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2006-11-02
Blumke Katz, 93

Blumke Katz, a veteran of the first Yiddish Teachers' Seminary (Yídisher lérer-seminár) in Vilna in the late 1920s and early 1930s, passed away on October 27th, at the age of ninety-three. An international icon for interwar secular Vilna Yiddish culture, Blumke (the Yiddish diminutive of Blume, by which she was widely known) was for many years also “the international address” for the history of Jewish culture in Svintsyán (now Svencionys, Lithuania, some ninety kilometers north of Vilnius).

Blumke grew up in Svintsyán and was a pupil at its Yiddish school. As a teenager, she moved to Vilna to enroll in the Yídisher lérer-seminár and to study with major figures of Yiddish culture, including the philologist Max Weinreich and the poet Moyshe Kulbak. She was one of the first members of the Yiddishist scout organization Di Bin (‘The Bee’), and worked as a research assistant to Weinreich.

“Discovered” for the modern world of Yiddish culture by Prof. Dovid Katz, during his first expedition to Lithuania in 1990, “Blumke in Svintsyán,” as she became known informally in Yiddish culture circles internationally, began to participate actively in the Oxford Program in Yiddish; she published memoirs of pre-war Vilna (and her teacher Max Weinreich) in Oxford Yiddish 2 (1991), of her years in the Soviet gulag in Oxford Yiddish 3 (1995), and of her Yiddish school in Svintsyán (in Yiddish Pen, no. 7, 1995). In 1996, she was flown in by Oxford University to be the keynote speaker at the opening of the Yiddish Teachers’ Seminary at the (now defunct) Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies. She same year, she published her now-famous memoir of the boyhood years of poet Abraham Sutzkever in Vilna (in Yiddish Pen, no. 19).

When the Oxford program was relocated in Vilnius, Blumke Katz’s inspirational role was bolstered. She gave lectures as well as walking tours of both Svintsyán and Vílne (Vilna, Vilnius) at the inaugural Vilnius Summer Program in Yiddish in 1998, and has appeared at each year’s program since, including 2006. She was a guest of honor when Vilnius University had the formal opening of its Center for Stateless Cultures in 2000.

But, as Blumke told it, "a real highlight of my life was to live to see the opening of a new Yiddish institute in Vílne.” Blumke was a guest of honor at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute’s foundation meeting in August 2001, which was also attended by the director of YIVO in New York, Dr. Carl Rheins. Since then, she has been the symbol of the exquisitely refined, highly cultural interwar Vilna Yiddish (Vílner yídish) which came to zenith under the leadership of YIVO founder Max Weinreich.

Blumke gave the opening address at the Vilnius Yiddish Educator Program in May 2005. As and when the resources will materialize, it is hoped to name future educator programs, and other activities in the field of living Yiddish culture, in the perpetual memory of Blumke Katz.

Blumke’s personal life was a hard one. Her father had emigrated to America in 1912, during her mother’s pregnancy with her, and he was never heard from again. Blumke emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1935, several years after the Polish government had closed down her beloved Yiddish Teachers Seminary. Her first husband, fellow Vilna Yiddish Teachers’ Seminary student Shimke (Simon) Yavitsh (Javits), who had also migrated to the USSR, was arrested and shot during Stalin’s terror of 1937. Blumke herself was sentenced to ten years’ hard labor in the Soviet Far East, a period subsequently extended to twelve years. When she returned home to Svintsyán in the late 1940s, she found out that her mother and all her relatives and friends left behind in Vílne and Svintsyán were murdered during the Holocaust. Until the late years of the Soviet period, she could have no contacts with the world of Yiddish culture internationally.

Nevertheless, Blumke exuded an air of youthful exuberance whose indomitable fount was Yiddish language and culture. She became the teacher and mother figure to students from all parts of the world who have come to reconnect to bona fide Yiddish roots at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute. Among the Yiddish teachers around the world who are proud to be counted as her former students are Antwerp University Yiddish instructor Jennifer Bell, and the Los Angeles teacher in that city’s new project of Yiddish in Jewish day schools, Hannah Pollin, who was a Fulbright Fellow at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, and a weekly visitor to Blumke in Svintsyán, in 2004-2005.

Blumke Katz had a remarkable knowledge of the Yiddish poetry of Yung Vílne poets, of Yiddish folksongs, and of (literally) thousands of Yiddish idioms and sayings. This was knowledge that she shared with love and enthusiasm, and a native gift for teaching, with her many students and admirers.

We mourn Blumke’s passing, celebrate her magnificent life, and look forward, in partnership with friends and colleagues internationally, to finding the most appropriate way to commemorate her inspirational life in the world of Yiddish language and culture.

NOTE: An essay in Yiddish on Blumke Katz’s life, by Dovid Katz, appeared in New York’s Algemeyner Zhurnál, 23 Sept. 2005.