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A Quest for Yiddishland: The 1937 World Yiddish Cultural Congress
In August 1935, a group of intellectuals who gathered in Vilna at a jubilee
conference of the Jewish Scientific Institute, YIVO, announced the founding of a
movement called the Yiddish Culture Front (YCF), whose aim would be to ensure
the preservation of Yiddish culture. The article focuses on the congress convened
by the YCF in Paris. The congress, a landmark in the history of Yiddishism, opened
on September 17, 1937, before a crowd of some 4,000 attendees. 104 delegates
represented organizations and institutions from 23 countries. Radically anti-Soviet
groups boycotted the convention, considering it a communist ploy. Ironically, the
Kremlin cancelled the participation of a Soviet delegation at the last moment.
From the vantage point of the delegates, Paris was the only logical center for its
World Yiddish Cultural Association (IKUF or YIKUF) created after the congress.
However, the French capital was not destined to become the world capital of
Yiddish intellectual life. Influential circles of Yiddish literati, still torn by
ideological strife rather than united in any common cultural “Yiddishland,”
remained concentrated in America, Poland, and the Soviet Union.