Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar France by Nick Underwood (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar France by Nick Underwood Zoé Grumberg Nick Underwood. Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar France. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. 266 pp. In Yiddish Paris, Nick Underwood writes the biography of the “forgotten homeland of Yiddishist diaspora nationalism in Western Europe: France, and more specifically Paris” (1) in the interwar years. He studies several Yiddish cultural institutions, their members, and the performances, activities, and meetings they organized. If the book focuses mainly on Paris, which was the city where most Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe settled before and after the First World War, Underwood also briefly mentions cities such as Nancy, Metz, and Strasbourg. At that time, for many, France represented the country of human rights, of liberty, and, for leftists, of multiple revolutions. More specifically, for Jews, the emancipation of Jews in 1791 and the Dreyfus affair were major symbols. France was seen as a country that could be torn apart over the fate of a Jew. Fleeing from authoritarian regimes, antisemitism, and poverty, many east European Jews thus chose France and, more specifically, Paris. They brought with them a specific language and culture from eastern Europe. But this specific Yiddish culture was also shaped by the French context. As Underwood argues, these Jewish immigrants created an “alternative diasporic and French identity: Franco-Yiddishness” (6). The book is divided into five chapters that are five case studies: each focuses on a component of interwar Yiddish culture in Paris. In the first chapter, Underwood presents the institutionalization of Yiddish cultural life in Paris after World War I. He studies the Paris branch of the Kultur Lige, created in 1922. The Kultur Lige was originally founded in Kiev in 1918 by Yiddish cultural activists who wanted to create and extend high Yiddish culture. It was, at first, a nonpolitical institution. In France, it also started as an apolitical institution—or rather, an institution that united different political sensibilities, without being political itself—before being taken over by the Communists in 1925. The Kultur Lige was central in the building of a Yiddish community in Paris: it helped recent immigrants accommodate to their new life in France while sharing and maintaining their Yiddish culture through lectures, discussions, and various cultural gatherings. In the second chapter, Underwood turns to the Medem-farband, a cultural institution created in 1925 by Bundists and named after Vladimir Medem, a Bundist ideologue known [End Page 474] for his anti-Bolshevism and defense of the nation as a cultural form. Soon, a connection was made with the Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research). Bundists thus hoped to make their own mark on Parisian Yiddish culture. The next three chapters address transpolitical cultural activities: drama (chapter 3), choirs (chapter 4), and two main events in the Parisian Yiddish cultural life of the 1930s: the Modern Jewish Culture Pavilion at the World’s Fair and the First International Yiddish Cultural Congress (chapter 5). While modern scholarship on Jews in interwar France has mostly studied conflicts between native French Jews and immigrant Jews, as well as between Jewish Communists, Bundists, and Zionists, Underwood insists on cooperation among Yiddishists, through a focus on the cultural sphere. He writes that “the continually changing nature of interwar Jewish culture illuminates how official policy differed from cultural practice ‘on the ground,’ so to speak, in the work carried out by cultural organizations” (56). This is one of the main interests of the book; another one is to offer the reader insight into this dynamic cultural life, through the analysis of numerous and unstudied archives that Underwood collected in several countries. By doing so, the author resurrects a part of the history of Yiddish Jews in France that had been unexplored so far. More importantly, he intends to show that this cultural life was entangled with French cultural life. Yiddish cultural activists indeed wanted to “position themselves as an important contributor to French (and more broadly European) culture, perhaps ironically through their specific subculture” (193), even though this Yiddish cultural life was known only by very few non-Jewish French citizens. Finally, studying Jewish cultural associations and institutions of the interwar years...