About

The Lerer Roskes Archive was born out of a seemingly banal and straightforward task: to clean out the office of Professor David Roskies, scholar of Yiddish and Holocaust literature. He wanted the materials of academic value and those that were not readily available to be digitally scanned, to be retrievable for future use, and to dispose of the rest. Prof. Roskies could thus vacate his office without pounds and pounds of paper stacked in impenetrable boxes, reduced instead to a tiny USB stick with hundreds of documents organized in folders and instantly accessible with just a few clicks of a mouse.

But it soon became clear that much more was at stake: In the late 1990s, the Sholem Aleichem Memorial Foundation began an initiative to translate the entirety of his comic oeuvre into English. To find one or more competent translators, they announced a translation competition. And so it came to be that 18 different translations of chapters three and four of Sholem Aleichem’s Stempenyu find themselves in the office of Prof. Roskies. These translations alone are of inestimable value to the booming field of Yiddish translation studies and practice, while much can be learned from the systematic critique and evaluations by the panel of judges. What’s more, from the correspondence documenting the demise of the project—indeed, nothing was ever published—one can uncover a new and untold chapter of Yiddish institutional history.

Before the widow of the pioneering Yiddish linguist Elye Spivak left the Soviet Union for Israel, she withdrew three of her husband’s manuscripts from the Soviet archives. She eventually entrusted them to Professor Avraham Novershtern of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who in turn handed them to Roskies. In this circuitous way, two unpublished chapters and a third heavily emended chapter of Spivak’s life’s work on the language and style of the three classic Yiddish writers finds itself among the papers of Prof. Roskies. One of the most important critical studies of Yiddish literature thus sees the light of day, to be read and admired by today’s Yiddish scholars.

With the field of Yiddish and Holocaust literature blooming in universities and institutions around the world, a new generation of students and teachers are taking root. Though the body of secondary and primary sources is constantly growing, there is a serious dearth of pedagogic material to work with or to build upon. The dozens of meticulously designed syllabi for courses in Holocaust and Yiddish literature, taught in English, Yiddish and Hebrew, exhaustively prepared by Prof. Roskies are thus both objects of intellectual history—they shaped this new generation—and prototypes for future syllabi and future generations.  

And so, every folder of every drawer of every filing cabinet reveals yet another jewel. What began as a seemingly banal and straightforward task has become the creation of a universally accessible archive of scholarly literature, pedagogy, institutional history, and many other areas within the fields of Holocaust and Yiddish literature. Their potential only grows.