Hasidic Warsaw

This book provides the first English translation of Yechiel Hofer’s book, Reb Zalmen. Centering on a particular denizen of the Aleksander Hasidim’s shtibl (prayer house), it offers a unique and intimate portrait of the lives of those who went inside to pray, eat, study, and argue there in the early 20th century. It is hard to imagine that Reb Zalmen was not an actual figure - someone the young Yechiel Hofer actually knew and loved - although finding any trace of him today would be a daunting task. Reb Zalmen was that rare thing, a traditional Jew without a family. His last name is never given; all we are told is that he had originally come to Warsaw from the town of Siedlec.

Regardless of Reb Zalmen’s historical existence, Hasidic Warsaw provides rich material for the ethnography of Polish Hasidism in the early 20th century. It reveals what it was like to experience ‘Gentile’ Warsaw for someone who spends all his time in the Jewish quarter; to confront the new waves of doubt and fashion that threatened the folkways followed there; the rivalries and alliances between different Hasidic courts and their followers; the bitterness of poverty and the struggle to transcend hunger.

Jonathan Boyarin’s introduction orients the reader toward the changing demographic and political situation of Polish Hasidim in the early 20th century. It points to the distinct facets of Warsaw Hasidic life and law that structure the chapters of Hasidic Warsaw, guiding the reader towards their own contemplation of the interplay between fiction and memory.

Yechiel Hofer (1906-1972) was born in Warsaw to a Hasidic family, and was a close childhood friend of A.J. Heschel. He trained as a medical doctor, but devoted himself to writing stories, poetry and essays – first in Polish, and then in Yiddish. He was exiled to Siberia during World War II, and emigrated to Israel in 1951. Yitzhok Yanasovitsh praised Hofer’s 'abundance of descriptions of ways of life and…wealth of types and images which populated the Jewish street in Warsaw in the past'. Melech Ravitch described him as an 'exceptionally vivid author of novels, whose background was the Warsaw courtyard'. Hofer received the Itsik Manger Prize for outstanding contributions to Yiddish literature in 1971, the year before his death in Yafo, Israel.

Jonathan Boyarin’s work centers on Jewish communities and on the dynamics of Jewish culture, memory, and identity. He has investigated these fields in a range of ethnographic projects set in Paris, Jerusalem, and the Lower East Side of New York City. Much of his work is in interdisciplinary critical theory, almost always from the perspective of modern Jewish politics and experience. He has extended these interests into comparative work on diaspora, the politics of time and space, and the ethnography of reading. His books include From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry (with Jack Kugelmass, 1998, 2nd edition), Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul: A Lower East Side Summer (2011), Jewish Families (2013), and Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side (2020). Previous translations from Yiddish include A Fire Burns in Kotsk by Menashe Unger (2013).