20世纪30年代初，在德国柏林，一群主要的东欧犹太知识分子开始实施一个项目，以改变世界各地数百万讲意第绪语的犹太人的生活。他们的目标是出版一本流行而全面的意第绪语常识百科全书，作为通往现代世界的桥梁和帮助读者在其中导航的指南。然而，在《通用百科全书》发表后不久，希特勒掌权迫使编辑逃到巴黎。在1966年纽约市出版最后一卷之前，该项目的范围和任务一再发生变化。
《大屠杀与意第绪人的流亡》解开了阿尔杰梅因·恩特西克洛佩代尔及其编辑的复杂传奇。编辑们继续出版书籍并修改百科全书的使命，而他们的主要读者东欧犹太人在纳粹统治下面临迫害和种族灭绝，以及在第二次世界大战后的最初几十年中重建自己的挑战。历史学家巴里·特雷斯登伯格（Barry Trachtenberg）揭示了在二十世纪中叶，该项目如何在犹太文化和政治界引发了巨大争议，争论了一部意第绪语百科全书的目的，以及它应该包含哪些知识和观点。尽管如此，这不仅是一个关于破坏和创伤的故事，而且是一个坚韧和连续的故事，因为百科全书的编纂者努力保护意第绪文化的遗产，记录其在大屠杀中近乎彻底的灭绝，并规划其未来之路。
The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish: A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye
In the early 1930s in Berlin, Germany, a group of leading Eastern European Jewish intellectuals embarked upon a project to transform the lives of millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews around the world. Their goal was to publish a popular and comprehensive Yiddish language encyclopedia of general knowledge that would serve as a bridge to the modern world and as a guide to help its readers navigate their way within it. However, soon after the Algemeyne entsiklopedye (General Encyclopedia) was announced, Hitler’s rise to power forced its editors to flee to Paris. The scope and mission of the project repeatedly changed before its final volumes were published in New York City in 1966.
The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish untangles the complicated saga of the Algemeyne entsiklopedye and its editors. The editors continued to publish volumes and revise the encyclopedia’s mission while their primary audience, Eastern European Jews, faced persecution and genocide under Nazi rule, and the challenge of reestablishing themselves in the first decades after World War II. Historian Barry Trachtenberg reveals how, over the course of the middle decades of the twentieth century, the project sparked tremendous controversy in Jewish cultural and political circles, which debated what the purpose of a Yiddish encyclopedia should be, as well as what knowledge and perspectives it should contain. Nevertheless, this is not only a story about destruction and trauma, but also one of tenacity and continuity, as the encyclopedia’s compilers strove to preserve the heritage of Yiddish culture, to document its near-total extermination in the Holocaust, and to chart its path into the future.
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