The Work of Jewish Folklorist Solomon Beilin in the Context of the Development of Yiddish Culture in the 1920s–1930s

Abstract

The article is the final part of a major study that featured the life and work of Solomon Kh. Beilin (1858–1942), a Jewish folklorist, ethnographer, and publicist, the Rabbi of the cities of Rogachev and Irkutsk, who was one of the first researchers to collect and systematize the Jewish folklore on the territory of the Russian Empire. The paper focuses on the post-revolutionary Yiddish works of Rabbi Beilin as part of the development of Jewish ethnocultural life in 1920s-1930s in the USSR, Lithuania, and Poland. The author worked in the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Studies (New York) and studied Solomon Beilin’s Yiddish correspondence with the Jewish philologist and publicist Zalman Reisen, as well as with editors of several Yiddish periodicals. The analysis proved that Beilin’s post-revolutionary research was extremely productive, probably, due to the rise of the Yiddish language in 1920s–1930s. In that period, Solomon Beilin was also interested in various philological issues related to Yiddish grammar and spelling.

Keywords

• jewish folklore
• yiddish writers
• institutes of jewish culture in the ussr
• institute of jewish studies
• yivo
• zalman reisen