Groysser Kundes

GROYSSER KUNDES. The “big wise guy,” or “big stick,” in Yiddish, the Groysser Kundes (1909–1927) was the leading satirical weekly in that language, and thereby one of the most widely read leftish satirical publications in the United States. Founded and published by a melancholy poet, Jakob Marinov, the Groysser Kundes (first called the Groysser Kibitzer, “big kibitzer”) was at once the weekly sitcom and the conscience of the Lower East Side. It pilfered jokes or reprinted cartoons from the British Punch and Simplicissimus, usually on such standard themes as jilted romances. But it also dwelt in loving detail on the contemporary personalities and problems of the ghetto. Its artists caricatured every literary or theatrical notable, often with scathing satire but also as a form of Jewish celebrity-recognition. Its writers similarly analyzed cultural developments through witty poems and feuilletons. In effect, they upheld a standard of moral or aesthetic purity and commitment to Jewish culture against which they judged their own, often quite harshly.

The Kundes, therefore, for a long period found its most serious and continued butt of satire in the Jewish Daily Forward and above all the Forward’s editor, Abe Cahan. According to the Kundes artists in particular, the Forward had been founded on socialist principles but conducted itself as a mere capitalist enterprise, with the production of literary shund (trash) a primary means of gaining readers and advertisers. The Kundes considered the Forward to be an organ, in essence, of assimilationism. In later years, the Kundes turned its barbs against the opponents, inside and outside the ghetto, of the proposed Jewish state in Palestine.

But the Kundes may be best remembered for its two great public campaigns: for Jewish labor, and against war. Its sentimental cartoons about Jewish martyrdom refocused attention upon socialism and the Jewish labor movement as the modern guides out of Pharoah’s Egypt. Its caricatures on World War I borrowed from the Yiddish literary tradition, which had since the 1870s detached Jewish interests from armies and fighting. For writers and cartoonists of the Kundes, militarism became the enemy and iconoclastic humor a chief Jewish strategy for survival. In its special “War Edition,” August 1914, the Kundes cover shows “Brutality” (male) and “Civilization” (female) superimposed upon a map of Europe. As “Civilization” is overrun by shovelfuls of soldiers, “Brutality” gloats: “Ah, now I’ll get even with my enemy: I’ll bury her alive!”

Jewish radicals sympathetic to the Russian Revolution, themselves (like most younger Yiddish intellectuals of note) former contributors to the Kundes, tried several times to launch pro-Communist versions of the Kundes. All failed, although the editor of Der Humorist (1922), Sam Liptzin, became humor columnist for the Communist Morgen Freiheit for a half century. With the disappearance of Kundes, a popular humor tradition on the Left came to an end.

Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976.