Proletpen

PROLETPEN. Yiddish left-wing poets, proliflcally active in the United States for more than three generations beginning in the early 1890s, were almost by definition working-class bards. But the Yiddish section of the Communist movement made special efforts to encourage and channel the activities of their own “proletarian poets.” Around them grew one of the most intense and widely read literary movements in the history of the American Left.

Early in 1924, about thirty Communist supporters formed the Young Worker-Writers’ Union, limiting membership to “those who recognized the class struggle.” They viewed themselves as heirs of the “Sweatshop Poets” (Morris Winchevsky, Morris Rosenfeld, David Edelshtat, and Joseph Bovshover) whose politics and aesthetics had been challenged by the aestheticist “yunge” (young ones) in the 1910s. Their journal, Yung-Kuzhie (Young Smithy, 1924–1925) attacked “art for art’s sake” and promoted the unity of revolutionary writers everywhere. Leading members also took part in a short-lived trilingual journal (English/Yiddish/Russian), Spartacus, inspired by an international conference of writers in Moscow.

The same writers took part in a wider, non-Party but sympathetic cultural movement of Workers Clubs, begun in 1920, with fifty branches and about five thousand members. Together, these clubs and the Union published Yugnt (Youth, 1926–1927), suspended along with Yung-Kuzhie after the appearance of Der Hammer (The Hammer), an official Communist Yiddish monthly of politics and culture. A colorful and in some ways superior counterpart to the English-language New Masses, Der Hammer carried lively journalism, original poetry and fiction, and illustrations by such leading left-wing artists as Louis Lozowick.

Meanwhile, a new Proletarian Writers Group was organized by about thirty of these young writers, taking the name “Union Square” to emphasize their revolutionary nature—revolutionary activity centered around Union Square—and their enmity toward the forces clustered on East Broadway. This group lasted only eight months but made a splash in the Yiddish Left with a collective criticism of editor Moissaye Olgin for coveting bourgeois “stars” in his widely read Yiddish communist Morgen Freiheit. Olgin, under pressure, admitted his error and outlined a revolutionary program for a new Freiheit Writers Union.

After the August 1929 Arab uprising in Palestine, which the Freiheit supported against British imperialism “and its Zionist lackeys,” a ferocious assault was launched on the Freiheit from within the Jewish community. Offices were attacked, vendors beaten up, copies burned, advertisers pressured to withdraw, and writers expelled from the Yiddish writers union. Four of the Freiheit’s most distinguished contributors, including famed poet and playwright H. Leivick, quickly resigned from the paper. But messages of support poured in from writers’ groups throughout the United States and abroad. At the first and most historic gathering, Olgin and fifty-four belletrists launched the Proletpen. They pronounced as their slogans: “With our faces toward Today! With our faces toward the working-class! With our faces toward America!” An opposition movement led by H. Leivick, declaring devotion to the ideals of the 1917 Revolution but Yiddishist and individualist in art, lasted less than a year.

The Proletpen played an electrifying role. Sending “brigades” of writers to read at workers’ gatherings in Depression America, they quickly issued Union Square, a 340-page anthology, and the Red Cock, a journal of humor and satire (in conjunction with the Proletpen Ball, which became an annual event), also providing the literary material for the Funk (Spark), Yiddish monthly of the International Workers Order, and for the publications of ICOR, dedicated to Jewish colonization in Biro-Bidjan. By 1930–1931, Olgin himself contributed to Der Hammer a series of essays evaluating each Proletpen writer, and a general report he would present to the Soviet Yiddish writers on his upcoming trip. Links between Proletpen and the Soviet Yiddish writers tightened, with Russian critical studies and an entire issue of the prestigious Russian-Yiddish Farmest (Challenge) devoted to the Proletpen. Due no doubt to the commonality of culture and language, these American leftists enjoyed perhaps the most intimate contact of any intellectuals with their Soviet counterparts.

Proletpen’s monthly Signal (The Signal) flourished from 1933 to 1937, when the group formally gave way to a much broader international organization, YKUF (Yiddishe Kultur Farband) with its journal Yiddishe Kultur. The new worldwide Popular Front against fascism appealed to many hitherto alienated Yiddish writers, although the groundwork of a vastly successful 1937 Paris Yiddish congress was undercut by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. Indeed, the most famed Proletpen figure, brilliant satirist and poet Moshe Nadir, expressed disgust and withdrew into bitter isolation. YKUF nevertheless has remained a key force in the continuing Yiddishist literary outpouring, with hundreds of cultural events and dozens of high-quality poetry collections, works of fiction, autobiographies, and children’s books. Yiddishe Kultur, edited first by Nakhman Maisel and later by Itche Goldberg, continues today as a banner publication of Yiddish literature and cultural criticism.

Ironically, only a few years after the Soviet Yiddish leaders, poet Itzakh Feffer and actor Solomon Mikhoels, were feted in giant wartime rallies across the United States and other surviving Yiddish centers, they fell victim, along with many others, to Stalin’s savage attacks on Jewish culture. Reaching middle and then old age, former Proletpen militants looked back with pride at the dynamism and seriousness of their youth and at their intimate rapport with a large readership, but with shame at having excoriated less radical writers while censoring themselves and one another in the name of ideological purity. As their use of Yiddish and their attention to form ripened, they and the surviving Left Yiddish literature at large continued to owe much to the movements of an earlier age, despite all the tragedies and contradictions.

Estraikh, Gennady. In Harness: Yiddish Writers Romance with Communism. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005.

Fenster, B. “From ‘Yung-Kuzhie’ to ‘Signal.’” Signal, February 1936.

Glaser, Amelia and David Weintraub. Amelia Glaser, trans. Proletpen: America’s Rebel Yiddish Poets. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.

Green, Ber. “Ten Years of Proletarian Literary History.” Signal, August 1936.

Katz, Dovid. “How the Left Was Excluded from the Yiddish Canon,” Jewish Currents. November 14, 2006. https://jewishcurrents.org/proletpen-and-american-yiddish-poetry/

Kurtz, Aaron. “The ‘Proletpen.’” Der Funk, February 1931.