June 5, 1998

NYC; Yiddish Paper Handles Loss As a Survivor

By CLYDE HABERMAN

That's a fact. It is enough of a challenge just to produce one of the few remaining newspapers written in a language that itself has to scramble to stay alive. The Forward, a century old and long considered the most important general-circulation Yiddish newspaper in New York, hardly needed to have life complicated by losing its editor of many years, Mordechai Strigler.
 

Mr. Strigler died last month at 76 after suffering a brain injury in a fall. All of a sudden, the Yiddish-speaking-and-reading world was deprived of not only an editor but also one of its most prolific writers of the postwar era. ''It's a terrible blow for Yiddish culture altogether,'' said Boris Sandler, a Moldovan-born Israeli citizen who was named the Yiddish Forward'snew editor a few days ago. ''Strigler was an institution all to himself.''

And his death was a reminder -- at the weekly Forward and at other Yiddish newspapers here like The Algemeiner Journal and Der Yid, which appeal more to Hasidic readers -- of what a strain it is to publish in a language that for years has constantly checked its pulse.

''I estimate there aren't more than a dozen people in the world below the age of 55 whom we could hire as editor of the Yiddish paper, and maybe not even that many,'' said Mr. Norich, 51, whose official title is general manager of the Forward Association, which also publishes separate weekly newspapers in English and Russian.

''The difficulty in sustaining a Yiddish paper in the tradition of The Forvertz,'' he said, using the Yiddish pronunciation, ''is not in finding readers or even advertising. The really hard part is finding qualified writers and editors.'' He believes he has found what he needs in Mr. Sandler, 48, who promises to lose no time building a stable of young Yiddish writers and spicing up the graphics of a publication whose pages are determinedly gray.

Whatever happens, a turning point has come for this newspaper of Labor Zionist origins, which decades ago did such a good job urging its immigrant readers to assimilate in their new country and to speak English that it nearly ran itself out of business.

One by one, readers of Yiddish died. But any time someone thought about writing an obituary for the language, too, the idea proved premature. Yiddish instruction has bloomed at several dozen American colleges, and imperiled volumes of Yiddish writing are being saved at the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass.

JOSHUA FISHMAN, an expert on the language who teaches psychology at Yeshiva University's Albert Einstein College of Medicine, estimates that the United States has 250,000 to 300,000 Yiddish speakers. That is a far cry from the millions in prewar America. But it also suggests, as Mr. Norich put it, that ''no one should stand with a stopwatch wondering when the last Yiddish speaker will fade from the scene.''

One reason is a high birthrate among Hasidic Jews, who speak Yiddish daily and provide The Algemeiner Journal and Der Yid with sales in the tens of thousands each week, while the Yiddish Forward bumps along with a circulation of a mere 6,500.

Just because a language can hang on, though, it does not mean it is thriving. Yes, there are readers. But how about writers? ''There are no Yiddish novelists now, I can tell you that,'' said David Roskies, who teaches Yiddish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary. ''A poem? Yes. A short story? Yes. But not anything of novel length.''

Similarly, the talent reservoir is not deep for newspaper editors, reporters or even proofreaders. ''I cannot say they are standing in line,'' said Gershon Jacobson, who owns The Algemeiner Journal. But at The Forward's offices in the Workmen's Circle building on East 33d Street, the managers are trying to live up to the newspaper's name by looking ahead with optimism.

This columnist was reminded of a 1972 interview he had with Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel laureate who wrote in Yiddish, his stories often appearing in The Forward. Even then, the language's future was in question. But Singer admonished, ''Resurrection with us is not a miracle but a habit.''

Who was he, Mr. Norich said, to disagree with ''the master''?