIT
The colosal task of assembling 2,638 items related to the poet was accomplished by Yehoash’s only daughter, Evlin, and her husband, Ben Dworkin. The exhibition is a treasure house of information concerning the literary, cultural and social strivings of the Jews for several decades. The unwritten biography of the poet peers through the many objects, volumes, newspaper clippings, photographs, letters, notices, essays and curios which speaks to the observer in twelve tongues. But of all the languages, the one which speaks out most clearly and most proudly is Yiddish, which under Yehoash’s mastery reached high stages of development and blossomed forth with freshness and beauty in his poems and his translation of the Bible.
One of the most interesting items of the exhibit is a reproduction of the room in which Yehaosh wrote for years and in which death stilled his hand on the cold day of January 10, 1927.
EXPERIMENTED WITH YIDDISH
This suddenness in the halting of the work is apparent at every stop, in every page and in every memorandum which remains. These incidentals have been collected into a division labeled “philological laboratory.” There are recorded words, phrases, combinations, new words, old and obsolete words with new meaning and a new twist, and a wealth of experimentation with the Yiddish language.
About 300 writers are represented by articles, studies and poems written about Yehoash while he lived and since his death. Of these writers almost 200 wrote in Yiddish, 100 wrote in English, and the rest in other languages. Eleven composers have written music to Yehoash’s poems. Fifty writers have translated parts of his work into Hebrew, English, German, Greek, Spanish, Russian, Polish and Dutch. Some of his works were originally written, by Yehoash in English or Hebrew, while others were translated by him into these languages.
From the 150 photograps in the exhibit the visitor becomes acquainted not only with ‘the appearance of Yehoash himself, even during the first days of his coming to America from Lithuania as a youth of 19 years, but also with that of a number of other writers and communal workers of today and the recent past. One sees, among them, people who as Yehoash’s contemporaries were prominent in Jewish life, which they helped shape.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
