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\u00a0 \u05e9\u05e0\u05e2\u05e2 \u05d0\u05d5\u05df \u05e8\u05e2\u05d2\u05e2\u05df \u05de\u05d0\u05b7\u05db\u05e2\u05df \u05d2\u05d0\u05b7\u05e0\u05e5 \u05e0\u05d9\u05d5 \u05d9\u05d0\u05b8\u05e8\u05e7 \u05d0\u05b7 \u05d2\u05dc\u05d9\u05d8\u05e9\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n “Snow and Rain Turn All of New York into an Ice-Rink”<\/strong><\/p>\n Source: Historical Jewish Press<\/strong><\/p>\n Please see Page 1 in \u05d9\u05d9\u05d3\u05d9\u05e9\u05e2\u05e1 \u05d8\u05d0\u05d2\u05e2\u05d1\u05dc\u05d0\u05d8, Monday, January 15, 1923: http:\/\/jpress.org.il\/Olive\/APA\/NLI\/?action=tab&tab=browse&pub=YTB&_ga=2.24326906.1191659540.1575310086-1579785624.1575310086#panel=document<\/a><\/p>\n Translation:<\/strong><\/p>\n “A hard, heavy snow that lasted from morning till evening covered New York with a blanket of snow that was 6 inches deep yesterday.<\/p>\n In the evening the snow reverted to rain and slush, and the Street Cleaning Department with its army of assistants had a [seemingly] easy job of clearing out the streets, as traffic could not interrupt.<\/p>\n 7 thousand men worked through the night to sweep the snow from the streets into a large mound and then clear it away. All day today 10 thousand people joined [\u201cwove\u201d] in the effort. All streets and avenues were thoroughly cleaned up through the night. As far as streetcars and automobiles are concerned, they should operate without interruption. The weather forecast for today and tomorrow promises slightly colder weather, however it seems there will be no further snow fall over the next few weeks.<\/p>\n During the snowfall there were a few accidents from automobile collisions and a small number of people were wounded and sent to the hospital.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This article from the Yiddishe Tageblatt<\/em>, or Jewish Daily News, published on Monday, January 15, 1923 recounts one of the heaviest daily snowfalls in New York City history and, consequently, one of the greatest collaborative efforts of the city’s inhabitants. On January 14, 1923, snow began falling in the morning, ultimately dumping nearly 8 inches on the city before evening. Over ten thousand people came together to dig New York out of the mountain of snow.<\/p>\n Though a massive city brought to a standstill merits attention, of particular interest in this article is the language itself. Yiddish, much like English, is a language marked by regional peculiarities, which are manifest in orthographic, phonetic and lexical differences. The year of the publication in question here, 1923, saw the existence of two prolific strands of Yiddish rooted in different countries with competing ideologies: The Soviet Union and The United States. In the early years of the USSR, Yiddish artistic production and Yiddish language schools were subsidized by the government. However, the heavy hand of\u00a0\u201cSoviet rule, after some years of freedom in the earlier 1920s, made for a highly \u201cstraitjacketed Yiddish\u201d through regulation of spelling and vocabulary that resulted in a simplified, \u201cHebrew-light\u201d incarnation of the language.[1]<\/a> Alternatively, a world away, \u201cinterbellum New York was the de facto capital of Yiddish culture,\u201d and the site of a flourishing Yiddish press.[2]<\/a> The newspaper here, Yiddishe Tageblatt<\/em>, reflects not only the spelling conventions of Yiddish that Sovietization would eradicate (for example, the letter hey<\/em>\u00a0[‘\u05d4’]\u00a0 between ayen<\/em>\u00a0[\u05e2]\u00a0 and reysh<\/em>\u00a0[\u05e8]\u00a0 in past participles of verbs, e.g: \u05e4\u05bf\u05e2\u05e8\u05e7\u05e2\u05d4\u05e8\u05d8 ), but also the influence of American culture and lexical conventions. Instead of providing a Yiddish translation for government agencies, the journalist here opts for transliteration of the English words. Thus, the Department of Street Cleaning is not referred to as \u05d1\u05d9\u05d5\u05e8\u05d0\u05b8 \u00a0(biuro<\/em>) or \u05d0\u05b8\u05e4\u05bc\u05d8\u05f2\u05dc \u00a0(opteyl<\/em>) fun reynikung<\/em>, but rather quite literally (and transliterated-ly) \u201cdepartment ov street-kleening<\/em>\u201d. Thus, the language of the article here reflects not only geographical difference, but also geographical affiliation; the journalist’s language is representative of a the flourishing New York Jewish community whose vernacular has been colored by the language of the host community, English.<\/p>\n Though such moments of linguistic assimilation can be contentious for their presumed links to cultural assimilation, there is a distinctly Yiddish angle to this phenomenon that speaks to the resilience of Yiddish-Jewish culture. Yiddish is itself a composite language of different linguistic influences (Germanic, Hebraic, and Slavic) which accumulated over time in tandem with the Jews’ movement across Europe. This synthesis of cultural and linguistic factors is in itself a reflection of one of the principle tenets of early 20th century secular Yiddish culture:\u00a0doikayt<\/em>, or “hereness”. After the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the Socialist Labor Bund–a Yiddish political organization–made doikayt<\/em> “the trademark of [Bundism] during the interwar period.”[3]<\/a> In opposition to Zionism, which posited that Jewish life ought to be lived in a Jewish homeland (Palestine) and Hebrew should be the vernacular of the Jews, the Socialist, Yiddish-speaking Labor Bund asserted that Jewish life was possible wherever<\/em> Jews were living. Champions of doikayt<\/em> belived “the future of the Jewish people would best unfold in the same places in the Diaspora in which it had experienced its past, and where it had developed and created its cultural resources.”[4]<\/a>\u00a0 By 1923, New York was one such site where Jews had made a life and cultivated rich cultural resources.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Katz, Dovid. 2011. “Language: Yiddish.” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. https:\/\/yivoencyclopedia.org\/article.aspx\/Language\/Yiddish (accessed December 7, 2019).<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Katz, Dovid. 2011. “Language: Yiddish.”<\/p>\n