Di Bloggerin's World of Yiddish
Di Bloggerin's very first blog is based on her obituary of Yehuda Lisky that appeared in the Independent in May 1990. He was tiny in stature but a larger-than-life fiery force in the Yiddish literary world. I knew him, miss him and am writing this to keep his memory alive.
Di (pron. Dee) Bloggerin (The Female Blogger)
BLOG 1
YEHUDA ITAMAR LISKY was a poet and story-writer and the editor of the last secular Yiddish newspaper to be published in the UK which closed in in 1989.
Yehuda Itamar Lisky, known universally as Lisky, was born in 1899 in Oszerne, a small Polish shtetl (village). His brother, Fuchs, was a more talented author, but it was Lisky who escaped the Nazis in 1930 and outlived all his contemporaries to become the grand old man of Yiddish.From 1924 to 1930 Lisky lived among the Eastern European Jewish literati in Vienna, were he wrote Yiddish stories about Poland. In May 1930 he was ordered out of the cafe that he visited daily by a member of the Nazi Youth Movement, who had seen him through the window writing in the Hebrew alphabet of Yiddish. Lisky decided that Vienna was no longer safe. The same day, he obtained forged papers from the Jewish underground and fled to England via Paris.
He joined the London Yiddish literary scene,which over the years included the poet Avrom-Nokhem Shtencl and the novelist Esther Kreitman (sister of Isaac Bashevis Singer). Lisky's marriage in 1938 to another Jewish immigrant, the authoress Sido, whom Lisky named after the seventh and eighth notes of the musical solfa scale, was a stormy romance.
Sido, a staunch Communist, and Lisky, were a feature of the small park in front of their home in Stoke Newington, where they would sit heatedly taunting each other in Yiddish: "Fascist" (Sido to Lisky who was considerably left of the political centre), to which the insult "Comunistke" was flung in return. The marriage broke down after the birth of two sons, and the couple lived apart -in the same street - for several years. Then came the great reconciliation until Sido's death. "I can tell you, she was a wild woman", Lisky would boast after almost a bottle of whisky.
In 1939, Lisky, Sido and Professor H. Levy of Imperial College, London, attempted to set up the first ever British university programme in Yiddish studies at London University. They were thwarted by lack of funds and the outbreak of war. Fifty years later, Lisky's Yiddish lectures to the inspired revivalists of the Yiddish programme at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies had become a bi-annual event. His encouragement to young Yiddish scholars usually included the practical advice, "You need your rear as well as your head to write - writing is sitting."
He began writing poetry in 1962 inspired by the arrest and execution of Adolph Eichmann. Until the age of 89 he was active as editor of England's last fully Yiddish newspaper Dos Yidishe Folk (The Jewish People). Then a mugging at his home robbed him of £10, his health and most of his eyesight. Lisky's final years were spent in frustrating inactivity at the home of his son, who enabled him to hold court to a stream of disciples. Three days before his death, Lisky told me that he would most like to be remembered for his story "The Cockerel and the Basket" in which he depicted the ritual life of Polish non-Jews in the 1920s.
To honour his 90th birthday and his pioneering attempts in the field of Yiddish studies, London University established a Lisky Archive at Queen Mary and Westfield College where research in Yiddish language and literature was carried out in his name.
Lisky's success finally lay in his longevity, which transcended his writings and championing of Yiddish scholarship. He succeeded in outlasting the period of rejection and shame attached to Yiddish by first and second generation Jewish immigrants eager to assimilate. He outlasted his contemporary Yiddishists. Thus the diminutive Lisky, wth his black beret and wooden walking stick, became the symbol of Yiddish revival in this country.
Yehuda itamar Lisky, author, poet and edtor, born Oszerne, Poland 12 December 1899, married 1938 Sonia Husid (died 1984; two sons), died London 5 May 1990.
