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The discovery of a Jewish Negro League star forces a rewrite of Jewish baseball history
(JTA) — For more than a century, Oscar Levis was hiding in plain sight.
He pitched a no-hitter and dominated the Cuban Winter League. He tallied five straight seasons without losing a game against one of the Northeast’s toughest white semiprofessional clubs. He was so dominant that W. Rollo Wilson, the preeminent Black sportswriter of his era, held him up as a benchmark of pitching excellence — the kind of player a younger star would aspire to equal.
For all of that, Oscar Levis does not appear on any official roster of Jewish major leaguers.
The reason is straightforward and ugly: the Negro Leagues — the professional leagues Black players built and played in after being barred from the White major leagues — were not recognized as major leagues until 2020. For decades, that exclusion meant that players like Levis were not considered major leaguers at all.
And there was another reason: Levis was Black, and the prevailing assumption was that Blackness and Jewishness were identities that seldom, if ever, overlapped.
But months of archival research, family testimony, and genealogical detective work have now established what Levis’ contemporaries occasionally hinted at but never fully acknowledged: Oscar Levis was Jewish. The son of a Jewish father from Jamaica whose family roots stretched through the Caribbean back to Portugal, Levis carried a Jewish identity that his world did not know how to fully accommodate — and that baseball history, until now, did not know how to find.
A clue left in the digital margins
In 2018, Gary Ashwill, the foremost authority on Negro League statistics and co-creator of the comprehensive database Seamheads, published an article identifying Oscar Levis as Jamaican by birth — a fact that had itself been hidden for decades, since Levis routinely identified himself as Panamanian, the country where he grew up and learned to pitch. Ashwill noted that Levis’ father was a man named Amos DaCosta Levy, but that beyond the name, he had been unable to learn much more about him.
What happened next was the digital equivalent of a message in a bottle. Readers who recognized the Levy name began leaving comments on Ashwill’s webpage. One, who identified himself as Amos Levy’s great-great-nephew, wrote that Amos was Jewish. Another commenter was more specific. “I’ve never heard of [Oscar],” she wrote, “but just wanted to say that Amos DaCosta Levy is one of my ancestors. He was not a black man, he was a white, yes Jewish, man.”
Those comments caught my attention. My previous foray into Jewish baseball history had already produced one meaningful discovery — the posthumous identification of one-game major leaguer Monte Pfeiffer as Jewish. But where Pfeiffer had played a single game, Levis had played and been a star for more than a decade.
The blog comments served as a starting point, not a conclusion. Tracking down their claims took months. I reviewed digitized editions of The Gleaner, Jamaica’s newspaper of record, which confirmed DaCosta Levy’s public prominence — his election to the Legislative Council, his Masonic leadership, his business dealings. Jamaican civil and ecclesiastical records, accessible through genealogical archives, corroborated the synagogue marriage record for DaCosta Levy’s parents. I contacted historians specializing in Caribbean Jewish history, including Stanley Mirvis, whose scholarship on Jamaican Jewry provided crucial context for understanding how Jewish identity operated in that world.
I communicated directly with DaCosta Levy’s descendants, who were able to confirm, from within their own family history, what the blog commenters had suggested. And I called Shaare Shalom Synagogue in Kingston — the historic heart of Jamaica’s Sephardic Jewish community — where staff were able to confirm the existence of records connecting the Levy family to the congregation. The picture that emerged from these independent sources was consistent: DaCosta Levy was a member of Jamaica’s Jewish community, and Levis was his son.
When the evidence pointing to Levis’ Jewish identity began to solidify, I reached out to Rebecca Alpert, a professor of religion at Temple University who had spent years thinking about exactly this kind of story. Her 2011 book, “Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball,” examined the largely overlooked history of Jewish involvement in the Negro Leagues — and her expertise at the intersection of religion and sports made her the ideal partner for a discovery that sat squarely in both. Together, we reviewed the historical record, stress-tested the evidence and considered what Levis’ story means for our understanding of Jews in baseball — a conversation that only deepened my confidence in what the research had found.
An upbringing at the margins of Jamaica’s Jewish world
DaCosta Levy was born in 1848 in Port St. Mary, Jamaica, to parents whose marriage is recorded in synagogue records. According to family history, DaCosta Levy’s family lineage traced to Portugal, where his ancestors had been mariners — almost certainly Sephardic Jews who scattered across the Atlantic world after the Inquisition. By the late 19th century, DaCosta Levy had built a prosperous mercantile firm, Levy Brothers & Company, that imported goods from the United States and England. He was elected to Jamaica’s Legislative Council for St. Mary’s Parish. He was also a Worshipful Master of the Caledonian Masonic Lodge, helped found Jamaica’s Masonic Benevolence Association, and served as a justice of the peace. A 1919 article in the Kingston Daily Gleaner, written when DaCosta Levy was living in Panama, called him “the oldest foreign Mason on the Isthmus” and praised him for “faithful services.”
Levis’ mother, Theodosia Foreman, was a Black Jamaican woman who worked as a dressmaker. The union between DaCosta Levy and Foreman was not uncommon in the Caribbean Jewish world of the era. Mirvis has explained that relationships between Jewish men and women of color were relatively widespread in Jamaica and throughout the Caribbean, shaped by the power dynamics of the plantation economy. The children of such relationships occupied a complicated place — neither fully inside nor fully outside the Jewish community, a status scholars have described as “peripheral inclusion.” Contemporary observers, including one 20th-century American rabbi, noted that many Black Jamaicans bore Jewish surnames and took pride in their heritage. Levis was among them.
That identity, however, needs to be understood on its own historical terms — rooted in the Caribbean Sephardic world Levis was born into, not the standards prevalent elsewhere. Mirvis has explained that Jamaica’s Jewish community in this period was composed almost entirely of former Portuguese conversos and their descendants, a population that had never developed the same rigidity around matrilineal descent that characterizes Orthodox practice. Within this particular Sephardic tradition, patrilineal descent carried more communal weight than it did elsewhere — a distinction that shaped how men like Oscar were understood by those around them. In the Caribbean context specifically — where relationships between Jewish men and women of color were common and children of those unions were frequently integrated into Jewish social and economic life, however conditionally — the boundaries of who belonged were porous in ways that defy easy categorization.
Levis appears to have understood himself within this tradition. His family has confirmed that he was proud of his Jewish heritage and aware of it throughout his life, though he rarely foregrounded it publicly — a pattern consistent with Black Jews of the period, who frequently navigated skepticism from both White Jewish communities and the broader Black community. Jewish Baseball News — an independent organization that maintains the definitive roster of Jewish players in professional baseball — applies a deliberately inclusive standard. “We define the term ‘Jewish’ broadly,” the organization states. “If a player has at least one Jewish parent … does not practice another faith, and is content to be identified as a Jew, we include him.” Levis had a Jewish father, was publicly identified as Jewish by contemporaries and his family confirms he was proud of that heritage throughout his life.
Growing up on the color line
By the time Levis was a young man, his family had relocated to Panama, drawn by the economic opportunities opening up around the canal. It was a decision that shaped him as much as his father’s bloodline.
The U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone was a masterclass in racial hierarchy. White American workers received higher wages, better housing and superior facilities on what the system called the “gold roll.” Black workers — among them the tens of thousands drawn from Jamaica and Barbados to perform the most grueling excavation labor — were paid lower wages, housed in substandard quarters, and segregated at pay windows, hospitals, and schools. Levis, known locally as “Chick Levy,” would have understood the color line intimately before he ever set foot in the United States.
Despite those conditions, it was in Panama that he became a baseball star. He emerged as the premier pitcher on the isthmus, a “popular figure in the baseball world” celebrated for his dominance of the local clubs. Even after his American career took off, Levis returned in 1923 to pitch for a combined Panama–West Indian All-Star team before massive crowds at Balboa Stadium. Two years later, the Panamanian government awarded him a medal for his baseball achievements, and in the 1930s, he was offered – but declined – the opportunity to coach Panama’s national team for the Central American Olympics.
The Cuban stars and a career in the shadows
Levis arrived in New York in 1918. By 1921, Alex Pompez — the Cuban-American entrepreneur who owned the Cuban Stars and would eventually be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame — had recruited him to join the team. Levis became one of the first non-Cuban international players in the Negro leagues, and one of their most effective pitchers.
What followed was a career of genuine distinction. Levis pitched in the Negro leagues for the Cuban Stars (East) and the Hilldale Daisies across more than a decade, supplementing the short Negro League season with year-round appearances in exhibition games, barnstorming tours and the Cuban Winter League, where he pitched for the Almendares, the Habana Reds and the Marianao Grey Monks. On Oct. 11, 1924, he threw the first no-hitter in Cuban baseball history. He was voted to the All-Eastern Team in 1925 and led the Eastern Colored League in shutouts in 1927. He went five straight seasons without losing a game to a rival club which fielded white players, the Brooklyn Bushwicks. Cuban sports editor Jose Massaguer calculated that Levis pitched in more than 500 games across his career, and Cuban pitching records attributed to him reportedly stood for decades beyond his retirement.
None of that success saved him from the color line that excluded Black players from what was known at the time as Major League Baseball. Ashwill, the statistician, has assessed Levis as a very good pitcher whose talent was more than sufficient for the white majors — a verdict echoed by sportswriter Rollo Wilson, who in 1929 called Levis one of the sharpest and most effective right-handers in the game.
In 2020, Major League Baseball officially recognized the Negro Leagues as major leagues, and in 2024 incorporated their statistics into its historical record. By that accounting, Levis pitched in 102 major league games and accumulated a career WAR (wins above replacement) of 12.9, which ranks eighth all-time among Jewish pitchers: Sandy Koufax (48.9), Max Fried (32.3), Ken Holtzman (27.3), Dave Roberts (23.6), Barney Pelty (19.2), Steve Stone (17.1) and Erskine Mayer (13.5).
Based on his officially recognized statistics alone, Levis had the most successful professional career of any Jewish player in the 1920s.
Hidden in plain sight
What makes Levis’ story even more compelling is that his Jewish identity was not entirely hidden — it surfaced in scattered notices buried in the newspaper record.
In 1926, after Max Rosner — the Jewish immigrant who owned the rival white semi-pro team the Brooklyn Bushwicks — signed Levis’ naturalization papers, a Brooklyn newspaper ran the headline: “Oscal, Cuban Pitcher, Is a Spanish Jew.” The following year, a New York sportswriter named Aloysious Palma made the point plainly. John McGraw, manager of the (baseball) Giants, had recently signed a Jewish infielder named Andy Cohen specifically to attract Jewish fans to the Polo Grounds. Palma wrote that Levis had the talent and ability to pitch for the New York Giants — that he should have been McGraw’s Jewish star. He was the right religion. He had the right arm. He was the wrong color.
A third article, published during his managerial tenure in the 1930s, again noted his Sephardic Jewish heritage. “Oscal Levis, pitcher and manager,” the Brooklyn Times Union reported, was “of Spanish-Jewish extraction.”
Taken together, the three articles form a quiet paper trail — Levis’ Jewish identity was occasionally noted, but never coherently recognized or integrated into the broader baseball record.
He was neither the mainstream white Jewish player typically celebrated in the New York press, nor the Black player whose Jewish identity was fully acknowledged and chronicled in the Black press. He belonged to both worlds, an identity for which mainstream America had no framework.
Harlem, and the life after
When Levis’ playing and managing days ended, he built a second life in Harlem, New York. He and his wife, Lovana, operated Chick’s Bar and Grill on Seventh Avenue — a short walk from the Apollo Theater — for 35 years, making it a mainstay of the neighborhood. He served as chairman of the Harlem Riverside Tavern Owners Association, raising money for hospitals, the YMCA, the Police Athletic League and the Boy Scouts. He organized interracial boxing events at the Golden Gate Arena to keep youth out of trouble. And he was a 33rd-degree Prince Hall Freemason — the highest rank of the Scottish Rite — following directly in the tradition of his father, who had served as Worshipful Master of a Masonic lodge in Jamaica.
But even in retirement, Levis never left the game of baseball. Friends recalled that he loved to “stick his finger in the baseball pie whenever he got a chance.” He returned to Cuba just to sit in the stands “day and night.”
He was also, in his own quiet way, a witness to the great transformation of the sport he had played under the cruelest constraints. As chairman of the Jackie Robinson Day Committee, Levis helped organize the celebration and personally presented the ceiling-shattering Black major leaguer with gifts from fans across the country. New York Amsterdam News reporter George Palmer captured what the day meant to him:
“He claims that one of his biggest thrills was Jackie Robinson Day — when he had the chance to see how the public took to Jackie. He, as a former ball player, knew the hardships and obstacles which Jackie had to overcome to reach the top. To him, Jackie Robinson’s Day was what every colored ball player dreams about — so much so that it was like a dream come true.”
A name that belongs on the list
In 1943, Rollo Wilson wrote a column pushing back against the habit of comparing Black ballplayers to white stars. The “Black Babe Ruth” formulation, he argued, was both lazy and diminishing — to the player being praised and to the tradition being ignored. Black baseball had produced its own immortals, and Wilson listed Oscar Levis among them. To be considered their equal, Wilson wrote, was a standard worth chasing for any young baseball star.
Just as Wilson named Levis among the immortals of Black baseball, this research names him among the greats of Jewish baseball. His inclusion changes the historical record — and adds a dimension to the story of Jewish contributions to the game that has long been hiding in plain sight.
He was one of the finest pitchers of his era. He was Black and he was Jewish. And for a century, baseball didn’t have the categories to say so.
It does now.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post The discovery of a Jewish Negro League star forces a rewrite of Jewish baseball history appeared first on The Forward.
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This 90-year-old Jewish performer and promoter is the Zelig of folk music
Harry Tuft was in a taxi with Judy Collins, who had her guitar with her. The cab driver looked back and asked if the two of them were folk singers. They replied in the affirmative.
“Folk music is dead,” the cab driver asserted.
“We kind of chuckled a little and said, ‘Oh, really, how come?’” Tuft recalled.
“Did you see Ed Sullivan last night?”
The passengers replied that they hadn’t.
“There was a group on there called The Beatles. Folk music is dead.”
To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of the death of folk music were an exaggeration.
“That was a time when, really, we didn’t know what was going to happen,” Tuft said during a recent Zoom interview from his home in Denver.
“I think it’s thanks to groups like Peter, Paul and Mary and maybe somebody like Joan Baez and Judy Collins and John Denver — people who were popular enough and smart enough to appeal to a larger segment of the population. They really kept folk music alive.”
The genre lived on, also, thanks to the efforts of the now-90-year-old Tuft, who was more than a bit player in the folk music revival during the 1960s. He founded the Denver Folklore Center in 1962 and, with others in 1979, founded the Swallow Hill Music Association, which presents concerts, teaches music classes for all ages and offers outreach programs. In 2012, Tuft was inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame.
Tuft was also a link in the chain that led to Bob Dylan meeting the Beatles. He also may be the only nonagenarian who released an album this year.
“Friends, Lovers & Other Strangers” includes songs by artists like Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, as well as ones by some of Tuft’s friends. It also includes a cover of the Nat King Cole Trio’s “Nature Boy.”
“I grew up in Philadelphia listening to pop music of the day on radio stations WPEN and WIBG, and R&B stations at night,” Tuft writes in the album’s liner notes. “This song was popular across the board.”
Tuft’s paternal grandfather, Dr. Jacob L. Manasses, was the founder of Bushkill Farms Camp, a Jewish boys camp in the Pocono mountains. Tuft went to Indian Lake, another Jewish camp in the Poconos. A counselor at his camp played the ukulele. Tuft, who played piano and clarinet, soon acquired a ukulele. “I found out there was such a thing as a baritone uke and it turns out that the tuning of the baritone is the same as the four highest strings of the guitar, so I was already two-thirds of the way to a guitar,” he said. “It was very customary in those days for Jewish kids somewhere in their college years to go to Europe so I bought a Chimes guitar and carried it with me.”
Tuft intended to become a doctor like his father and paternal grandfather. But his grades weren’t good enough to get into medical school. Instead, he graduated from Dartmouth in 1957 with a degree in philosophy. He went to graduate school for architecture at the University of Pennsylvania with thoughts of being a city planner.
“But music won out,” said Tuft.
While at Dartmouth, Tuft met Pete Seeger at a folk club. Seeger met with the club members in the afternoon and performed that night.
“He was really intent on getting us as a group to go out into the community and see if we could find people who had songs to offer. He arrived in a blue Plymouth station wagon with his kids on a mattress in the back. His wife, Toshi, set up a display in the hall and sold Pete’s Folkways Records after the concert. Here was this icon, this important person in my musical life in the moment, and he was just getting along,” he said.
“He requested a large log, and did a song called ‘Didn’t Old John (Cross the Water).’ It included a place to swing the axe. Unfortunately, the podium was very slick and Seeger ended up chasing the log all over the ‘stage.’”
After graduating from Dartmouth, Tuft joined the growing folk music scene that was centered around the Gilded Cage in Philadelphia. There, he met his lifelong friend Dick Weissman, a banjoist and guitarist who was in the Journeymen with John Phillips, who would go on to found the Mamas and the Papas.
Tuft eventually ventured out to Colorado, where he auditioned at The Exodus, a Denver folk club.
Tuft was told about the owner: “If he was going to hire you he would be critical and if he was not he would be nice to you. And he was nice to me, so I knew that I wasn’t going to get a job there.
“I had a repertoire that was out of the ordinary, and I was never really attracted to the ‘quote’ popular folk songs,” Tuft said. “As a matter of fact, when it came to trying to make a living playing in the bars what they wanted to hear were the popular songs by the Kingston Trio or Peter, Paul and Mary or the Brothers Four, and I didn’t know those songs.”
“I’m a sucker for a story, I’m a balladeer. I love ballads. Quite often, I do ballads of 10, 12, 14 verses because I like the form so much.”
The Exodus owner said that he thought someone could make a part-time living opening a folklore center like Izzy Young’s Folklore Center in Greenwich Village. “I sometimes joke and say that he was right. I opened a full-time folklore center in order to make a part-time living.”
Tuft also sold records, instruments, strings and accessories and it was the strings and accessories that paid the rent.
The shop became a way station for up-and-coming folk musicians traveling between Chicago and the West Coast. When Bob Dylan made his first cross-country tour and played in Denver, he had his mail forwarded to Tuft’s store.
“Even then, he had an attitude about him,” Tuft recalled. “The following summer I saw him at the Kettle of Fish in the Village, and he grudgingly acknowledged that we had met.”
After a visit to Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, he started a school for Denver musicians and soon branched out into promotion. His first job was for Joan Baez who sold out a 2,400 seat house in March 1964.
Baez was involved with Dylan at that time and wanted to get him to meet The Beatles, who were playing Red Rocks on August 26. Baez was scheduled to play at the venue a couple days earlier, so a plan was hatched for her to come out a few days early so that she could meet the lads and arrange for them to meet Dylan in New York, where The Beatles were going after Denver.
The day before The Beatles’ show, Tuft and Baez went to see A Hard Day’s Night. The musicians met before The Beatles show and Tuft recalled that Baez and the band members were deferential to one another. Except for Ringo, who wasn’t interested and was reading a comic book.
Tuft also brought the Mamas and the Papas to Denver’s Municipal Auditorium Theater with 7,600 seats in 1966. Richard “Dick” Lamm, a friend and lawyer, fronted him $5,000 for the guarantee. Lamm later admitted that he had absolutely no idea who the Mamas and the Papas were. “That showed the amount of trust he had in me,” Tuft said. “And he said he was nervous until a week before the concert until they were on the cover of Life magazine.” Lamm used his profits to fund his first run for the Denver statehouse.
Later, John Denver offered his services for a benefit Tuft organized and helped raise more than $40,000 for Lamm’s successful run for governor.
Folk music endures, Tuft said, “because the best of folk music involves music. And the best of music is melodic. And whatever it is in our physical makeup that involves not just the heartbeat, which is our basic rhythm, but something about our voice, maybe, and the way we speak and our desire to communicate that all put together leads to somebody creating a song about something that happened, and if the kernel of it, either the music or the words, or both are such that people like it and repeat it and you get musical history, and history of countries and our country in particular, of the songs.”
Tuft is already putting together his next album — a double album of cowboy and western songs, traditional on one side and contemporary on the other.
“I’m a song addict,” Tuft said. “And I like to think that I have pretty decent taste in songs. Nothing pleases me more than to be able to find a new song, make it my own, and pass it on and open it up to whatever audience I’m able to bring together.”
The post This 90-year-old Jewish performer and promoter is the Zelig of folk music appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel has a lot riding on Nvidia, whose CEO resigned today
Jensen Huang, who co-founded Nvidia and has run it for 33 years, resigned as chief executive on Thursday, ending a tenure that turned a maker of video-game chips into the engine of the artificial intelligence boom. The decision followed revelations of an affair with a businesswoman whom U.S. intelligence officials suspect of being a Chinese spy, and allegations of a second relationship, with an executive who reports to him.
Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer, will serve as interim chief executive while the board searches for a permanent successor.
The turmoil is a Silicon Valley story with a significantIsraeli subplot. Nvidia employs roughly 6,000 people in Israel, including on 18 floors of office space in a Tel Aviv skyscraper. Israel is home to the company’s largest R&D hub outside of the U.S. As well, Huang has been the driving force behind a plan to build a giant new campus in the country’s north. Huang has courted Israel for years, and the open question now is what happens to that commitment without him.
Nvidia’s Israeli business traces back to 2019, when it agreed to buy Mellanox, an Israeli chip company, for $6.9 billion. Mellanox made the technology that lets thousands of chips in a data center work together as one machine. That technology is now central to how AI data centers are built.
Huang kept Mellanox in Israel, along with its patents and its sales. The Israeli teams’ work is now woven into Nvidia’s newest products, and includes building a chip meant to rein in AI tools that act on their own.
In the second quarter of 2026 alone, Nvidia’s Israeli operation booked $17.5 billion in sales, nearly a fifth of the company’s worldwide revenue and more than four times the sales of Teva Pharmaceuticals, the multinational Israeli drugmaker. Analysts credit Nvidia with largely driving a 13% jump in Israeli tax revenue, and its workforce there has roughly doubled since Oct. 7, 2023.
A personal stake
Huang’s attachment to Israel is not purely commercial. On Oct. 7, Avinatan Or, a chip engineer at Nvidia’s Israeli operation, was captured at the Nova music festival along with his then-girlfriend, Noa Argamani, in a video seen around the world. She was rescued eight months later. Or remained a hostage for 738 days.
Nvidia colleagues held vigils with his mother, Ditza, and Huang stayed in touch with the family throughout. When Or was freed in Oct. 2025, Huang wrote to employees that “Avinatan has come home.” Huang later hosted Or and Argamani at the company’s headquarters in California. This March, as the war with Iran broke out, Huang told Israeli employees that he was “very worried” about them.
Huang has called Israel a “second home” for Nvidia.
That attachment is intended to last. In December, Nvidia announced plans for a campus in Kiryat Tivon, near Haifa, reportedly second in size only to its Silicon Valley headquarters. Construction is set to begin next year, and the offices are expected to open by 2031, with room for up to 10,000 employees.
What lies ahead
The next CEO has become a question in Israel, too. Kress, 59, has been Nvidia’s finance chief since 2013. The board says it will look both inside and outside the company for a permanent chief executive.
Haaretz speculated Thursday that two Israeli executives could be potential candidates. Both men studied at the Technion in Haifa. Michael Kagan, who was born in St. Petersburg, Russia and moved to Israel with his family after high school, co-founded Mellanox in 1999 and has been Nvidia’s chief technology officer for six years. Johny Srouji, born in Haifa to an Arab Christian family, joined Apple in 2008 and now leads its hardware work, including the chips inside its products.
Nothing so far suggests Nvidia’s plans in Israel will change. The Israeli teams work on products the company depends on, and the new campus has long been in the works.
Nvidia’s stock has fallen by about a third since early October, a loss of more than $1.5 trillion in market value, and the company is due to report earnings on Nov. 17. The numbers will matter in Israel. So will something they can’t show: whether Nvidia’s affection for the country outlasts its last CEO.
The post Israel has a lot riding on Nvidia, whose CEO resigned today appeared first on The Forward.
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I. B. Singer predicted the war between Fascism and Communism
יצחק באַשעװיס איז אַרײַן אין דער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור אין 1925, װען ער איז געװען בלויז 21 יאָר אַלט. אַז ער איז באַרימט געװאָרן אין אַמעריקע, האָט ער ניט געלאָזט איבערדרוקן אָדער איבערזעצן זײַנע פֿריִערדיקע װערק, װאָס זײַנען דערשינען אין ייִדישע צײַטשריפֿטן אין פּױלן.
לעצטנס האָט מען זײ אָבער אָפּגעזוכט און איבערגעזעצט אױף ענגליש אונטערן קעפּל „אױפֿן עולם־התּועה“. די דאָזיקע אױסגאַבע איז אַ קאָלעקטיװער אױפֿטו פֿון אַ גאַנצער גרופּע רעדאַקטאָרן און איבערזעצער, אַרײַנגערעכנט דניאל קענעדי, יאַן שװאַרץ, ראָזע װאַלדמאַן, אַגניעשקאַ לעגוטקאָ און אַנדערע.
אין זײַנע דערצײלונגען פֿון יענער תּקופֿה מאָלט באַשעװיס אַ ברײטן לײַװנט פֿון ייִדישע צרות אין דער נײַ־אױפֿגעקומענער פּױלישער רעפּובליק. כּמעט אַלע העלדן זײַנע זײַנען יורדים, װאָס שלאָגן זיך מיט די ביטערע עקאָנאָמישע באַדינגונגען און פֿאַלן נאָך טיפֿער אין יסורים און נױט.
גימפּל בעדנער, דער העלד פֿון „אױף דער עלטער“, איז אַ מאָל געװען אַ װאַסערטרעגער, אָבער איצט האָט ער מער ניט קײן כּוח פֿאַר אַזאַ אַרבעט. די אײנציקע שטיצע זײַנע קומט פֿון זײַנע טעכטער, װאָס האַלטן אַ שאַנדהױז. קײן סך אָרט איז דאָרט ניטאָ, מוז ער נעבעך ליגן אין דעם אײגענעם בעט, װוּ זײַן טאָכטער „באַדינט אירע געסט“.
דוד סװירסקי, דער העלד אין „צוריקװעגס“, קערט זיך אום קײן פּױלן פֿון ארץ־ישׂראל. אַן אַמאָליקער ציוניסט, איז ער אַנטױשט געװאָרן אינעם ציוניסטישן חלום און מיד פֿון זוכן „עבֿודה“ בײַ די חלוצישע ייִשובֿים. אָבער קײן מזל אין דער אַלטער הײם האָט ער ניט. זײַן פֿאָטער שיקט אים אַװעק, און מיר געזעגענען זיך מיט אים װען ער לאָזט זיך זוכן גליקן בײַ זײַן מאַמעס משפּחה אין אַ פֿאַרװאָרפֿענעם שטעטל.
באַשעװיס מאָלט אַ רײַכע פּאַנאָראַמע פֿון ייִדישן פּױלן נאָך דער ערשטער װעלט־מלחמה. אים זײַנען גוט באַקאַנט סײַ די אָרעמע ייִדישע גאַסן פֿון װאַרשע סײַ די װײַטע פֿאַרװאָרלאָזטע שטעטלעך. ער לאָזט דעם לײענער ממש שמעקן דעם ריח פֿונעם ביטערן דלות און ייִאוש. עס איז ניטאָ קײן נס װאָס קען ראַטעװען זײַנע העלדן פֿונעם ביטערן גורל.
די אַלטע סטאַבילע װעלט אונטער דער שליטה פֿון די מעכטיקע אימפּעריעס, דער רוסישער און דער עסטרײַך־אונגאַרישער, ליגט אין חורבֿות. די נײַע פּױלישע מלוכה איז שװאַך און אָרעם און זאָגט ניט צו קײן צוקונפֿט פֿאַר ייִדן.
אין די װערק פֿונעם װאַרשעװער פּעריאָד פֿון 1925 ביז 1935 דערקענט מען בפֿירוש די השפּעה פֿון י. ל. פּרץ, סײַ אין די פּרטימדיקע, נאַטוראַליסטישע שילדערונגען פֿון די שטעטלעך און סײַ אין די פֿיגורן פֿון כּלערלײ מערקװירדיקע פּערסאָנאַזשן: מקובלים, משׂכּילים, חסידים, ציוניסטן, אַפּיקורסים און סתּם ייִדן פֿון אַ גאַנץ יאָר.
דאָס זאַמלבוך נעמט אויך אַרײַן אינטערװיוען מיט ייִדישע מחברים, װאָס באַשעװיס האָט געמאַכט פֿאַר דער װאַרשעװער צײַטונג „ליטעראַרישע בלעטער“.
הלל צײטלין באַגריסט באַשעװיסן אין זײַן דירה, װוּ ער לערנט חסידות מיט זײַנע תּלמידים. ער האַלט, אַז מחוץ פּרץ, אַנ־סקי און דער נסתּר האָט די ייִדישע ליטעראַטור ניט קײן אמתע דערגרײכונגען. צײטלין באַדױערט, אַז ער מוז ציִען פּרנסה פֿון דער ליטעראַרישער אַרבעט און באַקלאָגט זיך, אַז ער קען קױם קריגן אַ פּאָר גראָשן פֿאַר זײַנע װערק. אָבער פֿאַר לערנען נעמט ער ניט קײן געלט.
מלך ראַװיטש זעט אױס מער װי אַ דײַטש אײדער אַ ייִד, שרײַבט באַשעװיס. אַנשטאָט צו באַגריסן באַשעוויסן מיט אַ „שלום־עליכם“ װײַזט ראַװיטש אױפֿן זײגער, װײַל באַשעװיס איז אַ פּאָר מינוט שפּעט. נאָך אײדער באַשעװיס שטעלט אַ פֿראַגע, הײבט ראַװיטש אָן צו דערצײלן װעגן זײַן ליטעראַרישן װעג. ער גיט באַשעװיסן אַ גאַנצע דרשה װעגן זײַן „אידעאַליסטישן“ צוגאַנג צו ליטעראַטור: די אידײ איז דער עיקר, זי איז די „נשמה“ פֿון אַ קונסטװערק. פֿאַר ראַװיטשן זײַנען די װיכטיקסטע ייִדישע דיכטער פּרץ מאַרקיש און ה. לײװיק.
דער סאַמע לעבעדיקסטער שמועס האָט באַשעװיס מיט פּרץ מאַרקיש. ער כאַפּט מאַרקישן ממש אַ פּאָר שעה פֿאַר זײַן צוריקפֿאָרן קײן סאָװעטן־פֿאַרבאַנד אין יולי 1926. מאַרקיש איז אױפֿגערעגט, מסתּמא ווײַל ער מוז צוריקפֿאָרן, און „שרײַט“ זײַנע ענטפֿערס צו באַשעװיסעס פֿראַגעס.
ליטעראַטור איז פֿאַר מאַרקישן די „לעבעדיקע אָרגאַנישע ענערגיע“ װאָס פֿליסט פֿונעם יחיד צו דעם כּלל און צוריק. ליטעראַטור האָט ניט קײן צװעק, זי איז אַן אײביקער פּראָצעס פֿון װערן.
מאַרקיש טענהט, אַז די רעװאָלוציעס, מלחמות און פּאָגראָמען צװינגען מענטשן צו קערן זײערע פּנימער צו דעם רעאַלן לעבן. און איצט, האַלט ער, קומט די ייִדישע ליטעראַטור נענטער צו אָט דער נאַקעטער װירקלעכקײט.
עטלעכע חדשים נאָך מאַרקישעס אָפּפֿאָרן קײן סאָװעטן־פֿאַרבאַנד האָט זיך ישׂראל יהושע זינגער, באַשעװיסעס עלטערער ברודער, אומגעקערט קיין אַמעריקע פֿון אַ צװײ־חדשימדיקער רײַזע איבער „נײַ־רוסלאַנד“.
לױט זײַן אײַנדרוק, האָט די סאָװעטישע קונסט אָנגעװױרן דעם גײַסט פֿונעם ראַדיקאַלן אַװאַנגאַרד און האָט זיך אומגעקערט צום טראַדיציאָנעלן רעאַליזם. די דאָזיקע טענדענץ איז זינגערן געװען צום האַרצן װײַל ער איז אַלײן געװען אַן אָנהענגער פֿונעם רעאַליסטישן סטיל.
צום באַדױערן האָט דער איבערזעצער דאָ געמאַכט אַ פּאָר גרײַזן אין די נעמען פֿון סאָװעטישע שרײַבער: דער מחבר פֿון „גאַלאָפּ“ הײסט עזרא פֿינינבערג און ניט Feinberg, און איציק קיפּניס איז ניט קײן E. Kipnis. דערצו איז דער ענגלישער אױסלײג פֿון ייִדישע נעמען ניט אױסגעהאַלטן: איזי כאַריקס נאָמען שרײַבט מען סײַ Kharik סײַ Charik.
באַשעװיס האָט פֿאָרמולירט זײַן אײגענעם עסטעטישן אַני־מאמין אינעם עסײ „צו דער פֿראַגע װעגן דיכטונג און פּאָליטיק“, װאָס איז אַרױס אינעם קלײנעם ליטעראַרישן זשורנאַל „גלאָבוס“ אין 1932.
דאָס איז אַ װיכטיקער דאָקומענט אין דער געשיכטע פֿון דער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור, און עס קומט אַ ייִשר־כּוח די רעדאַקטאָרן און דער איבערזעצערין װעראַ סאַבאָ פֿאַר מאַכן דעם דאָזיקן מקור צוטריטלעך אױף ענגליש.
„דער גײַסט פֿון פּאָליטיק האָט אפֿשר נאָך קײן מאָל נישט אַזױ אַרומגעכאַפּט דעם מענטש װי הײַנט. […] די מלחמה צװישן װעלט־פּראָלעטאַריאַט און דעם פֿאַשיזם דערנענטערט זיך. אידעיִש איז די אַרמײ פֿון דער צוקונפֿטיקער װעלטשלאַכט שױן מאָביליזירט.“ אַזױ שטעלט באַשעװיס זײַן דיאַגנאָז דער תּקופֿה, װאָס װעט זיך ענדיקן מיטן חורבן.
באַשעװיס שרײַבט מיט לײַדנשאַפֿט און קלאָרקײט. ער איז אַ שאַרפֿער קריטיקער פֿון ראַדיקאַלע פּאָליטיקער, סײַ די רעכטע פֿאַשיסטן סײַ די לינקע קאָמוניסטן. סײַ די, סײַ יענע „צײלן שױן זײערע סטאַדעס און מ׳באַשטימט יעדן זײַן אָנטײל אין דעם צוקונפֿטיקן בלוטבאָד.“ די פּאָליטיקער פֿאָדערן, אַז אַ שרײַבער זאָל ענטפֿערן אױף דער פֿראַגע: „מיט װעמען גײסטו? פֿאַר װעמען ביסטו?“
אָבער דער קינסטלער, האַלט באַשעװיס, איז בטבֿע אַנדערש פֿון דעם פּאָליטיקער. דאָס איז „דער מענטשן, פֿאַר װעלכן די פֿלײש־אַריטמעטיק פֿון פּאָליטיקער איז פֿרעמד און עקלדיק“.
אַלע עכטע קינסטלער האָבן „אײן בשותּפֿותדיקע אײגנשאַפֿט: זײ האָבן אָפֿענע אױגן צו זען, װי אומגליקלעך דער מענטש איז. דערין באַשטײט זײער טאַלאַנט.“
ער איז געװען בטבֿע אַ פּעסימיסט, װאָס האָט ניט געגלױבט אין גליקלעכע חלומות. די סאַמע געלונגענע פּערסאָנאַזשן זײַנע האָבן ניט קײן מזל אין לעבן, סײַ אין פּױלן פֿאַרן חורבן און סײַ שפּעטער אין אַמעריקע. זײַנע ווערטער אין אָט דעם אַרטיקל דינען טאַקע ווי אַ שליסל צו באַשעװיסעס קינסטלערישן װעלטבאַנעם.
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