9 - Aspects of the History of Warsaw as a Yiddish Literary Centre

Summary

The leading role of Warsaw on the eve of the Holocaust in Yiddish literature is well-known and generally accepted. Yet, apart from a large number of memoirs, dating especially from the period between the two world wars,1 we do not possess even a single attempt at a broad survey of this centre. What is envisaged here is not a history of Yiddish literature in Warsaw as such, or of the theme of Warsaw in Yiddish literature. What is required is a study which will make us aware of the many factors in the wider background of Jewish Warsaw, which made possible the emergence of such a large and bustling - alas now merely historical - literary centre. In this article I want only to indicate some significant moments in the history of Yiddish literature in Warsaw, mainly in the period down to the First World War, with no intention of exhausting an extensive and truly fascinating theme.

Let us start with some history: from 1795, when the total Jewish population of Warsaw was 6,000, and certainly most of them without full and legal right of abode, the Jewish population grew constantly. Although Jews were not allowed to live in all the parts of the city, their population in 1861 had already reached 43,000. In the course of twenty years, until 1882, their number tripled to 130,000. In 1914, just before the First World War, 337,000 Jews were living in Warsaw.

This steady growth of the number of Jews was not, of course, merely a result of natural increase, but was principally caused by the rapid urbanization of the Jews in Poland, by internal migration from the shtetlekh and the provinces to the big city. Warsaw, from the middle of the nineteenth century, exercised an enormous pull, not only on Jews within the borders of Congress Poland, but also on all Jews living in the Russian Pale of Settlement. It should be emphasized here that in addition to the stream of Jewish emigration overseas after 1881, there was an equally large internal migration, so that in the course of 32 years, from 1882 to 1914, over 200,000 Jews came to Warsaw.