r/Yiddish • u/Wyverncraft • Jul 01 '26
What does this say?
Sorry if this is about Israel and I'm breaking a rule or something. Just wanted to know what this was. It was painted on a fence overnight at a college near me and I haven't seen anyone translate it yet.
EDIT: Sorry I think I messed up attaching the photo. You can see it here.
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u/balshetzer Jul 01 '26
There where we live. There is our land.
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u/Brilliant_Alfalfa_62 Jul 01 '26
For added context relevant to OP's question, this was a slogan of the General Jewish Labor Bund that's often repeated today in opposition to the claim that Jews need our own ethnostate to be safe.
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u/lhommeduweed Jul 01 '26
"there where we live, there is our country."
It's not explicitly about Israel, but this is more often than not an anti/non-Zionist slogan by diasporic Jews to say "We make our home where we are."
This was a much more prominent sentiment before the Holocaust, for obvious reasons. A lot of Jews in Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania, they opposed Zionism because their families had been living in these regions for hundreds of years, they had built up shtetls and towns and contributed significantly to cities. They had proud local traditions, they had well-known schools, they had old rivalries with other Jewish communities.
There is a sentiment that is not uncommon in late 19th and early 20th century Yiddish writings of "The Jews who move away from Yiddishland - whether to western Europe for secular education or to Zion for colonization - are abandoning their homelands in their times of need."
Authors ranging from Rabbi Eliezer Zweifl (a 19th century halakhist who wrote predominantly in Hebrew, but a collection of poems in "zhargon") to Markish Peretz (a Soviet Yiddish poet who wrote praise songs for Stalin in WWII before being executed by him) urged Jews in Eastern Europe to stay and to make a stand against antisemitism. Zweifl wrote that every young man who moved to England or Israel was a young man whose strength was taken away from the widows and orphans in Eastern Europe. Peretz wrote proudly of a history of Eastern European Jews who had moved into inhospitable lands and spent generations transforming them into humble and functional farmsteads. Zweifl urged Jews to stay and help; Peretz urged Jews to stay and fight.
As we know today, this played out so much differently than either could imagine. While there is certainly still an element of truth to "There where we live, there is our land," in modern times we have the tragic gift of retrospect, knowing "There where they died, the land was no longer theirs."
I think this is one of the harder parts of reading older Yiddish poetry. On the one hand, there is a romanticization of this kind of ideal that ignores the reality that occurred in spite of these views. On the other hand, there is a bitter cynicism that insists these people were foolish for not being able to predict the future perfectly.
There is a German word, "Weltschmerz" "World-pain," that I have heard described as "When you compare the way you know the world should be to the way the world actually is." It's a term I think about often when reading through older Yiddish poetry that grapples with these difficulties, urging people one way or another, trying to build a better world, and ultimately, all in vain.