Today in Yiddishkayt… November 29

Birthday of Nokhem Shtif, Linguist, historian, and political activist

Linguist, historian, and political activist Nokhem Shtif was born in Rovno November 29, 1879. He studied in Kiev and in 1906 became a political activist while at university, co-founding the Jewish Socialist movement Возрождение (Renaissance) in Kiev in 1903 and became a committed Yiddishist in the early years of the century. He founded the Jewish Socialist Labor Party and began writing under the pseudonym בעל-דמיון (Bal-Dimyen, The Imaginer). Shtif’s socialist world view promoted a brotherhood of nations that protected and fostered the rights of national minorities (like the Jews) — including their cultural rights to live and produce their own culture in their own language.

During the bloody civil war that raged in Ukraine in the early 1920s, Shtif settled briefly in Berlin, where he was part of the thriving Yiddish literary scene and proposed the creation of the YIVO, which was realized in Wilno in 1925. While in Berlin, he was particularly close with the essayist and literary critic Bal-Makhshoves and the writer Dovid Bergelson — the three held fast to the idea that Soviet Kiev would become the cultural center of Yiddish. Excited by state-supported Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union, Shtif returned to Kiev in 1926 and became a principle figure at the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture.

Shtif died in Kiev on April 7, 1933.

• נחום שטיף • Nokhem Shtif

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  Nokhem Shtif was born in the Volhynian city of Rovno on November 29, 1879. His family was rather well off and he had both a traditional and secular education. He studied at a Russian gymnasium and went to Kiev's Polytechnic University. He was expelled and arrested for his socialist activism as he became committed to the ideals of Jewish cultural autonomy in the diaspora and to the fostering of the Yiddish language.

  

• ייִדן און ייִדיש • Jews and Yiddish

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  In 1917, Shtif revived the diaspora nationalist Folkspartey and began writing on Jewish cultural autonomy, including the book, "Yidn un yidish (Jews and Yiddish)," shown here, published in 1919, which opens with the question: "Ver zaynen 'yidishistn' un vos viln zey? (Who Are the 'Yiddishists' and What Do They Want?)"

  

• Shtif with Tsipe Bergelson

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  At the start of Shtif moved to Kaunas, a stronghold of his Folkspartey. Shtif pictured on a writers picnic outside the city with Tsipe Bergelson, Dovid Bergelson's wife.

  

• YIVO — A Yiddish Academy

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  Shtif's work, which combined political writing, literary criticism, modern history, and philology, led to his 1920 proposal to create a Yiddish intellectual center that would serve as the national academy of Eastern European Jews. This was realized first with the establishment of YIVO in Wilno in 1925 and later in the Jewish cultural institutes of the Soviet Union. The 1925 YIVO publication of his proposal is shown here.